Barbara Of The House Of Grebe at Nottingham Library - Press Release

Just posting here the press release for my storytelling performance of Thomas Hardy's Barbara Of The House Of Grebe at Nottingham Central Library in a couple of weeks time:

BARBARA OF THE HOUSE OF GREBE

A Dramatic Storytelling Show by Marty Ross

– Nottingham Central Library Oct 2^nd. 19.00 (Tickets £2)

Great literature comes ALIVE at Nottingham Library as storyteller Marty Ross performs Thomas Hardy’s strangest, darkest love story.

After 5 star reviews and sold-out houses for his show 21^st. Century Poe at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Scottish (but Nottingham based) live storyteller Marty Ross has come home to bring literature to life in Nottingham Central Library by way of his unique, highly dramatic approach to live storytelling. He will be performing his one man dramatization of Thomas Hardy’s most gothic short story Barbara Of The House Of Grebe. Already performed to considerable success by Ross at Chilwell Arts Theatre in February, as part of his Hardy double bill In Passion’s Shadow, Barbara now makes her solo debut in a performance combining impassioned storytelling, mime and gesture and even an eerie bit of mask work. Those who have seen Ross perform in venues from theatres to libraries to Nottingham’s pubs and cafes know how evocatively he can bring great stories to life. As 3 Weeks said of his Edinburgh show – “what Marty Ross does with some of literature’s most mystical and macabre works is make them sing with new energy and beguile an audience all over again.”

There is a gothic undercurrent running through many of Hardy’s greatest novels, but it is in the short story Barbara Of The House Of Grebe that this element comes to the fore. Hardy always claimed the story was based on the actual history of a Wessex family; let us hope he exaggerated, for the story of Barbara - of her elopement with the commoner she loves, the horrendous injury he suffers, her second marriage to a man she most definitely does not love, and the macabre way this second husband exorcises the ghost of her true love from her mind – is even more tragic and disturbing than anything in his more celebrated novels.

Marty Ross is already well-established as a playwright with a long string of dramas for BBC radio, encompassing everything from the Scottish ghost stories of The Darker Side Of The Border to the science fiction of Ghost Zone to the Shakespearean black comedy of last year’s Rough Magick to the Russian drama of Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk, due to be broadcast on Radio 4 on Oct 4^th. He has also written Doctor Who and award-nominated Dark Shadows audio drama. But communicating a story directly to an audience through live storytelling remains a great passion, as attested by his Edinburgh reviews:

“Ross is a master craftsman who never turns down the pressure… insanely good storytelling.” – Broadway Baby (*****)

“Marty Ross is a compelling narrator and onstage presence… it is the utter conviction with which Ross performs that draws you into his world.” – Fringe Review

“Ross has a great aptitude for suspense and terror.” – The Scotsman

Doctor Who: The Lurkers At Sunlight's Edge interview

By the way, was recently interviewed by the estimable Kenny Smith of Finished Product fame for volume 3 of the Big Finish guide and thought I'd include here my answers to his questions relating to the writing of my Doctor Who audio, The Lurkers At Sunlight's Edge.... (The audio itself is available here: http://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/lurkers-at-sunlight-s-edge-307

Alan Barnes and David Richardson seemed very happy with NIght's Black Agents as they got back in touch almost immediately asking for another script.,,, As for the fallout from the likes of {preceding story] Death In The Family, to be honest I wasn't really informed of the details of any of that: I was essentially asked for a free standing story for Doctor, Ace and Hex with no other proviso. In the very late stages of scripting, Alan suggested a couple of lines for Hex referring to a recent experience of death, so I knew something was going on, but the details of this weren't spelled out for me: I think they were playing their cards close to their chest in case anything leaked out. So I had no real knowledge of my story being part of a 'trilogy': I worked on it very

much as a self-contained story.

...I had always been fascinated by the work of H. P. Lovecraft and the basic idea was to take that very gothic science fictional world and bring it into collision with the Doctor's world. The combination of horror and a weird kind of beauty in Lovecraft's work is very haunting: the great big slimy monsters in Lovecraft are never JUST big slimy monsters - they're ancient Gods and have all the strangeness and sublimity of that. But, in a way, the personality of Lovecraft is

almost more fascinating than the work itself: this slightly nerdy introverted man who had all these weird universes exploding in his head, so obviously that inspired the character of Doveday, pushing it all the way so that Doveday's actually one of the strange alien creatures he writes about.

But there's another side to Lovecraft: although in many ways he was a decent, kindly, sensitive man, at certain points in his life he was attracted to fascistic ideas about white supremacy and racist ideas about supposedly 'lesser' races... a story like 'The Horror At Red Hook' is a real racist diatribe and the dread of human/alien interbreeding that runs through virtually all his stories would seem to have undercurrents of that. So, rather than make Doveday himself a

hateful character, I split that other, nastier side of him off into the character of Whytecrag - so it's really a sort of bifurcated dual portrait, Jekyll & Hyde style: Doveday is obviously Lovecraft, but

Whytecrag's his other, nastier side. I would have liked, in a way, to make him more overtly a foul-mouthed racist - but you have to be careful with things like taste and decency in a Doctor Who context.

The Lovecraft story that's most directly an influence in plot terms is "At The Mountains Of Madness". The likes of James Cameron and Guillermo Del Toro have been trying for years to do a mega-budget direct adaptation of that, but they never seem to have licked the

script problems. I think it's kind of fun that we at Big Finish sneaked through a sort of unofficial quasi-adaptation when no one was looking!

There was one very key change to the plot in the early stages. The original idea was that the Doctor, Ace and Hex travel not to an island off the Alaskan coast, but to an alien planet, a moon of Saturn or something like that. And there, impossibly, they find an exact

reproduction of the New England coast that was native to Lovecraft. And Freya and the other people at the mental hospital would actually belong to a whole other alien race, a peaceful race wanting to contain the risk of the Karnas'Koi - imprisoning Doveday in a sort of 'velvet

cage' version of his natural environment and assuming human form to keep up the illusion. But Alan Barnes, rightly I think, thought that was just too weird and baroque and encouraged me to set it on earth and have Freya & co. be real human beings. The only thing I regret is

that in that original version Sunlight would have had an 'edge' in the most literal sense... you'd wander so far in this New England landscape and you'd come to something almost like the back edge of a theatrical backdrop and there'd be a while other alien landscape beyond. That's slightly lost in the earthbound version - and I wondered about revising the title, but Alan loved it, so we stuck with it.

 I thought the finished thing worked pretty well. I liked Michael Brandon in the Doveday role: I was really impressed by the interview with him - he seemed a guy who had really thought seriously about what he was doing, he wasn't just camping it up or fooling around. That's what you need, writing in this kind of genre. And it means there's only degree of Kevin Bacon

between me and Dario Argento! And I wanted to give Ace, who I always liked, something more touchy-feely to do than the usual tomboy running around. The scenes where she's embracing Doveday to try and hold him in human form have, I think, a kind of weirdly erotic, romantic

quality... they show the inspiration of an old Scots folk tale I've often done in my storytelling act - the ballad of Tam Lin. On the back burner, I have a novel called "Eyes Of Tree" based on the same story. That'll see the light of day, someday.

....Sylvester McCoy was actually just back from a cruise around Alaska - so he had the real scenery fresh in his mind! The name 'Whytecrag' just popped into my mind - it was months after

Lurkers had come out that I realised where I'd got it from: I was travelling on the Glasgow southside suburban train line that I'd known since my childhood and passed through the station at 'Whitecraigs', which is the station closest to my childhood home.

The very first Doctor Who I ever saw was "The Sea Devils" - that was my proto-Whovian experience and I suppose, in retrospect, there's echoes of that here: the coastal setting, the reptilian monsters linked with a more human(oid) megalomaniac. I suppose if it works on

that kind of old-fashioned atmospheric monster story level, then I 

succeeded in what I was aiming for.

My Thomas Hardy storytelling show at Nottingham Central Library

Performing my one man version of Thomas Hardy's creepiest, most gothic love story BARBARA OF THE HOUSE OF GREBE at Nottingham Central Library on October 2nd at 19.00, tickets a mere £2. I performed this back in February as the first half of my Hardy show, IN PASSION'S SHADOW, at Chilwell Arts Theatre - but here I'm presenting it as a stand alone show. Have just been rehearsing - the dread, as a storyteller who doesn't work from a written script but from a series of memorised improvisations, is that when you haven't done a particular story for a few months, you'll have forgotten it all. But first rehearsal I had a go at a full run without checking the original Hardy text and most of it, miraculously, was still there. A check-over of the Hardy story supplemented the few gaps and I think I'm ready to go... after another few rehearsals. Anyone who's going to be in or around Nottingham that evening ought to check it out!

Siberia in North London: recording Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk

Drawing breath after a busy week, the main part of which was spent in London, recording my new Radio 4 play at the home / studio of one of the truly great radio drama directors, Cherry Cookson. I can remember as a kid a long holiday drive to Scarborough being whiled away by listening to a cassette of Cherry's Radio 4 production of Frenchman's Creek by Daphne Du Maurier - one of those formative experiences that made me want to write for radio in the first place: a thrill, all these years later, to be working with the great lady herself.

It was a new experience for me, all my previous BBC plays having been recorded in the safe confines of a studio, to be recording the interiors in an upstairs bedroom, the exteriors in Cherry's garden, at least during the gaps between helicopters and planes flying overhead, not to mention the occasional police siren. But one crow made an absolutely on-cue contribution at mention of one of the characters dying.

We had a great cast, led by a newcomer to radio in the leading role of tragic, murderous Katerina Ismailova - Rochenda Sandall, who I think is going to be a very highly-ranked actress in the next few years, especially if this production gets listened to! Incredible to think her only previous radio drama experience had been 'rhubarbing' in a crowd scene. But she grabbed hold of her character and really took off with it.

This was most of all a special production because it was the first Radio 4 commission for the Wireless Theatre Company, who've been working miracles on the internet for the last few years to what must have been very limited financial reward, led on through thick and thin by the wonderful Mariele Runacre Temple, the single-minded visionary behind the company, one of the true saviours of radio drama in our time. I had already done a handful of plays with them for the sheer love of it - Medusa On The Beach, Blood And Stone (in conjunction with 3D Horror Fi) & the upcoming Redder Than Roses: A Glimpse Of Mary, Queen Of Scots, just glad of the chance to do some of my best work free of the sometimes confining strictures of BBC production... and suddenly it's all paid off, for all of us, in terms of old school mainstream BBC recognition.

It's all still to be edited and we'll see what happens with some of the violence in the murder scenes... which is pretty hard-hitting... but as a writer I feel in safe hands with this particular team.

Darker side Of The Border on BBC Radio 4 Extra this week

My Radio 4 series of adaptations of classic Scottish gothic tales The Darker Side Of The Border is repeated on digital channel Radio 4 Extra this week, each episode available from the 4 Extra website for 7 days afterwards. Here's the link... http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00cf4bb/episodes/guide

Another 21st Century Poe review

... and here's another review for 21st Century Poe from Fringe Review -

Fringe Review - enue:  Paradise in the Vault www.paradise-green.co.uk 

Low Down

This was one out of a series of three tales. Heart Shaped Hole was Tell Tale Heart for the new generation. Bringing it up to the tenement about to be blown up in Glasgow and blowing off the cobwebs of the past to see the work in a new light but also one that shines in relevance for today. The other two have similar descriptions and update The Fall of the House of Usher and Ligeia.

Review

Marty Ross arrives in the dark. Dressed in a tracksuit he is a thief, a junky looking for a fix. Once the junky gets into the house we are greeted with lights and the illumination of the problem as told by our untrustworthy narrator. The fix is on the thigh of an old man who had an unhealthy interest in wee boys which made the junky’s sojourn morally more acceptable at least to himself. Once he has stolen the stash, made lots of cash and thrown it around whilst entertaining a young girl he rescues whilst in the pursuit of his own ends, his end arrives with confession due to the heart beating louder than his words could ever do.

This was visceral. There was no doubt this was to be an update that cried Trainspotting in the flyer and held nothing back in its telling. Marty Ross is a compelling narrator and onstage presence. Whilst some of the monologue became slightly long winded for me there was never any doubt that this was Poe. The essential elements were well translated into a modern setting that certainly left you thinking as well as reeling.

Ross’s ability to transform himself into the old man through the ever seeing eye of that old man’s own abuse was remarkable. Never less than compelling this was theatre that kept you on edge and occasionally threatened to send you off it.

One man, one bhoran, one chair and a tracksuit: as a set list it hardly needs a transit but it was all that was needed as a door in the venue was used to good effect as the old man’s front door; the side of the archway, where the young girl was held captive in the flat.

As a raconteur it is the utter conviction with which Ross performs that does not allow you time to consider what is being said but draws you into his world. His character driven monologue is on full speed and ahead is the direction you get dragged in. There are no periods for reflection or doubt, this is happening and it’s happening NOW!

It was almost a full house when I went and it certainly deserved that. The audience were appreciative though a little reserved at the end. I put this down to a collective letting out of breath at the end of the roller coaster rather than a lack of appreciation.

It was unsophisticated storytelling and in a manner that left all the rough edges hanging. Anything that was surplus to requirements was turfed but it still had the raw emotional energy that dragged people kicking and screaming into the narrative. It was this lack of sophistication and light and shade that gave me some doubts. It perhaps needed more in the way of colour to heighten the effects of the story rather than having a full speed charge towards the eventual conclusion. That having been said, it was an immensely entertaining ride that scared and shocked in equal measure – a fair ground ghost ride for the 21st Century of which Poe would have been rightly proud.

Reviewed by Donald C Stewart Friday 9th August 2013

Website :

 Martyrossstoryteller.blogspot.co.uk

 Run now ended.

Three weeks review for 21st Century Poe at Edfringe

Here's a review I just saw from Three Weeks for my Edinburgh Fringe show 21st Century Poe last week...

Wednesday 14 August 2013 | By Katharine Wootton

ED2013 Theatre Review: 21st-Century Poe (Marty Ross)

There’s an argument to be had that the tales of Edgar Allen Poe are just fine as they are, thanks. No need for re-inventing. But for what Marty Ross does with some of literature’s most mystical and macabre works, that is, make them sing with new energy and beguile an audience all over again, I’m happy to make an exception. Offering different stories for different evenings, the poetically re-worked ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ which I saw, manages, in its modernisation, to still preserve and revere the original, even intensifying its impact. Physically sweating out his enthusiasm for Poe, Marty Ross delivers a bewitchingly good story that leaves a haunting reminder long after the lights have gone down.