My gothic horror serial CATCH MY BREATH is on BBC Radio 4 Extra once again this coming week, Monday 21st - Friday 25th October, 6pm every day, with a midnight repeat (and then each episode available digitally for 7 days afterward). So I thought I'd write a bit about the background of the story....
(Meanwhile, if you catch CATCH MY BREATH and like it, catch me LIVE at the London Horror Festival in my two shows there, the very vampiric BLOOD AND STONE: A Lullaby For Elizabeth Bathory http://www.londonhorrorfestival.com/whats-on/blood-stone/ on Oct 30th and my Edinburgh Fringe hit 21st. CENTURY POE: FALLING FOR THE USHERS http://www.londonhorrorfestival.com/whats-on/21st-century-poe-falling-for-the-ushers/ on Halloween.)
...So one night, while guiding up in the Cairngorms, I got the news - courtesy of a public phone booth in a remote highland village (a mobile signal - don't make me laugh....) that we were commissioned by BBC 7 (later Radio 4 Extra). My play about the expressionist poet Else Lasker Schuler, My Blue Piano, had been commissioned by Radio 4 around the same time, so it was a busy autumn shifting back and forth between the two projects. Director once again, as with all my BBC projects up to that point, was Bruce Young: we were a good partnership, in part because we were in many ways opposites in terms of aesthetic temperament, Bruce very pragmatic, keen on straightforward, coherent storytelling and an economical use of language, me the baroque fantasist, the reckless head-in-the-clouds dreamer. Even now, when I haven't done a production with him for some while, it's always a useful exercise to me to ask myself "What would Bruce say?" about this or that scene or speech or individual line of dialogue. He's certainly the guy who taught me the proverbial ropes in terms of radio storytelling and I owe him a lot.
A key contribution Bruce made was in pressing me to keep Strachan from being too straightforwardly villainous - my concern in the first draft or two was in making sure he was genuinely scary, but Bruce was insistent there be more to him than that. BBC directors are always too respectful of writers to tell you what to write, but they're good at discreet nudges - and so scenes like the attic scene between Strachan and the old man in episode 3, a scene in which we begin to get a sense of what an utterly lost soul Strachan is, a scene that's one of my favourites in the whole story, was very much my response to Bruce's promptings.
We recorded at a former school in a former school in the tiny village of Pencaitland in eastern Scotland. The old BBC radio studios in Edinburgh (where my first BBC play A Hundred Miles was recorded) had been shut down when the Beeb sold the property and while the BBC offices that now stand on Pacific Quay in Glasgow were being laboriously completed, with their own in-house studios, we used this tiny independent studio: all but Hundred Miles and Rough Magick of my BBC Scotland work were recorded there. I loved Pencaitland - cast and crew without their own transport would meet in Waverley Station in Edinburgh and be mini-bused for the better part of an hour out to this tiny hamlet in the middle of nowhere. The studio was actually alongside a graveyard, where I used to go strolling in the coffee breaks, maybe a better setting for recording this sort of story than the corporate offices on Pacific Quay.
We had a good cast. Claire Knight was in BBC Scotland's soap River City, a good strong presence to hold the thing together. Suzanne Donaldson was more of a newcomer to radio, but I really liked her performance. I remember Suzanne telling me that she was a major Marilyn Monroe fan - and maybe there's a teeny whiff of Marilyn's influence in the way her characterization combines a sort of breezy sexual self confidence and a deeper vulnerability. We had Eileen McCallum as Isla Thorwald - a bit poignant for me as my grandmother had died just a couple of weeks before the recording: she was the biggest influence on me both as a human being and as an artist and she'd been a big fan of Take The High Road, the STV soap on which Eileen was the star, so she missed by a couple of weeks hearing one of her soap favourites appear in one of my dramas. (She was an even bigger fan of Frazer Hines - on account of Emmerdale rather than Doctor Who: if only she'd lived to hear Night's Black Agents a couple of years later....).
But another crucial bit of casting came with the character of Strachan himself. Bruce had an actor lined up - a very good actor who'd been in a couple of my previous pieces, but a middle-aged character actor, not necessarily the sort of radio presence who'd make you swoon over every syllable. There was, however, a scheduling conflict and with about a day to go, that actor pulled out and Bruce had to recast: maybe, as with Rochenda Sandall in Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk, all major roles should be cast last minute, because as with Rochenda we wound up with someone brilliant, in the form of Liam Brennan.
I confess that when Bruce told me over the phone who he'd cast, my response was "Liam who?", Liam being primarily known as a classical actor on the Scottish stage, rather than TV or film. But he was utterly brilliant, all I could have asked for. Crucially, he connected with that aforementioned 'lost soul' aspect of the character: without his changing a single word of the script, I could see and hear him, day by day, deepening, expanding, the character beyond my own vision of it. That's the greatest part of being a playwright - when an actor, while respecting your text, gives it a richer life than you could ever have envisioned. It's like a parent seeing his or her kid doing something you never guessed the kid had in it. Just listen to him in the final scene between Strachan and Isla Thorwald in episode 5 and you'll hear what I mean....
As with Ghost Zone, we found an episode or two running too short in the recording, what with the hectic pace, so I had to write a couple of extra scenes at short notice. But one of these, the scene in episode 4 where Strachan does Colleen's make up for her, is almost my favourite in the whole thing. There's nothing overtly sexual in the scene, but it's a deeply creepy, sensual, fetishistic moment, more pervy and disturbing than any overt sex scene. That's one of the joys of writing a sexually-charged story in a very tightly censored medium - like Josef Von Sternberg in all those 30s Marlene Dietrich movies, you have to constantly find metaphors for the sexual aspects you can't portray directly. And the way Bruce directed the scene, so that in contrast to the material either side of it, it's all very S-L-O-W and hushed, almost if the actors were whispering in a trance, a kind of 'underwater' acting even, is really effective; I think it's almost my favourite bit of direction from Bruce on any of the shows we did together.
(Again, the scene in episode 3 with the horse falling over the cliff and dying very slowly and audibly while Strachan embraces Colleen above, shows how that kind of outrageous, bizarrely displaced imagery can be more sexual than any sex scene, that broken backed horse belching out blood and froth and screams a hundred feet below the lovers a bolder image of sexual violation than any sex scene could ever be: a kind of 'blatantly indirect' surrealist sexual fetishism.)
Things I wasn't happy about? Well, we had a genius doing the sound effects on Ghost Zone and we didn't quite have that this time around - the 'demons in the forest' FX could have been much better. I wish I'd breached recording studio etiquette and jumped in front of the mic myself when some of those demonic voices were being recorded (although I do appear as one of the cackling party guests in ep.4.) But all told, it was one of the productions I was happiest with - and it meant a lot, after all those years, to see my Primal Scenes trio of Kate, Colleen and Strachan gain the fullblown dramatic life so many other dream projects of those early years failed to achieve... an ongoing dramatic life given how often the BBC repeat it. Do tune in and listen at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007k378
Sunday, 20 October 2013
Friday, 18 October 2013
Catch My Breath - BBC Radio 4 Extra - Behind The Scenes Part 1
My gothic horror serial CATCH MY BREATH is on BBC Radio 4 Extra once again this coming week, Monday 21st - Friday 25th October, 6pm every day, with a midnight repeat (and then each episode available digitally for 7 days afterward). So I thought I'd write a bit about the background of the story....
(Meanwhile, if you catch CATCH MY BREATH and like it, catch me LIVE at the London Horror Festival in my two shows there, the very vampiric BLOOD AND STONE: A Lullaby For Elizabeth Bathory http://www.londonhorrorfestival.com/whats-on/blood-stone/ on Oct 30th and my Edinburgh Fringe hit 21st. CENTURY POE: FALLING FOR THE USHERS http://www.londonhorrorfestival.com/whats-on/21st-century-poe-falling-for-the-ushers/ on Halloween.)
We go back a long way do me and 'Catch My Breath' (on BBC Radio 4 Extra all this week LISTEN HERE.... It began one day in my teenage years when I came across a film still in a very highbrow movie magazine, a still from a German Expressionist silent film. I long since parted company with that magazine, but I have a faint memory that the still was supposed to come from the film Schatten / Warning Shadows... although I've since seen, and loved, that film and could nowhere see in it an image exactly matching the one I recalled from that movie magazine. But the still depicted a darkly handsome man holding a candelabra standing at the foot of a staircase and looking directly up at the camera. I don't think the accompanying article said anything about the narrative context of the image - it was a general survey of the German silent cinema - but there was a game I used to play in those days as a would-be writer, a sort of imaginative five finger exercise. I would look at a still from a film I'd never seen, about whose story I knew nothing, and make up my own story to go with the image. (I would also do this with titles of films I otherwise knew nothing about: I once got a great plot out of the title Spider Baby).
Anyway, I stared at this intriguing still, asking myself who is this man? What staircase is he stood at the foot at? And who is he looking at with that handsome but untrustworthy grin. And I started to come up with answers. He's in a grand house, he owns that house, he's welcoming us to that house, we're lost, we need someplace to stay, he's handsome, charming, seductive. But he's not to be trusted. He has a secret. A downright demonic secret.
It was just a game, but already it was the beginnings of an honest-to-goodness story and when I started to get serious about being a writer, clunking a typewriter onto a kitchen chair in my first Glasgow bedsit, I began using it as the starting point for a screenplay called 'Primal Scenes': there had been a brief boomlet in low budget British horror cinema and I thought, like many an ambitious tyro writer... who knows? Of course, like 99.9 % of screenplays it didn't have half a hope of actually being produced, although it did at least get me shortlisted for the National Film School's screenwriting course. But I didn't give up on the story, converting it into my first, abortive, attempt at writing a novel and then, when Ghost Zone was something of a hit on BBC 7 as (Radio 4 Extra then was) and I was offered the chance to do another serial for them, I decided to rework Primal Scenes into radio drama.
There was quite a bit of reworking required, as the change of title implies. The most obvious difference between Primal Scenes and Catch My Breath is that the two heroines of Primal Scenes were a mother, Colleen, and her daughter, Kate, both escaping suburbia and a violent / drunken husband / father. But when the chance to do the story for radio came along, I immediately wanted to change this: for one thing, I was aware of the radio convention that when there's a child character, directors tend to cast adult actors doing 'child voices' - and it's never really convincing. It's acceptable for a small part, but I didn't want the main actor through the whole 2 1/2 hours of a five part serial sounding like that, so I changed the situation to make Kate and Colleen both young women... though Kate's experiences with a violent father did find their way back into the plot - even more dramatically, in fact. And the dynamic of the two characters didn't even change as much as one might anticipate with a significantly younger Colleen still sexually self confident and an older Kate still implicitly virginal and fearful of the whole world of sexuality a figure like Adam Strachan embodies.
Furthermore, Primal Scenes had been much closer to a traditional vampire story - I was a child of Hammer Horror, the classy atmospheric gothic of Brides Of Dracula and Kiss Of the Vampire a particular influence. But by the time I did Catch My Breath, I'd been earning spare time money as a walking guide on the long distance paths of the Scottish highlands and, for the first time in my life, steeping myself in the supernatural folklore of my own country and culture, as distinct from that of Transylvania, or Bray Studios, or Hollywood. I can still remember the rainy, 'dreich' night in the King's House hotel out on Rannoch Moor when, huddling close to the fire in the bar, I fell into conversation with a much older hiker (from Aberdeen, I think), who'd caught me reading J.F. Campbell's Popular Tales Of The West Highlands and told me "Och, son, I ken a few mair fearful tales than yi'll find in an auld book like the yon." I called his bluff and he told me about a creature called a Beatha-Greimach that drew the breath from its victim's bodies. Instantly I was grabbing a beer mat and scrawling the name on the margin of a beer mat (like most names in Gaelic it doesn't look anything like how it sounds). This sounded fascinating: Scottish folklore doesn't have any vampires, but it's well known that it has creatures very close to the vampire, the beautiful female Leanhan Shee, for example, who may have been a stronger influence on Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla or Bram Stoker's vampiresses than anything in Romanian folklore. Maybe that's what lies behind the fact that the four most important 19th century writers in the vampire genre were all Celts, or part-Celt at least; the Scots-Italian Polidori, the Scottish James Malcolm Rymer (Varney The Vampyre) and the Irish Stoker and LeFanu. What, I thought, if I ditched conventional vampirism in favour of a tradition of supernatural horror a Scottish author could truly call his own? One day that old man from the King's House bar is going to catch up with me and demand a 'finder's fee' at the very least!
Developing links with the Scottish folk tale tradition allowed me to go more into the origins of my supernatural villain, and that in its turn, allowed me to develop the character of Isla Thorwald, a character who existed in Primal Scenes solely as a babbling, toothless old crazy woman jumping out of the scenery occasionally to provide a scare or two, but who now became a major, developed character.
There were other, essentially practical changes. Primal Scenes was very much a film script, orientated around set pieces of visual action. There was a great scene, for example, where Kate tails Strachan all the way to the back streets of Glasgow, where she catches him 'in the act' with a young woman. Strachan chases Kate through the streets, he in a car, she on foot. She jumps on a train out to the countryside and he drives like a madman to head her off at the station. But that kind of purely visual, wordless action just doesn't work in the verbal medium of radio so you're better off reworking all that stuff into scenes that, though action-packed, are word driven.
The other main change came at a prompt from Patrick Rayner, head of drama at BBC Scotland. I'd been developing the idea with Bruce Young, the director, and we were all ready to go in terms of submitting the final pitch to the commissioning editor down in London, when on the day of the deadline Patrick got in touch to say he liked the idea, but we needed 'one more character': my storyline, devised initially for a two hour film might not have enough plot for a 2 1/2 hour radio slot. Panic! A whole other major character, with the deadline that afternoon? Who? Doing what?
So I took the dog for a very intensive walk around the local nature reserve and racked my brains. But something came to me very quickly. Originally, I'd purposefully not attempted to explain how a supernatural forest demon came to acquire a human name and identity: I thought it was fair enough in a gothic tale to leave some details shrouded in mystery. But then I thought there might be real dramatic potential in developing a human character from whom the demon's human identity was stolen. And, of course, to a writer in the Scottish gothic tradition, the tradition of Jekyll& Hyde and the Justified Sinner, the doppelganger aspects were irresistible. So suddenly there was an extra resident creeping around the upstairs recesses of the Strachan house. And the pitch made the deadline!
In part 2, I'll talk about the actual production.....
(Meanwhile, if you catch CATCH MY BREATH and like it, catch me LIVE at the London Horror Festival in my two shows there, the very vampiric BLOOD AND STONE: A Lullaby For Elizabeth Bathory http://www.londonhorrorfestival.com/whats-on/blood-stone/ on Oct 30th and my Edinburgh Fringe hit 21st. CENTURY POE: FALLING FOR THE USHERS http://www.londonhorrorfestival.com/whats-on/21st-century-poe-falling-for-the-ushers/ on Halloween.)
We go back a long way do me and 'Catch My Breath' (on BBC Radio 4 Extra all this week LISTEN HERE.... It began one day in my teenage years when I came across a film still in a very highbrow movie magazine, a still from a German Expressionist silent film. I long since parted company with that magazine, but I have a faint memory that the still was supposed to come from the film Schatten / Warning Shadows... although I've since seen, and loved, that film and could nowhere see in it an image exactly matching the one I recalled from that movie magazine. But the still depicted a darkly handsome man holding a candelabra standing at the foot of a staircase and looking directly up at the camera. I don't think the accompanying article said anything about the narrative context of the image - it was a general survey of the German silent cinema - but there was a game I used to play in those days as a would-be writer, a sort of imaginative five finger exercise. I would look at a still from a film I'd never seen, about whose story I knew nothing, and make up my own story to go with the image. (I would also do this with titles of films I otherwise knew nothing about: I once got a great plot out of the title Spider Baby).
Anyway, I stared at this intriguing still, asking myself who is this man? What staircase is he stood at the foot at? And who is he looking at with that handsome but untrustworthy grin. And I started to come up with answers. He's in a grand house, he owns that house, he's welcoming us to that house, we're lost, we need someplace to stay, he's handsome, charming, seductive. But he's not to be trusted. He has a secret. A downright demonic secret.
It was just a game, but already it was the beginnings of an honest-to-goodness story and when I started to get serious about being a writer, clunking a typewriter onto a kitchen chair in my first Glasgow bedsit, I began using it as the starting point for a screenplay called 'Primal Scenes': there had been a brief boomlet in low budget British horror cinema and I thought, like many an ambitious tyro writer... who knows? Of course, like 99.9 % of screenplays it didn't have half a hope of actually being produced, although it did at least get me shortlisted for the National Film School's screenwriting course. But I didn't give up on the story, converting it into my first, abortive, attempt at writing a novel and then, when Ghost Zone was something of a hit on BBC 7 as (Radio 4 Extra then was) and I was offered the chance to do another serial for them, I decided to rework Primal Scenes into radio drama.
There was quite a bit of reworking required, as the change of title implies. The most obvious difference between Primal Scenes and Catch My Breath is that the two heroines of Primal Scenes were a mother, Colleen, and her daughter, Kate, both escaping suburbia and a violent / drunken husband / father. But when the chance to do the story for radio came along, I immediately wanted to change this: for one thing, I was aware of the radio convention that when there's a child character, directors tend to cast adult actors doing 'child voices' - and it's never really convincing. It's acceptable for a small part, but I didn't want the main actor through the whole 2 1/2 hours of a five part serial sounding like that, so I changed the situation to make Kate and Colleen both young women... though Kate's experiences with a violent father did find their way back into the plot - even more dramatically, in fact. And the dynamic of the two characters didn't even change as much as one might anticipate with a significantly younger Colleen still sexually self confident and an older Kate still implicitly virginal and fearful of the whole world of sexuality a figure like Adam Strachan embodies.
Furthermore, Primal Scenes had been much closer to a traditional vampire story - I was a child of Hammer Horror, the classy atmospheric gothic of Brides Of Dracula and Kiss Of the Vampire a particular influence. But by the time I did Catch My Breath, I'd been earning spare time money as a walking guide on the long distance paths of the Scottish highlands and, for the first time in my life, steeping myself in the supernatural folklore of my own country and culture, as distinct from that of Transylvania, or Bray Studios, or Hollywood. I can still remember the rainy, 'dreich' night in the King's House hotel out on Rannoch Moor when, huddling close to the fire in the bar, I fell into conversation with a much older hiker (from Aberdeen, I think), who'd caught me reading J.F. Campbell's Popular Tales Of The West Highlands and told me "Och, son, I ken a few mair fearful tales than yi'll find in an auld book like the yon." I called his bluff and he told me about a creature called a Beatha-Greimach that drew the breath from its victim's bodies. Instantly I was grabbing a beer mat and scrawling the name on the margin of a beer mat (like most names in Gaelic it doesn't look anything like how it sounds). This sounded fascinating: Scottish folklore doesn't have any vampires, but it's well known that it has creatures very close to the vampire, the beautiful female Leanhan Shee, for example, who may have been a stronger influence on Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla or Bram Stoker's vampiresses than anything in Romanian folklore. Maybe that's what lies behind the fact that the four most important 19th century writers in the vampire genre were all Celts, or part-Celt at least; the Scots-Italian Polidori, the Scottish James Malcolm Rymer (Varney The Vampyre) and the Irish Stoker and LeFanu. What, I thought, if I ditched conventional vampirism in favour of a tradition of supernatural horror a Scottish author could truly call his own? One day that old man from the King's House bar is going to catch up with me and demand a 'finder's fee' at the very least!
Developing links with the Scottish folk tale tradition allowed me to go more into the origins of my supernatural villain, and that in its turn, allowed me to develop the character of Isla Thorwald, a character who existed in Primal Scenes solely as a babbling, toothless old crazy woman jumping out of the scenery occasionally to provide a scare or two, but who now became a major, developed character.
There were other, essentially practical changes. Primal Scenes was very much a film script, orientated around set pieces of visual action. There was a great scene, for example, where Kate tails Strachan all the way to the back streets of Glasgow, where she catches him 'in the act' with a young woman. Strachan chases Kate through the streets, he in a car, she on foot. She jumps on a train out to the countryside and he drives like a madman to head her off at the station. But that kind of purely visual, wordless action just doesn't work in the verbal medium of radio so you're better off reworking all that stuff into scenes that, though action-packed, are word driven.
The other main change came at a prompt from Patrick Rayner, head of drama at BBC Scotland. I'd been developing the idea with Bruce Young, the director, and we were all ready to go in terms of submitting the final pitch to the commissioning editor down in London, when on the day of the deadline Patrick got in touch to say he liked the idea, but we needed 'one more character': my storyline, devised initially for a two hour film might not have enough plot for a 2 1/2 hour radio slot. Panic! A whole other major character, with the deadline that afternoon? Who? Doing what?
So I took the dog for a very intensive walk around the local nature reserve and racked my brains. But something came to me very quickly. Originally, I'd purposefully not attempted to explain how a supernatural forest demon came to acquire a human name and identity: I thought it was fair enough in a gothic tale to leave some details shrouded in mystery. But then I thought there might be real dramatic potential in developing a human character from whom the demon's human identity was stolen. And, of course, to a writer in the Scottish gothic tradition, the tradition of Jekyll& Hyde and the Justified Sinner, the doppelganger aspects were irresistible. So suddenly there was an extra resident creeping around the upstairs recesses of the Strachan house. And the pitch made the deadline!
In part 2, I'll talk about the actual production.....
Tuesday, 1 October 2013
Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk - BBC Radio 4 Friday
It was a few years ago now that in a reference book I encountered a mention of a Russian novella about a romantic murderess haunted by a ghostly cat. I sought out the story - it took a bit of searching! - and then a little while after encountered Shostakovich's opera based on the story: I remember getting hold of a box set CD of it just after getting my first ever BBC drama commission, for A Hundred Miles - another story set in Russia. In fact, I stole some Russian cuss-words for my play from the Russian libretto of the Shostakovich opera!
The Leskov story was always lurking somewhere at the back of my mind... I suppose its indirect influence can be seen in my novel Aztec Love Song...
Aztec Love Song - my novel
...which again features a very uncompromisingly murderous anti-heroine, although that's not set in Russia but in my own home town of Newton Mearns. But when Wireless Theatre Company, who'd produced Medusa On The Beach, Blood And Stone (in conjunction with 3D Horror Fi) and Redder Than Roses asked for suggestions for an adaptation that could be pitched to BBC Radio 4, it was top of my list. And at last after a few rejiggings (it was going to be a 2 part serial, then a one hour one off, then suddenly a 45 minute afternoon play), it was commissioned - on a very hit-the-ground-running schedule.
But the piece basically wrote itself (sort of): the Leskov plot was so tight and brilliant, the only trouble was cramming everything (or nearly everything) in - and the short running time forced me to curb my more baroque flourishes in terms of language in favour of a terse, laconic style... which in itself suggested something of the dialogue in the 40s films noirs which we'd used as a reference point in selling the idea in the first place. And then suddenly we were round Cherry Cookson's house in the bright August sunshine, recording this evocation of Russia's chilly wastes in her back garden and her son's bedroom. And it all worked!
Good casting helped enormously. I've learned the hard way that the one thing a dramatist can't survive is miscasting - but here everything worked perfectly. We had a certain well known actress from a certain lah-di-dah high end soap lined up to play our anti-heroine Katerina, but she exercised a star's prerogative to drop you in the deep end at the last moment, forcing poor Cherry to recast over the phone while stuck in a traffic jam... she had an ex-student she thought might be able to handle the role, a prospect that gave one momentary pause... what was this - nepotism where we'd been after a Big Name??? But in fact Rochenda Sandall was/is utterly brilliant in the role - all this playwright could have asked for. Away from the mic, she's a bubbly laugh-a-minute young woman, in front of the mic she's fully wedded to the character's crazy, passionate intensity. If she's not a Big Name now, she will be very soon, I suspect.
As male lead we had Joe Armstrong. Joe was just back from holiday... unfortunately, he'd come back with a sore throat and worried about his ability to cope with the vocal demands of the role. That first day, he spent all his free time collapsed across a bed, trying to muster his strength for the next take, apologising to us, convinced he sounded like some hoarse subterranean monster in a horror flick, even as we kept reassuring him "No, no, Joe, it sounds fine." And then the second day his sore throat had miraculously cleared up - and now he worried he wouldn't sound like the same guy who'd done the other half of the scenes the day before. But again we reassured him that on-mic you couldn't tell the difference. And hearing him in the final cut was a revelation; they used to always say that when Gene Hackman acted on set, he hardly seemed to be doing that much, but then you saw him on screen you suddenly realised what a powerfully etched performance he'd created. Joe, I think, is a bit like that in front of a radio mic: what he does is very subtle, internal, he thinks deeply about what he's doing, asks a lot of questions... and you wind up, in Lady M with a performance of real power.
Backing those two up we had an ensemble of real skill, ranging from well known character actors to those who'd got their break through Wireless Theatre, such as Jessica Dennis who'd just given a terrific performance in another of my plays, Redder Than Roses, playing Mary, Queen Of Scots. Then the whole thing went into the editing suite... I was anxious about this as my previous BBC production Rough Magick had had to lose about 10 minutes in the editing room - and I was particularly worried the violence of the story would get cut away to nothing... and the hard clear eye Leskov has for violence is one of the great aesthetic virtues of his story - it's one of the great things Russians like Leskov or Dostoevsky do... they don't keep the hard dark edge of life at a genteel distance - like, for example, their English contemporaries. They go in hard for the hard gritty truths of life. A Glaswegian can relate to that....
Anyway, the violence survived, as close to intact as I could have wished for (I'm willing to concede that in the script I maybe pushed a wee bit TOO far - rather than play safe!)... this is quite an intense piece when all's done and dusted. I have this fancy of folk listening on Friday after sitting through The Archers, thinking "19th century Russia? Set on a farm? Unhappy marriage? It must be like a sort of Russian version of the Archers...." and then getting knocked out of their seats by what we have for them.
Anyway, there it is -- and it goes out this Friday at 2.15 pm, and then onto the iPlayer for the next 7 days. I hope people like it... Radio Times certainly did. But it's the play I had in mind all along, certainly. It's not every time round I'm as completely happy with a production as I am with this - and for that I thank Cherry, Mariele and the wonderful cast (although I should add that if you listen very closely you can hear me shouting and mumbling in the background as a sort of extra filling out the crowd scenes... it's long been a tradition with me to do a bit of a 'Hitchcock' in my radio plays... I'm a soldier dying horribly in Ghost Zone (shortly to return to BBC Radio 4 Extra - and I'm a cackling demonic partygoer in Catch My Breath...)
Anyway, here's the link to the appropriate page on the BBC Radio 4 website - although it talks about my dialogue being 'Shakespearean'... not sure I can live up to that!
The Leskov story was always lurking somewhere at the back of my mind... I suppose its indirect influence can be seen in my novel Aztec Love Song...
Aztec Love Song - my novel
...which again features a very uncompromisingly murderous anti-heroine, although that's not set in Russia but in my own home town of Newton Mearns. But when Wireless Theatre Company, who'd produced Medusa On The Beach, Blood And Stone (in conjunction with 3D Horror Fi) and Redder Than Roses asked for suggestions for an adaptation that could be pitched to BBC Radio 4, it was top of my list. And at last after a few rejiggings (it was going to be a 2 part serial, then a one hour one off, then suddenly a 45 minute afternoon play), it was commissioned - on a very hit-the-ground-running schedule.
But the piece basically wrote itself (sort of): the Leskov plot was so tight and brilliant, the only trouble was cramming everything (or nearly everything) in - and the short running time forced me to curb my more baroque flourishes in terms of language in favour of a terse, laconic style... which in itself suggested something of the dialogue in the 40s films noirs which we'd used as a reference point in selling the idea in the first place. And then suddenly we were round Cherry Cookson's house in the bright August sunshine, recording this evocation of Russia's chilly wastes in her back garden and her son's bedroom. And it all worked!
Good casting helped enormously. I've learned the hard way that the one thing a dramatist can't survive is miscasting - but here everything worked perfectly. We had a certain well known actress from a certain lah-di-dah high end soap lined up to play our anti-heroine Katerina, but she exercised a star's prerogative to drop you in the deep end at the last moment, forcing poor Cherry to recast over the phone while stuck in a traffic jam... she had an ex-student she thought might be able to handle the role, a prospect that gave one momentary pause... what was this - nepotism where we'd been after a Big Name??? But in fact Rochenda Sandall was/is utterly brilliant in the role - all this playwright could have asked for. Away from the mic, she's a bubbly laugh-a-minute young woman, in front of the mic she's fully wedded to the character's crazy, passionate intensity. If she's not a Big Name now, she will be very soon, I suspect.
As male lead we had Joe Armstrong. Joe was just back from holiday... unfortunately, he'd come back with a sore throat and worried about his ability to cope with the vocal demands of the role. That first day, he spent all his free time collapsed across a bed, trying to muster his strength for the next take, apologising to us, convinced he sounded like some hoarse subterranean monster in a horror flick, even as we kept reassuring him "No, no, Joe, it sounds fine." And then the second day his sore throat had miraculously cleared up - and now he worried he wouldn't sound like the same guy who'd done the other half of the scenes the day before. But again we reassured him that on-mic you couldn't tell the difference. And hearing him in the final cut was a revelation; they used to always say that when Gene Hackman acted on set, he hardly seemed to be doing that much, but then you saw him on screen you suddenly realised what a powerfully etched performance he'd created. Joe, I think, is a bit like that in front of a radio mic: what he does is very subtle, internal, he thinks deeply about what he's doing, asks a lot of questions... and you wind up, in Lady M with a performance of real power.
Backing those two up we had an ensemble of real skill, ranging from well known character actors to those who'd got their break through Wireless Theatre, such as Jessica Dennis who'd just given a terrific performance in another of my plays, Redder Than Roses, playing Mary, Queen Of Scots. Then the whole thing went into the editing suite... I was anxious about this as my previous BBC production Rough Magick had had to lose about 10 minutes in the editing room - and I was particularly worried the violence of the story would get cut away to nothing... and the hard clear eye Leskov has for violence is one of the great aesthetic virtues of his story - it's one of the great things Russians like Leskov or Dostoevsky do... they don't keep the hard dark edge of life at a genteel distance - like, for example, their English contemporaries. They go in hard for the hard gritty truths of life. A Glaswegian can relate to that....
Anyway, the violence survived, as close to intact as I could have wished for (I'm willing to concede that in the script I maybe pushed a wee bit TOO far - rather than play safe!)... this is quite an intense piece when all's done and dusted. I have this fancy of folk listening on Friday after sitting through The Archers, thinking "19th century Russia? Set on a farm? Unhappy marriage? It must be like a sort of Russian version of the Archers...." and then getting knocked out of their seats by what we have for them.
Anyway, there it is -- and it goes out this Friday at 2.15 pm, and then onto the iPlayer for the next 7 days. I hope people like it... Radio Times certainly did. But it's the play I had in mind all along, certainly. It's not every time round I'm as completely happy with a production as I am with this - and for that I thank Cherry, Mariele and the wonderful cast (although I should add that if you listen very closely you can hear me shouting and mumbling in the background as a sort of extra filling out the crowd scenes... it's long been a tradition with me to do a bit of a 'Hitchcock' in my radio plays... I'm a soldier dying horribly in Ghost Zone (shortly to return to BBC Radio 4 Extra - and I'm a cackling demonic partygoer in Catch My Breath...)
Anyway, here's the link to the appropriate page on the BBC Radio 4 website - although it talks about my dialogue being 'Shakespearean'... not sure I can live up to that!
Thursday, 26 September 2013
REVEALED - My secret love affair with Elizabeth Bathory!
With my storytelling show about real life 'vampire' Countess Elizabeth Bathory coming up at the London Horror Festival on October 30th (and now booking, by way of link below!)...
Blood And Stone at the London Horror Festival website
Download audio drama of Blood And Stone here
..thought I'd throw in a few words about my lifelong secret love affair with 'Countess Dracula'...
Blood And Stone at the London Horror Festival website
Download audio drama of Blood And Stone here
..thought I'd throw in a few words about my lifelong secret love affair with 'Countess Dracula'...
THE COUNTESS & I.
We go back a
long way together, Erzsebet Bathory and I. One of my earliest childhod memories
is of a Saturday afternoon in the Govanhill area of Glasgow when I badgered my
parents to let me spend my pocket money on a book I had just seen in a shop
along the road: the novelisation of Hammer Films’ version of the Bathory story Countess Dracula. My Mum and Dad, to be
fair, were less worried about my exposure to the horrors within those pages (I
was already the kind of kid allowed to sit up in his Star Trek pyjamas to watch
the late night horror film on TV), than concerned over the waste of money on a
book surely unreadable to a child with his age still in single figures. (“Think
of all the long words,” I remember my Mum saying.) But I persevered and soon had
my hands on my very first ‘grown-up’ book, with its gorgeous front cover of a
beautiful young Ingrid Pitt and its disturbing back cover image of a
grotesquely aged Pitt shoved in her prison cell at the end of the film (which
therefore ends just before BLOOD & STONE begins.) And within those covers I
was introduced to at least a fictionalised version of the great lady, right at
the absolute inception of my literary life. She has haunted me ever since.
How could she
not? As someone who firmly believes that great horror is achieved when – and
only when - horror and beauty ring out at the same instant (No beauty? Then I’m
not interested.), this woman, simultaneously magnificent and beautiful and
monstrous beyond conception, might stand as the sheerest embodiment of that
aesthetic, less a commonplace serial killer (yawn...) than a kind of wondrous,
terrible Goddess of death, like Kali or Medea, Hecate or Clytemnestra.
Throughout
the rest of my childhood, a childhood blessed with the true writer’s ability to
promiscuously mingle ‘fact’ and fantasy, the tenement building in Glasgow’s
Catchcart Road which housed that newsagent’s shop became for me the home of
Countess Bathory. I would look at the dusty upper windows of that tenement and
visualise the Countess locked up in there – for it was the image of the
imprisoned Countess of her latter years that truly haunted my imagination.
(Likewise, the toy shop across the street where I bought a model kit of Doctor
Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde housed, in my imagination, that very laboratory
somewhere in its back shop.)
And so,
inevitably, I dreamed of one day creating my own artistic, dramatic vision of
the Countess. The basic plot of BLOOD & STONE was already at least
half-formulated in my mind by my teenage years, but I dithered over getting it
down on paper, fearful perhaps of doing justice to the great lady, but also at
a loss to think who would produce such a grim, gothic story. It hardly seemed
material for the BBC or the Royal
Court
Then, when a
backpacking trip around Austria saw me basing myself in Vienna, in a hotel room
so cheap the window looked out on a romantic airshaft heaped with dead pigeons,
I felt the Countess herself taking a hand in the matter. There’s no time to deal
with this in BLOOD & STONE, but not all the Countess’s atrocities were
committed in her Hungarian Castle. She also had a townhouse in Vienna, just
behind the Imperial Court (signifying how highly ranked her family were in the
Austro-Hungarian monarchy) and committed some of her crimes there. The monks on
the other side of the street used to chuck pots across at her window when the
screams of tortured girls disturbed their devotions – but never thought of
reporting someone so important to the authorities. Vienna doesn’t publicise her
its Bathory connection like it publicises Mozart, but after a bit of detective
work at the Vienna police museum, I worked out her Vienna address and made my
way there after dark one night.
The street is
narrow, poorly lit and with houses that seem to lean towards one another across
the street in Caligari fashion. The doorway that once been hers was large but
drably painted and many of the floors above in a building now split into
offices and apartments looked empty, derelict, buried in dust. I couldn’t help
but picture her staring out of the uppermost windows, haunting the spot still.
And, standing there, I happened to glance a few doors along to the window of a
small record shop on the same block. Two big musicals were playing in Vienna
VAMPYR ELIZABETH
It was like a
sign, direct from the ghost of the lady herself to my own imagination. I turned
away, hurried back up the street towards the brighter lights and broader byways
around the opera house. And I swear I could hear the moth-eaten folds of her
gown hissing after me up the pavement, pursuing me all the way back to the grey
shadows of that hotel room. That night I felt her crawling into my skull.
After that, I
had to write something. The first
form the idea took on paper was that of a stage play entitled Laundry, but this was a different piece
from BLOOD & STONE: the bare bones of the plot were identical, but Laundry updated the story to modern
Eastern Europe, both under and after Stalinism and was written in a surreal,
absurdist style closer to Ionesco or Kafka or Durrenmatt than to a
straightforward horror story. Inevitably, perhaps, no one knew what to do with
a play so wilfully off-beat and peculiar so the script lay gathering dust, like
the Countess’s ghost up behind those Vienna
But still I
couldn’t let go of her; or she wouldn’t let go of me. The idea came to me to
take the story back to what it had been in the first place: a pure no-bullshit
gothic horror story, 17th. Century castle setting and all. When I
took up professional storytelling, I performed a rough-and-ready 25 minute
version of Blood And Stone during one of my regular stints with the
Storytellers Of Nottingham in Nottingham’s haunted Trip To Jerusalem pub. It worked
well, but seemed too big and intense for that tiny venue and limited slot, so I
thought about developing it further as a full length piece in its own right.
Meanwhile,
I pitched it
tentatively to BBC Scotland as a radio play, but they took understandable
fright at the thought of something so dark and nasty coming on straight after The Archers. Then Mariele Runacre
Temple, who’d already produced another play of mine, Medusa On The Beach, for her Wireless Theatre Company dropped me a
line about a new audio drama company being set up specially to focus on horror
drama. And I knew in an instant that the ghost which had trailed me along the Vienna Glasgow street
BLOOD &
STONE was recorded in a spooky Norfolk church and then released, through 3D
Horror Fi, Wireless Theatre Company, Amazon Audible, iTunes etc. and was very
well received, ultimately earning a 2012 Rondo award nomination. But the tight
hold the Countess had taken of me meant it wasn’t enough to just write a script
and let others perform it – that dream of a longer storytelling version offered
me the chance to bring to fruition my own inner Countess, to fully channel the
way, years before, I’d felt her spirit creeping into me, whether in the streets
of Glasgow or Vienna. Storytelling, when it’s really going full tilt, has an
almost Shamanic quality… one feels the characters are passing through one like
spirits, like you’re a medium, an intermediary, between your audience and the
world of the dead. And, God help me, as I rehearse Blood And Stone, day and
out, as I twist mind and voice and body into the Countess’ stark contours, it
really feels as if there’s more than my imagination at work, as if
something/someone who followed me home, skirts a-rustle that night in Vienna is
slipping on my skin and bones like a ragged ballgown, a pair of dark gloves, a
tragic mask for a tragic (anti) heroine…..
Tuesday, 24 September 2013
21st Century Poe at the London Horror Festival on Halloween - press release
Just pasting in here press release for my other show at this year's London Horror Festival, 21st. CENTURY POE: FALLING FOR THE USHERS, recently such a success in Edinburgh. If anyone reading this or the press release for BLOOD AND STONE: A LULLABY FOR ELIZABETH BATHORY, my other London Horror Festival show, wants to get on with buying some tickets, here are the appropriate links:
21st Century Poe: Falling For The Ushers
Blood And Stone: A Lullaby For Elizabeth Bathory
Anyway, here's the press release:
21st Century Poe: Falling For The Ushers
Blood And Stone: A Lullaby For Elizabeth Bathory
Anyway, here's the press release:
21st.
CENTURY POE: FALLING FOR THE USHERS
London
Horror Festival
19.30,
31st. October 2013, Etcetera Theatre, Camden (Tickets £10)
Marty Ross (BBC Radio
horror; Doctor Who audio) drags Edgar Allan kicking & screaming into the
modern world – just in time for Halloween & the London Horror Festival!
In the horror tales
of Edgar Allan Poe, the same opening note is struck again and again: an
isolated, tormented narrator wants – needs! – to tell us of his strange
experiences. They are ideally suited, therefore, to contemporary theatre’s
great comeback kid, the most ancient and suddenly most modern form of narrative
theatre: live storytelling. But Marty Ross, a storytelling ‘modernist’ keen to
shift this resurgent form away from backward looking quaintness, has no intention
of presenting Poe’s stories as period pieces: rather he radically updates them
to our era – shifting the setting to his native Glasgow. Fresh from critical
raves and full houses for three of his 21st. Century Poe stories at
this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Ross now brings his reinvention of Poe’s most
famous tale to the London Horror Festival – on Halloween!
Well established as a
playwright, particularly with dark drama for BBC radio (Ghost Zone, Catch My
Breath, Darker Side Of The Border, this month’s Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk), plus
Doctor Who & award-nominated Dark Shadows audio drama, as well as Blood And
Stone, nominated for a 2012 Rondo Award (horror fandom’s Oscars) and also
presented at this year’s London Horror Festival
(Oct 30th), Marty Ross onstage is a whole dramatis personae in himself, using expressionistic mime and
gesture as well as evocative words, shifting fluidly between the strange and troubling
characters of his story - in which haunted, incestuous twins Roderick and
Madeline Usher have left behind the misty gothic manor of the Poe tale to
become superstars of the contemporary art world, thanks to their macabre
conceptual installations in the manner of Damien Hirst and the Chapman Bros.
But when Madeline’s old art school admirer Ed shows up, their tragic fall is as
inescapable as ever….
Critics at the
Edinburgh Fringe knew they had seen something special. Now London can see how cutting
edge this most traditional form of theatre can be….
“Insanely good
storytelling… a master craftsman who never turns down the pressure… Ross’
violently impressive performance make this a heart-pounding triumph…
Trainspotting meets gothic horror….” – Broadway Baby *****
“Ross has a great
aptitude for suspense and terror, and he hurls himself into his tale with
energy and passion, in words which ring with Glasgow rhythm. An accomplished
piece of work… a chilling conclusion.” – The Scotsman
“Visceral. A
compelling narrator and onstage presence. … left you thinking as well as
reeling… theatre that kept you on edge… an immensely entertaining ride that
scared and shocked in equal measure – a fair ground ghost ride for the 21st
Century….” – Fringe Review
“…What Marty Ross
does with literature’s most mystical and macabre works is make them sing with
new energy and beguile an audience all over again…. poetically re-worked ‘The
Fall of the House of Usher’ manages, in its modernisation, to preserve and
revere the original, even intensifying its impact… a bewitchingly good story
that leaves a haunting reminder long after the lights have gone down.” - 3
Weeks ****
Festival website:
http://www.londonhorrorfestival.com/whats-on/21st-century-poe-falling-for-the-ushers/
Monday, 23 September 2013
BLOOD & STONE - A Lullaby For Elizabeth Bathory
Just pasting in here press release for Blood And Stone - the storytelling show I'm doing at the London Horror Festival on October 30th. Be there AND be scared! (And maybe moved - in a weird kind of a way...)
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BLOOD
& STONE – A Lullaby For Elizabeth Bathory
London
Horror Festival
19.30,
30th. October 2013, Etcetera Theatre, 265 Camden High Street
London
NW1 7BU (Above Oxford Arms pub), Camden (Tickets £10)
1610:
Hungary’s real life ‘vampire’ countess is imprisoned in her castle, the most
prolific serial killer in history. But at this year’s London Horror Festival,
storyteller Marty Ross is going to set her free….
It’s one of history’s
great horror stories – the Countess who bathed in blood to preserve her beauty.
It has inspired horror films from Hammer’s ‘Countess Dracula’ to recent efforts
starring Julie Delpy and Anna Friel. Those accounts have focused upon the
Countess’ gory heyday, but the emphasis in Marty Ross’ storytelling show is on
the aftermath… the ageing Countess punished by being locked for years in a
lightless chamber in her castle, her hunger fierce as ever. Blood And Stone imagines
a young maid listening to the Countess’ protestations of innocence - and being
lured into unlocking the door of the cell….
Those who saw
storyteller Marty Ross’ performances at last year’s London Horror Festival, or
at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, will know his storyteller’s ability to
shape-shift through the forms and voices of a myriad of strange characters,
male and female. Well established as a playwright, particularly with dark drama
for BBC radio (Ghost Zone, Catch My Breath, Darker Side Of The Border, this
month’s Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk), plus Doctor Who & award-nominated Dark
Shadows audio drama– as well as the audio drama version of Blood And Stone,
nominated for a 2012 Rondo Award (horror fandom’s Oscars) - as a storyteller he
is a whole dramatis personae in
himself, a key figure in the current revival of this oldest – and yet suddenly most
modern - of theatrical forms. As Broadway Baby said of his show 21st.
Century Poe (also at the London Horror Festival on Halloween), “Ross is a master craftsman who never turns
down the pressure, painting vile pictures and weaving a grotesque spell over
his listeners… Certain images were so repulsive that people in the front row
were noticeably squirming”. Using not just powerful words, but mime and
gesture indebted to the likes of German Expressionism, Ross’ storytelling is
more Theatre Of Cruelty than Book At Bedtime, creating vivid on-stage images,
even as he projects more scarifying images still into the audience’s
imaginations… which is where the really scary stuff always happens….
Reviews for Ross’
storytelling at the Edinburgh Fringe:
“Insanely good storytelling… a master craftsman
who never turns down the pressure… violently impressive….” – Broadway Baby
*****
“Ross has a great
aptitude for suspense and terror… chilling.” – The Scotsman
“Visceral. A
compelling narrator and onstage presence. … left you thinking as well as
reeling… theatre that kept you on edge… an immensely entertaining ride that
scared and shocked in equal measure – a fair ground ghost ride for the 21st
Century….” – Fringe Review
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Tuesday, 17 September 2013
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
BARBARA OF THE HOUSE OF GREBE
A Dramatic Storytelling Show by Marty Ross
– Nottingham Central Library Oct 2nd. 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 21st.
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 4th. 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
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