Just composing programme note for Friday's performance of The Blackwater Bride at Chilwell Arts Theatre, Nottingham this Friday, Feb 7th. at 7.30.
The
blackwater bride
programme
A
Chilwell Arts Theatre production
Principal
characters in the drama:
James
Miller – a bank manager
Catriona
Miller – his daughter
Constance
Miller – his wife, her mother
Detective
Sergeant Bryan Culley – a young policeman
Detective
Inspector George McGavigan – his superior officer
Mrs.
Hubbard – proprietess of a very exclusive establishment for
gentlemen
The
Blackwater Bride – a mystery
The
setting is Glasgow and, briefly, Dumfries in the year 1893.
As
a teenager, after school, I would sometimes catch a bus from the
Glasgow suburb where I lived, travelling to 'inner city' Govanhill to
stay overnight with my Grandmother. On autumn and winter nights I
would often get off the bus a stop or two early and walk the rest of
the way, this taking me through a maze of Victorian tenements lit
against the dark by the amber, almost sepia, light of the street
lamps. I developed this slightly peculiar habit because, as a
precocious devourer of Sherlock Holmes stories and Victorian Gothic
tales from Jekyll & Hyde to Dorian Grey, I could almost feel as
if I had stepped, there in the latter 20th.
Century, directly into the Victorian landscape of those tales, making
up stories of my own as I went along. After all, my Bancroft Classics
edition of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, bought in the childrens'
section of Woolworths, featured a pen and ink illustration of Mister
Hyde evading the police by jumping a fence into a tenement
backyard... which was the exact spitting image of my Grandmother's
yard.
And
then I would reach my Grandmother's tenement and settle by her gas
fire and, after tea, she would teach me the art of storytelling,
spinning extravagantly detailed yarns that ranged from fairy and folk
tales to her own retellings of the old black and white films she
loved so much... Gaslight, The Spiral Staircase, Frankenstein: the
films themselves, when I later saw them, would often pale by
comparison with the vivid, thrilling images she put in my head with
simple word and gesture. I suppose tonight's show is a kind of
tribute to her, Jessie Downs, my first and greatest master in the art
of storytelling.
It
was inevitable, when I began to seriously write and perform myself,
that I would want to bring all those influences together in a single
story... Celtic myth and legend, the whole genre of 'gaslit Gothic',
and the Victorian Gothic landscape of Glasgow itself. I first wrote
tonight's story as a conventional play – and in fact it was the
first piece I ever had performed. But I always longed to give it a
second life, to rework it for the particular form of one man
storytelling I have made my own. In that first stage-play version, in
fact, I had my young Scots heroine from Dumfries travel to London for
her mysterious adventure. Living in Glasgow at the time, Glasgow
suddenly seemed too familiar to me to play the role of a city of
bewildering strangeness. Now that I have been living in the East
Midlands for more than a decade, however, still joined at the
heartstrings to Glasgow but separated from it by hundreds of miles,
my home city exists for me more as a city of the mind, of memory
embroidered by imagination, than a place of direct daily experience.
Thus it has taken on, in my mind, just that quality of 'otherness'
necessary for the city in this story. Sigmund Freud, in his essay on
the supernatural tale, said that 'The Uncanny' (or in German, the
unheimlich,
the
un-homely)
is not simply the utterly strange, the wholly alien, but the homely
that has become
'unhomely', the familiar that has been rendered strange, as our
dreams spin fantastic landscapes and adventures out of things we knew
very common-sensibly hours or years before in the wakeful day.
Glasgow was my home and is now my un-home...
it haunts me, simply put, like a ghost.
And
it is, therefore, now the perfect setting for my uncanny tale --
which means a journey back to my roots as a storyteller, walking
those Govanhill streets on lamp-lit winter evenings, imagining the
strange and wondrous characters who might step out of the shadows at
any moment – and begin telling me their story. To those Glasgow
shadows, I likewise dedicate The Blackwater Bride.
MARTY
ROSS is a Glasgow-born, Nottingham-based storyteller and playwright,
best known for a string of BBC radio plays, ranging from 2002's A
Hundred Miles to 2012's Rough Magick (available from the BBC's
AudioGo site) and 2013's Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk, as well as the
Radio 4 series The Darker Side Of The Border and the Radio 4 Extra
serials Catch My Breath & Ghost Zone. Commissioned for 2014 is a
drama for Radio Scotland, The Dead Of Fenwick Moor, to be broadcast
later this year. He has also written two Doctor Who audio dramas,
Night's Black Agents & The Lurkers At Sunlight's Edge (available
on CD and as download), as well as the Dark Shadows audio drama Dress
Me In Dark Dreams (nominated for a 2013 Scribes award). The Wireless
Theatre Company have produced Medusa On The Beach, Blood And Stone
(nominated for a 2012 Rondo Award) and Redder Than Roses: A Glimpse
Of Mary, Queen Of Scots, which was commissioned by the 2013 Buxton
Festival. A new play, a ghost story set at Chatsworth House, has been
commissioned for this year's Buxton Festival. His novel Aztec Love
Song is published by Weathervane Press. Two other novels, Glasgow,
Like A Stranger and Dances Sacred & Profane are available from
Amazon's kindle store. His stage plays have been performed at the
likes of Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre, the Liverpool Everyman &
London's Finborough and Warehouse theatres.
As
a live storyteller, he has performed everywhere from traditional
theatre spaces to Scottish and German mountainsides, having first
developed his storytelling skills while working as a guide on long
distance hiking trips. The Blackwater Bride is his third show at
Chilwell Arts Theatre and he has also performed in Nottingham's
libraries and a couple of its classier cafes, as well as two years
running at the London Horror Festival. Last year, at the Edinburgh
Fringe, his show 21st.
Century Poe was a considerable success and he will be performing
there again this August. His repertoire runs from folk tales to his
own versions of literary classics to his own stories. His website is:
www.martyrossstoryteller.blogspot.co.uk
and he tweets at @martyrosswriter
Special
thanks to Michael at Chilwell Arts, to Stewart and Ted and Emma, to
Helen & Ceri, & to all involved with the original Jordanhill
production, especially Jill & Laurance.
