Me & The Gorbals Vampire

STOP PRESS: THE GORBALS VAMPIRE IS NEXT ON AT LEE ROSY'S IN NOTTINGHAM ON 23RD. OCTOBER AT 8PM. YOU CAN GET TICKETS VIA WWW.NOTTMFRINGE.COM....

In the run up to the opening next weekend (eek!!!) of my Edinburgh Fringe show VAMPIRES IN THE VAULT, I thought I'd talk here a little about the background of one of the two vampire tales I'm performing. (If you want to book tickets, link is H E R E ! ! !

THE GORBALS VAMPIRE, which I'm performing on Sat 8, Mon 10, Wed 12 & Fri 14 August, is inspired by one of the strangest true stories of post war Glasgow social history. The fact that I, mad keen on vampire tales since shoplifting my first copy of Dracula at the age of eight, spent a significant part of my youth staying with my grandmother Jessie Downs in her tenement at the corner of Langside Road and Butterbiggins Road, two turnings and about five minutes walk away from the Southern Necropolis, scene of the phenomenon gave the story immense resonance for me. I loved Hammer Horror, but here was a vampire story that took place not in distant Transylvania but just around the corner.

What actually happened is that in September 1954, local kids got the idea into their heads that a vampire with iron teeth was running amok in the graveyard devouring children. And so for several nights these kids would descend upon the graveyard en masse, some it is said even carrying wooden stakes with which to tackle the vampire directly. Police were called in to chase the kids away, headlines were made and the adult world started looking for a scapegoat for all this under age anarchy. They found it in the then current popularity of US horror comics, then in the super gory era of the EC horror comics such as Tales From The Crypt and The Vault Of Horror and their various competitors. Questions were asked in the Houses of Parliament and it wasn't long before a ban was imposed on the US comics.

In fact, the forces of the state may have been barking up completely the wrong tree: interviewed in later years, several of the now grown up vampire hunters denied they had ever read any of these comics and more local legends of an 'Iron Man' and a female monster, Jenny With The Iron Teeth, may have had more actual relevance to what happened.

But the whole thing essentially petered out with, alas, no real sighting or experience of anything that could honestly be said to be a vampire: a slightly anticlimactic ending for anyone other than a sociologist or a historian of censorship.

In consequence, I was haunted ever since first hearing the story by the thought of rectifying reality's inability to deliver a real honest to goodness vampire – and that's just what I've done in the story I'm performing at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe. My story is set a generation later, in 1976, all the better to relate it to the era of my childhood and allow a guest appearance for one of the great horror comics of my childhood, House Of Hammer.

In my story, ten year old Timmy is the son of one of the original vampire hunting kids: he's heard the story off his Dad and his incautious repeating of it one day gets him into a world of trouble, both human and supernatural. For this is no whimsical piece of tongue in cheek mock-gothic japery: I set out to produce a real honest to goodness gritty, disturbing supernatural story about the most unsettling subject imaginable, the destruction of a child's innocence by the most squalid and ancient evil, a piece more 'Exorcist' than 'Edward Scissorhands'.

I didn't want my vampire to be some kind of lah-di-dah Byronic aristocrat either: I pictured a vampire appropriate to the rather past-its-best setting of the Southern Necropolis: a rancid, ancient working class vampire in a shabby second hand tartan suit straight off a barrow in Paddy's Market, Nosferatu-bald save where barbed wire grows out of the back of his head, wrinkled and liver-spotted and generally smelly.

Fallen tombstones in Southern Necropolis

Gatehouse of the Southern Necropolis

Nature reconquers the Necropolis

And of course I took a wander, by way of my old Govanhill haunts, out to the Southern Necropolis when I was first gathering my ideas for the show. The photos from the trip are on this page. Particularly note 'The White Lady', actually a kind of timeworn grey in colour. A whole mythology surrounds the Lady herself: she's supposed to turn her head to look at you when you walk by, at least if you're not looking too close – and indeed to wander the graveyard freely after dark in ghostly form.

The White Lady

I was particularly struck by the pile of coins placed between her feet like votive offerings to an ancient Goddess. There I was in the middle of the Gorbals, an area – as ever – of sometimes grinding poverty, but no one had thought to help themselves to these coins, as if they belonged to the Lady and no one else. This caught hold of my imagination and the Lady herself features in my story, a kind of divine counterpoint to the the hellishness of the vampire himself.

These claw-like bushes rising from the tombs put in an appearance in the show!

That the gravestones almost seem to be humping one another adds to the illicit atmosphere

I'm really excited about the show: I need to set up performances in Glasgow after Edinburgh is done, because I think I've paid my home town, my own neighbourhood even as a South Sider, the best kind of tribute I've got in me: I've taken a quirky social incident and made it into an honest to goodness folk tale, a backstreet myth, a Gothic epic of good and evil.

More branches from beyond the grave!

Well, we'll see whether that comes across in a week and a half's time!  

The juxtaposition of graveyard & tower block crucial in the show

VAMPIRES IN THE VAULT poster for Edinburgh Fringe

My brilliant designer Liam Proctor of DAPR Collectivehas just sent through the proof of the poster for my Edinburgh Fringe show VAMPIRES IN THE VAULT and it's a quantum leap beyond all I asked of him, so I don't know what more to do here and now than post it big as I can. It basically says it all. Tickets can be booked H E R E ! ! ! !

VAMPIRES IN THE VAULT my Edinburgh Fringe show 8 - 15 August

Hi, seeing as today's the day the official Edinburgh Fringe guide is released, thought I'd better crack on and attach here the media release for the show, which has all the details on dates etc. Tickets can already be booked  H E R E ! ! !

Vampires in the Vault

A dramatic storytelling show by MARTY ROSS

Paradise In The Vault (venue 29)

11 Merchant St. EH1 2QD

8 – 15 August 17.55

Box office: 0131 510 0022

www.paradise-green.co.uk

Tickets £8 / £6 (2for1 on 10^th. & 11^th.)

After his acclaimed 21^st. Century Poe shows at 2013 & 2014's Edfringe, live storyteller and playwright Marty Ross (BBC Radio drama; Doctor Who & Dark Shadows audio) descends once again into the Vault with a themed show alternating two vampire tales – dare you see them both?

His radically updated Poe shows saw him acclaimed as “a compelling onstage presence”, “a master craftsman who never turns down the pressure” with a gift for “insanely good storytelling” and “a great aptitude for suspense & terror”. Now he descends deeper into the dark with stories of vampirism, historic and modern, supernatural and disturbingly real.

In THE GORBALS VAMPIRE, being performed on Sat 8^th, Mon 10^th. Wed 12^th. & Friday 14^th. August, Glasgow's very own urban legend of an iron-toothed vampire in the city's Southern Necropolis inspires a disturbing tale of innocence lost. Twenty years ago, Timmy disappeared in the graveyard, victim of a schoolkid prank. Now he's back, to tell the tale of where he's been... and how close he came to being trapped there forever.

In BLOOD & STONE: Lullaby For A Vampire Countess, being performed on Sun 9^th. Tue 11^th. Thurs 13^th. & Sat 15^th. August, Ross again draws on a true tale, in this case that of the Hungarian Bloody Countess Elizabeth Bathory, aka “Countess Dracula”, who in the early 1600s was imprisoned in her castle for bathing in the blood of her victims. This fictional sequel to the historical story imagines a servant listening to the Countess' protestations of innocence and being tempted to set her free.... (Marty Ross' audio drama version of this story was nominated for a 2012 Rondo Award – the horror world's Oscars – and can be downloaded here: http://www.wirelesstheatrecompany.co.uk/product/blood-and-stone/ )

Anyone who has seen Ross' previous shows will be aware of his ability, with the simplest resources, to – as Broadway Baby said - “ paint vile pictures and weave a grotesque spell over his listeners”, to create, in the words of Fringe Review “an immensely entertaining ride that scared and shocked in equal measure – a fair ground ghost ride for the 21^st. Century.” Forget any quaint olde-worlde notions of live storytelling – this is storytelling as visceral, in your face, expressionistic, full tilt theatre, Ross using bold gesture and imagistic language as he shifts fluidly across a whole dramatis personae of characters innocent and monstrous, young and old, male and female, good and evil. Horror and dark humour, stark tragedy and grand guignol, Gothic Hungary and the hard side of modern Glasgow, are all evoked as vividly as in any classic horror film. Descend into The Vault and see for yourself....

BLOOD AND STONE: Lullaby For A Vampire Countess at Belper Arts Festival Saturday May 23rd.

PHEW! Just back from a couple of well-received 21st CENTURY POE shows at Glasgow Southside Fringe, slightly exhausted, and pole-axed with a head cold, but making time to post here details of my next show, in just over a week at Belper Arts Festival, in the No. 28 arts centre, which is becoming a regular haunt for my macabre storytelling. Show is BOOKING H E R E ! ! !

BLOOD & STONE – Lullaby For A Vampire Countess

A Dramatic Performance by Marty Ross

Belper Arts Festival, May 23^rd. No. 28, Market Square, Belper DE56 1FZ. 7.30pm (doors open 7pm). Tickets £7 / £5 from Belper Arts Fest box offices at Oxfam books, King Street & Gatehouse Tea Rooms, DeBradlei Mill, Chapel Street. Ticket hotline: 07845 400914. http://www.belperartsfestival.org

The early 1600s. Hungary’s real life ‘vampire’ countess Elizabeth Bathory is imprisoned in her castle, the most prolific serial killer in history. But what if a servant were naïve enough 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 that hunger being turned loose on the world once again, in a haunted and haunting drama: a unique and intense theatrical experience, far beyond all cliches of what a 'storytelling' show might be.

Those who have seen Marty Ross' previous performances at No. 28 in Belper (The Blackwater Bride at last year's Belper Arts Fest; two performances of 21^st Century Poe)... or at venues around Nottingham or the Edinburgh Fringe (where BLOOD & STONE is headed) or the London Horror Festival (where this show was successfully performed in 2013) will know his storyteller’s ability to shape-shift through the forms and voices of a myriad of strange characters, male and female, young and old, good and evil. Well established as a playwright, particularly with dark drama for BBC radio (Ghost Zone, Catch My Breath, Darker Side Of The Border), 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 21^st. Century Poe, “Ross is a master craftsman who never turns down the pressure, weaving a grotesque spell over his listeners…”. Using not just powerful words, but mime and gesture indebted to the likes of German Expressionism, Ross’ storytelling is more Jacobean Tragedy than Jackanory, 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’ previous shows:

“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

21st CENTURY POE at Glasgow Southside Fringe 9 & 10 May

Just a quick note to correct a misprint in the Glasgow Southside Fringe brochure regarding the 21st CENTURY POE shows I'm doing next weekend as part of the fest at The Bungo on Glasgow's Nithsdale Road. The brochure says I'm doing FALLING FOR THE USHERS on both 9 & 10 May, but in fact I'm doing USHERS on Sat 9, but doing a DIFFERENT, equally stunning, show on Sunday 10 May, HEART SHAPED HOLE, the show that got me my best reviews when I did the show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013. Extra value: 2 nights, 2 shockers! I'll paste in the poster here, which has all the details, including how to book at www.brownpapertickets,com.

USHERS can be booked H E R E ! ! !

and HEART SHAPED HOLE can be booked H E R E ! ! !

BLOOD & STONE: Lullaby For A Vampire Countess this week at Lee Rosy's

Big event this week is my Walpurgisnacht show this Thursday 8pm at Lee Rosy's in Nottingham (downstairs, in the "crypt"!) Tickets are £4 / £3. I'm performing BLOOD AND STONE: LULLABY FOR A VAMPIRE COUNTESS, based on the true story of real life 'vampire' Elizabeth Bathory, history's most prolific serial killer who, according to legend, bathed in blood to preserve her beauty. So below I'll reprint my little essay on my 'relationship' with the Countess, which I originally wrote to accompany my audio drama version of the story, written for the Wireless Theatre Company and 3DHorrorFi and which was nominated for a 2012 Rondo Award. (You can download the audio drama version HERE!!!

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 Cathcart 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 that year: one of them, Elizabeth, portrayed the tragic 19^th. Century empress ‘Sissi’, Austria’s very own Princess Di. The other show was Tanz Der Vampyr, a musical based on Roman Polanski’s film Dance Of The Vampires (aka Fearless Vampire Killers). But the way the posters for the two shows were juxtaposed in the window, one above the other, meant that what I saw when I glanced that way was the dim lamp light falling across two words only:

                                    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 windows.

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, 17^th. 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 streets that night, which had maybe been trailing me all the way from that Glasgow street of my childhood, had found a home.

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, seizing hold of 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…..

VAMPIRES IN THE VAULT - my 2015 Edinburgh Fringe show

Starting to prepare my storytelling show for this year's Edinburgh Fringe. Again, it's at the Vault @ Paradise Green, where I performed my 21st. Century Poe shows at the last couple of Fringes. The show is ALREADY BOOKING at Edfringe Website H E R E ! ! !

This year, I'm doing, as the title makes fairly obvious, two vampire stories, alternating them between Saturday 8th and Sat 15th August, 17.55 every day.

On Saturday 8, Monday 10, Wednesday 12, Friday 14 August, I'm performing THE GORBALS VAMPIRE  in which I use the true story of how some kids on Glasgow's south side got the idea that there was a vampire with steel teeth haunting Glasgow's Southern Necropolis - using this as the leaping off point for a very gritty horror story of innocence lost.

Then on Sunday 9, Tuesday 11, Thursday 13 and Saturday 15 August, I'm performing BLOOD AND STONE: LULLABY FOR A VAMPIRE COUNTESS, in which I use another real life 'vampire' story as a leaping off point for a dark fictional drama. The real life story in this case is the infamous one of Elizabeth Bathory, the 17th century Hungarian bloody Countess, who bathed in human blood to maintain her beauty. The true story ended with the Countess being sealed up within a room in her castle. My story imagines a sequel to this true story... In which someone is seemingly naive enough to let the Countess out!

I'm also performing BLOOD & STONE at Lee Rosy's in Nottingham on April 30 (Walpurgisnacht!) and at Belper Arts Festival on May 23rd. My audio drama version, nominated for a 2012 Rondo Award, is available from the Wireless Theatre Company website HERE