Nincumpoop

Well Thumbed in Wigtown.  The unseasonal sun was shining in Dumfries and Galloway. The spirits of Robert the Bruce and Robbie Burns shimmered and shimmied in the party atmosphere. Wigtown Book Festival time!

Upstairs in the Book Shop  in Wigtown is where the authors (and performers) retreat. There, a charming photographer asked for a favourite word on his blackboard. I should, perhaps, have written Well Thumbed. Don’t blame me for being a nincumpoop. The resultant image was to form part of a display of festival folk. Here it is:

My mum used to call me a ‘nincumpoop’. I know, spellcheck spells it ‘nincompoop’. Capt. Francis Grose defined it as ‘a man who has never seen his wife’s private parts’. Something like that. & so, Notional Theatre arrived in Scotland.

Well Thumbed played to about 30 people who laughed a lot. The stage was small and the borrowed armchair was beautiful. More or less the same show as Cardiff but different, tweaked and more confident – & the autoharp died!

Back home the pretty way to a couple of pretty good reviews of the first night. I mean they’re not bad at all; critical but more than respectable; a really good start for a show that is not even planned to open until next year. (Honestly, I have given much worse reviews to really good shows that have had time to run in.) My favourite quote in the reviews is one you can bet will be  highlighted on the posters –

‘A show, I imagine, that would have Mary Whitehouse spinning in her chastity belt.’

One thing though. Both reviews draw a comparison with Brian Blessed. Why?

I can’t see it myself.

Although, to be fair, I was at the Mill at Sonning Theatre recently to see a friend in a play that Brian Blessed had directed. I was sat in my seat, minding my own business, when the man sitting alongside leant over and said, ‘Brian?’

Anyway, now the real work begins. Making Well Thumbed all it can be. So, sorry ‘n’ all that but that’ll be the last from this blog for a wee while.

Oh & don’t worry about the autoharp – it’s under guarantee. It will be back.

Away with the Fairies

In times of rehearsal the world shrinks around a performer’s shoulders, hugging, squeezing, keeping reality at a safe distance. The outside world bangs on the door, an inept burglar huffing and puffing, ‘Let me in, I want to steal your focus’.

Sometimes, stuff happens.  You get yourself sidetracked. Look! How big the world is. See! That e-petition really is very important. Ah! How small I am in the scheme of things…

That’s when an early morning, half-waking reverie makes Well Thumbed leaps of synaptic logic. I am Tom Thumb. I am Thumbelina. Lost in space. Lost to the world. Lost in rehearsals dreams.

What is every dreamy actor’s ultimate desire? A big hand.

Then I get butterflies. You see, it all makes some kind of sense.

BTW, all credit to the fairy illustrators Vilhelm Pederson and E. A. Lemann.

I woke up this morning …  blinking away the fairy dust. And back in the real world it turns out that this is Banned Books Week. Oh Happy Day! I did not see that coming. Here I am about to perform in Well Thumbed, a show that draws inspiration from, y’know, books of that sort. Including, let it be known, one very, very well-known fairy tale.

You’ll find all the Well Thumbed details you could possibly need on Notional Theatre’s homepage <www.notionaltheatre.com>.

Me, I am once more back on the helter skelter of final rehearsals.

Head on straight.

Concentrate.

Focus.

The world shrinks away.

But now I know that dreams can and do come true.

& no fairies were harmed in the making of this blog.

Thank you, Thumbelina.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Despatches from the Thumb Wars

Singing for my supper & dancing to the media’s tune.          1, 2, 3, 4, I declare Well Thumbed war.

Actor @TheTerryVictor stars in new play Well Thumbed. So can he beat @wynneevans in a THUMB WAR? #theatre pic.twitter.com/2h2wRlzgtl

— BBC Radio Wales (@BBCRadioWales) September 23, 2016

Yes, that’s me playing Thumb Wars with Mr Go Compare (yes, really) in a bijou publicity stunt inspired by the title of Well Thumbed. And, yes, don’t get me wrong, I was more than happy to go along with it. Wynne’s a lovely man. He let me win. It’s a Wynne-win situation. Besideswhich, the more and however the words Well Thumbed get out there the better the chance of finding an audience.

The interview for Wynne Evans’ show on BBC Radio Wales – following Taylor Swift out of the 11.30 news break – was fun and full of useful Well Thumbed puffery. I could have asked for no greater opportunity to recommend and enthuse.

But, and this is what’s on my mind, the memorable hook is Thumb Wars which has nothing (apart from a poorly pun) to do with Well Thumbed. It’s the final realisation that all  (and whatever) our creative efforts and artistic endeavours add up to is yet another product in the market place, fighting  a 2 star shoot-em-up at the local multiplex to get those bums on our seats. It’s a marketing rule of thumb. So, Well Thumbed is full of sex & violence – well, sex & sexy violence – artistically credible and commercially attractive.

Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?  Let’s fight for a share of the leisure and entertainment economy. Bring it on. & beware you 2 stars in a shoot-em-up, I do my own Thumb Wars stunts.

This is a pic(k) of my actual thumb armour. There is now less than a week to go until Well Thumbed opens. I am in a whirl. My heart is already beating faster than a well strummed thumb piano. But I am so thumbs up for it.

&, please, no more thumb puns.

 

 

 

Middle for Diddle

It’s the weirdest thing, experiencing a show as it develops. Somewhere around the middle of rehearsals, as the outside world shrinks, the work becomes more than you ever realised.

On the other hand, the closer I get to my Well Thumbed performances the harder it becomes to write this blog. As if the thought process wasn’t abstract enough already. Trying to reflect moods and moments. What was going on in my mind without getting into rehearsal specifics. Or performance secrets.

Dear Diary: this last few days have been mixed bag of frustrations and, fingers crossed, triumphs. And inbetweentimes diddling with very bad puns. Like this one: 

The script of Well Thumbed was pretty much finished and ready to roll weeks ago. But by the middle of rehearsals it had become apparent that there was something, I don’t know, not quite there. From the first words to the final thumbs-up, the production script has a logic, a rhythm and pace. It has a beginning and an end. And it doesn’t outstay its welcome. What more could you want?

A couple of restlessly tossing nights revealed what was missing. To be honest, it was the tiniest of things but, without going into details, Well Thumbed now has a middle. An axis. A pivot. A core. What was missing from the script was really nothing more than a non-textual metaphor, yeah?

I know. That sort of thing sounds terribly arty-ficial but finding it, the tinselly thing, really has opened up the piece for me. Made it, y’know, more.  OK, it’s a pretentious way of dressing up  and justifying a simple pun that no one else may even notice for what it is. Whatever. I diddled with the middle and now, for me, the show has a theatrical identity.

And relax. Unless you are stage management, in which case get your broom out; yes, sorry, my diddling does have SM ramifications.

• Disclaimer: Well Thumbed is the product of many great writers (three of them may be seen in the picture above). However, the use of Edgar Allan Poe’s image elsewhere in this blog should nevermore be interpreted as a guarantee of that author’s place in the final performance script.

Notional Theatre is happy to acknowledge the support of the pun-loving Mr Poe for its @NotionalTheatre tweet-credibility marketing strategy.

Furthermore, Notional Theatre asserts that Virginia Woolf is getting above herself.

 

 

Subtexting

Subliminal undercurrents and esoteric motivations that drive a piece of creative work …

                       Eh, what’s that all about then?

I am wrestling with the subtext.

                       Oh, stop being pretentious.

The writer underpins a text with a personal philosophy

The director brings another, human appetites abound

This performer finds hidden truths in cups of coffee

And the audience interprets what is left to be found

                     I cannot believe you stooped to poetry.

I am trying to explain, as co-writer and sole performer, what is going on in my head as we bring Well Thumbed to the stage.

                    Go on then. Explain yourself.

This is like talking to myself in public…

Well, Well Thumbed is a compendious celebration. There’s no story arc, as such. Nor, with so many classic authors involved, is there much room for character development. Well Thumbed is a theatrical amusement. A mischievous diversion. The serious Well Thumbed subtexts are in the context and concept of the piece:

• Humanity (here, in the form of great writers) has wrestled with sexual identity and contemporary moralities since the year dot but here’s proof that nothing has really changed.

• Humanity is greater than any religious stricture or political morality.

• Censorship always fails.

                    That’s not a whatchamacallit. Subsex. That’s the message.                                                         & you are up your own –

OK. Whatever.

                   So stop faffing about. The job is to entertain. Get on with it.

Fair enough.

                    What’s it all about?

Well, Well Thumbed is a saucy compilation of the finest mucky bits from classic authors. As many short and sweet bits as could be squeezed in to a single set of stand up literature. Well Thumbed is well read and well rude.

                    But is it funny?

Oh yes. Very. And you’ll never guess who turned up at rehearsals… Only one of the most banned authors of all time. See –

                      That’s Mark Twain!

You won’t believe what he put in the mouth of Homer.

                      Simpson?

Now you’re being silly.

                    Isn’t that the real subtext?

 

 

 

Secret Passages

You can’t judge the bookish by a cover story…

Try this (& don’t even get me started on e-books): take a stroll though the crime and thriller section of a busy bookshop. Pull out random titles and look at the front cover art.

See!

Ignore the words and favour the graphic.

Despite the very best work of paperback designers you really can’t tell a book by its cover, can you? Odds are that the cover art will either have eyes staring back at you (this is crime and thrillers, after all), or  will sketch the story of a central figure, leading you into the book, often in dramatic silhouette with enhanced perspective; a first or third person hero/ine on a quest, heading into danger. Don’t be mislead by the harp and the hand on the hip….

OK, so maybe you can tell a book’s genre by its cover but, as the throbbing graphic of indiscriminate thrilldom beckons you, dear hungry reader, you can’t easily tell them apart, can you?

Now step into Well Thumbed world. Imagine, just for a moment, that you are seeking fresh literary thrills in the serious leatherbound volumes of a classic library. Your quest, heroic reader, is to seek out the guilty pleasures of antique dirty bits.

Q. How can you guess at particular contents? & which blurbless book might suit your requirements?

A. Look at the bindings. Find a well worn spine. Slip it off of the shelf. That book, you can be sure, will fall open at Well Thumbed pages. You are pretty much guaranteed that there is a passage to be found which has excited the interest of a previous reader (warning: if you discover scribbled marginalia you are almost certainly in the wrong book – unless phrases of pertinence to scholastic disciplines really do fill your needs). Your quest here, for the purposes of a fractured metaphor, is to run down the secret passages of a book.

And that, in an ornately carved nutshell, or even dog-eared paperback, is the Well Thumbed concept. A unique theatrical event created by Notional Theatre, in a production that offers a classy blend of acting, reading and singing; mixing comedy with the frankly tragic; the well read and the well rude.

Oh, the picture of the man with the harp standing in a gateway… That’s supposed to be Dafydd ap Gwilym, a Welsh poet of the Middle Ages who is a surprisingly saucy contributor to the Well Thumbed script.

 

Enough digression. Back to rehearsals.

 

 

Who is he? Who am I?

This Well Thumbed instalment is nothing more nor less than one actor’s idiosyncratic rumination (self-obsessed or what?) on the explorative nature of finding a character in rehearsal.

Or, to put the headline other ways, which bit of him isn’t me? Which is the walrus and which is the whale and where does that leave the carpenter?

It’s a conundrum of sorts (with apparently random pop-culture references).

 

The Beatles perform 'I Am The Walrus' for the film Magical Mystery Tour.  West Malling Air Station, Kent, England. 20th September 1967.

 

Images may be editorially reproduced only in conjunction with the 2012 DVD & Blu-ray / digital release of Magical Mystery Tour.

Please credit © Apple Films Ltd.

Promotional and review purposes only.

I researched, wrote and will play in Well Thumbed – of that much I can be blogging certain – but, now, the rehearsal process is messing with my head.

Getting into the performing of Well Thumbed’s Librarian and, inevitably, it’s beginning to get complicated. Always happens. According to my (official) version of the Librarian’s back story, he’s the one – not me – who researched, wrote and is performing Well Thumbed. But I am & am not the Librarian. There’s more to me than him. I am me. Maybe meta-me. It’s got complicated.

Not to worry. Performance uncertainty is a default that Equity members get with their actory settings.

Stop reading now! These random jottings can get no better than that world class pun.

Sorry, this fractured logic echoes the process of exploration and discovery in my world of rehearsals. That might be what I am trying to get at. So, meanwhile, back at the plot…

In some roles it is important for an actor to lose his or her identity into the performance. A method in the madness. Take 1tsp of character, stir with a soup spoon of performer.  At worst, a miscast actor will try to find an honest character(-isation) to hide behind. Exploring, balancing a tandem, maybe even a trandem identity. Goodie goodie yum yum. Yes, no. That’s not what is happening in the Well Thumbed rehearsals. I am perfectly well cast, thank you very much, and will deliver the goodies.

However, it is important to me that the Librarian should be more than just me. I am he and he is me and we are altogether. Goo goo ga joob.

One moment we, he and me, are being Richard Burton, the explorer (below). He has the Walrus.

Then, at the very next line, we find ourselves trying to be ourselves. Disarming, charming.

Before switching into a character written by this fellow:

By which time we all need a coffee. Anyone for Starbuck?

Well Thumbed isn’t all that complicated. But there is only one man on the stage. & he will be the Librarian. Not me. I’m just trying to work out what I am doing there.

& what about that pun, eh?

XYZ Men

This afternoon was spent at the (1) Sherman Theatre in Cardiff, enjoying the company of (2) Sir Patrick Stewart. He was chatting about life, luck and politics. And the importance of being a member of (3) Equity.

OK, perhaps you have fallen into this blog by accident. Here’s some facts.

So, (1) http://www.shermantheatre.co.uk, the Sherman Theatre. A highlight of upcoming programme is The Weir by Conor McPherson, directed by Rachel O’Riordan. It runs from October 7th.

The Weir‘d Sherman fact: Well Thumbed director Steven Elliott is in the cast.

(2) Patrick Stewart, who he? Actor, cowboy singer, sir, OBE. Star Trek, X-Men, the RSC and https://youtu.be/cK9dlmYvB-Y among other things.

Yes, him. Patrick Stewart. Nice man.

X-fact: He is currently touring with fellow X-Men star Sir Ian McKellen in a West End and Broadway production of Pinter’s No Man’s Land. If you want more facts Google it.

(3) Equity is the UK trade union for professional performers and creative practitioners.  This is its logo:

Bonus fact:  Notional Theatre’s Well Thumbed boasts an entire cast, production, administration and web-mastery of Equity members. We’re proud of that fact. And we would all like to thank Abbie and Caron (and the rest of the the Cardiff branch) for excellently organising today’s event.

Patrick Stewart’s message today, to a theatre full of Equity members, came down to two things, really. Be lucky and be brave.

And here’s an oddity that kinda brings it all together. From X-Men to Z Men. The first time Terry Victor, who plays Well Thumbed‘s Librarian, played the Sherman, it was in a production of Much Ado About Nothing (TV likes to joke that he played the title rôle). The role of Dogberry (or was it Verges?) was played by the late Howell Evans.

You might remember Howell as Daddy in Stella. Way, way back he appeared in The Goons’ movie Down Among the Z Men. He was really proud of that credit.

So that’s the X & Z in the title taken care of. Where’s the Y? Why the Y? In ye weird world of Well Yumbed the Y is the ‘thorn’, an old letter of ye alphabet that was conveniently supplanted with the ‘y’ but still pronounced ‘th’. Then mispronounced. Think  ‘Ye Merrie Olde Whatever Shoppe’. Think Shakespeare. Don’t worry about it. That’s our job.

Final facts, in case you really don’t know: Notional Theatre’s production of Well Thumbed is currently rehearsing. You can see it at Chapter in Cardiff, four weeks today, on Wednesday 28th September and two days later at the Wigtown Book Festival. Or you’ll have to wait until 2017.

Be lucky and be brave.

 

A Compendium of Women

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

A quotation from Virginia Woolf to introduce the women of Well Thumbed. Some of our finest Well Thumbed texts were written by some of the world’s greatest authoresses. Most of them thoroughly respectable women by the conventions of their times.

Meet Jane Austen, Aphra Behn, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Frances Trollope.  There are no potted biographies here, just first impressions. Oh, and one of them published under a male non de plume.

Can you match the faces to the names?

cropped to image, recto, unframed

They are each an important part of N^otional Theatre’s excursion into the Well Thumbed dirty bits of immortal authors.

• Alas and alack! – now that has an classic ring to it – the majority of our immortal authors are good and dead. And the majority of them have been good and gone for more than the seventy years that copyright law requires.

Hence the full title for the show that has inspired these random jottings:  Well Thumbed & well out of copyright. And that’s why we won’t be including the Well Thumbed joys of Agatha Christie for instance.

• When can we see the show?
• Good question. Glad you asked. The plan, the anticipation is a Well Thumbed 2017, fingers crossed. That’s why it’s launching in September 2016. To get the word out.
•  Where can we expect to be Well Thumbed?
• N^otional Theatre is a Wales-based company so, naturally, at Chapter Arts in Cardiff on 28^th September 2016. Then two nights later, that’s on the 30^th, in Scotland, Dumfries and Galloway, at the Wigtown Book Festival. We’ll see where we go from there.

Virginia Woolf, immortal and eligible, is not quoted in Well Thumbed. Here is her picture. & then a perfectly Well Thumbed quote from her to round things off.

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.

Shakespeare is sexy

Shakespeare is genuinely sexy, Well Thumbed and notoriously bawdy.  And, of course, the very notion supplies a good headline for this page.

However, you should know that there’s so much more to this Well Thumbed repertoire than may be found in the compass of one great man’s complete works. Whoever he was. Or might have been.

Fortunately, N^otional Theatre has developed a ‘rampant, roaring, roysterous’ catalogue of other writers to namedrop. Amongst many others you will also get saucy snippets from Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aphra Behn, Charlotte Brontë, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Julius Caesar, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Donne, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Frances Hodgson Burnett, James Joyce, Christopher Marlowe, Herman Melville, Thomas Otway, Samuel Pepys, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Laurence Sterne, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, H. G. Wells, Oscar Wilde & Anonymous.

Yes, that Jane Austen.

Hard to believe that there could be smut – and deliberate smut at that – in her complete works, isn’t it?  But of course it’s there if you look in the right places. One Well Thumbed performance and you will be privy to Jane Austen’s Carry On moment.

BTW ‘rampant, roaring, roysterous’ is not a Shakespearean quote but is actually taken from a Well Thumbed work by one of the authors listed above. The man pictured below.

  Who is he?

& is he as sexy as Shakespeare?

In case you are one of those audience members who can’t get enough Shakespeare, Well Thumbed includes words from Venus and Adonis, Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night. On the other hand, if Shakespeare has always struck you as a bit too worthy or inaccessible, don’t be afraid: he wrote some great knob gags.

N^otional Theatre’s Well Thumbed will have its premiere at Chapter in Cardiff on September 28th 2016. The show’s first international performance is at the Wigtown Book Festival two days later.