I have writer's block, though actually it's more like writer's constipation; I'm full to the top but can't get it out. That's disgusting I know, but my head is like that woman's handbag, I just keep filling it but haven't had time to shit.

Now I'm sat down, paper (literally) at the ready with time alone and nothing else to do today and I can't so much as fart an appropriate sentence, let alone follow through with a paragraph. So this blog will be my pencil and maybe together we will work it out:

Christopher Baugh's Theatre, Performance and Technology: the Development of scenography in the twentieth century is an historical survey of convenience compiled as a fait accomplis of theatre technology. It is extensive and wide ranging referencing many epochs and periods and practioners of stage construction and design who could now be called scenographers: Sabbatini, Inigo Jones, Loutherberg. He does this with a certain amount of reductive vagueness, grouping them into large periods of time for his convenience while only partially exploring their worth. The problem is that Baugh is almost exclusively concerned with the historical survey of these people and not the work they carried out. Technology to him is something that is happening within and outside theatre that has a mystery of its own, and rather than exploring this mystery, he catalogues it, pins it down to a period of time and labels its significance without bothering to understand what it is he has labelled. In fact my pinning metaphor is almost complete, he has caught certain butterflies, decided that they are in someway unique and excluded all sub-species and demes and 'something else' then without trying to witness the organism in its niche he has pinned it to black velvet and closed a glass case over the top. His examples have become isolated and separate, covered by that dusty beauty familiar to all taxidermatised creatures. Baugh takes the example of Craig and Appia (two twentieth century scene designers who revolutionised theatre design) and places them in a chapter called "Rejecting the past", which is frankly daft, as both of those men were on record as saying that the only way to move forward is to look at the past and take what you need, disregard what you don't, but never reject anything. They understood that process was eternal and continuous, not something to be isolated and never returned to. There is not one path to the future but many. Which is why Baugh's grouping of them in this way is anathema, why Baugh's treatment of all technology becomes the same, he has removed it from the environment it comes from and has pinned it to the page. this is something that Percy Fitzgerald is very careful not to do in his book from 1882 'The World Behind the scenes', okay this is actually a partial translation of Moynet's 'L'envers du theatre' and does not have the illustration of Moynet's, but it is a book which organically glides through the contemporary history of the theatre in terms of stage device and production practice the result is a rambling affair in which reminiscences of theatre greats are recalled alongside variety acts and stories of the Paris Opera. Fitzgerald allows his subject to flutter by unmolested albeit by recollection, it is a hindsight account with all the wisdom of the time painted into the gaps left by memory. And it is this difference that I am trying to write about, because at the heart of the difference is an argument which rages silently between no one, but one which I can hear very clearly, neither Fitzgerald nor Baugh are able to explore the argument, because both by their methods have ignored it. It is the search for a language, one that is understandable to scenographer, technologist and actor alike; it is a language that can lay out the tangle of theatre technology in terms of itself, not of history, nor of art or text, but as theatre technology with its own art and text and history.

And this is what I am stuck on. All the thoughts are there, they just are not coming out in an appropriate manner.

It's time to blog again, though I  ,must admit a serious flattening out effect, rather like Phillip K Dick's in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The reason: it's the end of the academic year, or rather the end of the year that I have been working to the last 24 years, only there is no Summer present giving and no debauched New year's eve. I did however promise a summary of the year so here it is:

 August brought two major events for me, firstly the publication of "The Sound of Sun Rising" in the Hadley-Rille Barren Worlds anthology which turned out to be a really excellent and rather gorgeous book, I really felt I had made it, which helped with the confidence to push my own book out: Poetry in a Louder Voice which was officially launched in October at Borders, but the buggers still haven't paid the invoice and I still haven't sold a single book to anyone I don't know. There was a moment around Christmas that I thought I had, but it was immediately dashed when I discovered that my Sister-in-Law Charlie had bought it, brilliant but disappointing. There was also the book that I deliberately pushed onto the shelves during the launch to see if it would disappear, it did, and was bought by the daughter of one of my colleagues for his Birthday: I of course see no money for this, and have not met her, but technically it still counts as someone I know.

I came nineteenth in the Predators and Editor's award after prematurely announcing twenty third place on this blog, so it was top twenty in the end and not top twenty five, it does make a difference, but as yet there have still been no reviews of the anthology announced at all, which is a pity as the book is actually a very strong one as far as themed anthologies go. And no one has reviewed Louder Voice either despite sending it out, which is annoying but not unexpected since nobody buys it anyway.

I appeared in the pages of Roundyhouse, not once, but twice, which was nice but after the initial thrill everything kind of dies down and you realise only poets read other poets; only poets even know of the existence of Roundyhouse and the Ruth Padel fiasco shows what that can be like:

 (Padel Haiku:

 It hasn’t gone well.

Did you or didn’t you then?

Smell your empty chair.)

On other fronts, academically I have been plodding along waiting for the summer when I have time to think and write and procrastinate by writing this blog. The production of Evil Dead or Dead by Dawn as we eventually called it went very well, we sold out on the last night and the effects and scenography pulled off without a hitch. Chris and Pete came to see it and both wrote very fair and praise-full reviews, I would Hyper-link but you know where they are guys, no one else reads this thing.

It's very tempting to blog about their achievements as well because they blog more often than I do and actually make me understand finally the point in the blogging thing: if you have something to say people want to read it, you can actually bask in their reflected light by being a follower, you feel connected to their lives, so it's been lovely to keep up in a very masculine fashion by still knowing what's going on in my friend's lives without having to phone once a week. I really don't get the twitter thing though.

So that's about it, whenever I sit to write this thing my mind goes blank, my news never seems blog worthy, I'm almost ashamed to write stuff down, It's occasionally nice to rant about stuff: I was going to have a good time ranting about the Laureate race, but there was no race at all to speak of, or news until they suddenly gave it to Duffy. Great, but that was overshadowed by the Padel vs. Walcott thing and now the whole thing looks destined to be overshadowed by a sudden BBC fixation on poetry and poets in particular, dead ones. That wouldn't be so bad, but they seem incapable of filming programmes about poetry without swishing the camera about the place. Anyway, that's a rant for next time I need to procrastinate.

Oh and I won a £500 learning and teaching Award last week for excellence.

There was one of the last three British SF greats passing away with no big send off.  I can't remember what was happening in the news on that day, but it was depressing and he barely got a mention.  In the same week, Paul Scofield died; Paul Scofield unknown to anyone who wasn't extremely familiar with live London Theatre topped the bill.  Clarke was barely a side mention or a "finally".  Those of us who read and wrote science fiction felt his absence like a softly stoppered breeze, noticeable and lamented because its freshness was no longer there.

Now J G Ballard has died and I am faced with a twenty minute news segment from channel four news.  This is a good thing, Ballard was excellent, brave and vitriolic and savagely satirical whilst remaining lyrically beautiful in almost everything he wrote.  What I am lamenting about now though, aside from his passing, is the rather vile and stupid way the public news broadcasters are handling his back catalogue of work.  He is J G Ballard author of 'Empire of the Sun' (made into a film by Steven Spielberg) and of 'Crash' (made into a film by David Cronenberg)  and apparently nothing else.  He is most definitely not a science fiction writer and any suggestion that he is leaves broadcasters confused and slightly afraid, and it leaves me at home rather pissed off.

J G Ballard wrote more than those two books, he wrote some profoundly fascinating and incredible science fictions and some terrifying apocalypse tales and I loved them all.  He was one of the most influential and impressive writers I have ever read, and one whose cannon I have returned to more than once.  Those who know me know that is an unusual thing, only certain poets, Nabokov, Clarke and Shakespeare have that honour.

But it's not just Ballard that I've seen this with, any suggestion in academia or popular criticism that science fiction is something other than trash is ignored or shrugged away.

Perhaps that modern academics spend so much time trying to define science fiction in new and different ways is a symptom of this.  It's incredibly frustrating reading criticism of science fiction when all they do is try to redefine the genre; and they are so haphazard about this, as though it wriggles about and squirms, when actually it is a really really simple thing:  Fiction based around a scientific idea. 
Quite why this causes such consternation I don't know but it has a number of results:

• People ignore it and label it as not worth reading
• People enjoy it, but insist it's not really science fiction.  And proceed to add a long excuse about why this book about men going to the moon is actually an historically relevant piece of social realism that happens to explore the technological nitty gritty of actually going into space a full century before civilization actually does.
• People get pissed off that one of their favourite science fiction authors is a labeled a post-modernist upon his death because there are two books the public can deal with and to think of him as someone who could write in two literary comfortable comfortable styles is easier to do than to honour him as one of Britain's last great SF authors.  Even if one of those books is actually much more threatening to literary society than anyone is ready to admit, but then how many people actually have read 'Crash'?  I suspect John Snow has not.

I have a spare minute, a lose end and with whirlwinds of all kinds of stuff going on I have decide to blog. But not about the crap that's happening around me, because that is intensely boring and work related, and where sometimes work is interesting, this time it really isn't. This is no 'Dead by Dawn' project and I don't have anyone coming to see it. It is the third year finals for the students and its just hard work. Boring but all consuming. 

I get some free time and need to blog and though there has been stuff happening, I feel I can live vicariously through the other blogs I follow and take a moment to make an observation about something that has been bugging me for a while and has come to the fore because of a brief discussion on Chris' Blog: Computer game narratives, in particular cutscenes.

Now Chris made the point that these scenes should blend in and show little bits of the story, a story which you unravel yourself, making the leaps and connections as you play along. I agree, you should be a participant in the narrative as it unfolds, more than that in fact, you become a co-producer of the story, your action leads to more branches and strands of the story. I really liked the First 'Resident Evil' game, its cut scenes were clumsy when they appeared, but they were so infrequent it didn't matter, what was fascinating was that in between zombie killing, there were clues and puzzles. The diary pages and log entries you find while playing still chill me now: "Itchy, itchy. . . Tasty, tasty". Of course it can go too far like 'Morrowind' and the 'Elder scroll' games or recently in 'Two Worlds' where the story is so vast and unforthcoming that frankly who cares?* The story is disparate and sporadic and not properly interlinked. It's almost as if the programmers have never even heard of a hyper-text, which is strange as computer programmers invented it. The story in a sandbox / open-play game needs to match in with whatever you know, it should match your level of knowledge. If you have been to the Caves of Oomphga, then NPCs should stop banging on about the mysterious caves to the north where there is a lost mystic armour when you turn up wearing the damn thing. 
That said, there is also the gameplay for them to worry about and making it look beautiful and a hundred other things, but I would have more patience if they sorted out the narrative of games which aren't so hot on the graphics and the battle, because it is the narrative that has me trading in the game before I've got past the eighth boss. 

It's also the execution of the narrative that bugs me. RPGs tend to rely on cut scenes far too much at the moment, they have always had a tendancy to do so, but damn, there has been a whole string of games that really let the side down and it basically started with the first one I played that had voice work in it: 'Final Fantasy X', the graphics were ace, the gameplay was okay, the water polo bits were crap, the battle system was okay, the cut scenes were pause friendly but they were also hours long and boring as hell. The voice acting was nauseating and the dialogue terrible, but the worst part was that the characters were speaking with every single part of their bodies: Their hands would gitter about, scratch themselves, brush their hair, gesture wildly and erratically for no reason at all. The animators wanted everyone to know who was talking and at what time. And just to be sure, the programmers put in large gaps between the speakers so that we could differentiate. It was slow and embarrassing to watch and frankly, was a bit crap. It didn't help that the story line was a lame duck compared to Final Fantasy VII, which though graphically inferior (it was PS one to be fair), is hard to beat in narrative terms within the FF franchise.

But FFX was early on the PS2, surely we have improved by now? Well there was 'Dragon Quest' and 'Rogue Galaxy' on the, notable for interest's sake, the far superior but ultimately disappointing and 'Star Ocean' all came later on the PS2. These had a much better crack at the voice over thing and some very beautiful moments graphically, but still weak stories and dreadful dialogue. 'Dragon Quest' was meant to be much more light hearted than your average RPG, but the dialogue transitions were so slow that every gag fell completely flat, comedy characters don't come over well in cut scenes. (I'm not even going to mention 'Avatar Tuner' which had a comedy character with a Jamaican acent, but was white.  I shan't mention that, I will put it down to cultural niavety and ignore it)

Then there was 'Final Fantasy XII' PS2's swan-song, and I was hopeful.  I'd waited a long time for it, was playing all sorts of god awful games to pass the time, and they almost cracked it, the cut scenes, weren't horribly slow, the story was really very weak, but the game-play more than made up for it; the thing that bugged me the most was the awful voice acting and again the random waggling of arms and scratching of faces, heads and everything else. Was there to be no end? Surely the next-gen consoles could sort me out?

They did with 'Lost Odyssey'; it was slick, interesting, played really well, the story was sufficiently interesting to keep me going, it even had twists I didn't guess. Most importantly, the voice acting was sublime: the actors understood what they were saying and the voices embodied the character's actions, jokes were made funny, the characters felt alive and I was glad the world had finally caught up. But hell fire, did no-one else play this game? Programmers and game designers, I'm talking to you. WTF is with 'Last Remnant'? WTF is with 'Infinite Undiscovery'? The stories were lame, the characters poorly written, the voice acting unbearably nauseating and completely disassociated from the action on screen, and I'm not surprised because the designers for the body movement are clearly not human, nor have they ever seen a human being move, talk or interact.

For everyone's sake please, computer game companies, please, please, get someone in who understands dialogue, get in a voice director, buy in actors record the sound, not as files, but a soundscapes, have everything performed live and record it. Have the animators come on over and watch how actors move. Come on now. Be brave about it, it's not as if we have never seen TV or movies is it? If your target audience is kids, then watch 'Ben Ten' or go old school and watch He-man, even that is better than the crap I keep having to trade in until a better game comes along.

 Here endeth the rant. Back to work.

 * Foot note addressed to the writer of 'Two Worlds'.  If you are going for the early modern English dialects, do your home-work please: "perchance" does not mean "please continue speaking Sir".  Dumbass.

Ah ha! Finally a day of almost total procrastination where I read and do things other than write this conference paper. I figure I'm due for a break what with Dead By Dawn and all:

The designs started a bit like this. . .

Then we were told that we may not get the space we wanted so it turned into this. . .

But then we were so I redeveloped the whole thing and tightened some of the proxemics. . .

And when it came to be realised it ended up like this. . .

with some of this thrown in. . .

The photos are not the best (he kept using a flash, always bad when things are lit for theatre); and although I'm responsible for the scenography, we have to give the students jobs to do, so some of the makeup is not quite as gloopy and dripping as I would have liked, but on the whole it is very effective live, especially the exploding head and Henrietta.

The opening night was an excellent first time round the block, there are still some things for the actors to tighten up on: they distracted themselves during a fight and had to replay the knap-slap sequence again, the end vortex, felt a little flat, but by Friday, the day I have important friends coming, it should be really tidy.

So just to get you all in the mood, here's a little ditty I threw off in the pub while joking around about what I wanted on my show T-shirt:

 Dead Night, Deadite,

First love I kill tonight

I wish I may, I wish I might,

Destroy the dead I slay tonight.

Actually I've been nowhere for a bit just at work some thirteen hours a day six days a week. (I took Sunday off on account of a hangover). In life not much has happened, but in career loads have all at an individually not blog-worthy level, but at the same time quite big personally. Unfortunately they have all come at a time when I am so unbelievably busy I have not been able to say anything about them, other than make cryptic references in other peoples' blogs as comments or in dashed-off emails to friends. I finally have twenty minutes free, so before I dash off to give a guest lecture I have time to fill by procrastination, here is the list of things I wish to blog about, details can follow:

• The photos and audio came back about Sweeney Todd, so I can edit them and stick on Youtube, finally,
• I was published in Roundyhouse again, this time with a poem about Deborah Kay Davies' poetry, which I raved about before.
• Photos from the Grand Guignol Project I designed for the Society for Theatre research Christmas Lecture have come back too and here is a photo for a taster of things to come from. .

• . . .Dead By Dawn the title of the Evil Dead stage adaptation I have designed and am about to give a lecture on.
• And finally, a proposal which I sent to the Journeys Across Media 2009 conference at Reading University has been accepted so in April I will be delivering my first conference paper on the future of theatre technology.

Sweeney Todd. Written and directed by Richard Hand. Performed on GTFM Radio, 22 October 2008.

This specially mounted drama performed in the style of 1940s British and American radio plays retold the story of Sweeney Todd, the self-styled ‘Demon Barber of Fleet Street,’ who gives his unfortunate customers the closest shave of their lives before slitting their throats and sending their corpses down to the basement via a specially-designed barber’s chair. The corpses are then turned into delicious meat pies sold at Mrs. Lovett’s shop next door. John Clarke, an expatriate returning to Britain after twenty years, is one of these unfortunate customers; after his death, his niece Joanna goes looking for him accompanied by her boyfriend Stephen. Inexorably the two of them are drawn towards Todd’s shop, and there they discover the barber’s grisly secret. Todd tries to kill Stephen, but eventually plunges to his death by falling head first into the basement via the barber’s chair. Mrs. Lovett escapes, but we do not know where to.

The tone of Richard Hand’s production was set in the opening moments, as a mysterious female narrator taunted those listeners who “sup on dinner while we sup on horrors.” She invited us to consider where our meat came from; was it human or animal flesh? Her speeches were written in a consciously artificial style, peppered with superlatives, sibilants and alliterations. She reappeared throughout the performance, providing commentary on the preceding action and preparing listeners for what was to follow, as well as giving us plenty of macabre laughs. I loved her description of Todd and Mrs. Lovett as “dastardly partners in crime” who strive “every time [for] the perfect crime.” Grand Guignol might be horrific, but that does not mean it can’t be simultaneously funny.

What I liked most about this production was its meticulous attention to detail, in which music and sound-effects assumed as much importance as the dialogue. The transitions between each scene were expertly handled by a three-piece band of piano, organ and violin relishing in a score comprised of what the actor John Gielgud once described as “great fat chords.” Hand had conceived Sweeney Todd as a full-blooded melodrama; and the music was designed to reinforce this impression. At point when Stephen discovered Todd’s guilty secret, he exclaimed “You don’t suppose …” The remainder of his line was drowned by the organ, as we heard him vomiting in the background. Nothing needed to be said at this point; the music was sufficient to communicate the emotion of this scene. The sound-effects were notable for their ingenuity; I especially liked the sound of Todd’s razor being sharpened and the rattle of the string of pearls as Mrs. Lovett took them off Clarke’s corpse and pocketed them.

And what of the central performances? Hand has obviously worked hard with his cast to create the appropriate emotions. Sweeney Todd clearly relished his task, frequently giving vent to a blood-curdling laugh reminiscent of the old British actor Tod Slaughter (who played Todd both in the theatre and in ‘B’ Movie released in 1936). Mrs. Lovett displayed considerable vocal virtuosity, which enabled her to create an unexpected dénouement (to find out more, I invite listeners to tune in to the repeat of this production on 31^st October.) The young lovers occasionally sounded a bit vocally stilted, but I believe that Hand had deliberately encouraged this style of delivery so as to underline the artificiality of Hand’s dialogue. Like the narrator, Stephen was fond of alliterations, describing Todd as a “demon” and a “devil.”

If nothing else, this Sweeney Todd underlined the fact that, while vocal and performative styles might have changed since the 1930s and 1940s, the dramas of that time had the capacity to hold the listeners’ attention. Perhaps this helps to explain why so many of them are now available on podcast, and why student groups are so keen to recreate them in the modern era. In 2004 a group of University at Albany students and faculty, in association with two local sound effects producers collaborated on The FBI in Action, a play originally broadcast in 1943. Hand’s production followed the same path – only this time they worked on a specially rewritten version of an old classic. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and hope that the director and his multi-talented cast will repeat the experiment with another play in the not-too-distant future.

LAURENCE RAW

*Laurence Raw is a freelance reviewer and theatre critic, as well as teaching drama and English at Baskent University, Turkey. He reviews plays for the British online journal Theatreworld Internet Magazine (www.theatreworldinternetmagazine.com).

*************************

So that's pretty good, then Richard Emails me with this:

 

My Zombie Plan (To be read in the style of Ian MacMillan.)

If you hit it in the head then the fucker's going to die

If you hit it in the head then the fucker's going to die

I'm going to joke with you, I'm not going to lie

If you hit it in the head then the fucker's going to die.

Grab some comfy shoes, and clean change of bra

Arm yourself with a club, a knife or iron bar

It's not going to run about and leap on your from far

It's not going drag you off, unless you go crash the car.

It's not like in the films, least not since ninety eight

It's more like their rotten stiff yet still animate;

And just cos we've had sex doesn't mean you'll meet your fate

We've been together quite a while, this isn't our first date.

Look there's one, Mrs Spac from number twenty two

There with her slavered jaws and hair of rinses blue

She's staggering about like she hasn't got a clue.

Now take your bar and fuck her up!  You know what to do.

Hit her in the head my love, make sure to do it twice

Whack her fucking brains out, I know that it aint nice.

Think of those cakes she made in concrete by the slice

No go and hit her in the head, for god's sake be precise.

Okay, okay don't panic, it's your first time anyway

Everyone messes up when they face their first doomsday

Now back up a bit my love, and shield your eyes from spray.

Come here bitch and get some, let me see your grey!

Aaargh! fucking bit me, did you see what that cow did?

I think I tripped on something and corrected while I skid;

I thought I go out in a crowd with me stuck in amid,

And then she fucking leapt at me like a sprightly bloody kid.

Well that's all it now my love, my chips are in the can

I didn't even tell you each aspect of my plan

We'd stock up on guns and food and break into a van

Then off to somewhere hot, Gibraltar or Milan.

But now you'll have to kill me, I've not got long to live

I've no more pearls of wisdom to share with you or give

It's tough I know, but let's face facts and this you will forgive:

I'm going to start to fade away and then I will relive.

You're going to have to hit me in the head to make me die,

You're going to have to hit me in the head to make me die,

I'm going to joke with you, I'm not going to lie,

Your going to have to hi. . . erg.





Thanks very much for reading.  I think you'll all agree the swearing is necessary, I now have something to feel guilty about despite being almost thirty.

Have a great night. . . Mwhahahahahahahaaa!

Mad, mad week.  Very cool weekend leading into the most nuts busy week I have had all year and it's only Wednesday morn.   But not with writing, not yet anyway, that is to come when I'm left alone this weekend and I can finally get some stuff done, though I will probably sit around and chill for most of it and regret not writing a word later, depends on how exhausted I become during the week.
So reasons to be cheerful (and not bored shitless like normal):

• I'm teaching technical theatre on Monday nights.  Not really worthy of mentioning but is keeping me sane.
  
• Sweeney Todd is going out live tonight at 8ish on GTFM.  I'm one of the voice actors and it should be very cool.
  
• Thursday Night is the book launch of Deborah Kay Davies, which I have been invited to and am very excited about because I really, really like her work and highly recommend it to anyone with even the vaguest interest in poetry or indeed in modern women writers.  She is brilliant and very inspirational.
  
• My own book launch on Friday night at Border's in Cardiff.  I'm on their notice board, and Gok Wang is next week, Kate Adie the week after that.  I don't really care for Gok Wang, he is everything that is bad about daytime TV and Trinny/Susannah rolled into one heavily made up face, but he's got a book and he's famous and I'm on the same bill.  So I suppose I have to be luvvie about it all.  Sod that, I've got a book launch. . . and I wrote my book so nyaar!