Tuesday, May 14, 2013
The Bowel Cancer Testing Kit I Got For My Birthday
I got a bowel cancer testing kit for my birthday.
As we all do, here in Scotland, once we reach a certain age.
There is something heroic about the Bowel Screening Centre. They are tackling, head on,at least 3 firmly held taboos:
- our reluctance to contemplate the certainty of death
- our terror at the possibility of having cancer
- and our intense reluctance to contemplate our shit.
Bowel cancer exploits the fact that it has plenty of room to expand in. I am aware of this, and the need to catch it early, because that was why my sister in law Angela and my father in law Alec both suffered and died.
We were with Alec when he died. We saw it.
This happened in 1983 and cancer surgeons were in the habit of lying to their patients then.
Alec’s surgeon cut him open, saw there was nothing to be done, and sewed him back up again. But he told Alec the operation had been a success.
Somehow we all got sucked into maintaining that lie; and that caused us all the most intense suffering.
As for Alec, he had a deep faith in the inscrutable wisdom of his LORD and so he quietly allowed his life to slip away.
And all these memories distract me from understanding the instructions.
Essentially you cover your hand with toilet paper and use it to catch your shit.
It’s a strange sensation, feeling the gentle but irresistible push of it, and then the warmth and weight in your hand.
They give you little cardboard sticks to collect two samples a day, each from a different part of the same shit.
It’s really not as disgusting as I may be making it sound. Perhaps I’ve been eating virtuously and well.
And here I am on day 2 of the 3, and it feels a bit like an eccentric meditation exercise. One that is somehow connected to the other, very powerful, exercise of looking at my work. My other emanations.
“By your fruits you shall know them”, the dear man said. Which seems to mean that it is not what someone says they believe but what they actually do.
Just as Jesus also said that it is what comes out of us that defiles us. Our treachery, our malice, and our rage.
I wonder what would happen if we could see the consequences of each moment we live and each act we do.
See our emanations as clearly as I can see the shit in my hand.
Perhaps one day we’ll be able to. Perhaps that’s what we call heaven.
Perhaps that’s what we call hell.
Meanwhile I am very frequently washing my hands.
Monday, May 13, 2013
Play 6: collaborating with a Mr. Shakespeare
Play 6: Romeo and Juliet adapted from William Shakespeare. 4M and 3F. First production: TAG Theatre in John Bosco Secondar School, Glasgow on 23rd Oct 1984. Then touring.
With Stuart Hepburn, Robert Paterson, Paul Morrow, Robin Cameron, Isabella Jarrett, Anne Myatt, Helen McGregor.
Directed by Ian Brown; designed by Stewart Laing.
With Stuart Hepburn, Robert Paterson, Paul Morrow, Robin Cameron, Isabella Jarrett, Anne Myatt, Helen McGregor.
Directed by Ian Brown; designed by Stewart Laing.
Something I learnt very early on when I started playwrighting was that you have to know the right people.
That discouraged me hugely, because as far as I could tell I didn’t know anyone useful at all.
I was wrong. And then amazed, as time passed and I kept trying, how somehow I came to know exactly the people I needed to.
Romeo and Juliet was a case in point.
A good friend, Mark Bunyan (www.markbunyan.com) happened to have a musical produced by the Cockpit Theatre, and directed by Ian Brown who happened to be coming up to Scotland to become director of TAG, which stands for Theatre About Glasgow, and was, and still is, the educational wing of the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre.
Mark introduced us to each other and Ian had had the idea of adapting Romeo and Juliet for Glasgow schools.
And that’s how my first professional writing commission for theatre came about.
Their policy at that time was to mainly tour schools in areas of musltiple urban deprivation, and these were the main venues for the tour.
So my brief was to create a version that:
- should last for less than two hours
- could be performed by a cast of 7
- that all props, scenery, costumes etc + cast and crew should all fit into a small van
- that is whould remain faithful to the poetry of the original, and yet be absolutely clear
- that it should be comprehensible to an audience of 2nd to 4th year secondary school children who were likely to know nothing of Shakespeare and care perhaps even less.
So I kept the bits of the text that moved me or made me laugh or seemed essential to the story and cut the rest. And that was at least a third of the original play gone. I was amazed. I didn’t know you could do that to Shakespeare.
And then I took the bits that were left and made sure that I understood them. I modernised the grammar, and where there were words that were obscure I replaced them with others, reliving the moment in my imagination and trying absolutely to keep the feeling and rhythms of the original. As if I was translating from a foreign language. The result looked a bit like this:
Come night, come Romeo, come day in nightAnd you will lie upon the wings of nightWhiter than new snow upon a raven’s back.Come, gentle night, come loving black browed nightGive me my Romeo, and when I dieTake him and cut him out in litle starsAnd he will make the face of heaven so fineThat all the world will be in love with night...
Sometimes I’d keep the original if I liked the sounds of the words and they seemed to make sense
Lord how my head aches! What a head have I!It beats as if it would fall in twenty places.And my back.. at the other side.. ah, my back, my back!Beshrew your heart for sending me aboutto catch my death with jauncing up and down.
Sometimes everything would need to be rephrased
He’s hiding but I know he’s there.He’s sitting under a willow treeWishing he was a piece of fruit,That hard and horny kind that women useTo exercise their provate parts.Have you come yet? Turned into a loofah?Are you warm and wet?...
I was really shocked to see how frankly Shakespeare can talk about sex. Because in the past I’d just let the words kind of drift over my head, I’d always assumed he was mostly polite. Really having to understand what he was saying was a revelation.
The photo, of the late Robert Paterson as the Friar and Helen McGregor as Juliet, makes the whole thing look more conventional than it actually was.
The design was by Stuart Laing (http://www.untitledprojects.co.uk/) and he clothed the actors in an amazing edgy mix of renaissance glitz and Doc Marten boots. And Ian Brown’s production, among other lovely things, beautifully did the balcony scene without a balcony.
Our Romeo, Robin Cameron, was playing the romantic lead in the STV soap opera "Take The High Road" at the time, and he was always mobbed by autograph hunters.
A royalty statement from Christine Hamilton (http://christinehamiltonconsulting.com/), who was their administrator says my royalty came to £120.00.
But how amazing to get the chance to enter Shakespeare’s mind, learn his storytelling technique from the inside, and watch its impact on totally frank and uninhibited audiences.
In that sense, what I learnt was priceless.
Friday, May 10, 2013
Play 5: At the end of time
play 5: Ending Time Broadcast on Radio 3 on 7th November 1984.
With Martin Heller, Crawford Logan, Ann Louise Ross, Bill Paterson, Iain Cuthbertson.
Technical presentation: Jim Ross.
Directed by Stewart Conn.
This commission came out of the last. Only this one was for BBC Radio 3. I was excited.
I’d heard a performance of Messaien’s Quartet For The End Of Time and got incredibly excited and deeply moved by it.
I don’t think the piece was very well known in those days (1984) because I seem to have felt there was a need to explain it...but I had obviously just discovered all these possibilities in Radio Drama and was so excited by them.
Because there’s an unnamed radio producer having a petty feud with his unnamed (and unspeaking) secretary, there’s Mary and James who are in a car on the way back from a camping weekend, and they can’t decide whether or not to have a child, and James is a disgruntled violinist who’s just been playing the the Quartet, and there’s John of Patmos, him of the Book of Revelation, in Patmos, and in the present with James and Mary, and there’s an Angel too...
The whole thing is tied together by the structure of the Quartet which we hear playing in a concert hall, and on Mary and James’ car radio, while we zap around between Patmos, the Celestial Throne, the campsite, the producer’s office and the prison camp where the Quartet was first performed before ending up in the loo of Kinross motorway service station where John has a beautiful revelation of the new Jerusalem...
Technically it's amazing, beautifully directed by Stewart Conn, recorded on tape amazingly mixed and spliced together by Jim Ross. With Sue Meek clacking on a piece of lino in her heels, and doing the typing on her typewriter. (This was before computers. There were electric typewriters).
There’s a lot of me hating myself as a man in the portrayals of James and the radio producer, which is a shame, but I love the zany energy of it, it makes me laugh and laugh, and there’s moments of amazing beauty too.
Like just now. Listening to Messaien’s haunting, beautiful music, slowly coming closer:
JOHN: What is it?
ANGEL: Listen. It’s music. It’s for you.
JOHN: For me?
ANGEL: For you. And look. All the people. Do you see them? They’re listening.
JOHN: But how thin they are. How pale.
ANGEL: They are starving.
A PAUSE FOR US TO HEAR THE MUSIC, PLAYING PERHAPS THROUGH A BITTER WIND.
JAMES: He was in prison. Behind wire. He’d lost all his friends. It was winter. He was hungry and cold. They squabbled for food. Someone had a clarinet, someone else a violin. The piano was broken. He had to make do. People were dying. He still wrote it. No one, he said, no one has ever listened so well. I can’t even play it. How could I be someone’s father? Father to a child....
JOHN: How still they are. That’s how they listened to him. In their thousands, packed together. Beside the sea shore, all silent. Hungry for every word. How beautiful he looked. How soft his voice was. He spoke low, but they all heard him. If our child asks for bread, he said, will you give him a stone?
ANGEL: (SADLY) You give him gas.
And when he’s dead, you burn him.
That must have been when I fell in love with radio. How amazing to go from the sky to Stalag VII-A to a motor car to the shores of the sea of Galilee and then to the ovens of Auschwitz. Seamlessly. Travelling by the power of the mind.
And what a cast. Bill Paterson as John of Patmos, Iain Cuthbertson as the Angel, Martin Heller as the producer, Crawford Logan as James and Anne Louise Ross so lovely as Mary.
With a deep pang I could feel how one of the scenes was inspired by me and my late partner Susie making love. The debate betwen the two characters was one we had had some years earlier, as to whether it was right to bring a child into this disintegrating world.
And those moments. Those beautiful moments of tenderness. This must be why, the night before last, I dreamt she was still alive. And I could talk to her.
But I won’t think of that. I’ll think of John, and the final vision of the play. With Messaien’s utterly beautiful last movement...
JOHN: How peaceful it is. How quiet. All this water. Patmos was a desert place, but here is water. I saw the City. I remember now. I measured it with my hands. I saw it with my eyes. The city was of gold, like unto clear glass. There was no more war. There were no tears and the seas had all run dry. I said, Lord I am not worthy, Lord I am not worthy but the rod was put into my hand. So I measured.
The streets were full of dancing.
All the children were there, they rose up from the ovens and all the women too. All the downtrodden, all the oppressed.
All the prisoners were set free. And the others they, too, cast aside their whips and their truncheons and laughed. They laughed. Everyone was there, everyone. All joined the dance. It’s over they said. It’s all over. It was just a bad dream. And it’s over. It’s finished and done. And the lion lay down with the lamb. And there were springs of pure water.
I was there. I ate the bread. I drank the wine. I must tell them I was there.
IN THE FAR DISTANCE WE HEAR THE MUSIC. THE LAST MOVEMENT, FAR, FAR AWAY, COMING CLOSER
I must tell them. I mustn’t forget. Dear God don’t let me forget. I was there. Let me not forget. Let me not forget...
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