This week’s Dragons’ Den featured an unusual solicitation from a gasmask wearing nurse and some bloodied mental patients.  They were part of a team bidding to raise £200,000 for a live horror experience in central London, a consortium of people active in a scene I’m tangentially aware of through a somewhat exhibitionist friend with cybergoth tendencies.  He’d been involved in a smaller scale interactive horror experience that seemed to be about freaking out the straights to use sixties parlance: ooh, people with body piercings eating flames, kind of thing.

I didn’t realise that there was a larger version of the live horror experience that traffics in six figure sums of money, but it makes some kind of sense.  Horror as a genre seems to be doing pretty well overall, if you take into account not only the constant stream of horror films appearing at cinemas, but the number of computer games based on a horror premise, and the amount of bookshop space devoted to horror.  You could arguably include misery lit within its orbit, though I hope we’re some way off from paying for live experiences where people vie to be the runner’s up prize in a domino tournament for OAP swingers.  We have, after all, got Jeremy Kyle for such titillation, and it’s all the better for the screen it puts between us and its subjects.

The live horror experience the medical mutants on Dragons’ Den were pitching was a very particular sort of horror, familiar to people who’ve heard of emo and Silent Hill.  Which is another way of saying teenagers, or people whose teens featured those icons.  It’s all very Slipknot; people with randomly bloodied costumes and hints of BDSM gear.  And I can see how such an experience would be enjoyable and could indeed make commercial sense, given the number of horror fans looking to drop disposable income on having the bejesus scared out of them.

What’s interesting is the range of experiences at the moment being offered to the live event fan.  I’ve spoken to a couple of people who’ve been massively impressed by the walking dinosaurs of, err, Walking With Dinosaurs, coming to an arena near you soon.  The show is a technical triumph; basically a beauty parade of animatronic dinosaurs ambling around while an excitable Steve Irwin type provides some sort of commentary as they frolic, fight, and fart.  And why not?  No surer way can have been devised of introducing children to the world of live entertainment than a show populated by monstrous reptiles with matching merchandise.  Ker-ching.

And that’s just the start.  Down in London recently I saw posters for what promised to be yer actual chariot races.  Like what they had in Rome.  I salute the logistical ambition of someone creating a show based on real horses pulling real chariots with real riders round indoor arenas given contemporary health and safety legislation, something the Romans never had to contend with.  Has a risk assessment ever been done on those cool scythes that come out of the wheels to hack at opponents’ legs?  The horses that is: presumably this is not thoroughbred stallions they’ll be using in these shows, more the equine equivalent of an Aldi 3 for 2 offer.

Where chariot races are in the air, gladiator battles are not far behind.  And yes, there are some of those coming up.  Jousting is fairly well established in the British summer holiday calendar, but I’m looking forward to seeing men marinated in olive oil prod at each other with short swords, tridents, and nets in the interests of entertainment.  Maybe put a few ASBO offenders up on crucifixes at the entrance to set the mood.

If all of this stuff was seen as evidence of the decline of the Roman Empire, what does it say about our own culture that we’re embracing simulacra of what a previous civilization did to get its kicks?  Are we too wedded to reproducing what has gone before, branding it with the name of something known and trusted, to come up with something new?  Or have we indeed reached the end of history, and all we have to look forward to is variations on a theme, starting with Obama’s plan to put America back on the moon, and ending who knows where and when…

I’m not a New Year resolution kinda guy, doing pretty well at setting directions for myself without the need for an arbitrary deadline.  But one desire, which came out of a couple of workshops I attended in December, was to take up classes in impro comedy.  And come January, that’s just what I did.  I did the second session last night.

What are my motivations?  Well, it’s partly about becoming more spontaneous in groupwork, which I’m sure will be useful in leading my own creativity workshops.  And with two coming up between now and early March, might as well hit the ground running.  Besides, being more flexible in the moment has got to be useful in any context.  Never know when I might get kidnapped by deranged gunmen and have to get out of it by improvising a ragtime song about Bin Laden.  Plus, coming up with ideas on the spot might help generate material for stories that I want to devote more time too.  And, somewhere in there, I feel the glimmer of an urge to do stand-up comedy, for the sheer hell of it rather than as a new career direction, and this can only help prepare me.

Last week’s class had three more people.  This week we just had three.  Plus the tutor, a New Zealander doing a Philosophy PhD.  Which may or may not help you answer the question of what kind of people run impro classes.  Anyway, Charlotte is a kind and good-natured philosopher, and her feedback as we went through the session was very helpful.

Broadly speaking, the class consists of exercises and games, the former preparing you for the latter.  One exercise was to stroll round the room pointing at objects and giving them the wrong names.  Sounds silly, but doing it with confidence takes a certain swagger, as you point to a cushion and declaim ‘Baby rhino’.  Finesse that for a few years, and you’ll be well equipped for work as a spindoctor.

The games you’ll be familiar with if you’ve seen Whose Line Is It Anyway? They’re tremendous fun to do, as long as you can rely on your colleagues to support you and play fair; ie accept the ridiculous propositions you make rather than putting them down.  The alphabet game is one classic, our first featuring two astronauts whose sentences begin with subsequent letters of the alphabet and magicking from nowhere a twisted scenario in which one astronaut’s oxygen is running out and the other refuses to share.

Our favourite game was one in which we created a poem on the spot as a trio.  The theme was to do with a character and their wish to achieve a particular goal, and our contributions had to rhyme.  I found my natural home as the third contributor, doing my best to wrap up the preceding lines to create something along the lines of a story.  And we managed that more often than not, which while not up there with the invention of the Swatch was nevertheless an achievement of sorts.

The biggest stretch for me, not surprisingly, were the games when physical rather than verbal skills were called for.  In one game we had to relay the death of poor Mrs McGinty to another player, and could only convey the means of her demise physically.  Sounds easy?  Well, each person adds to the sequence and has to remember and act out again what happened before.  By the end, she’d died as a result of shooting herself, having her eyes explode, injecting a lethal dose of heroin, being run over, having a safe fall on her, being strangled, subjected to eletrocution, attacked by a shark, and experimented on by aliens.

If you’re looking to limber up your imagination, and have a lot of fun with likeminded people in the process, I heartily recommend that you give impro a go.  And if you don’t believe me, think about some of its leading exponents: Stephen Fry, Josie Lawrence, Ken Campbell, and Greg Proops to name a few.  Sure, you won’t make it look as effortless as they do, but achieving that effortlessness takes a lot of effort.  And that starts with finding where your local impro class is.

I come not to bury Ken Campbell but to praise him, because even though the old bugger’s gone and died on us I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he pulled some kind of stunt. That would be the Kennish thing to do, after all. Yes, dissatisfied by audiences in the here and now, Campbell is off doing research in the afterlife, and maybe it’ll be up to me to interview him through Ann, the medium I met regarding me writing a script based on her life story. And why not? If it hadn’t been for a medium, Ken would never have bought a huge telly to watch Jackie Chan films on, a story he relates here (Part 1): Part 2 and Part 3.

Ken Campbell has cropped up in my life a few times, and continues to feature in workshops on creativity I do, most recently at DruidCamp, a spectacle that Ken would have appreciated. I was the only male over the age of ten without any facial hair, and felt somewhat out of place because of this, but with his distinctive eyebrows and amazing presence Ken would have commanded DruidCamp, and got up to who knows what antics there. Basically, I use one of Ken’s tales to encourage people to get off their arses and do something fun: if you read about it here you have to promise likewise, OK?

Ken and I met a few times over the course of the last twenty years. First time was, as recounted above, in his picnic bench office in Walthamstow Marshes, where I was happy to listen to him tell me tales of the prophet of Haverstock Hill, and the secret of invisibility (the art of hiding in front of things, it turns out). The interview featured in a comic anthology called Discordia that I published while attending the London Cartoon Centre.

Discordia is the name for the Goddess of Chaos. At least the Roman name. The Greeks called her Eris. I first heard about her in The Illuminatus Trilogy, written by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Discordianism – either a joke disguised as an ancient religion, or an ancient religion disguised as a joke – predated the books, and its ‘bible’, Principia Discordia, is written in part by Kerry Wendell Thornley, a counterculture figure with connections to the assassination of John F Kennedy. All of this improbable stuff, and much more, was brought to life in a theatre production of the trilogy, directed by Ken Campbell. He talks about it here and here.

I saw a few of Ken’s extraordinary one man shows, which are alternately hilarious and moving as he recounts tales of doing productions of Macbeth in pidgin English, expounds on the occult history of ventriloquism, shares his experiences in psychiatric care, and mourns the loss of loved ones by howling along with a huge sled-pulling dog. They are – were – amazing examples of a man determined to get to the outer limits of human experience, who lived to be amazed, and came back to tell the story.

And I came across him from time to time; on a training course in London, at a forum about the state of cinema at Cannon Hill Arts Centre in Birmingham, and after performances at Nottingham Playhouse. He was always generous with his time, a warm and humane presence eager to swap tales and share laughter. More recently, I attempted to engage his services for an event I’ve been involved in. Nothing came of it, though that’s not because of Ken — sad to say, being hailed as a visionary and a genius doesn’t mean it’s easy to put food on the table. If anything, people were wary of employing him. Certainly, if you’d got any kind of preciousness or ego, Ken would be no fun to be around, and that applies to many of those who hold the purse strings in arts circles.

So, what is there to remember Ken by? Some amazing shows that anyone who’s seen will treasure. A scattering of tv and film appearances. And flotsam like the YouTube clips I’ve already linked to. And for me, I’ll keep telling Ken’s tale of the German artist that I already linked to, and hope to inspire people to discover within themselves a fragment of the madcap creativity that drove Ken to make the world a more magical place.

So, I finally got to see Willy Russell’s musical play Blood Brothers. And I get why it’s so popular, and very much enjoyed it, even if I disagree with a lot of Russell’s beliefs, at least as they come across on stage. Yeah, like he or anyone else is going to be bothered, 26 years into this phenomenon’s international touring history.

In essence, Blood Brothers is old-school Marxist thinking as rendered in three dimensions plus orchestrated sound by Jim Steinman. Steinman, you’ll remember, is the record producer responsible for Meat Loaf, whose approach could be summarised as ‘never knowingly understated’. I read an interview with him once in which he described his job being to produce music “for people who wear chrome pyjamas in leather beds”, and that sums up his melodramatic approach to musical narrative perfectly. Subtle, he ain’t.

The story is semi-Shakespearean, in kitchen sink drag. A put-upon mother of many children becomes pregnant once again, and ends up swapping one of her new twins in exchange for a week’s paid holiday from the posh woman whose house she cleans. No, it doesn’t make much sense if you think about it, even with some swearing on the Bible involved, but please swallow this conceit or what follows really won’t sit with you.

What follows is tried and tested stuff in which the twin brothers grow up in separate homes of very different sorts, but become bosom buddies none the less. Actually, the title of the piece gives away the nature of their relationship with more precision. One brother is socialised with proletarian values, the other becomes a member of the bourgeoisie. It’s put with slightly more subtlety than that, but only slightly.

It’s when the brothers are young – though played by adults – that the play was at its strongest for me. The performers (I was too much of a cheapskate to buy a programme to find out who, save that one of them, the mother of the twins, was a Nolan Sister) did an excellent job at bringing their characters to life as kids. Looked like some time had been spent to good effect getting them to inhabit what kids look and sound like – stuff that wouldn’t have been in the didactic script I’m sure, but was brought out in the rehearsal process. Anyway, it paid off: these sequences were lively and convincing.

Unfortunately, somewhat florid narration got in the way of emotional connection with the audience. Sequences that could have been conveyed by the good actors were rendered redundant by what amounted to voiceover. Perhaps this is because the show has its origins in what amounts to a theatre in education piece, and Russell wanted to make the script immune to the vagaries of directors and performers. Anyway, what it means is that the flow is interrupted from time to time.

This being a piece with a message, it’s no surprise that brother Mickey, the working class one, got a raw deal. Heading for minimum wage work while his middle class sibling swans off to university, it’s not long before Mickey gets caught up in crime, locked up, and hooked on medication to deal with depression. Or maybe that should be anomie, the correct Marxist term for what happens when workers are alienated from the means of production, distribution and exchange.

Yes, it’s heavy handed. But there’s also a kind of truth in that dogmatism, and when put to relatively stirring tunes with super-retro syndrums booming and thwacking away and a sax tootling over the top, it makes for grand entertainment. And that relieved me of notions of my place in the global economic order for a while and allowed me to enjoy myself, which is what musical theatre should be all about.

(Please note that Jim Steinman was not the actual musical director of the show on this or any other occasion: that was a metaphor of some sort.)

I had a meeting the other day with The Garnett Foundation, a fascinating bunch who use drama in training on issues such as diversity and leadership for the public and private sectors. Their approach is first to show a scripted play, and then to workshop it using a method called forum theatre. I’ve seen their work on several occasions, and somewhere down the line they’ll be touring a piece I’ve developed for them on creativity and innovation.

I’m looking forward to the rehearsal period for a film I haven’t written yet.  This is technically known as ‘getting ahead of yourself’, but I never saw the harm in anticipation.  And it’s reassuring that the director in question is keen on the rehearsal process too.  Some filmed projects don’t allow time for it, but I believe it’s a valuable part of the business of making any script come to life.

I’d strongly recommend any writer to get actively involved in rehearsals of their work.  Only, go along with the intention of helping your precious script change for the better, rather than believing your presence will inspire the actors to perform it word-perfect.  Those words might be just dandy on the page, but if an actor can convey the same meaning with the curl of a lip, or a momentary glance, then go with that option and avoid your words being redundant.  Besides, you’ll get the credit for your lean and psychologically insightful script if you do it this way.

The Sandfield Centre in Nottingham, where I did scriptwriting classes, was home to actors and writers learning their craft under the tutelage of professionals from RADA and other noted institutions, and it was an amazing resource.  I was seemingly the only writer there to put 2 + 2 together and realise that student actors plus student writers would be well advised to collaborate, and that led to some valuable early lessons in writing for and working with actors.  As such, I spent just as much time with budding thespians as wannabe wordsmiths, and learned a lot about the differences between the two. 

One weekend, I had lunch Saturday with the writers, and Sunday with the actors.  The writers said little, and got on with the business of eating their modest packed lunches (cheese or ham sandwich, crisps, apple and a can of drink) while reading a book.  For the actors, lunch was a social occasion, each of them taking the opportunity to flourish ‘a little something I found in the fridge’ (Persian style chicken legs and tri-coloured rice salad) and share it with their chums, who were happy to reciprocate with chunks of runny Camembert they had knocking about the place, smoked salmon that would have otherwise been thrown away, and so forth.  Hmm.

Where film is concerned, I recommend getting on set if you can, though some directors like to be the sole voice of authority at that point.  I still wince when I catch one dialogue exchange in a short film I scripted, rewritten to take shooting practicalities into account, which was devised jointly by director and actors.  It features one of my pet hates; reference to a past situation framed by ‘remember that time when..?’; a kind of flashback in disguise that I’d have patched over more elegantly had I been on set at the time.  Instead, I was in the production office surrounded by cans of Red Bull and boxes of KP Crisps, which some enterprising production person had blagged, and phoning through a list of 150 potential extras to see which of them could commit to being in the audience for the boxing match scene we were shooting that weekend.

It’s fascinating to see the way that different performers prepare for their roles.  In a production I put together that used a couple of dancers, they went through their moves at high speed together to get them wired into their bodies: a lot of performance skills require that kind of muscle memory.  Actors will similarly go through their lines as fast as possible in rehearsal, just to be sure they actually know them.  The less a performer has to consciously think about the content of what they’re doing, the more they can deliver it with finesse.

And why stop at watching others deliver your lines?  Taking even a basic acting class will open up the issues involved in making lines on a page come alive, and going to improvisation classes will present you with the problem of how to engage fellow performers and an audience with nothing beyond bodily movements and concepts you can conjure out of thin air.  In either case, you’ll be learning what it’s like to utilise space and movement as part of your repertoire, and in doing so feed that understanding back into your writing, which gets better as a result. 

I went to see a theatrical version of The 39 Steps with friends yesterday, and it was excellent. I don’t go to the theatre as often as I’d like, and I’ve walked out a few times in recent years when I have been. This production had me captivated throughout. So, what were they doing that worked, when some trips to the theatre had ended prematurely?

Most importantly, the key to the show was the effort that the cast had put into devising inherently ridiculous solutions to impossible problems. The story is based on the film(s) and book of the same title, and features chases, train journeys, desperate runs through boggy terrain, and a cast of maybe a couple of dozen characters all performed by the same four actors. Realism was clearly out of the question, and so the performers looked elsewhere.

I wish I’d seen the process of devising and rehearsal for the show, because it was evidently a lot of fun. Given the necessity of entering into the realms of the absurd, they did so with gusto and team spirit, which is the only way to enter uncharted territory. Anthropologists talk about liminal zones, where normal social rules no longer hold sway. This applies just as much to audience members as it does to performers. For an actor to persuade an audience that a piece of silvery cloth being moved by someone offstage is a stream they’re wading through requires more than the sound effect of running water: complicity with the illusion is required.

The 39 Steps was built on many bold and audacious acts of complicity, which we as an audience accepted because they were entered into joyfully for one thing. But those devices are often used by small theatre companies doing plays for small audiences, whereas on this occasion the venue was filled for several consecutive nights.

The key to this conundrum, I believe, is that inventiveness in The 39 Steps was firmly wedded to a familiar narrative. Even if you don’t remember the film in detail, you’re aware of the gist: guy goes on the run to Scotland after getting falsely accused of a murder, and is enmeshed in an espionage case. Beginning, middle and end are clearly delineated, and many other dramatic conventions were observed along the way. Like, the hero had a conscious want – for adventure – distinct from his initially unconscious need – for the stability of a relationship. In achieving one, he secures the other, just like in so many films audiences are used to.

This balancing act of experimental physical theatre with conventional narrative made for a compelling audience experience. A more faithful recreation of The 39 Steps story would be dull on stage, with its hackneyed period characters, stilted dialogue, and tricky to realise action sequences. And a full-blown evening of avant-garde theatre would be too self-indulgent for most audiences to take in the absence of narrative. Here though, the combination was perfect, and hilarious, and an artistic success on every level.

I’ve relished the opportunities I’ve had to work with actors, and look forward to doing so again. One show I did, a theatre in education play called In Your Head on the theme of dyslexia, was a powerful and enjoyable learning experience. Sometimes I scripted scenes that actors performed. Other times they improvised and we shaped a definitive script from what worked between us. And on a few occasions they gave me a brief that I’d have never come up with myself, but delivered for them. In the show itself, the distinctions between working methods faded, and instead the audience responded to different elements: this part humorous, this moving, this polemical and this musical.

For no particular reason other than it’s fun, here’s the conclusion to In Your Head, which audiences – particularly teenagers with dyslexia – loved. To set the scene, protagonist Brian has made the journey to accepting and celebrating his dyslexia, and comes onto stage in a new guise as stand-up comic:

Think. In the beginning was the Word, which gives you some idea of where God stands on dyslexia. Although quite what you’re supposed to make of someone who spells their name YHVH and pronounces it Jehovah I don’t know. Maybe – just maybe – He’s dyslexic Himself. Anyway…

God goes round creating stuff – the heavens and the earth and the beasts that crawl and the fish that swim and every fowl of the air and every other living thing unto the ones that’s never been on Wildlife on One. But after all that work he couldn’t be bothered with doing an index for it. So he creates Adam, and one of the first jobs Adam has is to name everything.

Now what you’ve got to ask is, why did God get Adam to do the names? Sounds to me he was a bit worried about it. Scared he might get it wrong. Like a dyslexic?

And that might explain a few things. If we’re living in a messed-up world that no one can make sense of, maybe that’s because it was put together by a dyslexic deity. And if He made everyone in His own image, then dyslexics are just that bit more God-like than anyone else…

Bow down to me my people, for I am the Lord Brian, and those who tell me where to put a capital letter shall suffer my wrath…And mighty indeed is my wrath…