Acting and writing...books

The first book I published, Grimhilda!, was based on a stage play. This turned out to have both advantages and disadvantages. 

One disadvantage for the book version was that I had a script that worked on stage, and lines that dovetailed into each other. But a book doesn't need page after page of dialogue: there has to be action, and we have to be able to 'see' the characters. You need to free yourself from the limitations of the stage, and have your characters move through their 'scenery' in ways that aren't possible in front of audience. It took quite a bit of rewriting to bring the book to this point. 

On the advantage side, I already had dialogue that had proved itself on stage. When it came to writing the book, the best moments in the story had quality dialogue ready to go. (Though it was a task to ditch great bits of dialogue that worked on stage but weren't needed in the book! It's not easy to ditch lines you're fond of.) 

One other thing helped with the writing of the book. In the first decade of this century I had the chance to appear in several plays. There's nothing like having to learn dialogue, and then perform it as though it's coming straight from your own brain, to make you very aware of what works on stage. 

The plays had been written over the last hundred years, so there was a variety in style. It depends on how old a play is as to how the dialogue is written. Early 20th century plays are dialogue-heavy, and require actors to speak longer phrases and sentences, an art in itself. This doesn't mean that they necessarily sound old-fashioned. The playwrights of the early 20th century were masters of subtlety and give their actors wonderful opportunities to develop characters. 

Later plays can still have longer speeches, but they tend more towards shorter dialogue, and bursts of words tossed back and forth between two or more actors. This is a different skill for the actor and a different approach for the playwright. 

So how does this relate to writing dialogue in books? There's a tendency in fiction, now, for speeches to be shorter and snappier, and apparently (though not necessarily) more realistic. Furthermore, the author can insert information about how a speech is delivered, how a character is feeling, what action takes place at the same time, and much more. I've been re-reading some of the best P G Wodehouse; it's interesting to see how long a gap there sometimes is between what one character says and another answers, because Wodehouse often writes hilarious material about the characters between their lines of dialogue. These insights into things beyond the dialogue are of course only possible in books. 

Anyway, this post came about because I read a piece by Jennifer Zang, in which she recommends that writers (especially screenwriters) should take some acting classes in order to give them a better sense of how dialogue works - especially in films. But her comments apply to books as well. 

Acting requires you to think about why the character is speaking, it enables you to understand economy of words (I've been in plays where the director has cut swathes of dialogue in order to move the play along) and it assists you to understand the emotions behind the words. 

All things of great value to authors. 

Jennifer Zang's article is entitled: Five Reasons a writer should take an acting class, and appears on the Save the Cat website. 

On writing: Exercising your writing muscles

In January, 1990, I began keeping a diary on my computer. I'd often kept handwritten diaries before, spasmodically, but this one was much more regular, and more detailed. It was written on my old computer and then printed off regularly, finally amounting to some 700 pages. It was good that I printed it off, because the disks that the diary was saved to are long gone, not being compatible with later models.

Much of the stuff, of course, is private family material, but in 1989 I'd been unemployed for six months, and had started doing a writing course by correspondence. (My father, Frank Crowl, used to play chess by correspondence.)

By 1990 I was well through the writing course and between being father of a family with five children and working as a manager of a bookshop, I found time to write articles and the occasional short story. Most of the articles got published, because I'd been advised to aim not only for the major New Zealand magazines but for the small ones: trade mags and special interest magazines. The latter proved to be the place that was happy to publish my work. More on that in later posts.

Anyway, scattered with varying degrees of frequency throughout the diary are references to my writing joys and woes. I thought these would be of interest on this blog, and have decided to include posts with extracts from the diary as and when I can. I'll keep an index of these on the blog for reference.

Here's a brief opener from the 6th of January, 1990.

In doing the index for my filing system I came across a quote again by a poet who talks about the need for exercises, even in writing poetry. He compares it to the concert pianist who must exercise each day in order to play the pieces well. I think it's something I've avoided because it appears to take away too much time from 'real writing,' but in fact it's out of that exercising that the ideas often flow, and the work of writing is limbered up. I've been reading two books in the last few weeks, one on writing plays, and the other on writing in general. The latter has some excellent ideas for working out as exercises and the other, though it sometimes seems simplistic in its exercise approach, is probably what I need to really write plays well. I don't want 'just' to be a playwright, but an all-rounder. However, I want to be able to write plays as well as I can when I do.

I'm not sure that I took my advice about doing writing exercises as seriously as I should have, subsequently, but I do recommend this all the same. There are other ways to do exercises, of course. Blog posts are a great writing exercise, as are typing notes galore for the children's book I'm currently writing. In fact, anything that gets you putting down words on the page/computer is worth doing, even if those particular words aren't ever used as part of something publishable.

I have an interesting book called The Exercise Book which lays out dozens of ideas for exercises, some of which various people have turned into poems, stories, books. The book is by Bill Manhire and others. Manhire is one of New Zealand's literati, and a creative writing teacher. Don't let that put you off. The exercises are the thing, along with the stimulation of approaching writing in a different way.

See also an earlier blog post from 2014, in which I mention Peter Elbow and Anne Lamott, both of whom saw first drafts and writing even without any aim in mind as of great value.

Updating the list of plays

This is now being updated here. 

14th Feb 2015: This is yet another update to this list. It's easier to keep it in one place rather than blogging all over again...I've also included the authors of the plays, something that for some reason I failed to do previously. 

Back in October 2011 I listed out the plays I'd performed in this century. The ones I acted in before that were in the 60s, so I've pretty much forgotten the details, though I did have a couple of small roles in a curious comedy called Lady Precious Stream, which we performed at the Globe Theatre in Dunedin. I also had some roles in one act plays that we performed the British Drama League competitions.)  

Early 2012 was taken up with working on Grimhilda!, as a repetiteur (rehearsal pianist), occasional assistant conductor, general factotum. No acting, but plenty of associated work. After that a bit of a hiatus until Easter this year, when our church put on a play in celebration of Rosalie Macgeorge, the first Baptist missionary to leave New Zealand. She went to what is now Bangladesh, and only survived the climate and the diseases for four short years.

The following is a complete list of productions I've been involved in this century:

1.      Mr Beaver in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, [second production by Narnia Productions], 2004 (Teachers’ College auditorium) - Director (and scriptwriter): Erina Caradus

2.      Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew, Sept 2005 (Teachers’ College auditorium) - Director (and scriptwriter): Erina Caradus

3.      Mr Dussel in The Diary of Anne Frank (Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett), 2006 (The Playhouse) - Director: Liz Nisbet

4.      The Father in And Then They Came for Me (James Still), May 2008 (Globe  Theatre) [also co-directed with Carol Krueger]

5.      Reepicheep in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Sept 2008, (Mayfair Theatre) - Director (and scriptwriter): Erina Caradus

6.      Ormonroyd in When We Are Married (J B Priestley), May 2009, (Playhouse Theatre) - Director: Natalie Ellis

7.      Jacob Marley and Mr Fizziwigg in The Christmas Carol (adapted from Charles Dickens' story; dramatist unknown), Nov 2009 (Mayfair Theatre) - Director: Liz Nisbet

8.      Pianist/Composer for Love – or Nearest Offer (Hugh O'Brien), Apr 2010 (Playhouse Theatre) - Director: Natalie Ellis

9.      Rev Harry Harrington in Shadowlands (William Nicholson), May 2011, (Playhouse Theatre) - Director: Natalie Ellis

10.   Paravicini in The Mousetrap (Agatha Christie), October 2011 (Mayfair Theatre) - Director: Bert Nisbet

11.  Grimhilda! - general all-round dogsbody [Mike Crowl & Cherianne Parks/music by Mike Crowl] April-May 2012 (Mayfair Theatre) - Director: Bert Nisbet

12   Reverend Hinton - Harvest Field: the ministry of Rosalie Macgeorge (Greg Brook)- March 2013 (Otago Boys High School Auditorium) - Director: Greg Brook

13   Al Lewis in The Sunshine Boys (Neil Simon). The Playhouse, June 2013 - Director: Natalie Ellis

14.  Padre in Hamp (John Wilson) The Playhouse, August 2014 - Director: Bert Nisbet
15. Sir William Rollander in Verdict (Agatha Christie), The Playhouse, March 2015 - Director: Natalie Ellis

Three Act Tragedy

Last night I finished reading Agatha Christie's 1935 mystery, Three Act Tragedy.  I've had it on my shelves for years, but never actually read it before.  Christie makes a wonderful jubilee from some of the heavier reading I seem to have been doing of late, and this book not only has a neat plot, it keeps you guessing even while Poirot is doing his usual summing-up at the end.  You start to realise who the murderer is, but hope, for the sake of one of the other characters, that it isn't.

It features an actor, Sir Charles Cartwright, and the book is full of references to acting, the stage and the theatricality of normal behaviour - Poirot's included - and the way in which people play at being someone they're not.  It also has some of Christie's allusions to the art of writing murder mysteries: the three main characters, who do most of the leg-work for Poirot, continually compare what is happening in their 'real life' to what happens in books. And it has some of Christie's delightful humour (she occasionally compares with P G Wodehouse in her wit), the same sort of humour I noted when I performed in a production of The Mousetrap a couple of years ago.  The world of the novel is one that's mostly gone, I suspect - people who live without any obvious means of support, 'penniless' upper class people, and an assortment of servants.  And people with names like Mary Lytton Gore, known as 'Egg'.  Christie is quite good at names - certainly they're memorable, unlike those in many modern thrillers. Occasionally she goes a little too close to absurdity; is anyone likely to be attracted to a girl with the nickname of 'Egg?'

Christie published some fifty novels in her career, along with 150 short stories, half a dozen romances under a pseudonym, and around twenty plays, so she can forgiven for the occasional dull entry in the canon.  This book isn't one of those.  The plot is tight, the structure is clever and the clues she lays along the trail are all there - even if we miss them - as well as a good number of red herrings.

On one of my other blogs I've posted a few extracts from the book as well.

Gender-imbalance, light fittings & Ephron

There's a awkwardly-written article on the Guardian website with the headline: Subsidised theatres have too few female roles, Equity says - Actors' union finds male roles outnumber female roles by average of two to one in publicly funded companies. 


I say awkwardly-written not because of its content but because there's one sentence that appears to be unfinished: "But despite contacting the theatres twice, the union received a "disappointing" response, with only eight ." Note the gap between 'eight' and the full stop.  Seems like something's missing there.  And further down we have a paragraph that tells us about various plays currently showing that are dominated by male casts; in the next paragraph we have the same information all over again in a barely rearranged fashion.  Curious. And most unusual for The Guardian, whose online website is one of the best, I find. Or at least one of the best that I actually read.  


The subject of gender inequality in theatre productions intrigues me.  For one thing you can't necessarily blame the production companies, especially those committed to producing classic plays.  If you're going to do Shakespeare, for instance (and two of his plays are among those noted) then you're bound to have a gender imbalance, since the parts for women in these plays are severely restricted.  I went to an evening a while ago in which a group of young people, male and female presented much truncated versions of three Shakespeare plays.  Depending on the director and the casts these worked - the version of Hamlet, in particular was very well done, but the version of Cymbeline was a bit of a mess.  In these the casts were pretty evenly mixed between male and female, with many of the original male parts being played by girls.  However this isn't something you can readily do in a professional theatre production, I don't believe.  


And here in Dunedin, when we were trying to find men for Grimhilda! back at the end of last year and the beginning of this one, we struggled because two other musical societies in the town were producing two very heavily male-dominated productions: Jesus Christ Superstar and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat.  So we had a problem with gender imbalance from a different perspective altogether.  


Two other productions the Guardian writer, Alexandra Topping, mentions are Billy Budd and Chariots of Fire.  Hmm, you'd be hard-pressed to add any women to the roles in those productions.  Billy Budd is set aboard a ship where women weren't present anyway, and Chariots of Fire is about a race in which only men appeared.  It's probably coincidence that so many of these pieces are on at the moment.  


What are production companies to do?  Certainly there are plays in which there are plenty of women's roles, and good ones, but theatre has tended to reflect a society where men have the active roles and women don't.  That society has changed is certainly true, but it seems that playwrights aren't yet reflecting that enough.  I can't think of any play, off the top of my head, that's female-dominated in terms of roles, and certainly there aren't that many plays that have only females in the cast.  


Perhaps it's an issue as to what producers will put on.  Although playwright Stella Duffy [at right] says that women make up the majority of the audiences - 70% according to her - producers still produce plays in which men take the leading roles, or, if the women have leading roles, there are also plenty of males roles as well.   It may also be indicative of a society in which men take the leading 'active' role in stories, like it or not.  There are female superheroes, but not as many as there are males.  And if you really want to check out inequality in gender, look at the movies that are made.  Males dominate there too.  Except perhaps in so-called 'chick flicks'.  But are chick flicks addressing gender imbalance, primarily?  And what is the theatrical equivalent of a chick flick?  


Looking a totally different question altogether, I'm intrigued to see metal switch plate covers being advertised.  These are things that you put over light-switch fittings to stop the children playing with the wires - or to prevent adults inadvertently plugging themselves in instead of the electrical device.  Metal seems an odd choice for this.  I haven't seen metal fittings for years (we used to have old-style round ones in the house) - plastic seems to be the norm.  I guess metal is less likely to go on fire if anything goes wrong, but equally isn't it likely to pick up an electrical charge more readily than a plastic cover?


Just a thought - it made me go and check out a couple of the round switch plate covers in our bedrooms.  It just occurred to me that we might have metal ones after all.  Nope, they're some other material, but they aren't metal.


And one final thing.  Nora Ephron, a screenwriter whose movies balanced out male and female roles with ease and delight, has died - this is already 'old' news, I'm sure.   The Guardian wrote an article about her too, but it linked to a list of things Ephron said she wouldn't miss, and things she would miss. The two lists are a great deal of fun, and warmth and humanity.  Just like Ephron's stories.

Changing looks and computing plays

A few days ago I decided to change the look of this blog to Google's new dynamic approach, which means that not only can the writer of the blog change how everything appears on the page at the drop of a hat, but so can the readers.

However, there are some frustrations with this new look. firstly, it's much harder to search on it.  For one thing on some of the dynamic pages you can't even find a search box.  Secondly, all the additional matter that you've so carefully added to the page over the years seems to go AWOL.  The Google ads are still there - on some versions of the page - but not consistently.  Links to other sites seem to vanish completely, and other interesting bits and pieces are all hidden away somewhere that I haven't been able to discover since I did the change.

So tonight, as the observant will note, I've changed the look again (or the 'template' to use the correct term).   In fact I've done it on all the blogs I have on Blogger.   Given them a facelift, but left them so that they're still easy to follow and won't go swishing all over the page as soon as you touch something.

I quite enjoyed that, but I didn't enjoy trying to find some information again on one of this blog and spending far too long doing so.  In fact, anything that's older than this year, it seems, just comes up as a complete chunk of stuff: all the posts from 2008 will arrive if you ask for some info on a post that was done that year.

Not so hot.

Incidentally, what I was trying to find were the dates of the plays I've acted in over the last decade.   It's been quite a productive time in that regard, with roles in nine plays, and music written for a tenth.   Here's the list.

1.      Mr Beaver in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, [second production by Narnia Productions], 2004 (Teachers’ College auditorium)

2.      Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew, Sept 2005 (Teachers’ College auditorium)

3.      Mr Dussel in The Diary of Anne Frank, 2006 (The Playhouse)

4.      The Father in And Then They Came for Me, May 2008 (Globe  Theatre)[also co-directed]

5.      Reepicheep in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Sept 2008, (Mayfair Theatre)

6.      Ormonroyd in When We Are Married, May 2009, (Playhouse Theatre)

7.      Jacob Marley and Mr Fizziwigg in The Christmas Carol Nov 2009 (Mayfair Theatre)

8.      Pianist for Love – or Nearest Offer Apr 2010 (Playhouse Theatre)

9.      Rev Harry Harrington in Shadowlands, May 2011, (Playhouse Theatre)

10.  Paravicini in The Mousetrap, October 2011 (Mayfair Theatre)

I've kept a journal since 1987 (the first entry discusses my daughter waking up in the night with a rat in the room - the only time such a thing has happened - and dropping it down the toilet to get rid of it) you'd think it would be easy to track down the dates of these productions.   But for some reason there are chunks of time when I didn't make entries in the journal, and often they seem to coincide with the productions of these plays.  Furthermore, I've often written about these plays on this blog - or so I thought.  But in fact I hadn't.  I only seem to have mentioned Anne Frank in passing - after it was finished - and the two earlier Narnia plays barely get a look in.  Odd.

The Star newspaper is supposed to have some references to a number of these plays, but when you click on the Google search results, invariably you find that you locked out of the archives.  So you try the Star page...worse still.  The search box that's supposed to be available according to the help page is missing and when you try to access 'all' newspapers, it happily gives you nothing more than 2011. 

The photo is from The Mousetrap: all cast members on stage in Act II (Natalie Ellis, who played Mrs Boyle, doesn't appear in the second act).  I'm sitting comfortably on the couch keeping the audience guessing as to my role in the situation.  The photo was taken by Andy Cook, who designed the set.

Update as at 30.3.13: I've now completed another role, or rather two roles: Rev Hinton, and the Doctor, in Harvest Field, the Ministry of Rosalie Macgeorge.  This play had its world premiere last night, and its one and only performance, as part of the Dunedin City Baptist Church's 150th Celebrations.  The script was by Greg Brook, who also directed.  The play was performed at Otago Boys' High School Auditorium.
And, while I haven't acted otherwise since my part in The Mousetrap, the first part of last year was greatly taken up with Grimhilda! which I'd written with Cherianne Parks, composed the music for, played the piano during rehearsals for (and occasionally stood in for the Music Director).

More on Robertson Davies

Finished reading Robertson Davies' Murther and Walking Spirits last night. It's a late book in his career, and I suspect that if he hadn't been such an established author when it was published, it wouldn't have seen a single bookshop shelf.

It's really two books in one: the first, which provides bookends for the other, begins with the murder of the narrator, goes on to discuss his subsequent interaction with his wife and her lover and other characters (all without them knowing) and then is literally dumped for some 200 plus pages before resurfacing so that things can be resolved in some degree.

The second book is the meat in the sandwich - very substantial meat, in fact. Its only connection to the other story is that the narrator continues to inform us what's going on, and his murderer is also mentioned spasmodically - they're 'sitting' together in a cinema watching old rediscovered movies. However what the narrator sees on the screen (for no explained reason) is different to what the murderer sees. It turns out that he sees several 'movies' about his ancestors, each movie gradually coming closer to the time of the book. In this section there are dozens of characters, some of them receiving little more than a line or two to delineate them. Supposedly the narrator is telling us what's happening in the movies, but Davies goes way beyond that and adds in authorial comment and much more. It's a puzzle of a story, since there's no structure to it, merely the detailing of some of the ancestors' lives and how they interacted with those around them. Often there's no dialogue for page after page (though things come vastly more alive when there is dialogue). Instead the narrator will tell us what the supposed director of the movies is showing him, and somehow this superb director can make the inner thoughts of the people on screen known to the narrator as well. It makes for interesting historical reading, but isn't the material for a novel, in my opinion - at least not as it stands.

As one of the reviews on Amazon says about this book: If you haven't read Davies, "please, please don't start here because this is awful and just not indicative of what a great writer he is." Here's a more detailed review from the New York Times, written when the book first came out.

I read a much earlier Davies book (1951) before this - Tempest Tost - in which a bunch of amateur actors put on Shakespeare's The Tempest. Again there are heaps of characters, some of them only turning up in the last thirty pages or so. There's a lack of any sort of structure (which is interesting, because Davies was a playwright before he began writing novels), and it's hard to figure out who the main characters are: people who start out seeming to play an important part in the action often fall by the wayside; others come into their own for a while and then are dropped into the background. A man who plays a major part in the story takes quite some time to get a head of steam, and even then can vanish for lengthy periods.

The novel basically moves forward in time, but there's no sense of plot, and very little of things known early in the piece coming into their own at a later point. It's enjoyable, and often very funny (more in the writing about the characters than from what the characters themselves say), and Davies has a nice line in aphorisms; the book is littered with them. He likes to play the author as a wise old man...but it's a bit of a puzzle how he's regarded as the Grand Old Man of Canadian Letters.

This year's reading

In a recent post I mentioned that Salesman in Beijing was the last book to make it onto the list of books I've read in 2009 - which made me consider posting the rest of the books. So here they are, in the order they were read. Those in italics are fiction; the rest are non.

It's a fairly eclectic list; some of the novels were read for reviewing (for the Otago Daily Times), and the non-fiction titles tend to lean towards the areas in which I'm interested (not necessarily those in which I actually know a lot about the subject). Some of the books didn't get finished, but they'll only be on this list if I got through a fair chunk of them. There were heaps of other books, non-starters that I thought would be interesting and weren't, or that I just didn't get far through because some other more interesting book came along. Plus, this year, I had to read and re-read some text books for my course, and a number of other books that I dipped into for reference. Most of those don't appear here.

This year is perhaps notable for the number of books that I've read for the second (or third) time; I read somewhere about a person spending a year reading just the books she had on her shelves; I haven't made a conscious effort to do this, but I have re-read several that I had 'in stock.'

Since I started checking through this list again, I find there are at least two books that I've had to add because they got missed out. Weird. (The links are to reviews and blog posts I've written on the books.)

Knots and Crosses – Ian Rankin – 3.1.09
The Drunkard’s Walk – Leonard Mlodinow – 15.1.09
The Horse and His Boy (reread)– C S Lewis – 16.1.09
Set in Darkness – Ian Rankin – 25.1.09
Gilead (reread) – Marilynne Robinson – 29.1.09

Evil and the Justice of God (two-thirds) – N T Wright – 9.2.09
Reason for God – Tim Keller – 10.2.09
The Novice’s Tale – Margaret Frazer – 12.2.09
Extreme Weather Events – Tim Jones – 25.2.09
The Last Battle (re-read) – C S Lewis – 28.2.09

When we are Married (play) – J B Priestley – 2.3.09
Soul Survivor (re-read)– Philip Yancey – March 09

The Third Peacock (re-read) – Robert Farrar Capon – 8.4.09
Flashback Forward (well-skimmed) – John Cairney – 10.4.09
Twilight – Stephenie Meyer – 10.4.09
The Hunting of the Divine Fox – Robert Farrar Capon – 19.4.09
Digital filmmaking – Mike Figgis – 26.4.09
Creative Interviewing (mostly read) – Jack Douglas – 26.4.09

Sins of the Father – Fleur Beale – 7.5.09
Awakening – S J Bolton – May 09

Easy Virtue (play) – Noel Coward – 3.6.09
Readings for the Research Methods course – various dates.
Tzigane (play) – John Vakidis - 8.6.09
Leaving Church – Barbara Brown Taylor – June 2009
Original Sin – Alan Jacobs – June 2009
Fear and Polemic In Seventeenth-Century England: Richard Baxter And Antinomianism – Tim Cooper – (3/4 read) – June 2009

Anthony Trollope – James Pope Hennessey – 11.7.09

Just Take My Heart – Mary Clark Higgins – 3.8.09
Embracing the Wide Sky – David Tammet – 4.8.09
When in Rome – Ngaio Marsh – 14.8.09
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton – abridged audio book version – 15.8.09
The Seven Dials Mystery – Agatha Christie – 17.8.09

Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies – Blake Snyder – 1.9.09
Reason for God – Tim Keller (re-read) – 7.9.09
People’s Train – Tom Keneally – 12.9.09
The Consciousness Plague – Paul Levinson – 18.9.09
A Week in December – Sebastian Faulks – 21.9.09
Finding Sanctuary – Abbot Christopher Jamieson – 25.9.09
Save the Cat – the last book on screenwriting you’ll ever need – Blake Snyder – 27.9.09

Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass on Tour – Adrian Plass – 11.10.09
Transmigration of Timothy Archer – Philip K Dick – 11.10.09
Somebody Loves Us All - Damien Wilkins - Nov 09
Performer as Priest and Prophet – Rock & Mealy – 17.10.09
A Kiss before the Apocalypse – Thomas Sniegoski – 21.10.09
The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy – Barbara Vine – 25.10.09
The Champion – Maurice Gee – 29.10.09

Supervision in the Helping Professions - ? – 1.11.09 (two-thirds finished – recalled to library)
The Complaints – Ian Rankin – 2.11.09
To Heaven, with Scribes and Pharisees – Lionel Blue – 14.11.09
The Big Picture – Tom Reilly – 29.11.09

And it was good – Madeleine L’Engle – 2.12.09
A little exercise for young Theologians – Helmut Thielicke – 2.12.09
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J K Rowling (re-read) – 8.12.09
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – J K Rowling (re-read) – 17.12.09
SuperFreakonomics – Levitt and Dubner – 28.12.09
Salesman in Beijing – Arthur Miller – 31.12.09

Catching up on some interesting links

When I'm too busy to post on my blog(s) I tend to accumulate links to various items of interest that I intend to get around to one day...such as today.

The first item is about the 'fluid' piano that a composer called Geoff Smith has invented. It allows the musician to micro-tune each individual key and thus hook into music that is tuned differently to Western music, such as Indian or Iranian. My first (biased) reaction was that it sounded pretty much like most out-of-tune pianos I've come across over the years (including my previous piano, which resolutely refused, in its later life, to allow the bass notes to stay in tune for more than a few days). I guess it takes a bit of getting used to, and certainly the pianist is going to have to rethink their whole approach to playing when they use one. Will it build an audience? The world is littered with instruments that never quite made it, so it will be interesting to see what happens.

The video is here, and an article (from the Guardian) here.

Improv Everywhere is the name of a company (?) that does surprising seemingly improvised and random things literally everywhere. The example below takes place in a supermarket, and is typical of the average modern American musical.



Third on the list today is a question and answer piece (again from the Guardian) in which various artists are asked a random list of 50 questions, and provide some wonderfully random answers about art, photography, acting and more. All the little things you wanted to know such as how does an orchestral triangle player earn his living?

And finally, from a blog called First Things, a list of the blogger's top 100 spiritually significant films. Don't just read the blog post - check out the comments, in which a bunch of film buffs come up with more (and sometimes better) spiritually significant movies.

Stage struck

When I was a young man, I had two very close friends, both of whom left New Zealand for the bright lights of London - with intentions to go on the stage. Neither of them went on the stage; one of them eventually came back home after having an interestingly varied career in the usual sort of jobs NZers do when they go on the Big OE. The other got a lot closer to show business, at one time being part of the film promotion team for MGM. Which meant he got to see all the movies that were worth seeing, often before they went to the English public. I saw Last Tango in Paris in a tiny little private cinema as a result of this (not that I was greatly impressed with it), and also Pinocchio before it came out on a re-release. (Those were the days when you couldn't just go down to your local video store and hire a movie you liked - you had to wait until either the distribution company decided it was time to give it another go (which could be years after its original release) or until you caught it at some niche cinema where they managed to ferret out movies that weren't readily available.) I'm not sure if I saw Pinocchio as a child, but even as an adult it was a revelation in that small cinema; animation like you couldn't believe possible.

This same friend stayed in the UK until he died (much too young); he lived on the fringe of the show business world, flatting with a fellow Dunedinite who'd been big time in amateur theatre here and wound up on a daytime soap there. This actor had a tiny part in A Clockwork Orange, as a policeman. I think he's visible for all of a minute and a half.

I was reminded of this by reading an article in the Guardian today about young actors at the Royal Scottish Academy of Drama and Music in Glasgow, people who are still hopeful of getting in the business even in these tough times. Not that it's ever been easy to be an actor: two-thirds of them may be out of work at any one time, and reality TV certainly hasn't helped.

The curious thing is that when I joined my two friends in London, I hadn't had any plans to go on stage, but I certainly got a lot closer to it than either of them did. I went over to study as a repetiteur at the London Opera Centre, and wasn't only involved in the productions the Centre put on in-house (and the one that was presented at the Sadlers Wells Theatre), but also had free access to opera rehearsals at Covent Garden, which became almost as familiar to us as the Centre. I even played for auditions at the English Opera's theatre once. On the stage (a rather scary moment, actually). And on another occasion I played for a young singer in a competition, Abigail Ryan, at the Wigmore (pictured on right) - and she won. And went off to Germany to study as a result.

Well, that'll do for name-dropping, for the moment. Our mini-dramas at church have finished their 'run' - there were five in all, and I made it into four of them. (The second was on at the same time as When We Are Married.) Last Sunday's featured the four blokes who've appeared in the previous plays, and they were celebrating the loss of the All Blacks at home. One of them, who's become increasingly angry over the last couple of episodes, tries to explain his anger amidst the banter. It was a good little piece, and should have got a number of laughs, but the audience was surprisingly subdued, and it became hard work for the actors to keep up the momentum. Never mind, it made its point, I think. It had a second 'half' as it were: a return to the four soliloquies we'd started the series off with; this time the four actors (three of the guys and one of the two women who'd appeared in the plays) went in reverse order to the first play, and their speeches showed the progress they'd made. Different levels for each, but progress nevertheless.

Easy Virtue - the play

Last night I mentioned going to see Easy Virtue, the movie. I thought it would be interesting to see what the original play was like, so got it out of the library today. Crikey. The first and most interesting thing is that the movie is far better than the play. The departures from the original are so considerable that only things that are similar to Coward's play are the following:

• A butler called Furber, who is a real person in the movie; in the play he has no existence except buttling.
• A strikingly good-looking woman who's married the heir in a very uptight family. However she isn't American in the play - and she's some years older than John; they go on about it all the time.
• An extremely repressed mother, who doesn't, however, have any concerns about the family property, though she's so uptight about life in general from the moment the curtain rises that she would act as an appetite suppressant to anyone silly enough to try and eat in front of her (actually, that's not dissimilar to the movie!).
• A father who's remote, but who likes his new daughter-in-law. He's not only remote in the play, he's utterly boring, and would probably have been played by an aging matinee idol who had relied in the past on his charms rather than his acting skills to sway the public.
  
• Two daughters, one serious and one scatty. Except in the play the serious one is a bit of a religious nut, and the scatty one is exceptionally catty with it.
  
• John, who's naive and callow. At least in the film he also has some charm.
  
• The neighbouring girl who would have married John if the outsider hadn't come in. She's much the same as in the film: wiser and warmer than the cold-hearted family.
  

The story is roughly similar: callow youth brings home gorgeous, slightly older woman, to the horror of the family. Woman has something in her past, and at the end has to leave for the sake of her sanity, even though she actually does love the boy.

But there the similarities end. Notice that I didn't say anything about the humour in the play; in fact, there's almost none. The funniest lines come in the author's introductions to his characters; their speech is seldom more than a little amusing - there's no laugh-out-loud humour here. Mrs Whittaker (the Kristin Scott Thomas character) is described thus: The stern repression of any sex emotions all her life has brought her to middle age with a faulty digestion which doesn't so much sour her temper as spread it. She views the world with the jaundiced eyes of a woman who subconsciously realises she has missed something, which means in point of fact that she has missed everything.

And what actress would be excited by this description of Marion, the older sister?: She is largely made and pasty, with big lymphatic eyes. Hilda, the younger sister, 'possesses all the vivacity of a deficient sense of humour.'

Which means that most of the humour and wit and nifty one-liners in the film are the film's scriptwriters, not Coward's. In fact, there's almost nothing of Coward in the movie, as far as lines go, at all. Furthermore, Coward doesn't provide us with the hay fever, the Picasso painting, the vicious chihuahua who gets squashed to death by being sat on, the motorcycle amidst the Hunt, the tango at the end with the father (nor the running away with him), the butler who's a bigamist, the can-can at the local cultural evening, the boyfriend with the broken leg, the other girl's wealthy father who's not only buying up the land but also has his eye (goodness knows why) on Mrs Whittaker senior. And the father has never been to war, been sullied by it, nor wandered about France living in brothels.

In other words, most unusually, the film is infinitely superior in almost every way. It would take a cast of considerable skill to make anything of the play as it stands; the movie even manages to remove the sense of datedness.

On top of this, Coward asks the impossible of the average modern producer: he asks for nine characters for the first two acts (plus adding in, during the second act, a young man of no importance who will appear unimportantly in the third, and an elderly bloke who appears for about a minute and is never seen again) and then in the third brings on another eight characters, plus several unnamed extras. These people have come to the ball that's taking place in the next room, and wander in and out randomly during the scene making inane remarks, or, to a degree, building up a bit of tension when the heroine doesn't appear on cue. So that's some dozen actors who do nothing for two acts and then do very little in the third.

I thought When We Are Married was a bit oddly constructed in terms of its usage of some actors: Dyson the reporter appears in the first and second acts for about three minutes apiece and then disappears; Rev Mercer comes on late in the second act for two minutes, is hussled off and then gets another couple of minutes towards the end of the last act; Lottie turns up very late in the second act but at least gets some stage room; the niece gets five minutes early in the first act, another half minute a bit later on, and then a couple more minutes at the beginning of the third act. She's totally forgotten otherwise. Even the young man who sets everything in motion in the first act, where he's a major player, is dumped almost completely after that (he gets a couple of minutes at the beginning of the third act too). My character, Ormonroyd, appears with Dyson early in the first act, and then vanishes for well over an hour before he becomes a major character later in the piece. I suppose in the thirties actors were a lot cheaper, and they could be tossed on and off like this without consideration!

Of course, with the Coward, it makes a big difference, after two acts of constant talk (and very little action - another difference between the play and the film) to have lots of people bobbing in and out, and women and men in pretty dresses and evening wear. It gives the last act some additional lift (and it certainly needs it).

Well, there you go. A relatively straight play turned into a successful comic movie: wonders will never cease.

The Director

There are two sisters acting in the play I'm currently involved with (And Then They Came For Me). One of them, who played Anne Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank, in which I had the role of Mr Dussel, the dentist, now plays Young Eva, the main character. The other sister plays Anne Frank (!), who though she has a smaller role, is still significant in this play.

I've been a bit concerned that the girls haven't been getting too much coaching in how to work their lines, so I suggested to their mother a couple of weeks ago that perhaps I could take them through the play and look at some better ways of dealing with the lines. Because I've been directed by this lady in the past (in the Narnia plays we've done) she was quite happy for me to do this.

So the two girls came round to the house and we worked through their roles, line by line, trying to see how best to put across the stuff.

I got an email later from their mother, full of enthusiasm for what had been achieved. I confessed to her that I must be a 'closet director'. She had no hesitation in agreeing!

I've got a little list

In line with what I said in the last post here’s a quick overview of the creative factor in the Crowl world as at this date:
Lined up for a small part in a play called And Then They Came for Me: remembering the world of Anne Frank. It’s written by James Still.
Writing some brass band music in the hope that one of the A Grade local bands might consider playing it.
Writing some piano music with tongue-in-cheek titles.
Considering writing some songs again, including a song for the dramatisation of C S Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which our church is producing later this year.
Writing four blogs mainly, and posting occasionally to a couple of others.
Considering a way in which a novel I’ve virtually finished might be published on the Net, bit by bit.

That’ll do for the moment. Meantime, I’d like to alert you to a poem I wrote which gets advertised at times in a widget along the side of these posts. It doesn’t get many views from people, so I’d like you to have a look and either leave a comment here or on the site of the poem itself.

Michael Gurr

Michael Gurr is an Australian playwright

‘Believing your value as a human being is measured by your independence and separation from others is the great lie of the market-driven world.’
From Michael Gurr’s memoir Days Like These, quoted in Time Magazine 6th Nov, 2006

‘On the early trains, slightly damp hair and recently applied make-up give you access to bodies so lately asleep or naked that it can induce a sensation like the swoon of a long kiss.’
Ibid.

In regard to writing his memoir, he discovered his aim was:
‘To put a bit of steel back into the language of ideas that have come to be seen as soft, nebulous, weak. All the things that have been stripped out of the national conversation.’ This follows from an earlier comment about Australian politics: ‘I’ve never been angrier. Our current national government has presided over a time of almost unbelievable moral corruption.’