A Literary Pub Crawl Video. Perhaps.

A sort of completion of pics from The Lit Pub Crawl.  A bit random, but does if convey a flavour, do you think?

A Chistmas Carol Brummy programme note

It's exciting being back in Birmingham at the Old Joint Stock Pub and Theatre. And last years London sellout version of my A Christmas Carol has done just that again - this time in Birmingham. Here's what I wrote for the programme.



We all know Charles Dickens' remarkable Christmas story. He wrote it in 1843, just as his fame and success as a writer was fading. The novella has not been out of print since! I first came across the book as a boy. I borrowed a children's version of the story from the Library at Wheelers Lane School in Kings Heath, Birmingham and forgot to take it back. Like most kids, I was amazed, fascinated and slightly horrified at the tale. And it became a ritual. I would read the book every year at Christmas in our council house in Hollybank Road, sometimes with my sister, but mainly in bed and at night. I had to make sure I got to the end of the book by Christmas Eve. Every Christmas Eve.
It would take me some years to realise how Charles Dickens influenced his society and indeed, later authors such as George Orwell who professed to wanting to make writing about social issues an art form. In recent history, Dickens was one of the best, I think.

I’d wanted to write a version of ‘A Christmas Carol’ when we were still at the Billesley Pub. Indeed I started to do just that in 1996-ish. But we were in a recession and my brother had been made redundant. His reward for being a ‘hardworking family’ was for him, his wife and four young children to be evicted from their family home by the bank. Their comfortable home then sat empty for nearly two years. So without knowing why at the time, I wrote a play called ‘A Ghost of A Chance’ about a man who is made redundant. I was delighted when it won the Guinness Award through the Royal National Theatre. Although the main characters are still called Bob and Tim! And Tim is tiny!

And now Maverick Theatre has changed again. The original idea of Maverick was to attract a non-theatre audience to the theatre. I’d realised working with lots of OxBridge types on radio the reason nobody on our estate ever went to the theatre was that nobody ever asked us. So we - Maverick - invited the estates and they came. We were the only pub theatre in Birmingham and we were once described by The Stage as the biggest in the country. (I claim COMPLETE credit for the OJS Theatre pub
Theatre in Birmingham, by the way. Although it may have more to do with the pub management..!) But in London there are dozens of theatres above pubs, so I thought we’d go back to another fundamental - ensemble storytelling. With Katie Merritt - introduced to me, by the way, by another Birmingham stalwart who STILL lives in the area, former Birmingham Rep Artistic Director John Adams - I found a willing co-operator. And Scrooge seems to have been some what ‘Walt Disney’d’ over recent years. So this version, first presented at the Wheatsheaf in the West End of London last year, used NO sound and light effects and the cast did everything. Most of the language and the script is Charles Dickens, but I hoped the shape of the script and the ‘beats’ we would create could be sufficiently transparent, accessible and moving for an audience. It proved to be so. The critics got what we were doing and were universally positive and as a result the whole run sold out. RemoteGoat described us as "the new bohemians of Soho!"

We’re using more of the OJS theatre technology here. And I’m finding it quite emotional. The last time we performed in a pub in Brum was 1999. It’s good to be back. I’m very impressed with the OJS Management. I’m also looking forward to a good curry! And I might drive past my childhood home at 154 Hollybank Road in Billesley and glance up at my old bedroom window. Because it looks like, once again, I’m involved in Charles Dickens’ magical tale at Christmas.



Nick
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Location:Cromwell Road,London,United Kingdom

Raymond Briggs and Creative Socio-paths

As you know, life in the arts is a constant financial struggle and I’ve been looking at an author Crowdfunding platform called Unbound. As I have both Charles Dickens AND William Shakespeare lined up to provide an introduction to my next book - more about that later perhaps - I’m thinking of using the service, if they’ll have me.
I was checking them out and came across this, from Raymond Briggs’ pitch of a book he’s hosting on the platform. For the last few years Raymond has also been writing a regular column for The Oldie, 'Notes from the sofa’.
His new book is overfunded, of course, but I loved how the man most famous for ‘The Snowman’, described himself and writers and I reproduce it here, hoping he won’t mind as I’m crediting him and his new book!

The Excerpt
Bring back creative socio-paths

Having recently written of my discovery that I am a stereotype, it was a relief to find that the label does have its compensations.
Also, for the last 17 years I have had on my wall of my workroom an article from the Times by the great Doctor Stuttaford. It has stood me in good stead for almost two decades. Thanks a million, Doc!
Why Gifted Artists Pay a High Price for their Vocation, is the title.
‘Creative people often find it difficult to comply with the demands of a prosaic world [such as Ingrams and The Oldie, R.B.]. The artistically gifted are frequently so dedicated to their vocation, whether it is music, visual arts or writing, that they can appear SELF-ABSORBED, IMPULSIVE, IMPATIENT AND INTOLERANT [Yes! My CAPS. R.B.] Even in my medical lifetime there was a sub-group whom psychiatrists labelled creative socio-paths – a term now abandoned.’
What a shame! I like it. I am definitely a creative socio-path. I am impatient and intolerant of stupid PC people wanting to tidy up the language. What’s twrong with being self-absorbed? It’s better than being absorbed in someone else, so ‘in love’ that you can’t think straight or get on with work. Also, it’s being impulsive and impatient that gets things done, otherwise you might spend hours gawping at your mobile phone or garbage on the telly. In the War, it was intolerance that got rid of Hitler, Buchenwald and Belsen.
Being labelled a psychiatric type with a proper title is reassuring. It helps you to understand who you are and where you stand. It gives you the kind of reassurance that religions must give their believers. ‘You are a sinner!’ Er… well yes, I suppose so. ‘You will burn in hell!; Um… oh dear. I’d better try and be good then.
Millions of people find this comforting. At least it tells them what they are and where they are going. So why should we creative socio-paths be denied the comfort of our label?
We won’t go to hell, will we?

Location:London

Autumn Events and Spreadsheets. My Friends.

I should be writing here more often, but to be honest, running the London Literary Pub Crawl takes a chunk of time. We've done incredibly well over our first year or so, but I've decided we could do much better, so we're looking to raise £30k for marketing. It'll make us a real attraction in London and my Chinese actors stand poised, ready to go.

But we're writers, not accountants. Fortunately I've found a brilliant accountant who is able to frame my terms of reference in accounting speak and if the banks don't want to play ball our financials look strong enough to attract private investors. I have to keep reminding myself. "Spreadsheets are my friends. Spreadsheets are my friends..." Repeat often.

That aside, if you are in London at the moment, you picked a good time. Head over to The South Bank for their Literary Festival. This year’s festival will include a four-day live reading of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1-4 Oct). The first ever live reading of the novel in the UK, the reading is presented by The Special Relationship and Southbank Centre specially for this year’s festival. The event will feature 160 ten minute readings by actors, writers, comedians and special guests including Melville’s great, great, great granddaughter and novelist Liza Klaussmann, Chibundu Onuzo and A L Kennedy.

Another exclusive event will include the world premiere of The Hollow of the Hand, the début collaborative book by the Grammy Award and Mercury Prize winning PJ Harvey and celebrated photographer Seamus Murphy. Featuring words and images collected during a series of journeys to Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Washington D.C. between 2011 and 2014, the event will present poetry readings and new songs performed by PJ Harvey alongside images and a short film by Seamus Murphy (9 & 10 October).

The event I'm most excited about though, is Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam in conversation with a special guest (to be announced) (7 Oct). Discussing Terry’s life, career, art and the broader question of creativity, the event will focus on Terry’s latest memoir, Gilliamesque: A Pre-Posthumous Memoir, which is due to be published this October. Terry’s only book appearance in the UK this year, the event will track his vivid and unorthodox career from Monty Python to his role directing English National Opera’s Faust in 2011. I grew up watching Monty Python. I'm going to see if I can get Terry on my radio show Literary London every Friday on Resonance 104.4FM and Podcast on this site. But he's a bit of a hero and you know what they say about meeting heroes. I did once nearly tread on Terry Jones' foot at a party though, so maybe I'm qualified.

Never mind heroes. Spreadsheets are my friend.




- Posted from my iPhone

Location:Oakwood Road,Birmingham,United Kingdom

The Perfect Holiday Reading List?

I'm taking 2 weeks in Wales to write, and  thought this article from The Conversation by Andrew Tate, Reader in English at Lancaster University, might be interesting.

Hell is not, as Sartre suggested, other people – it’s a holiday without books. Holidays, with their promise of carefree pleasure seeking, might seem like the most materialistic of activities. Yet the name has sacred roots: the holy day suggests a time set apart from the ordinary flow of life.

I can tolerate zigzag queues and disappointing hotel rooms but a lack of literature would ruin my trip. For some of us there is no greater pleasure, or more sacred thing, than the imaginative travel afforded by a good book.

Holiday reading fan.

The great philosopher Blaise Pascal believed that human misfortune was the result of other people’s inability “to sit quietly in one’s room”. I’m not sure where Pascal liked to spend his summer break – Disneyland Paris hadn’t opened its gates in the 1600s – but if forced to leave the tranquillity of his room for adventure and the promise of ice cream, it’s probable that he would have filled his suitcase with literature as well as factor 50. And, if he were to ask for a few suggestions, I might recommend this mini-library of my all-time holiday reading favourites. Take note, if you want a real break on your travels.

First chapter

Clive James’s absurdly funny and sad Unreliable Memoirs (1980) is the first book that I remember reading on a beach. I was 16 and should have been focusing on other things, like the exhilarating surf and real human beings, but this “novel disguised as an autobiography” snagged me and encouraged a lifelong belief that words placed in the right order are a kind of magic.

James’s rites of passage tales of suburban Sydney in the 1940s and 1950s are intense in their specificity, evoking a distant world and way of life. But his askew take on the ritual humiliations and surprising freedoms of childhood are so resonant that they might connect with anybody who remembers what it is to be young, awkward and excessively bookish.

In another world. Soloviova Liudmyla/Shutterstock.com

The family saga

This evocation of the idiosyncrasies of family life anticipates the fiction of James' fellow Australian, Tim Winton. I especially recommend Cloudstreet (1991), now widely regarded as a classic of world literature, which follows the fortunes of two families who are compelled by separate losses to share a house for two decades.

Winton writes with a distinctive lyricism about Western Australia but this is also a compelling family saga of the pious, industrious Lambs and their worldly, fortune-seeking peers, the Pickles. There are few better writers of landscape and this is a visceral narrative full of elemental detail, salty humour and raw feeling.

The page turner

Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London (2011) is likely to prompt less refined reader responses: fear, laughter and the need-to-know-what-happens-next are the big pleasures in the first of a rather Dickensian sequence that blends police procedural with the supernatural.

PC Peter Grant, a rare fictional detective who seems to be perfectly sociable, becomes a kind of wizard’s apprentice in the Met and investigates crimes that leave his peers clueless. The genre term “urban fantasy” may discourage but this is witty, smart contemporary fable that represents a mischievous rewriting of the rules of classic detective fiction.

Donna Tartt wants to know why you haven’t read The Goldfinch yet. Bas Czerwinski/EPA

The tome

A long break might create space to grapple with one of the big books of our time: Donna Tartt’s ambitious The Goldfinch (2013), which blends art, obsession and the search for home, is perhaps the closest thing to the experience of reading a 19th-century triple-decker published in recent years; it is rich with character, incident, plot twist and, yes, many pages. I found it utterly absorbing and the fact that it isn’t brief is part of the pleasure.

When homesick

Holidays might encourage escape from everyday life but they’re also a good opportunity to reflect on our understanding of home and belonging. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004), is a kind of hymn to the joys of not travelling: John Ames, a minister facing up to mortality, reflects on the ordinary mysteries of life in the titular mid-Western town in a series of letters to his young son.

Robinson, in common with otherwise very different novelists such as John Irving and Stephen King, is brilliant at world building. We might have little in common with a Calvinist minister living in 1950s Iowa but Robinson opens up his particular world in a way that encourages both thought and emotional connection. Gilead offers an alternative take on the velocity (and restlessness) of contemporary Western life.

In her brilliant poem, Questions of Travel (1956), partly inspired by Pascal’s defence of staying put, Elizabeth Bishop asks: “Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?” If you are similarly sceptical about tourism, I recommend this pile of books and the out-of-office reply as an alternative trek into new lands.

Defying the norm? Hardly, the Edinburgh Fringe defines it

This is interesting if you are performing or considering visiting the Edinburgh Festival.  We personally love it, (the picture above is us at Edinburgh in 1992!) but I understand the sentiment expressed here, by Stephen Greer, Lecturer of Theatre Practices at Glasgow University.  Reprinted from The Conversation, with permission.


This year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe slogan – “defying the norm since 1947” – might make for good marketing. But it hardly reflects the role of the world’s largest arts festival accurately. Far from supporting risk, the environment of the Fringe is increasingly one in which playing safe is the best way to avoid losing out.

The origin story to which the Fringe’s slogan refers is well rehearsed. In 1947, eight theatre groups turn up uninvited to perform at the Edinburgh International Festival. Though they’re not in the official programme, they perform anyway and are joined by larger numbers of independent performers in the following years. This leads to the formation of the Festival Fringe Society in 1958 as an organisation dedicated to supporting an “open-access arts event that accommodates anyone with a story to tell and a venue willing to host them”.

If the Edinburgh International Festival is the conservative parent – programming international artists to perform elite cultural forms of opera, classical music and canonical theatre – then the Fringe has been imagined as the more adventurous younger child engaged in a creative free-for-all.

But the claim that the Fringe is transgressive becomes less convincing when you consider the commercial and professional pressures of the festival. Above all else, increasing costs have created powerful disincentives to taking creative risks.

Charlie Wood of the Underbelly venue suggests that acts should consider the Fringe in one of three ways: as an expensive holiday, as a highly uncertain attempt to make money, or in the “hope your show will get bought and find a future life”. Putting on any show requires significant personal investment or the support of a production company that will gamble on your behalf (while also invoicing you for the privilege).

In the competitive mainstream of the festival, even a comparatively modest solo show can stand to lose £5,000 or £10,000 against fees for venue hire and marketing. An agreement for a standard box-office split with a venue will contain a guarantee against loss that means artists pay a deposit which is only returned when a certain proportion of tickets have been sold. A month of accommodation alone may cost more than £1,000 and a full listing in the print edition of the official Fringe programme itself costs £393.60 – again, all paid in advance.

In turn, the Fringe programme polices cultural standards for good taste. In its style guide, the Fringe Office reserves the right to edit any images or text that they judge “to be inappropriate in any way” and censors “potentially offensive” words with asterisks. This policy meant that Fringe-regular Richard Herring’s show appeared in the 2012 programme under the thinly-veiled title Talking C*ck: The Second Coming.

The standing of the Fringe as an industry trade show carries its own conservative dynamics. Viewing the Fringe as an investment that might lead to more lucrative work, major comedy agencies routinely offer contracts which guarantee a loss to the act, even if every ticket is sold. Stories of successful Fringe runs with packed houses and glowing reviews that end with an invoice for thousands of pounds are not uncommon.

While notionally interested in discovering the next new thing, talent scouts and BBC commissioning editors are also carefully watching their own budgets, and often prove unwilling to depart from tried and tested formulas. Though women in comedy have found increasing recognition over the past ten years, the choices of agents and bookers have been slow to change and reflect the continued wider dominance of opportunities for men across the industry. When Bridget Christie won the Foster Comedy Award in 2013, she was only the third woman to take the prize for a solo show since its inception in 1981.

In the current environment, the Edinburgh International Festival’s ability to exercise its own largely independent artistic choices means that the older festival may be in a far stronger position to foster work that “defies the norm”. Though the programme still reflects its heritage through choices of classical music and opera, this festivial still increasingly supports experimental choreography and performance by directly commissioning work.

One highlight of this year’s programme is Untitled Project’s production of Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner – first presented at Glasgow’s Tramway venue. This re-staging is particularly significant because it marks a continued life for a highly acclaimed, experimental company who were forced to close their doors when the Scottish Arts Council ending their funding earlier this year.

None of this means that experimental, adventurous or transgressive work won’t appear in this year’s Fringe. But the environment of the festival is far from inherently supportive of creative risk. While there is a significant body of new writing in each year’s programme, the public discourse of the Fringe is dominated by a small number of performance forms – primarily stand-up and naturalistic drama. The sheer scale of the Fringe – 50,459 performances of 3,314 shows in 313 venues, including 807 free shows – also means that smaller companies struggle to be get the word out about their work even when they are taking significant risks.

It’s no coincidence, then, that the increasingly popular organisations that make up the “fringe of the fringe” are characterised by an attempt to encourage experimentation by offering venues and performances free of charge to artists and audiences alike. PBH’s Free Fringe, Free Festival and Forest Fringe rely on volunteer labour, with artists pitching in to operate lights and run the box office. This is supported in turn with direct fundraising, as in the Free Fringe’s annual fundraising gala, and the Forest Fringe’s crowdfunding campaign to cover costs including an accessibility day for hearing impaired audiences.

We've moved! The Fitzroy Tavern closes!

The roots of the Literary Pub Crawl lie in the Fitzroy Tavern. I was doing my Masters at the University of London and looking for a cheap pint. My mate from Birmingham, filmmaker Andy Bloom, suggested I could get a cheaper pint at the Fitzroy, as the pub was run by the Sam Smiths Brewery and they were considerably cheaper than other pubs in the area. He also told me about the Writers and Artists Bar at the pub, which certainly appealed.

So I was nursing my cheap pint downstairs and couldn't help but notice the pictures of writers and artists on the wall. Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Augustus John. It occurred to me that if they'd all been regulars, there must be some stories to tell. So a few days (and cheap pints later) I'd done enough research to realise there certainly were some stories. Fascinating stories, I thought. So I wrote the stories into a script, found some actors and the London Literary Pub Crawl was born!

The Fitzroy Tavern has been talking about closing for over a year. We are part of the reason for this. The pub gets so packed they need more room. So they are closed for at least 8 months and they are looking to turn the first floor accommodation into public rooms. One, I think, is going to be called The Dylan Thomas Room!

So we've moved the start of our show from the Fitzroy Tavern, just down the road, to The Wheatsheaf on Rathbone Place. We're so blessed with literary pubs in the area that it wont make any difference to the show - in fact we love it because The Wheatsheaf is where we've been presenting plays for the last year or so. We were recently described by Arts Site Remotegoat as "the new bohemians of Fitzrovia and Soho." I quite like that. I hope you'll come and be bohemian with us soon.




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Location: London,United Kingdom