06 January 2014
‘The most influential radio programme ever’? Charles Chilton, P J Harvey, and soldiers' songs
Fifty years after its first production—and marking the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War—Oh, What a Lovely War! returns to its original home at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in February.
Described by critic Michael Billington as ‘one of the seminal events of modern British theatre’, this ‘musical entertainment’ drew on soldiers’ songs to expose both the ‘absurdity’ and the ‘vulgarity’ of war (the former every bit as important to Theatre Workshop’s presentation as the latter).
The musical was inspired by Charles Chilton's ‘The Long, Long Trail’, first broadcast on the BBC Home Service in 1961, and which told the story of the War through bleakly ironic (and yet strangely uplifting?) soldiers' songs. Chilton had collected the songs from a book called Tommy’s Tunes (the first edition of which is in the Library) and from former soldiers he met in pubs around St Pancras.
Chilton died a year ago in January 2013, and on Saturday the BBC broadcast a tribute to 'The Long, Long Trail' described by one contributor as ‘the most influential radio programme ever’.
The original recordings of 'The Long, Long Trail' were not retained by the BBC, but Chilton kindly donated a copy to the British Library; we also hold original recordings and sound effects from the original production of Oh, What a Lovely War!, equally generously donated by Theatre Workshop's Murray Melvin (talking here as part of the Theatre Archive Project).
By coincidence, before Christmas we hosted a reception to share news of the forthcoming launch of our Europeana Collections 1914-18 project, which will make hundreds of thousands of newly-digitised materials—from the UK and our partners in eight European countries—relating to stories and events of the war available online for free. (See more at last month's blog). One of our readers that night was the singer, musician and artist P J Harvey, who chose to read the lyrics of soldiers’ songs (as well as her own lyrics from the album Let England Shake, and a new poem).
Her choice to read three soldiers' songs—all of which featured in 'The Long, Long Trail'—was a stunning one. Stripped of the accompanying music, the cold absurdity of their lyrics was laid bare. It may be a weakness or a strength, but one of the singularities of Oh, What a Lovely War! is the hummability of its tunes about death and destruction; indeed many of the early audiences for this anti-War production were former soldiers who apparently enjoyed reliving memories of comradely cheer. But when you listen to the lyrics—really listen—they are jaw-dropping in their calm horror.
The biggest revelation among the lyrics that Polly read was the song 'We're here because': originally sheltered behind the tune of 'Auld Lang Syne', that night the lyrics opened up a Beckettian no-man's land of senseless repetition. 'Here because we're here because we're here because we're here': on it went, that tortuous, clinically neat, anti-logic.
We're pleased to include the video of Polly's reading below; our Europeana project launches at the end of the month.
Polly Harvey at the British Library from Europeana Collections on Vimeo.
P J Harvey reads:
Lyrics from soldiers’ song ‘I Want to Go Home (I Don’t Want to Die)’
Lyrics from soldiers’ song ‘When This Bloody War Is Over’
Lyrics from soldiers’ song ‘We’re Here Because…’
Lyrics from ‘The Words that Maketh Murder’ by P J Harvey, from the album Let England Shake
‘The Guest Room’, a poem by P J Harvey
The Charles Chilton audio collection, including tapes of 'The Long, Long Trail' can be found on the Sound and Moving Image catalogue under reference C1186
Murray Melvin's audio collection, including tapes of the original production of Oh, What a Lovely War! and sound effects can be found on the Sound and Moving Image catalogue under reference C1502
The first edition of Tommy's Tunes can be found on the British Library catalogue under reference 011604.g.16
05 November 2013
Most of What Follows is a Complete Waste of Time
Guest post from Ian Greaves, researcher of theatre and broadcasting history
N F Simpson (1919-2011) was said to be many things. During his near-century on the planet, he served as playwright, teacher, satirist, bank clerk, philosopher, a one-man-band English wing of the Theatre of the Absurd, army intelligence officer, father, translator, sketch-writer and poet. Coming to fame relatively late in life, his early successes A Resounding Tinkle (1957) and One Way Pendulum (1959) placed him in the company of Angry Young Men. These, however, were not his natural bedfellows.
N F (Wally) Simpson, photographed by Mike Harris
As the writer David Benedictus once observed, Simpson had the misfortune to not be foreign like Ionesco or rude like Orton. His was a particularly restrained form of English humour, a precise extension of his personality. Simpson was certainly no self-publicist and, as a consequence, he became a marginalised figure: largely absent from the theatre after 1965, and with most of his subsequent work out of circulation. It falls, then, to a new collection of his work- Most of What Follows is a Complete Waste of Time (Oberon Books) - to fully restore this brilliant but neglected writer in the public consciousness.
The new Oberon Books collection contains several extracts from Simpson’s previously unpublished 2009 miscellany, Anatomy of Bewilderment. Draft material is held amongst the British Library papers.
Simpson had the pause before Harold Pinter, planted the seed of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and inspired the comic philosophy of Tom Stoppard. His beguiling plays were full of memorable set-pieces, endless diversions, upturned clichés and dark philosophies. His worlds were essentially ordinary, but worlds in which everything was equal and interchangeable - the private and public, animals and humans, biscuits and books. Comedy emerged from a determination to hold onto reason with whitened knuckles. To quote his introduction to Some Tall Tinkles (1968), his characters followed “a simple faith in the axiom that for those to whom life is an exercise in survival, the secret is in knowing how to ride with the punch”.
In the five years immediately prior to his death, N F Simpson - or Wally to his friends - underwent what many artists enjoy only after they’ve gone: a resurgence of interest. There was a season at the BFI, a new play at Jermyn Street Theatre, revivals of A Resounding Tinkle at both the Royal Court and Donmar Warehouse, a BBC Radio documentary about his life and work, and the purchase of his papers by the British Library.
The last of these was characteristic of a gradual effort to put his house in order. Working as researcher on the 2007 radio documentary, I soon found that Wally was keen to establish the whereabouts of all his work. This put me on a five-year road of discovery: archive upon archive, covering radio and television, stage and print. Part of this process resulted in the quite accidental discovery of Pinter’s lost sketch 'Umbrellas' at the British Library. Even as a big Pinter fan, however, I was slightly more excited to finally locate a copy of Simpson’s 'Take It Away!' in the same Nottingham Playhouse revue.
N F Simpson collaborated with cartoonist Willie Rushton on a series of cod advertisements for Private Eye magazine. This piece appeared in issue 32, cover date 8 March 1963.
The British Library’s invaluable Simpson papers - acquired in 2009 - gift us many treasures and insights. Oberon’s new, authorised miscellany of Simpson’s writings brings some of this material back from obscurity, including his first professional writing (for The Tribune in 1953) and a number of important, pre-fame pieces for Birkbeck College magazine The Lodestone. Thanks to this material, Most of What Follows… acts as the most complete map of his creative life, revealing its continuities and experimental diversity. Perhaps now we can all of us enjoy the many different facets of Simpson and, with one collective push, assert his true place in the canon of great English comic writers.
Ian Greaves is co-editor of Most of What Follows is a Complete Waste of Time: Monologues, Dialogues, Sketches and Other Writings by N.F. Simpson, published by Oberon Books on 5 November 2013.
23 July 2013
What's the longest play in the world anyway (anyone)?
In my recent blog post on Ken Campbell I mentioned his 24-hour long production of Neil Oram's The Warp at the ICA in 1979, once decreed the world's longest play by the Guinness Book of Records.
I say 'once decreed' because the current Guinness World Records web site lists a production by the 27 O'Clock Players (of Belmar, New Jersey) of Ionesco's absurdist 'anti-play' The Bald Soprano (aka The Bald Prima Donna) as the world's longest 'continuous dramatic performance', at 23 hours 33 minutes 54 seconds.
Maybe The Warp wasn't quite 24 hours long after all, or perhaps the word continuous is key here, with the The Warp's intervals removed from the equation in the interest of accurate durational performance measurement.
The Bald Soprano, incidentally, is actually a short one-act play but - thanks to the stage direction 'repeat of start of first scene' - it can be looped indefinitely.
In any case, it would seem that Forced Entertainment's 24-hour edition of their show Quizoola! at the Barbican, London, earlier this year, offers stiff competition in the durational stakes, running as it did from 11.59 pm 12 April to 11.59 pm 13 April, with no audience breaks.
Forced Entertainment's Tim Etchells gives a fascinating account of the thought behind the making of the company's durational pieces here.
The British Library has enjoyed a long association with Forced Entertainment - our collection includes more than 300 of the company's performance and rehearsal videos, together with many audio recordings of talks and discussions - so we were delighted when the company offered to donate to the collection Hugo Glendinning's digital video documentation of the complete 24-hour Quizoola!.
Previously accessible only as a live webcast, the Quizoola! documentation is now available to view free of charge at the Library. Please note: you will need to acquire a reader pass if you don't already have one, and book an appointment (or several appointments if you wish to view the complete thing).
For an appointment or further information, please contact the Listening and Viewing Service via +44 (0)20 7412 7418 or [email protected] quoting British Library item number C802/398.
Some screenshots from the Quizoola! video (copyright © Forced Entertainment 2013) are reproduced below.
04 July 2013
Ken Campbell is alive and you are dead
On 31 August 2013 it will be five years since the death of writer, performer, director and general one-off theatre legend Ken Campbell.
In the Guardian's obituary, theatre critic Michael Coveney described Campbell as 'a perennial reminder of the rough-house origins of the best of British theatre, from Shakespeare, music hall and Joan Littlewood to the fringe before it became fashionable, tame and subsidized.'
The multifarious products of Ken Campbell's profoundly anarchistic theatrical imagination included his 24-hour long production of Neil Oram's The Warp at the ICA in 1979 - decreed by no less an authority than the Guinness Book of Records to be the world's longest play - and his production of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - performed inside a hovercraft - also at the ICA, later that same year. In the later part of his career he was perhaps best-known for his solo shows of fantastical monologues detailing all manner of odd experiences and arcane knowledge.
In 1977, the opening attraction of the National Theatre's new Cottesloe space was the full-cast stage adaptation by the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool - co-founded by Campbell with Chris Langham the previous year - of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy. The British Library made an audio recording of the full 9-hour show and continued, throughout the 1980s and 90s to record Campbell's (usually solo) shows at the National. These included Furtive Nudist, Pigspurt, Jamais Vu, Violin Time, The Pidgin Macbeth and The History of Comedy: Part One: Ventriloquism.
Campbell was happy to have his shows recorded for posterity, his only stipulation being that he was not informed of the date the recording would be happening.
As well as unique live recordings, the Library has tried to acquire any commercially circulated recordings of Campbell: from the CD 'Wol Wantok' (King Mob, 1999), in which Campbell advanced the case for Pidgin English as a new world language, to the DVD edition of G. F. Newman's TV series Law and Order, in which Campbell had a rare straight acting role, as a crooked lawyer. He later described his performance in Law and Order as an example of 'tie-acting' (the actor tucks in his chin and mumbles into his tie).
The Library does not have any unique audio documentation of The Warp but it does have a copy of the video version (on six videotapes) purchased from writer Neil Oram a few years back. This is still available to purchase from Neil here, now in DVD format.
If you would like to hear (or view) any of the material mentioned in this blog post you can do so free of charge at the British Library. You will need a British Library Reader's Card however and you may need to book an appointment.
Listen to Ken Campbell introducing his Pidgin Macbeth in 1998 (excerpt)
24 June 2013
The 'Sacred' seasons of live art at the Chelsea Theatre
The 'Sacred' seasons of live art and experimental contemporary performance were started at Chelsea Theatre, London, seven years ago by Francis Alexander, the Theatre’s Artistic Director.
Located in front of the World’s End Estate on the King’s Road, the Chelsea Theatre presents itself as the only London theatre dedicated to the production and presentation of live art performance. Each year Sacred brings together performers and practitioners from all over the world for a programme which also supports early-career artists.
Frontman
Action
Hero, 2011
Over the years themes and formats have varied, from one-to-one encounters, late-night cabaret, dance, promenade performances and installations. The 2008 season even included shows taking place inside an old Routemaster bus parked in front of the theatre.
Sacred also provides a place for discussion and engagement in the form of keynote addresses, artist-led workshops, symposiums, talks, lecture demonstrations, post-show talks and interactive critical debates including researchers and members of the public alike, often with an impromptu element.
These events have touched so far on the subjects of socially engaged performance, participation, performing the real, the make-believe world of performance, and most recently, in the current season, on hopes, dreams and predictions for future practice through the Wishful Wednesdays series of artists’ talks.
Ron Athey and Franko B in discussion, 2009
Audience involvement is not excluded from the shows and it can take many forms too. For example as a part of a performance in 2008 the duo Leibniz invited spectators to donate a drop of blood to be used as ink in the writing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into a thick, leather-bound book. And in 2010, performer Sara Juli put $5000 into the hands of the audience for her show The Money Conversation.
What Tammy Needs to
Know Lois Weaver, 2008
Since the beginning of the first Sacred, in autumn 2006, the British Library has been documenting all the shows and events. Seven seasons later this has resulted in a unique collection of over a hundred and forty video recordings. See BL reference C1214 in the Library’s online Sound and Moving Image Catalogue.
At the British Library we document performances from the audience point-of-view and we never see the shows in advance. Videoing under these conditions can sometimes be challenging. The results are made available for viewing, unedited, in the Reading Rooms.
BLACKOUTS:
Twilight of the Idols Dickie Beau, 2013
The collection is a comprehensive guide to the contemporary live art scene and its players and includes shows by Franko B, Goat Island, Ron Athey, Dominic Johnson, Kazuko Hokhi, Stacy Makishi, David Hoyle, Karen Christopher, Julia Bardsley, Helena Hunter, Sheila Ghelani, Action Hero, Dickie Beau, Peggy Shaw, Natasha Davis and Robin Deacon among many others.
The Chelsea Theatre’s partnerships with international venues such as brut from Viena in 2009 and PS122 from New York in 2010 brought to London the work of Jan Machacek (you delay), Richard Maxwell (ADS) and Young Jean Lee’s Theatre Company (Pullman, Wa), to give just three examples.
The current season is about to end. You are still in time for the last two shows: The Red Album by Rubix Collective on 27 June 2013, and Anarchitecture in the UK by Richard DeDomenici on 6 July 2013.
12 April 2013
Royal Court Theatre recordings at the British Library
Over the past year there have been a number of press articles about the Royal Court Theatre’s preparation for a change of artistic director. Dominic Cooke’s succession is going to be effective at the end of this month. Vicky Featherstone will be taking over, making her director number thirteen since George Devine, and the first woman to occupy the post.
To mark this new chapter in the Royal Court’s history this blog concerns the British Library audio recordings made at the Theatre over the past 40 years. Of course, if you have your list of missed productions ready you may want to jump straight into the online Sound and Moving Image Catalogue and plan your visit to the Library’s Reading Rooms.
The Royal Court is known as a writers’ theatre. The venue has hosted a long-running young writers’ programme, which has included national and international writers alluring audiences with all sorts of challenging subjects. For example listen to Hanif Kureishi and Karim Alrawi interviewed in 1986 discussing British Asian theatre. Kureishi was the Theatre’s writer-in-residence in 1982 and ran the writing side of the young writers’ workshops for a number of years. See BL reference C311/1.
The British Library made its first audio recording of a Royal Court production on 30 October 1970. The play was Home by David Storey, directed by Lindsay Anderson, starring John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Dandy Nichols, Mona Washbourne and Warren Clarke. It premiered 17 June 1970 and transferred to the Apollo on 29 July.
Since then, for all the subsequent recordings, the Library has kept a permanent set of microphones hanging from the lights grid of both the upstairs and downstairs performance spaces at the Court. The recordings are part of the Library’s ongoing programme of audio and digital video documentation of performing arts and spoken word, which began in 1963.
The Royal Court recordings collection include plays, pre- and post-show talks and rehearsed readings; forums on European writing, black writing, gay writers and female playwrights; and talks about production, design and acting; occasional gala events and more. All the recordings are listed on the Library’s catalogue. See BL references C1208, C1209 and C311. For material recorded prior to 2006, you will usually need to make an appointment with the Listening and Viewing Service
In 2006, for the Theatre’s 50th anniversary, the Royal Court programmed over 50 rehearsed readings under the title Look back: 50 readings, 50 writers, 50 years. The programme consisted of a selection of 50 plays produced at the theatre from 1956 till 2006, most of which were recorded.
In the same year, Harriet Devine, George Devine’s daughter, published Looking Back: Playwrights at the Royal Court, 1956-2006. The book was based on a series of recorded interviews that she had made with playwrights whose work had been produced at the Royal Court. The original recorded interviews are now archived at the British Library and include writers such as John Arden, Simon Farquhar, Sebastian Barry, Richard Bean, Martin Crimp, Anne Jellicoe, Terry Johnson, Hanif Kureishi, Conor McPherson, David Storey, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Arnold Wesker and Snoo Wilson.
Researchers may also be interested in the collection ‘The Legacy of the English Stage Company’, which comprises a series of life-story interviews covering the careers of theatre directors associated at some point with the Royal Court. See BL reference C1316. This collection has been sponsored by John Hodgson Theatre Research Trust and is an ongoing project curated by the Library’s Oral History section.
Some highlights of the Royal Court recordings include Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, Jim Cartwright's Road, Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem.
Over the past four years I have had the pleasure of making many recordings for this collection. I would like to emphasise the value to researchers of the post-show talks. They are usually attended by members of the cast, the director and often the playwright, and they provide a valuable insight into the creative process. Along with the recordings the Library also collects a programme or published text for each production.
The Royal Court has an active international programme which showcases the work of young playwrights from around the world, with a focus on contemporary issues. The programme, which is run by Elyse Dodgson, has included readings in translation and discussions of plays with playwrights from Nigeria, Syria, Chile, Romania, India, Georgia and Ukraine, to mention just a few. In August 2011, in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, I recorded ‘After the Spring: New Short Plays from the Arab World’, which presented work from Tunisia, Egypt and Syria followed by a post-readings talk, with the playwrights reporting on the protest movements and what was going on in the streets at the time. See BL ref. C1209/136 and 137.
I have also recorded many of the ‘Rough Cuts’ series of work-in-progress, experimental pieces, readings and shorts, which takes place twice a year, after a gestation period at the Theatre’s Studio. The most recent season ‘Bytes’ was shown in January. Playwrights Alia Bano, DC Moore, Nick Payne and Penelope Skinner presented work examining and exploring our relationship to the internet, and E.V. Crowe a rehearsed excerpt of her new play Searched.
We hope this whets your appetite for the collection. We are always interested in hearing from you and if you have any suggestions please feel free to comment.
Eva del Rey
Curator, Drama and Literature Recordings
05 April 2013
Neil Bartlett's Desert Island Discs
Neil Bartlett appeared at the Library recently performing pieces from his repertoire and discussing his varied career as writer, performer and director with Amy Lamé. Doing her best Kirsty Young impression, Amy invited Neil to select and perform extracts from some of his favourite shows. Neil chose pieces from A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep (first performed at Battersea Arts Centre, 1987), Night After Night (a show based on the night his parents met, Royal Court, 1993), Seven Sonnets of Michaelangelo (Lyric Hammersmith, 1998) and A Picture of Dorian Gray (Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 2012), as well as a recent solo piece, What Can You Do? (Theatre Royal, Brighton, 2012).
A clip from the event recorded at the British Library on 22 February 2013, followed by an archive video of A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep at the Drill Hall, 1989. Performers are: Neil Bartlett, Ivan, Regina Fong and Bette Bourne.
Over the course of the evening Neil reflected on what it was like to be a performance artist before he was even aware of the term, the challenges of taking over the Lyric Hammersmith, and his eclectic love of high and low art (but indifference to ‘everything in between’).
Out of the five pieces he performed, he chose ‘The Song of Solomon’ from A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep (inspired by the life of Simeon Solomon, the pre-Raphaelite painter persecuted for homosexuality) as the piece he would most like to save from the waves. It stands, Neil said, as an overwhelming reminder of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and is also the only piece to be tattooed on his body. For his luxury item he plumped for an endless supply of paper and pencils, to be put to use translating Racine’s final play, Athalie (his chosen book). This was his second choice, his preferred—though disallowed—luxury item being the Wallace Collection.
The event marked Neil Bartlett’s donation to the British Library of his video archive and working papers. The video collection, acquired with the help of the Live Art Development Agency, has now been digitised and catalogued and is available to view by appointment with the British Library Listening & Viewing Service, or at the Live Art Development Agency’s study room in Hackney Wick. Neil Bartlett’s working papers document his 27 books (novels, adaptations, translations and original work for the theatre) and 79 theatre pieces. Researchers wishing to consult these papers should contact [email protected].28 March 2013
Goodbye to the Singing Hypnotist
In Christopher Green's final performance as Artist in Residence he presented his research into hypnosis in the Library's collections and performed material for his new show, The Singing Hypnotist. Watch the full show below, recorded at the British Library on 25 January 2013.
What does hypnosis feel like? What tricks have been used to induce a hypnotic state? Why do we need such sophisticated strategies to shock us into the simplicity of being healed? These are the questions Christopher sought to answer through his research into hypnotherapy, and its glitzier cousin stage hypnotism. Through the course of the show he introduces the audience to some of the most interesting hypnotists of the last two hundred years, recounts his own experiences of hypnotherapy, and delves into the illegitimate side of hypnotism—past life regression.
It seems that there is currently a healthy appetite for understanding more about the intersection between art and science, healing and showbiz. Though Christopher’s residency has now drawn to a close, he has already re-incarnated his new character the Singing Hypnotist (a showman with ethical qualms about the strength of his own powers) as part of the Barbican’s festival, Wonder: Art and Science on the Brain (which continues till 10 April). He will also be appearing at Latitude Festival this summer in Neuroscience vs Sexuality.
Christopher was inspired by a range of items from across the Library’s collections—music hall songs, the conjuror Evanion’s playbills (pictured above), and patents for hypnotic devices, to name just a few—see below for Christopher’s ‘reading list’.
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