To Produce a Random Event…

It takes enormous planning to produce a random event.
         --Holmes

I write this on the eve of the sold-out, first preview performance of Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure.  It is an odd, in-between, sort of time for directors, with the bulk of our work behind us, yet not quite complete.  I suppose it’s rather like watching a ship you’ve helped build cast-off for the first time.

I doesn’t help that I’m listening to Barber’s Adagio for Strings as I write this…

My deepest thanks to everyone who has contributed to the production of this “random event” – actors, designers, staff, artists of all crafts, audience, friends and family.  It has been a fantastic experience and absolutely every moment has been worth it.

Break a Leg, Everyone

E

All the Single Ladies

Yes, that’s a Beyonce reference.  Yes, it’s going cost me a little credibility with my Idle Muse colleagues – and no: I couldn’t resist.

A previous post of mine dealt with the ideal of Victorian manhood, which the men in Holmes’ time  each had to contend with.  This one will take a look at part of the landscape that was facing women.

According to the United Kingdom Census of 1851,* the population of Victorian Britain contained 4% more women than men.   Since the same census counted a population of about 18 million, this is a difference of approximately 750,000 individuals.  These "superfluous women" would have no chance of ever marrying, due to simple mathematics.

For a very exceptional few, like Doyle’s Irene Adler, the gift of artistic talent provided a means to circumvent these restrictions, finding their own independence as divas and other performers.  For others, the inability to hold significant employment or obtain higher education forced them into more desperate professions…

To an actor considering the role of Madge Larrabee and her interactions with the other characters of the play, these are circumstances which must be considered.  What choices are left a woman with no resources and nothing to rely on but the schemes of a fallen brother?  How must she respond when those schemes attract the notice of one Dr. Moriarty?  Finally, what edge will her conversations with Irene Adler carry, knowing that she is speaking to a woman who has sidestepped all the difficult choices and all the moral compromises she herself has been forced to make?

*Ideas and figures in this paragraph summarized from the Wikipedia article “Victorian Era”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_era

Sketching Things Out

Long before I ever considered it as a career path, Theatre was identified as a “collaborative art.” The composition, which is to say the experience of taking in the performance, isn’t crafted by any one individual artist, but by the intersection of many. These include actors, writers, musicians and designers of all sorts. In this way, the art of the Director is concerned with providing a platform and environment for all of these artists to do their own unique work, while simultaneously acting as a sort of lens that focuses those disparate beams of light into a single, coherent vision that is the production.

This year, Idle Muse Theatre Company is exploring ways of taking this core idea even further and we’ll be ready to start talking about it in detail soon. The below is a sketch by illustrator Tom Kyzivat, inspired by reading Sherlock Holmes and conversations about the text. Check out more of Tom’s work at his site Murderous Automaton and consider the below a “teaser” of things to come.

Found Objects II

This is one that many readers will likely already be familiar with. I first read it myself back when I discovered my own love for poetry, thumbing through my mother’s old copy of One Hundred and One Famous Poems, which I had discovered on a dusty bookshelf. I have posted it here because so much about Kipling’s work is emblematic of the Victorian mindset and preoccupations – like his total immersion in “orientalism” in Just So Stories and The Jungle Book series, or the distinctly British imperialist perspective touted in works like The White Man’s Burden. I have written before how the societal changes brought on by Victorian industrialization helped give birth to concept of the self-made man – an ideal which each of the characters in Sherlock Holmes must, in part, define themselves in relation to.

Rather than endeavor to expound upon just what I think this ideal means myself, I’ll let Kipling, whose words won him a Nobel Prize for doing so, cover this one:

IF—
by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And—which is more—you'll be a Man my son!

What We’re Listening To

In my last post, I discussed concept material and sense-response work. Another form of this material is playlists – burned CD’s and weblinks to music sites that get passed among the creative team like cigarettes among inmates. Again, these tracks are concept material – most aren’t right or won’t make it into the final production. Their purpose is to inspire…

The below list starts out with the intellectual melancholy of Sting and moves on to the elegant pulp of Vitamin String Quartet. Dwelling there for a while, it drifts into rivers of darker strings and casts-off to explore new frontiers. Trading these tracks with each other is a kind of conversation we’re having about the ways we connect to the play and how we plan to express that on stage. I have posted some of them here so you might have the opportunity to listen in too.

Shape Of My Heart
Sting

Yellow
Vitamin String Quartet

Heroes (String Quartet Tribute to David Bowie)
Vitamin String Quartet

All I Want Is You (String Quartet Tribute to U2)
Vitamin String Quartet

Time After Time
Vitamin String Quartet

Clocks
Vitamin String Quartet

Hallelujah
Vitamin String Quartet

Fast Fall (Original Composition Inspired by the Music of Paramore)
Vitamin String Quartet

Dark Waltz
Hayley Westenra

Adagio For Strings, Op. 11
Barber

Into Dust
Mazzy Star

Devil's Dance Floor
Flogging Molly

Come Here Boy
Imogen Heap

Ghost Story
Sting

In Time
Mark Collie

Heroes
Peter Gabriel

Games Without Frontiers
Massive Attack feat. Peter Gabriel

Symphony 10 Mov. 1
Shostakovich

Klingon Battle
Jerry Goldsmith

Found Objects

When directors are cobbling together the massive looseleaf tomes we live by in production, affectionately termed “Directors Books,” among the various pages of script notes, photocopied research and design drawings, we often keep a number of what might seem like unrelated or extraneous pages.  These are sense-responses: collected art, literature and material that if not directly related to the play, somehow resonate with the text for us.  We don’t always know how or why, and they may never translate into something rationally perceivable on stage, but somehow, they just go.

Here is one such item:

 

ULYSSES
by Alfred Lord Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle —
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me —
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

On the Relevance of Punk II

In my last post, I explored the concept of punk as it relates to certain genres of pulp literature.  In the dystopian futures depicted in Cyberpunk stories, it is the criminals and hackers who have learned to master technology and manipulate the system for their own ends who are made heroes.  In a world where the system is the engine of dehumanization, the rebels becomes the image and champion of the human.

To understand how these science fiction concepts are relevant to to a Victorian Gentleman like Sherlock Holmes, let’s take a look at his greatest nemesis – a man Holmes describes together with himself in the play as “two men who share a shadow”…I am speaking, of course, of the notorious Dr. Moriarty.

Doyle based Moriarty off of real-world criminal masterminds like Adam Worth and Jonathan Wild – men who in their respective times both recognized that the rapidly evolving complexity of their world presented unique opportunities for profit.  A contemporary of Doyle, Worth was a “bounty jumper,” collecting income by enlisting in military regiments under false names and deserting after receiving pay – a trick he likely learned after he was mistakenly listed as killed-in-action after the Second Battle of Bull Run.  Pursued by the Pinkertons, Worth moved to New York City and eventually Europe, founding criminal networks which thrived on large-scale robberies and forgery scams.

Jonathan Wilde, a career criminal in 17th Century London, managed to portray himself in the public eye as a master “thief taker,” or private detective.  He used this position to claim rewards on “recovered” stolen goods which his own gang had made off with in the first place – men and women he frequently betrayed and turned over to the law for his own profit.

In effect, both of these men learned to “hack the system” and manipulate it for their own ends.  They were able to look at the machine-like workings of society and exploit that knowledge for a desirable result.

As I’ve written before, the Victorian Age, like the modern Information Age, was a time of rapidly increasing complexity and innovation.  Even as technology revolutionized production and created prosperity for some, these advancements vastly outpaced social and political change.  The men, women and children who labored along side that same technology had almost no legal protection and were themselves reduced to little more than cogs in the giant machine of Victorian industry.

The Victorian Age is, in fact, the beginning of the same post-humanism that Cyberpunk literature explores: the fear that as our world becomes increasingly complex, we’re going lose the very things that make us who we are.  The prevalence of these ideas has even given rise to an offshoot of Cyberpunk literature that takes place during the Victorian Age and explores the same themes.

This is called Steampunk.

I want to be clear here that I don’t mean to say Idle Muse is presenting Sherlock Holmes as a Cyberpunk – or even a proper Steampunk – play.  But these concepts are fascinating to me.  If we focus only on the archetypical and surface-level details we’re familiar with from other portrayals of Holmes, like the deerstalker cap and the curved pipe, these ideas might slip by us entirely. Living in the shadow of the factories and the black smog of the coal mines, however, they are forces that would have been present and very immediate to Doyle’s audience. They are fears that would have permeated the Victorian subconscious as they watched Holmes navigate the seedy underbelly of London’s criminal underworld and aristocracy with equal aplomb.

In Moriarty, Doyle presents an adversary who is a perfect machine – like Holmes, he understands the system so well he works in perfect concert with it, predicting results and manipulating outcomes.  At the same time, he is hindered by none of Holmes’ human traits, like empathy or compassion.  What sort of man must Holmes become to match and defeat such an opponent?  What happens when that man meets a woman who offers an alternative to that battle and the prospect of the most fundamental of human experiences?