Introducing...

Donald Dunstan, a 46 year old electrician with a slightly tubby belly, massive sideburns and bushy eyebrows. Donald is unusually tall, clocking in at 6’7. His work mates call him ‘Duny’ (after the Australian slang for toilet) on account of his time specific bowel movements. He was originally born in Clacton-On-Sea, although now lives in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire with his wife and two children, a girl and boy, 21 and 17 respectively. He’s somewhat conservative in views and left school at an early age to pursue a vocation. A photograph of him with a bucket and spade and his parents on Clacton beach sums up his most consistently happy memory. He secretly hopes one day his family will settle there. His ambition is to retire as soon as possible, and his greatest fear is never being able to afford to.

Donald is the product of a fruitful day spent at The Royal Court taking part in a playwriting workshop hosted by Penpals and London literature developers Spread the Word.

Led by award winning playwright Alia Bano, (featured in today’s Observer) author of the critically acclaimed Shades, it was great to dedicate time to developing ideas for the stage amongst peers, and before long I had a pen portrait of the somewhat unexpected Donald. Here’s a typical conversation with Donald, using the 10, 9, 8, 7, 6… words game.

(Don and Friend are sitting in a pub)

Don: Lost my pension the other day. Company went completely broke.

Friend: Money’s safer under the mattress these days, you know?

Don: Until some sod breaks in while you’re away.

Friend: Heard about that, what did you loose?

Don: The cash that’s under the mattress.

Friend: Christ, that’s rotten luck mate.

Don: I know, I’m skint.

Friend: Next rounds mine.

Don: Whiskey, thanks.

Friend: Sure.

Exploring Downtown

When I open my eyes Sunday has began. I shower, dress and explore downtown with The Velvet Underground’s ‘Sunday Morning’ playing in my head.

I take a left outside the Holiday Inn down Howard Street and cut across Broadway. I meander my way through the closed boutiques of Soho and Noho until I find myself in the Village. I pause for a moment in Washington Square park and watch the dog walkers circle the paths. A few moments later I stumble across several shop windows with puppies in them.

I’m looking for a record shop and am having no luck. The Virgin in Times Square has closed down, and the Jazz Record Centre on 26^th was another victim of recession. I’m after the expensive jazz cds you only get in Rays on Charing Cross, ones from the Tzadik and Nonesuch labels. Instead I find adland signified by the polished buildings of Saatchi & Saatchi and Euro RSCG. Both offices have Kandinsky rip off’s on the walls, a usual favourite of banks in London, although I imagine it’s to demonstrate the limitless of their creative expression. It’s wallpaper to me. I’m now back by the Hudson, then I walk East down Charlton Street and find a church playing ice cream van music. Churches are strange in NYC. Beautiful buildings, but lacking in history compared to European equivalents.

At midday I find myself gravitating towards NoLita. I walk down Spring Street, lunch at the organic Spring Street Natural Restaurant and shop at Canadian import McNally & Jackson as it begins to rain. I spend too much on poetry books. The amount of new writing journals is astounding, and their presentation creative. ‘A Plate of Chicken’ by Matthew Rohrer’ reminds me of a poem I wrote called ‘Chicken Skin Music’ (a domestic heart attack) after the Ry Cooder album. The book introduces me to the Brooklyn based Ugly Duckling Presse, a non-profit art and publishing collective focusing on emerging and forgotten writers. I admire their design.

On the way back to the hotel I pass Elieen’s Special Cheesecake and think of my Nan.

Devoted and Disgruntled NYC

We rise as the first yellow taxi belts its horn. The sun is still sleeping and for now our only light is an orange eco friendly lamp.

By 6.30am we’re on the subway. ‘N’ train to 42nd Street, ‘1’ train to Columbus Circle, coffee and a Panini to go. At 7am I’m on a ladder sticking up the 4 principles of open space. ‘Whoever comes are the right people,’ ‘Whenever it starts is the right time,’ ‘Whatever happens is the only thing that could happen,’ ‘When it’s over it’s over.’ They read more like philosophical quotations. Instructions for dealing with modern life. Rules to help free yourself from the conventions and expectations of others. Tell yourself these four things often enough, and life doesn’t seem so pressured to ‘get it right.’

The first guests arrive at 9.30. Laurence & Tarah from Anderson amongst them. Improbable Artistic Director and leading Open Space practitioner Phelim McDermott opens the space at 10.30. What’s strikingly different about the NYC one over the London D&Ds is that the participants are up in seconds to call their sessions. In London a serene politeness usually settles over the crowd as they wait for the first brave soul to break the silence and call a session. The New Yorkers are queuing at the word ‘go’ to call theirs over the microphone. I decide to call a couple of sessions around Funeral Customs and creating trailers for theatre shows.

The first session I attend, called by Steven Ginsburg of Hartbeat Ensemble discusses Free Theatre. Ginsburg himself runs an activist-based theatre company interested in social change and creating new works that challenge the status quo. He wants to discuss ideas of a ‘free’ theatre model whereby the audience sees the show for free. We discuss various models; pay what you can, complimentary ticket giveaways, but we also discuss how theatre and performance worked in the past. With the noblemen and landowners inviting the travelling gypsies to perform in their manors, and inviting all the peasants along to enjoy the show. Theatre was less ‘institutionalised’ then, without a real industry to call home. It’s great to see so many artists trying to work out models to give the audience something for free, but it’s hard to see how anything can be truly free when we live in an age where time itself has a monetary value.

At lunchtime I go for a walk around the area. I feel a cold coming on and the fresh sun air is light and full of wellbeing. I take a left outside the church and walk along 58^th West until I reach the Hudson. I see a kid with nunchucks in his back pocket, at least it’s not a knife I find myself thinking.

The day wraps up at 6pm, and after meeting many fabulous people, including the beautiful Juliet who bakes the best brownies I’ve ever tasted, we retire to Lafayette.

Saturday draws to a close in Little Italy where we’re encouraged to add sambuca to our espressos.

The Church of St Paul the Apostle

The setup for Devoted and Disgruntled begins at 9. It’s the first time Improbable have done one stateside. It’s an arts/theatre meet up held in ‘open space’ where participants are encouraged to set the agenda for the meet up by raising questions about areas of the arts that interest them.

We get there a little frazzled after the Lower East Side - Upper West Side subway dash, but the trains seemed nowhere near as busy as London. And although no regular announcements told us to let passengers off before we got on, everyone treated each other with respect, straight from the pages of the unwritten laws of the commuter.

After 4 hours of drawing butterfly's and bees underneath The Church of St Paul the Apostle we escape into the sun for some natural vitamin C. Central Park is beautiful with its naked trees and fifty odd statues. The day is warm; around 8 degrees and we begin to sweat. We check out the Alice in Wonderland Statue, record some buskers play jazz on a sweet afternoon, and finally make our way to the Guggenheim.

Sadly a large proportion of the museum is closed due to installations being set up, but we see our share of Kandinskys’ and the roots of impressionist painting. We have the most amazing lunch there. A Wright Salad with a ‘gently boiled egg.’

Next we walk for perhaps too long. Right down Park Ave from 88^th to 43rd yet we get to see Josh Harnett get of out a cab with a little dog in his arms. I think I know where he lives. We stumble through Grand Central and I imagine The Untouchables.

Back at Lafayette we regroup and head back uptown to Times Square were David Blaine is raising money for Haiti. We meet our friends from Anderson, IN who we haven’t seen in a year and a half. We grab a drink at Ruby Tuesday’s before jumping in a cab downtown to Bleeker Street, where Bob Dylan once lived.

We catch up over Sam Adams in a trendy Village bar.

Battery Park & Friends

Holiday Inn filter coffee is tasteless, but the bed is soft. They give out polystyrene to save on the washing up. We take a stroll downtown and breakfast at a Dunkin Donuts. That’s two fast food joints down. We pass ground zero and I’m surprised at how small the area is. Everyone says that apparently. The flame that never goes out is a fitting memorial; though I wonder how much gas it takes to run. Battery Park is beautiful and we watch an old man feed squirrels. Does it everyday he says as they effectively mug him, dashing for his bag when he strays more than a foot. We meet some kids collecting for their baseball team. They give us Skittles for dollars, and the cynic in me says they’re stolen, but it doesn’t matter.

We board the Staten Island Ferry with the workers, and watch the coastline expand. Lady Liberty waves and winks as we pass and I catch her pose on my camera. A delightful couple take our picture and we take theirs. I spend the rest of the crossing trying to catch seagulls with a photographic net.

We wander the island uphill and enjoy the view of Manhattan. Back in Battery Park we hit the first restaurant we see. It’s quiet and has a great view of the Statue. We trade ideas for logos, and our waiter gives us a free glass of wine at the end, we tip heavily.

I impulsively buy business cards on Broadway to advertise this blog. We visit Wall Street, check out Washington’s declaration, browse a pet shop then head back to Lafayette. We change and walk all the way to Times Square.

The walk is fantastic. Up Lafayette, past Public Theatre, Union Square, Flatiron, Empire State, and see the Chrysler stretching out to the right. Times Square makes Piccadilly Circus a poor mans neon valley, even the NYPD is all singing and dancing.

We ride the ‘N’ subway home and feel like locals.

Traveling to New York City

Black cab to Heathrow terminal 3, sixty quid. Check in three bags and the attendant doesn’t blink an eye that we’re over our economy passenger allowance of one per person. We’re there at 6.45 and the flight isn’t until 12. We find the showiest place in the terminal. Down a bacon bun shaped like a burger and a glass full of fruit salad.

The plane sits still for an hour and a half. Outside it’s snowing animal shapes whilst a man sprays a suspect yellow heating liquid over the wings. The ice thaws and the cabin crew make the safety demonstration the best ticket in town. I now know how to tie a lifejacket and inflate an emergency escape route.

I watch The Time Travelers Wife on the plane, a disappointing film of an enjoyable novel and catch only half of It Might Get Loud. It’s great to see Jimmy Page still rock out, Jack White’s epileptic guitar beatings and I now respect The Edge.

When we land customs keep us penned in for two and a half hours. I enter the US an exhausted man, but the officer said I look like DiCaprio.

‘Lafayette, Downtown Manhattan’ and we’re moving. I suspect the driver’s taking us somewhere else for ten minutes before I see my first Manhattan sign post. I’m a suspicious person. Thankfully he takes the bridge from Brooklyn, and my first sight of the Big Apple is a Christmas tree. It’s like those competitive suburban streets where the wives try to out do each other with Xmas lights, except Christmas is over. It’s a city made out of playing cards with pinpricks for the light.

My first taste of New York cuisine is a Burger King.

Hand & Star

Working hard these last few days before Christmas? Need to take the edge off a little? Then look no further. Pay a visit to ‘Hand & Star’ for all your literary needs! In its own words:

Hand + Star offers intelligent, fresh perspectives, open to the interplay between text, technology and popular culture. Hand + Star combines the speed and energy of blogging with the authority of the traditional literary journal, and is committed to seeking out new, independent and lesser-known voices in poetry and fiction.

Go on, seek some literary juices this holiday season, and whilst you're there check out my reviews on Abi Curtis’s Unexpected Weather, and Ryan Kamstra’s Late Capitalist Sublime.

Status Games

Following the Keith Johnson ‘Impro’ tradition, I’ve been playing some ‘status’ games recently. I can’t help but inject these little natural techniques into the workplace to gage reactions. Most are pretty normal day to day things that you probably do all the time, but when you’re aware of the way you’re behaving then you realise you can affect it. Like holding your head still when you speak. In certain situations like meetings this seems to make you appear more authoritative, where as jittery head movements come across as ‘the fool.’ Give it a try and see what reaction you get.

For Johnson, status games are a way to make improvisation amongst actors seem more realistic. His methods in ‘Impro’ encourage us to look at the way we react to certain situations and individuals in real life and use this to make acting on stage far more natural. If an actor knows his status in relation to the other characters upon entering a scene, then that scene is easier to improvise.

This makes sense really, using the office example again; we always play the inferior role to bosses, or those with director in their title. Shakespeare’s ‘All the world’s a stage’ quote rings a bell here, as I ask, are we naturally prone to status decisions, or are we acting a part based on our title? Try looking at the way shop assistants are treated. Lower status individuals will admire and ask for the assistant’s expertise, where as a higher status player might order them around like a servant. And then there’s the other form of high status where the individual plays low in order to hide their status, and only reveals it if vital to succeed dominance – a sort of flattery of the assistant you know is below you.

Johnson states that when a high status player is wiped out, then everyone experiences as if they are moving up a step. Wiping out could be as simple as talking about a culturally higher film watched than your fellow converser, thus confirming them as a lower status player. In the office space, you might notice a raise in everyone’s status when someone’s idea is shot down in a business meeting. Everyone becomes higher because they weren’t the ones shot down. In theatrical terms, the person who had the drop in status could be used to create sympathy in the audience, or to make them feel higher also.

Another trick in ‘Impro’ is to regularly modify status to keep up audience attention and the pace of a scene. So an example here could be two people having an argument where each character keeps getting one over the other. In office terms perhaps it’s something like:

Person A: Have you had a chance to finish that report yet?
Person B: Not yet, I’ve been too busy. Did you take a look at those costs though?
Person A: I can’t look at the costs until I’ve seen the report.
Person B: But the costs will help inform the report. I need them first.

There’s a wee bit of see-sawing that takes place next, but that can be used to comic effect, a sort of ‘he’s behind you,’ ‘oh no he’s not’ thing.

I’m only scratching the surface here, but if you’re interested in more, Johnson explains this a lot clearer than I.

Digital Priest

Recently I found myself on the way to a murder mystery evening in Richmond. I was late, frantically folding A4 paper to fit under by black collar to form what was to be the crux of my outfit. Yes, I was the priest, the saint, the holy father, the dirty beast, and I was the one that did it, but on the way I realized I’d forgotten my bible. Emails flew around the company, ‘has anyone got a bible laying around? Client has had a crisis of faith….’ and still no word. Until, that was, I remembered how we were in the digital age. Lo and behold, I saw a light, I reached for my IPhone knocked up the app store and downloaded the Bible app in seconds. I was now the bionic priest, a 21st century preacher with a digital reader. I could punch up any psalm, genesis, exodus, old or new testament in seconds. It was a revelation.

A while back I had this idea for the Catholic Church. It was an idea for a new business model, a way to cut costs by laying off staff. I figured, why not start a digital online confession booth? You’d get far more converts anonymously online than you would in church, and people could do it in the comfort of their own home. They could even set up online donations via paypal. ‘Absolve your sins – donate today’. In fact check out 'Group Hug’ which is an non-religion affiliated confession website.

If you’d like satire, EA have produced 'Mass We Pray' a sickeningly smug viral to secretly promote the video game interpretation of Dante’s Inferno.

Three days after the murder mystery LOVE and HATE were still stained on my knuckles. A sign perhaps?

Carry On Thought Criminals

It’s been a busy week. Long days and late nights punctuated by theatre. Let’s have a recap, in fact lets do a montage, turn up the stereo, radio, cassette player or iTunes depending on the era you’re living in and prepare for short snappy reviews. Let me start with last Saturday’s trip to Rich Mix over Brick Lane way to see Hardgraft's Poles Apart. A clever Brecht-infused take on the immigration issue where two Brits tried their hand at finding jobs in Warsaw. What followed was a comical tale of their endeavors, nods to Polish culture, and with just a ball of string Hard Graft demonstrated that no matter where we’re from we can all be joined together.


Come Tuesday I was at the BAC to see Amanda Lawrence's Charles Hawtrey biopic Jiggery Pokery. In fact ‘biopic’ doesn’t do justice to what Lawrence created. Playing a plethora of diverse roles, she explored Hawtrey’s life on and off stage, shedding light on the infamous alcoholic made famous by the Carry On films. Lawrence’s performance had more energy than an entire X Factor audience as she darted around the stage in one scene playing a young Hawtrey, his mother as well as various actors and agents. A truly fantastic play.

The next day I found myself in a stormy Vauxhall at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern (RVT) for The Festive Happening featuring cabaret artists Bourgeois & Maurice, Johnny Woo and Scottee who made the traditional Xmas Knit look more glamorous than a night out at The Birdcage. Laugh’s a plenty as they rip-roared through a Barack Obama mime of Beyonce’s Halo, breast bursting performance poetry, and B&M’s 21^st century dilemma Don’t Google Me Mother.

I polished off the week with a preview showing of Blind Summit's version of the classic Orwell novel 1984. If you’re expecting the serious intelligent tension of the book then think again. Blind Summit’s take turned what’s become a popular critique of society on its head. Borrowing the Brechtian style of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui Blind Summit began the show with a squad of thought police on the way to the BAC to perform the story of Winston and Julia, the thought criminals. Sets were words on paper cards and The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism was creatively performed as a complete puppet show with paper words and pictures. It begs the thought, if only all politics could be taught in this way?