Blog 2010

click here for details of Relax at the Warehouse Theatre

click here to buy tickets for Relax online

"Everyone really should set aside a moment or two for Robert's blog. It's like the potted shrimps of human knowledge."

Howard Evans, writer and masseur.

Tuesday, 9/03/10: Thought for the day

The level of your creativity is determined by your ability to tolerate chaos.

Monday, 08/03/10: Dial G for glamour

Today I go to Clapham to buy a wig for the role of the ageing houseboy. Of course I am excited. It has taken me all these years to realise that a comedy without a wig is not really a comedy at all.

The more you write, the more specific you get. Or the madder. About two years ago I decided that a comedy wasn't really a comedy unless it was set in a hotel, guesthouse, or other place of public accomodation. Now I would go further. What a good comedy needs is a duel of wits between two conflicted middle-aged closet-cases, stuck in the middle of nowhere and lusting over the RAC man.

I know I'm probably wrong, but such is the effect of slaving obsessively over a project for a number of years, and then finally - tremblingly - approaching the first night. (Friday, Reader. Buy your tickets via the link above...)

Wednesday, 03/03/10: Now that's what I call glamour!

Click here to see the "Relax" trailer!

Thursday, 25/02/10: Ravining down my bane!

Today I gave an interview to Gaydar. It was just one of those email interviews but I noticed that after doing it I felt so much better. Presumably this is because, along with the rest of the human race, I am an attention-seeker. Who cares that in order to experience the thrill of being interviewed I had to write a play, find a theatre and pay a press agent an undisclosable sum? - it still felt good. Afterwards I sat back and noticed that I was breathing properly again. Big, deep, satisfied breaths. Ah, Reader! - the oxygen of publicity!

The irony is that one spends nine-tenths of one's life gasping for that oxygen, and then the play goes on and one positively hyper-ventilates. There is, I would argue, no literary form quite as exposing to a writer as a play. (No-one cares who wrote a movie, and books don't have opening nights). Playwrights are like Shakespeare's rats that "ravined down their proper bane." We gasp for it, we lie, cheat and steal for it - and then when it comes we run screaming from it.

I can't decide whether this entry is a sober record of my production (ie, a plog) or a philosophical nugget (ie, a blog). So I shall put it on both pages.

Tuesday, 23/02/10: Amateurs and professionals

My grandfather used to say, the difference between an amateur and a professional is that the professional can do it even when he doesn't feel like it - and the amateur can't do it even when he does.

Today was the sort of day that, in the normal course of events, I would spend in bed. Splitting headache, mind foggy, damp weather. But I am in full-scream-ahead mode, so bed was not an option. I re-wrote the end of Act One of my play and started a new draft of my screenplay, ignoring the headache. On these occasions you may not be intuitive or brilliant, but you can get a lot of donkey-work done.

In the middle of the day I had to take a short bus-ride to return some keys, and this afforded me with an opportunity to switch off and let my tortured mind wander a little. I looked out of the window and enjoyed my random thoughts. For example: how nice it is that men stand in doorways outside offices to smoke cigarettes! It makes them look like hustlers!

And then I thought, well, obviously that doesn't apply to all the men who stand in doorways smoking. Wearing a cheap suit does diminish the effect. But it is surprising how many men you can imagine turning tricks once the thought gets into your head. Presumably this is because men's dress is so much less expressive than women's. Women have to spend their lives agonising about how provocatively to dress, whereas a man's less sensual clothes give him the freedom of ambiguity.

Friday, 19/02/10: James Holmes in his pomp

Week 2 of rehearsals comes to a close. For two weeks we have been in a kind of limbo. For one-and-a-half days a week we have had James Holmes (our lead), and for the other three-and-a-half, because James is doing a Pinter in Derby, we have had to rehearse the four supporting actors with a stand-in (the lovely Antonio Castaldo). Now things start getting interesting. Phil and Dom, Tony, Mark and Nadia are going to Derby for a full week to rehearse with James. Next week, finally, James comes back to London.

All this would be a frightful inconvenience - well, it is - but the point is, Mr Holmes is worth it. He played the role in the one-act version five years ago and has stuck with the project through various revisions and readings. So now he's really good at it - it's like he's been playing the part for five years. He can pick up a new page of Sandy dialogue and get it deliriously right first time.

We did some press shots on Monday. James sometimes photographs well, and sometimes the camera misses his gorgeous subtlety. We got a few pictures of him that I like. The one below, I think, looks like the picture of a star - which is what he is.

photo by Michele Martinoli

Monday, 15/02/10: rehearsal photos

Today, a riotous photo session down at the Warehouse, with trusted friend Michele Martinoli snapping. We did some posed-set-ups for the press in the theatre itself and then went back to the rehearsal room for some casual shots for the programme. The actors, of course, understood exactly what was required: not so much a rehearsal as a series of glamorous moments that will look like a rehearsal when reproduced in tasteful black and white. The five cast members are clever and talented and totally get the play. The atmosphere is good.

Thursday, 11/02/10: Thought for the day

There's no such thing as:

- a free lunch

- an ex-rentboy

- a famous contemporary playwright.

Monday, 8/02/10: Hooray for actors! - or at least, most of them.

Yesterday I ran out of cheques. Last week the bank's fraud department went onto red alert because I paid for my advertising campaign. Welcome to the world of off-West-End theatre production.

If you are a Pyschodrome completist, you may be interested to know that I am currently writing two blogs, both on the same website. Alongside this one (which I am reserving for my more philosophical side) I am also keeping a production log (a plog?) on the Relax page. There you can read about our new cast, brushes with the press and other excitements. But when the production makes me philosophical, I shall blog about it here.

Last night I smoothed out a glitch in my account at Lulu.com, so I can now proceed with my limited edition of the play, which I am producing as a gift for investors and angels. (Hurry! It is still not too late to invest in this show!) I have decided to dedicate it to my grandfather, because it's a full-on comedy, and it was from my Grandad that I learnt my stage-comedy first principles.

My grandfather taught me two things. Firstly, that comedy should be played straight - not such a secret, but always worth bearing in mind. Secondly, and far more important, he came from an era when playwrights wrote for actors rather than for themselves - a profoundly profound factor in the equation. He made sure his plays were fun to act, and always fixed things so that each member of the cast would have at least one moment when they were the centre of the action. As a result, his plays have never stopped being performed. Somewhere in the Australian outback or the wilds of Reigate there is always a group of people, amateur or professional, doing a Kenneth Horne. I know, because I get a share of the royalties.

And this leads me to further profound thoughts about performance-based writing. Most artists have to ask themselves if their first loyalty is to themselves or their audience. A playwright has a third alternative: he can write for the actors. And if you do, it's a great feeling. An audience will always contain both critics and the critical, but an actor's agenda is to be open to all the good qualities in your play. Actors love good writing, love being given a decent character to sink their fangs into. The moment an actor picks up your play is the moment when all your hard work starts to be rewarded. Hooray for actors.

(PS: Of course you have to choose the right ones. During the Relax auditions, a rather grouchy guy came in and read for us. After, Phil said, "So what did you think of the play?" The guy replied, "Actually, I thought it was a bit long. Have you thought of cutting it?" We didn't cast him.)

Monday, 1/02/10: Phonecall tips

One of the best bits of Michael Atavar's book How To Be An Artist (see the final entry of my 2009 blog for a full review) is when he suggests that you pretend to be someone else when making difficult phone-calls. Well, he doesn't quite say that. His concept is that you create a character for yourself, a persona, preferably confident and colourful and likeable, and you put this on like a mask as you face difficult challenges like asking for money. You dramatise yourself, see yourself as a character in a work of fiction. This gives you distance and allows you to experience both success and failure with equanimity, which in turn gives you reserves of strength and resilience. If it's just a fictitious character who gets turned down for a big grant, it hurts less. If it's just a character who maybe comes across as eccentric or clownish once in a while, that's less humiliating. You can't always get it right.

I think this is profoundly profound. It's more than just a handy tip. It's a way of living your life. It could only have been suggested by someone who had done a lot of meditating.

Tomorrow is the Tooth of the month, a day on which I always blog if I can because I like to call it that. So if I have a moment I shall share some fascinating thoughts about the secret of performance-based writing.

Tuesday, 26/01/10: How to survive the cold weather

Want to know how to get through a cold winter? Take on a project that you really care about and that really stretches you. You won't feel the cold. Or at least, you won't care.

This genius solution is adapted from the venerable scientifically-proven fact that if you stub your toe in a disco it is less painful than if you stub it at home. Because you don't care.

One could extend this theory indefinitely. For example, if someone pushes ahead of you in the queue at the post office, well, it makes a difference if it's George Clooney or just any old loser.

One could while away a pleasant hour (if one had one) musing on these things. For example, how glamorous would someone have to be in order for them pushing ahead of you in the post office to be a pleasure rather than an annoyance? Clearly if Peter André queue-barged it would just be annoying. But what about those in-betweenies? Would one be annoyed or charmed, if it was, for example, Gwynneth Paltrow? (annoyed). A member of Take That? (charmed). Mick Jagger? (can't decide).

Friday, 22/01/10: A walk outside your mind

Sorry if I scared you with Wednesday’s blog. I am currently living what I believe is known as a rich emotional life, and sometimes things just come out.

I am pursuing a course of action suggested to me by my spiritual advisor Alain Forget, and confirmed by my experiences on Gay Love Spirit’s two-year training. The idea is that pursuing your desires is the first step, if not the only step, of the spiritual life. Monsieur Forget advocates it on the basis that any kind of spiritual pretension is nonsensical if you are carrying repressed or denied agendas around with you. The boys at Gay Love Spirit go one further: our desires are in themselves holy, and will take us exactly where we need to go.

People have such a warped idea of what desire is. They imagine that a (broadly speaking) tantric practice is just an excuse to fuck around. But desire takes other forms. There is the desire, for example, to live the life that you yourself actually want to live, to go beyond fear and walk away from the limitations of the past, to take a walk outside your mind.

Alain Forget said, Play with your fear.

Kai Erhardt and Volker Moritz said, Play with your edge.

Alain Forget is splendid because he is a spiritual advisor (a contemporary secular mystic, to be precise) who wants his pupils to be ambitious and successful in the real world. Gay Love Spirit are fabulous because they are conducting an experiment in love. To be enrolled in just one of these two schools would be enough to make a boy’s head spin; to be enrolled in both simultaneously...

Wednesday, 20/01/10: Just a thought

So much has been lost, and we live in a pigsty of a world.

Tuesday, 12/01/10: A Glossary of Unusual Terms Used on this Website

Here is a list of unusual terms used on this website. One I have personally created for your pleasure. The others I have mined from the obscure depths of our race memory. Unlike the man who took out a copyright on the words “gay tantra”, and who presumably expects us to pay him a fee whenever we tickle our boyfriends’ arses, I offer these words to the public gratis and free of charge.

TO SNUDGE: a verb meaning to be idle, as in “She snudged around the house until teatime.” This word, with its definition and example, are taken direct from Dr Johnson’s dictionary, which recently celebrated a centenary, despite the fact that it was published 255 years ago (I’m being facetious: the centenary was Johnson’s). You can imagine how excited I was to discover this word. It is particularly good in conjunction with hyper-modern coinings such as blog. For example, “I spent the morning blogging and snudging.”

TO GLOTZ: a verb meaning to look at or watch, as in, “I spent my gap-year in Florence glotzing the marble buttocks of Michelangelo statues.” I like it because it can be used to emphasise or question the act of looking, as in, “I would not normally glotz this kind of thing;” or, “I have completely stopped glotzing TV.” I cannot find it in a dictionary, yet I do not remember inventing it. Did I hear it in another language? Dream it? Is it yiddish? Is it from Nabokov? (It appears not be from A Clockwork Orange). All I can say is that I suspect it of being a hybrid of “glut” and “goggle,” suggesting a greedy or even addictive mode of looking. Any information as to its origins would be gratefully received.

GODZILLION: a bona fide creation of my own, this new noun was crafted for your convenience by the careful splicing of “zillion” and “Godzilla”. Of course we will always continue to coin new words to signify a number more huge than the previously coined one. However, “a godzillion” may be confidently used to signify a monstrously huge amount - an amount so huge, in fact, that catastrophic consequences are subtly implied. To some extent this is the noun equivalent of “humungous”, but with a useful topnote of anxiety which the older word lacks. As such it is a very contemporary word, which I fully expect to see hoovered up into the vernacular. Example: “Please tick the box indicating how many sexual partners you have had in the past 12 months: 0 - 5; 6- 10; 11 - 100; a godzillion.”

Wednesday, 06/01/10: Cold weather, warm men: New Year in Berlin with Gay Love Spirit

Because a week without blogging is like a lumberjack without a moustache, I shall soldier on, exhausted and husk-like though I currently am. Just don’t expect me to be coherent.

Today’s nugget of wisdom is once again from Wei Wu Wei, whom I found, this morning, on uncharacteristically jolly form:

“So when we realise the truth, when the understanding, crowding in upon us, bursts into flame and illumines our vision, what is our reaction? What could it be but an immense roar of laughter? If it is not that, if it is any other kind of reaction to knowledge - beware of it!”

I celebrated New Year with Gay Love Spirit in Berlin. It was of course beyond sublime. I was out there on the roof at midnight in three inches of snow, wearing only a small pendant designed to stabilise my vibrational field. Cold? Who cares when you’re warm inside?

I am, broadly speaking, a comedy writer, and to some extent the glories of Gay Love Spirit can be discussed in the comic style (see quotation above). Irreverence is the cornerstone of Zen. But my way of writing cannot really do justice to what is going down in that lovely airy warehouse. The programme is both as easy as rolling off a mattress and as hard as riding a tiger.

Kai Erhardt remarked, “There’s nothing new about sex, but maybe there could be new ways of dealing with it.”

There is a rhythm to a GLS workshop that is profoundly disturbing, in the best sense. A class in erotic massage is one thing, but to do it immediately after playing a subtly terrifying mind-game is quite another. I was disturbed to my marrow, then I had all my ambivalences prodded, then I was force-fed pleasure, delight, excitement and connection. Finally I dissolved in a quivering pool of psychosomatic goo, just like Dr Jessup in Altered States. “Alles in Ordnung, Dr Jessup?”

It seems that the medicine being offered is entirely suited to my constitution. I can’t get enough. Four times a year I arrive back in the UK, wild-eyed and sleep-deprived, feeling that I will never be quite the same. And I won’t.

A few of us stayed on for an extra night after the workshop had ended, and the following morning we discovered a new way of having fun - as you do. We decided to stop fussing about trying to remember each other’s names and instead address each other nationally. Thus our Italian friend is now just called Italy, our Mexican friend Mexico, and so on. There are a number of Brits on the course. One of us has bagged “England” and I have bagged “London”. Others who join the game later will perhaps have to make do with less glamorous nicknames such as Holloway Road and Ealing Broadway

We know that the use of our family name, on its own, makes us feel formal and unloved (I wonder why?). But how does the use of nation-names make us feel? So far it seems to feel rather racy. Who can forget that Shakespeare’s Antony called Cleopatra Egypt? How telling it was when he used the form in his death-scene! Was he in love with her, or with some idea of Egypt which he had formed long before they ever met? “I am dying, Egypt, dying...” - marvelous stuff! And wouldn’t it be fun to use it during sex, as in, “A little more lube, Mexico?” Or, “I am coming, Belgium, coming!”

29/12/09 for 01/01/10: New Year's Resolutions!

Ah, New Year!

I remember from long-ago Shakespeare lessons a great moment in King Lear, when the silly old monarch, enraged by the disrespect of his daughters, blusters and threatens: “I will do such things...!” He adds that he’s not quite sure exactly what things he’ll do - but he’ll do them. And I often feel like that.

I used to be embarrassed by this feeling. Shouldn’t we all know exactly what we are going to do? Shouldn’t we announce our plans and stick to them? But now I am looser in so many ways. Surely it is rather charming to be a little unclear as to one’s intentions. This insight is very liberating.

For example, people have occasionally encouraged me to write my autobiography, and I have always found this a dreadfully alarming idea. The very thought makes one want to lie down. But I am letting go of anxiety. Yes, there will shortly be a splendid life-history, full of charming anecdotes and observations. There will be memories of the drag bars of divided Berlin and tales of the beer-soaked carpets of the rock‘n’roll dives of 80s London. There will of course be sexual revelations, increasingly scandalous, climaxing in the present day. It will be called “Refusing to be Fabulous.”

I will publish a slim volume of poetry called “Recently Closed Windows.”

I will write a medium-thickness “how-to” book, full of clever strategies for living your life without going stark staring mad. The working title is “How To Get Through The Day Without Screaming” although I appreciate that I will have to come up with a better one.

One of my most exciting projects is a review of all my discarded projects, entitled “All Those Wasted Years.” This will be a tome as fat as War and Peace. There will be synopses and critical appraisals of everything I have ever written, down to the last beer-mat scribble, along with a candid record of the response of my agent, producers and publishers. I will include works that for one reason or another I never even showed my agent, including my five-volume sci-fi epic, The Life and Opinions of Larry the Dog, which I wrote during the years when I didn’t even want to be a writer, and photocopied and gave out to my friends. (Note: the things you write when you are trying not to be a writer have a particular charm.)

I will write another how-to book, all about the erotic massage of the male body (clue: which part of the male anatomy is massaged most frequently and with least skill?) When it is published my family will disown me.

I will publish my blog (this, of course, will be a “blook”) under the title Blogging and Snudging. I like this because it sounds a bit like Shopping and Fucking.

I will put on a collection of short plays, six over two nights, called The Festival of Neurotica. The collection will contain Complex (my incest play from Lovers From Hell), an extended version of Donut that spans twenty years, and four new one-act plays. Evening One will be called Mystery Girls and Evening Two will be called Fear of Pleasure.

I will write a long novel in the verbose nineteenth-century style about a bunch of high-class people whose lives are wrecked by a series of unfortunate coincidences. It will of course be called Snot Fair.

I will write to twelve famous people and ask each one to confess his or her filthiest sexual fantasy. Then I will commission Roger Payne to make illustrations of each. I will produce a set of dinner-plates with Roger’s illustrations on them, sell a limited edition of 100 at £1,000 a pop, and give half the money to lobby-groups to fighting the criminalisation of sex-work. The project will be called “Licking The Platter Clean.” (The other half of the money will fund my Festival of Neurotica).

I appreciate that this is all a bit post-modern, but hey, if you can’t beat ‘em you might as well join ‘em.