Dreaming to Order

Welcome to the fourth of the Sikes & Nancy production diaries! Should it take your fancy, the previous entries are as follows: ‘Forcing the Soul’, ‘The Hertfordshire Horror’ and ‘Into the Black Lagoon’. Now: let’s press on with the scheduled burblings.

THE THEATRE, CHIPPING NORTON (3RD OCTOBER). The town of Chipping Norton is beautifully haunting. A village that seems cleaved from the cliff-face, everything in stone and at an extreme angle – leading down, down, down to the Gothic church. It’s here that the oldest stones of all are found, as well as the resting-places of the dead.

The theatre was likewise haunting, at least from my view on the stage. We’ve played a few extremely dark spaces on the tour – Radlett, Middlesbrough – but Chipping Norton’s theatre also feels ancient. It put me in mind of the Georgian Theatre, Richmond, where I long ago played in Macbeth: a tall and narrow platform, angled threateningly towards the audience. Perched high on my wooden chairs, I must resemble an enormous bird of prey. I’ve since discovered that the building’s only been a Theatre since 1975 (although the outer structure is nineteenth century), which suggests its atmosphere derives from these spatial peculiarities. For it’s unnerving that the stage, like the village, points straight to the churchyard.

Happily, this performance marked an advance on the breakthroughs of Southend. Everything from the beginnings of the Murder – roughly the last third of the play – has become an exhilarating terror to perform. It’s almost a state of possession, with unpremeditated business breaking forth. Vitally, it seems my brain is alive. And it’s carrying me down increasingly skin-crawling alleys whilst I’m acting:

Silence. It’s becoming a solid object now: heavy, expansive, impenetrably black. It begins when Bill Sikes sneaks through his house-door ahead of killing Nancy: ‘He opened it, softly, with a key: strode lightly up the stairs…’ I treat this as an integrated stage direction, one that calls for a near-balletic motion. Which leads to pauses. Thus the invasion of silence – enfolding the entrance so completely that it feels like the beginnings of a dream. In childhood, I went through a phase of nightmares where I would open my bedroom door and walk straight into dark figures. Never did I see them. I felt them only. As Sikes then, in these silences, I have become that dark figure, that sketchy embodiment of sleep paralysis. Yet I am also Nancy – my childhood self again, the defenceless victim.

The dog as supernatural. I find it very unsettling that Bull’s-Eye rises as though from nowhere. He first appears as a last gruesome touch in the Murder (and one of the scene’s best lines): ‘The very feet of his dog were bloody!!!’ What to make of this? Throughout ‘Sikes and Nancy’, the descriptive passages in Oliver Twist are often cut to allow for more dialogue. Bull’s-Eye – a character with no access to speech – is so diminished by these cuts that his very essence shifts. During his long absences, Bull’s-Eye seems to have been absorbed into Sikes’s being. He has become a witch’s familiar. Or the black dog of English folklore. But then, Bill Sikes is himself absorbed into the Narrator – and I’m still disturbed by the question of the Narrator’s identity…

Who else is present on Sikes’s countryside flight? Jonas Chuzzlewit has started to materialise – a murderer for whom the countryside (and, in particular, leaves) had a special significance. Also Jack Sheppard, from the novel by Ainsworth, who ran rampant through the wilderness after escaping Newgate Gaol. But Eugene Aram is still foremost in my mind, albeit in a state of flux. He started off as the blood-drenched wraith of Thomas Hood’s ballad – but he’s slowly transforming into the brooding, melancholy presence of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel. This version of Aram is close to who I imagine the Narrator would be, were he able to break free from his story: an ascetic scholar and hermit; a pale and sickly neurotic; distrusted by the locals as a sorcerer yet possessed of a mesmeric charisma. It’s fascinating how Dickens’s single mention of ‘the solitude and darkness of the country’ sets an immediate atmosphere of Rural Gothic. It’s a peculiarly English tradition, perhaps encapsulated by Bulwer-Lytton’s Eugene Aram, which overshadows the tranquillity of Grassdale – a fictionalised Knaresborough – with the wilder weather and storm of the Devil’s Crag.

And what to make of that apparition? Dickens describes it as follows: ‘At his head it stood, silent, erect, and still: a human gravestone with its epitaph in Blood!!’ It’s an apparition that resists all visual comprehension. Quite uncharacteristic for Dickens, that most riotously descriptive of writers. It seems more a creature of modern horror folklore, all of whom seem to be unseeable. The shadow demon of the ghost photograph. Sadako in The Ring, head almost entirely obscured by curtains of lank hair. The Slender Man, that man without a face. Even the unseen figures of my childhood nightmares – for no matter where Sikes turns, the figure remains behind him. The apparition is emblematic of what Dickens does throughout ‘Sikes and Nancy’ – eliding the horrifying centre, and suggesting all through the encircling grisly details. Nancy is there and not there. And yet – is it even Nancy at all?

I can quite understand why some actors see ghosts onstage. I, possessed of senses less acute, merely enjoyed a fish supper after Chipping Norton.

CLIFFORD ROOM, BARNFIELD THEATRE, EXETER (4TH OCTOBER). I nearly wound up studying at the University of Exeter. Based on this late visitation, I’d have been content here. It seems I had a knack for picking out locations eerily reminiscent of York. Rambling, hurled-together architecture. Cloistered ruins. Cathedral towns in spirit if not in fact. Which reminds me: I was greatly impressed by Exeter Cathedral, a strikingly bare Norman edifice. Such buildings, even so uncluttered, take me right back to discovering The Hunchback of Notre Dame as a child, and confusing York Minster with Quasimodo’s lair. Combined with some invigorating blasts of wind – and Tony Jay’s Frollo caterwauling on my iPod – this put me in an excellent performance mood.

After the technological wizardry of Southend and Chipping Norton, the Clifford Room proved a simpler arena. It was exactly that: a room. Again were stirred long-forgotten memories of school plays: the stage constructed of interlocking wooden platforms, the auditorium ruled by plastic chairs, the whole lit by flood-lamps rather than modern gels. Yet the Clifford Room is also quietly ambient: a cavernous old hall, evocative of the parish buildings that blight Oliver Twist. This frame is also helpful for encouraging me to focus on my performance at its most basic.

Exeter became the most successful performance yet for discovering the best levels for delivery. Levels are to me about communicating as much as is needed and no more. Yet I find this very difficult to achieve. I’ve long had an onstage anxiety that I’m too quiet and failing to enunciate. (Which is maddening: whatever my faults, I’ve rarely lacked for volume or articulation.) I imagine this springs from a generalised hatred of my voice as I was growing up. Without realising it, I started clamping-down, clamming-up, refusing to speak in public unless absolutely necessary. So whenever I did have to speak in public – teachers love picking out the child who never raises his hand – the act was so unfamiliar (and frightening) that I doubtless over-compensated. I also find levels tricky due to my phenomenally bad eyesight. The audience members I’m trying to reach, even when very close to me, inevitably seem to reside in the far-off distance. Some educated guesswork, and self-forgiving faith, is what’s required. Exeter was an encouraging move from interrogating my voice to trusting it more. Though this may have as much to do with settling into more of a run, my voice more than usually warmed by the last three performances. I should be firing on all cylinders by the time I reach Trafalgar Studios.

Exeter was also excellent for forcing me into an absolute belief in the storytelling. Without the technical infrastructure, there was little other than belief to sustain the atmosphere. Belief is above all what releases melodrama. Yet ‘Sikes and Nancy’ – unlike the run-of-the-mill Victorian melodrama – is a text with genuine literary (and dramatic) merit. So whilst it requires characterisation that might be better described as encrustation – a Dionysian attack – it doesn’t require free-wheeling invention (the ‘devil-dancing’ of which Henry Irving was often accused). The material can be trusted absolutely, without recourse to the tricks that so often signal self-consciousness.

Ralph Richardson captured the nature of this belief – as dreaming to order:

Acting is, to some extent, a controlled dream. In one part of your consciousness, it really and truly is happening … The actor must at any rate some of the time believe himself that it is really true. But this – in my experience, at any rate – this absolute reality, this layer of absolute reality, is a comparatively small one. The rest of it is technique, as I say – of being very careful that the thing is completely accurate, completely clear, completely as laid down, completely as shaped beforehand…

Coquelin has defined this state as ‘dual consciousness’ – the beginnings of real feeling, but tethered by conscious manipulation. As Richardson stresses, you don’t feel ‘complete’ without both. You must be puppet and puppet-master both. I was gladdened to feel some of this control in Exeter. Again, I think, consolidated by the three shows that came before.

Now, however, commences a large gap in the tour. So, that evening, I coat my overtaxed larynx in the previously forbidden alcohol (cider) and chocolate (Bournville). A dubious reward for its labours, though perhaps equivalent to wrapping the larynx in a big warm blanket. Perhaps. A six-hour train journey to York tomorrow – via Wales, bizarrely enough, by no means en route – and then a good few weeks of Henry Irving.

Forcing the Soul

I’m more than usually engulfed in Henry Irving at the moment – the Irving play is very near finished – so there’s my excuse for this latest delay. I shall do better next time. And for those who are keeping track, do check on the previous Sikes & Nancy production diaries: ‘The Hertfordshire Horror’ and ‘Into the Black Lagoon’.

MIDDLESBROUGH THEATRE (25TH SEPTEMBER). Middlesbrough is only an hour from York, though this is my first visit to the cultural hotspot. A flavour of industrialised Victoriana; Coketown in Dickens’s Hard Times. A dense concentration of churches – I stumble on at least ten over a very small area – and the beautiful Albert Park, steeped in pockmarked statuary and autumn trees. This proves ideal for my now-traditional pre-show stompings. It’s a ritual that’s been in place since June 2012, when I was first absorbing the words for Sikes & Nancy – thundering about the Cambridge countryside for hours on end, rehearsing as one with the winds and the heath.

I’d been wandering a lot over the last few days, meditating on the words in a catechistic vein. I usually revel in long walks – the longer the better – but I’d found I was getting suspiciously out of breath. That night, in starting the show, I had my suspicions confirmed. Illness was upon me. I at once felt my throat to be hopelessly dry – and this despite having drunk a bowel-deadening volume of water. The breathlessness reinstated itself, along with the fear that the audience could hear naught but gasping. A cruel bind: worry is the most decisive element in producing more gasping. In general, the voice felt somewhat distant and unresponsive. Sikes & Nancy depends so much on pushing myself to the edges of my vocal range; to balancing on that edge, to daring the precipice. To find the outer edges of my range clipped off is thus disconcerting.

I’d had this mid-show fatigue once before, playing Sikes & Nancy at St William’s College in March 2013. All it really means is that a bad cold will be on me the next day. Which is actually very fortunate: how much nastier to be acting with the cold at full strength! The worst of it is that the show ceases to develop. For an evening, it’s pickled in aspic. Most everything goes over to muscle memory, every chamber of your brain straining to approximate the usual effects. There’s little space left in my head for enjoyment.

Whether illness gives the show a new edge, I don’t know. Ronald Harwood believed that the acting of Donald Wolfit (another interpreter of ‘Sikes and Nancy’) was released by unexpected trials:

The years of touring produced a staleness in his acting that required some unlooked-for stimulus to banish it. A London first night would suffice, but more usually an accident or mishap during a performance would extract a greater intensity to make the performance succeed as a whole, for he well knew that the assessment by an audience of a play was dependent on their surrender to his powers as an actor.

A similar release might come from illness in Sikes & Nancy. A dry throat can create a rawness, a grittiness. Breathlessness can be nerve-shredding. And having to force out an unwilling voice is an exorcism ritual. Rather like Jesus driving Legion into the herd of pigs. Within this show, my voice is Legion – it serves as the voice of many – and I must drive it into the audience.

After the show, I met up with Andy and James. Two fine actors who’d come straight from The York Dungeon. This was a fortifying reunion. Partly because it was so good to be back among friends. You miss your fellow actors in the one-man play. But it was also a reminder that the Dungeon has prepared me for acting being anything other than easy or convenient or graceful. James has performed the Dungeon’s Plague show in an unventilated room for well over three hours (the wicked legacy of late-running lunches). He came close to fainting and genuinely to vomiting. But he did it. Andy has nearly lost one of his fingers at the Dungeon – though that’s a slightly less typical story. Yet he was back the next day, suitably bandaged.

Battle-scarred veterans, the lot of us. It’s possible, I’m sure, to take things easier at the Dungeon – to go at it without any voice loss, any great fatigue, any fear you’re not giving the public what they need. But it’s out of keeping with the spirit of the task. The profound terror of Dickens’s renditions of ‘Sikes and Nancy’ was seeing a man perform so ferociously that he was disintegrating before you. Quite literally killing himself to create you a memorable drama. But this is an instinct that should be as much alive in a more relaxed context. I turn again to Henry Irving, as told by Gordon Craig, who compares the great actor to Saint Francis:

I would go so far as to say that so intense was the fire which burned within him, this belief of his that the ACTOR was all that really mattered, that he suffered keenly whenever he found actors taking things easily, and considering too lightly that thing which to him was really a sacred trust.

To actually suffer when things are taken too easily. Because, more practically, there’s a danger of making your audiences suffer. I maintain that an audience always knows – on some level – when you’re not giving it your all. What’s needed is a pantomimic impulse: to try and give better than you’re getting. I was pleased to discover that James and Andy are appearing in the same touring pantomime this year. If I’ve said it once: the Dungeon, at its best, is a glorified horror pantomime.

I’ve had days at the Dungeon so punishing that they’ve become an out-of-body experience. Hideous to experience, but, in retrospect, I’ve gained a fire of confidence. Simply from knowing I can do it. This training was also what convinced me I could sustain a one-man show. The idea for the first of them entered my head at the end of 2009. I could never have guessed it would take me to the West End in five years. I owe the Dungeon a great debt.

DIXON STUDIO, PALACE THEATRE SOUTHEND (2ND OCTOBER). A wonderful gift from my landlady: a century-old edition of Oliver Twist. Although there’s no publication date – often a problem with older books – there’s a handwritten inscription at the front: 21st September 1901. This treasure was salvaged from an Oxfam bookshop. It seems that the charity bins all books that aren’t in perfect condition. Perhaps we need a new branch of Oxfam. To rescue the books chucked away by Oxfam.

In studying this book, on the morning of the show, I read Dickens’s 1850 Preface. He defends his representation of Nancy at some length:

It is useless to discuss whether the conduct and character of the girl seems natural or unnatural, probable or improbable, right or wrong. IT IS TRUE. Every man who has watched these melancholy shades of life, must know it to be so. From the introduction of that poor wretch, to her laying her blood-stained head upon the robber’s breast, there is not a word exaggerated or over-wrought. It is emphatically God’s truth, for it is the truth He leaves in such depraved and miserable breasts; the hope yet lingering there; the last fair drop of water at the bottom of the weed-choked well.

The above is also a good anecdote to accusations of untruthfulness in acting. A superficial untruth can sometimes point the way to something that naturalism can’t reach. As a lanky, corpse-like man passing myself off as a London streetwalker, I have little choice but to pursue this route.

‘Eeee! Is that the ghost of Jacob Marley?’ cried some amiable old relic as I sat in my pre-state, trying to look terribly serious. How correct she’d have been, had she seen me last Christmas. The matinee remained nerve-wracking from there. My voice and manner felt to me just slightly off-centre; the Narrator a little quavery, uncertain. This may have been because the show had been to bed for a week, but I suspected it was more a problem within my head.

Before the evening performance, I went down to the sea to ponder the difficulty. ‘Look at that dark water’ says Nancy, as she gestures to the Thames. In Dombey and Son – immortalised in Dickens’s Readings as ‘The Story of Little Dombey’ – the river is but the start. Here’s Paul Dombey in his sickroom:

When the sunbeams struck into his room through the rustling blinds, and quivered on the opposite wall, like golden water, he knew that evening was coming on, and that the sky was red and beautiful … His fancy had a strange tendency to wander to the River, which he knew was flowing through the great city; and now he thought how black it was, and how deep it would look, reflecting the hosts of stars – and more than all, how steadily it rolled away to meet the sea.

Dickens often uses watery reflections to suggest death: ‘Sikes and Nancy’ uses ‘the reflection of the pool of gore’ to indirectly convey Nancy’s obliteration. Light reflected – death seems to follow naturally from the absence of first sight. But how rarely we ever see clearly.

As I contemplated the sea, I brooded on emotional access. Nancy had felt rather locked to me. Thought and feeling should run on intertwining tracks, preferably fusing as one. Whereas I had felt derailed by unhelpful thoughts, unhelpful feelings: insecurities, technicalities, self-censorings, self-persecutings. Emotion must come to the stage. But it must be emotion of the correct order.

So, I begin listening to music and trying to think myself into Nancy’s sorrows. I’ve found Hadley Fraser’s ‘Again’ to be quite useful for this recently. A plea to stall a lost lover’s wedding; staking his soul at the fatal moment. Gorgeous song and voice and man – altogether heart-rending. In any case, it’s important that the song is simple and direct: it must communicate in an immediate manner, without venturing too far into abstract spheres. It’s as Noel Coward said: ‘Extraordinary how potent cheap music is’ (‘cheap’ strikes me as a compliment). Dickens saw emotional memories as profound in melting the human heart. His Christmas Books are all some variation on this theme, culminating in the final words of The Haunted Man: ‘Lord, keep my memory green’. I share Dickens’s belief. Anything other than mindless suppression. Embrace it all. The good and the bad alike will melt the heart – and then even the bad has come good.

Dickens’s declaration of ‘TRUTH’ also swam back into my head. I think back to moments in life where I’ve staked my soul on some emotion. None of them terribly recent. It’s partly been an effort to prove to myself that I’ve been in earnest – and how stupid that I ever have to prove that to myself. Amongst young actors, there can be a certain connoisseurship of dark and messy emotion. This was certainly what I found at university: everyone wanting to be seen to burn with the hard, gem-like flame; to be seen to surprise, to subvert, to dare; to be seen to live more intensely than the uninspired. One felt shallow by comparison. I’ve always regarded emotion as so central to everything I do that it’s never made sense to belabour it. Emotion is a fact, plain and simple, and to go on without is unbearable, madness. All the more reason to stake my soul as Nancy. Irving (via Craig again) had a phrase for this, very similar: ‘It is the soul, my boy; force the soul.’ Force it I would.

That night was the best the show had ever gone. A large and responsive audience helped, as did the confidence boost of having told the story earlier in the day. But it was the emotional thawing that really cleared the picture. It’s essential that Nancy give a glimpse of a world beyond the play. A Wildean garden, a place of loving feeling, as relief from stark Dickensian nightmare. The emotional flow also pays off in the show’s darkest excesses. From the Murder onwards, there are now the beginnings of a real take-off. I am creating vocal and physical shapes without pre-empting them. Some actors find improvisation easy. Not me. I have to trick myself into it – by tiring myself out, wearying my self-censoring little conscience. Another lesson of the Dungeon. How odd that ease should come from exertion.

The question-and-answer session yielded up a school group. A-Level, I think. Theatre Studies. Not so long since I was in such a class. They were utterly lovely, but I’m still searching for answers to their questions: from ‘How do you prepare for such a show?’ to ‘What advice would you give for getting into drama school?’ So much of my work has originated in blind intuitive stumblings that I’m at sea with dispensing practical knowledge. But ‘force the soul’ – that might be a good starting point.

The Hertfordshire Horror

This second diary entry kicks off with an apology. Well. Almost. Because I just haven’t had it in me to diarise the later rehearsals for Sikes & Nancy – those six days in York, followed by four more in London. I’m aware that this catapults me into the Dickensian school of ‘grow sad’ and ‘can’t do it’, which I vowed last time to avoid. In truth, I was staggered that I was so drained by my one-man rehearsals. Such depressive thinking isn’t worth airing. But it might be usefully explained.

I maintain that the main preparation for the solo show takes place within the head. The point of rehearsals is to release that mental energy through the body and the voice; to translate that energy, so furiously pent-up, into the kinetic, the sonic. It’s like a medium disgorging ectoplasm at a Victorian séance. Out comes the cheesecloth, knotted and knobbled, dragging a few people along as it leaves your system. An unnatural birth. And then we have our play.

The grey wall I bumped up against in rehearsals usually revealed itself as my own sabotaging brain. First there was the onset of a mysterious swollen throat, just before leaving for London – a swelling which I now suspect was (partly) psychosomatic. No fun to vocalise through. There was the terrible self-consciousness when people – God forbid! – actually started to watch the play. Then there was that unsettling late run-through in which the play lost some twelve minutes in length. A fine illustration of how faulty an actor’s perception can be: I’d felt I was going so terribly slowly. Beyond these considerations, there were the high-octane splittings of the self required to make the piece work at all. For roughly half its runtime, Sikes & Nancy features scenes of three characters (four, should we include the Narrator) engaged in intense conversation. I am everywhere yet nowhere: forever gazing, abstracted, at the place where I stood a moment before.

And, beyond anything, there’s the unfettered self-focus. Bolstered, in this case, by the absence of a director. Other than me, that is. Me, me, me, me, me, me, me. I’ve felt much burdened by me of late. You stumble about, rehearsing away, vaguely humiliated that you’ve no one more interesting to focus on. I would look wistfully to the plaque outside our Percy Street rehearsal rooms, commemorating the residence of the great Charles Laughton next door. Laughton, who played to acclaim in seven West End plays in the year he left RADA – and just as I’m preparing for my first West End stint. Laughton, whose remarkable Quasimodo – the subject of my second one-man play – remains the supreme grotesque. Laughton, who, not content with being the supreme grotesque, lived in Percy Street with Elsa Lanchester, herself the indelible Bride of Frankenstein. Why could Laughton – almost impossibly interesting – not resurrect and give Sikes & Nancy instead? You start wondering at the point of the torturous enterprise, but this is mostly healthy: a reminder that the one-person show, like pantomime, is completed by its audience. Until the audience arrives, self-focus is inevitable.

The absence of a director is a little unorthodox. But I feel it’s an unorthodoxy into which Sikes & Nancy has grown. I have no excuse for stalling the self-reliance required to embody the show – to beat it into the blood and the bones, so I can incarnate that other world. (And is this really so unorthodox? Dickens self-directed in the Public Readings.) However, a director no doubt eases the burden of the solo show. And fends off the pettifogging suspicion that it’s utterly terrible.

So a proper diary, a further reordering of grey space, proved to be one complication too many. Leisure hours were better spent in escaping. However, this has helped me towards a structuring principle for future diaries. From now on, I won’t chronicle anything other than the performances (and the days that swirled about them). This will save on much boredom.

RADLETT CENTRE (17TH SEPTEMBER). A night of terror. Our opening night – in a distinctly professional three-hundred seater theatre. In handling first nights, I often think of my great hero Boris Karloff. After ten years of Hollywood bogeymen, Karloff made his Broadway debut in Arsenic and Old Lace in 1941. He was petrified. What’s more, he excellently preserved his self-persecuting ramblings:

I thought, ‘There are only two things I can do. I know that I’ve always had this little, if I… go way below par. It has never troubled me, but now, in the tight spot, it has caught up. And only one or two things I can do. One is to go to them in the morning and say, “Well, I’m terribly sorry but we’ve all made a mistake. You’ve seen what’s been going on. You’ve been very kind and haven’t said anything, but it’s just no good. I can’t make it. How much do I owe you?”’

And then I thought, ‘Well, if that happens and I go back to Hollywood, I’m just about done there – because there’s been a flourish of trumpets and all that, and a week later, I come back with my tail between my legs and that’s it.’ So I thought, ‘Well, I’ve just got to make myself do it. I’ve just got to force myself to do it.’

The genial Frankenstein Monster had diarrhoea for a good few weeks after opening night: ‘I got on the scales and I had lost twenty-six pounds – in sheer fright.’

Fight or flight, fight or flight. Sikes & Nancy has always daunted me, but airing it in this newly professional context has added an extra spice of terror. Higher stakes; greater expectations; more and more people not to let down. I doggedly told myself that I’d much rather be acting than sitting an exam (thanks for that, Cambridge), and hurried upstairs for the fifteen-minute pre-state.

The performance was acutely discomfiting. Not that I hadn’t been prepared for that. From the get-go, I was sweating buckets. In seeming compensation, I was spitting buckets, seemingly every time I opened my mouth. (A post-show tweet was poetic in its evocation of ‘spittle overload’. Mea maxima culpa.) But then, this was in an effort to articulate and therefore be heard in a theatre so vast. Dark too – impossibly vast and dark; I could sympathise with Stanislavsky’s terror of the black hole of the auditorium. Felt I should be running to the foot of the stage to embrace whoever was out there. Felt I was tearing myself to pieces too, but for who exactly? And to what end, to what purpose? A nightmare thought, half-way through, while strangling myself as Fagin: ‘I bet they all hate this.’ Soon forgot this when I got some fake blood (primarily washing-up liquid) in my eyes. It mixed quite wonderfully with the sweat descending from my forehead, which had anyway been leaking into my eyes from the start. My eyelids flickered like moths throughout. The fatigue was quite powerful.

It’s a challenge I meet with some relish, powering through the haemorrhage of horrors that arise on first nights. The performance was no disaster. It’s just that I’m so aware of my mistakes. (That which goes to plan is unworthy of comment; the least of your professional obligations.) I must take care not to labour the pains of Sikes & Nancy. There’s the old story about Richard Mansfield, collapsed at the Garrick Club, and bemoaning the strain of playing Jekyll and Hyde to Henry Irving. Irving’s mumbled response: ‘Mm. If it’s unwholesome – why do it?’

Why do it then? Because it’s not unwholesome. Not really. It’s a joy. Even when it’s anything other than joyful. All was worthwhile. I managed to get the play’s running time to over an hour: adjusting to the vastness of the space had its compensations. And wandering through the new lighting designs (courtesy of Matt Leventhall) was an atmospheric treat. Matt’s brilliance has been to cross-light from the wings, with minimal spots and light haze, making it appear that actor and chairs are floating in an inky black void. The question-and-answer session was also strangely liberating. So exhausting is the play that I was free from self-consciousness: the ideal state for banging on about Dickens without fear of boring people.

Terrors aside, how good to get the play before an audience again. Having lain dormant since St William’s College – back in March of 2013 – Sikes & Nancy has returned.

LETCHWORTH ARTS CENTRE (19TH SEPTEMBER). The eighteenth was an odd day. I transferred from my Travelodge to a hotel where seemingly nothing worked: the tap, the shaving light, the shower, the pillows (so like four white boulders), the television, even the toilet paper (how can it work when there isn’t any?). A monotony broken only by choice attacks from crane flies. What little of Hertfordshire I could see was bizarre: everything seemed to be built next to a motorway. Quite different from the rural idyll I knew from watching Hammer House of Horror (barring the hitchhiker-happy ‘Two Faces of Evil’). Still, I had to restore myself for the next performance. Trusting to Dickens’s old mantra that energy begets energy, I went off on a five-hour walk. This did much good. A lonely day in all, tramping through Henlow churchyard, brooding on matters of love and death. All helpful, of course, for the next evening’s Sikes & Nancy.

The Letchworth performance struck me as a throwback to performing Sikes & Nancy at the Golden Fleece Inn (accomplished back in October 2012, thanks to the entirely brilliant Mark Watson). Here we had a venue, which, as arts centre, was not quite a theatre. (Indeed, we were informed that the room was being given over to Christian worship and recreational pole-dancing over the weekend. Not at the same time, I assume.) Here we had the audience on fold-up chairs and one lighting state throughout, as well as tabs that left one garden centre-style wall resolutely uncovered. And, just as at the Golden Fleece, there was great deliberation about whether we could open the windows (an exact parallel: both venues hovered above a pub on a Friday night). We were blessed to find a window, sequestered high above the performance space. I’d have been lost without it: I was more sweat than man before we even started.

It’s cruel that the seeming informality of Letchworth did nothing to reduce my nerves. Simon Callow put it best: ‘for actors as for farmers, nothing’s ever right’. I must have it out with my brain, and the only way to do that is to get a few more murders under my belt. Nonetheless, this Sikes & Nancy was an improvement on Radlett. I’m coming together a little bit more, reducing the extraneous twitchiness (some is desirable), happily adjusting to a space that’s intimate rather than epic. I find some more nuanced tenderness in Nancy (such a challenge: really thinking those high-emotion lines in speaking them) and forget some inhibition for Bolter (the key to that character, I believe). But there’s still a way to go yet. The audience seemed at ease with the play also: the question-and-answer session went on nearly as long as the show. It’s great for a solo performer to come together with an audience in this way. When I last saw Pip Utton in Edinburgh, he shook hands with the audience as they left. Ideal.

ASHWELL SCHOOL HALL (20TH SEPTEMBER). A day of impeccable framing. Ashwell is the Hertfordshire of my imagination, redolent with the autumnal Gothicism of The Blood on Satan’s Claw (hideous title, beautiful film). A smattering of mist and rain helped, as did the ominously chiming village church. I was fortunate enough to be staying in the medieval house of Colin Blumenau, our tour manager: a beacon of hospitality, particularly after the hotel where nothing worked. Colin had what can only be described as a theatrical library on the floor where I was staying. Utter heaven. I found a copy of Antony Sher’s Year of the King, which I hadn’t lain hands on since I was in Sixth Form. Really good to return to it; a formative tome for this slightly hunchbacked actor.

To our venue in the evening. Some interesting new challenges. The high-echo acoustics familiar to many school halls – always a danger with a piece as vocally detailed (and, let’s face it, loud) as Sikes & Nancy. Also a new thrust staging arrangement, the audience facing me on three sides. This is just what we’ll have in Trafalgar Studios, so I best get used to the nodding dog sensation. I find myself wondering why all school halls have parquet flooring. It was on just such a parquet tract that I gave my Ebenezer Scrooge in 2005. And everything encircling it, from Nativities (early to mid-1990s) to Return to the Forbidden Planet (2007). How many others discovered their love of acting on a parquet floor? Possibly the comforting old memory helped. Ashwell proved to be the least tiring show yet; certainly the least sweat-drenched. I’m starting to rediscover a certain ease in the performance. Vital, should I ever fling myself safely over the piece’s relentless emotional peaks (more an emotional mountain range). There are, unbelievably, moments for recovery – even mid-murder – so I’m pleased to be gaining access to them. Dickens wrote a monster, but it may yet be tamed.

A special joy in the question-and-answer session: practically the entire audience of sixty-five came round afterwards, mostly armed with glasses of wine. A lovely bit of chit-chat ensued. Not for the first time, I was addressed as ‘rubber face’ (Rowan Atkinson has played Fagin, of course), and I had chance to eulogise the just-deceased Donald Sinden as King of the Irvingites. And one delightful lady came out with the best of all after-show comments: ‘I’m really glad I came to this tonight, instead of staying in to watch The X Factor.’

I think I have arrived.

Into the Black Lagoon

Here begins an attempt to chronicle my preparations for Sikes & Nancy – shortly to be rehearsed, teched, dressed, prodded about the country and then (lovingly) hurled into the West End. Consider it a diary of sorts. Charles Dickens began a diary – his very first – in January, 1838. It terminated on the fifteenth:

Here ends this brief attempt at a Diary. I grow sad over this checking off of days, and can’t do it. CD.

Solitude, sometimes swelling into loneliness, is inescapable in the one-man play. This may also be true of diaries. It falls to the actor to alleviate this solitude by any means possible: above all, by direct contact with their audiences. But there are other ways too. It’s my hope that, in converting my daily meanderings into text – meanderings which often drive me to aggravation, so great is my blindness to their wider point – I can better discover their meaning, possibly even a light wisdom. Accordingly, I will steer well clear of the Dickensian school of life-writing (sample entry: ‘City people and rather dull’) and record only that which has helped my journey to the heart of Sikes & Nancy.

1ST SEPTEMBER. A dream in the early hours: an imagined performance review at the Dungeon, in which I’m winningly told how ‘undisciplined’ and ‘uncontrollable’ an actor I am. Funny, really, the cast-iron continuity of an insecurity. Ever and always do I worry that my acting is somehow inappropriate, embarrassing, uninhibited through personal wreckiness rather than ease (or – God help me – bare-faced ‘ham’). Perhaps it’s as well that this is my last day at the Dungeon. Happily, it’s a day that looks forward. I start with a long stint on Ghosts: grim period storytelling with a flavour of Poe’s first-person murder narratives, precisely what I get up to in Sikes & Nancy. There are also shorter bursts on Turpin (playing a character not unlike Bill Sikes), Entrance (what more forward-looking than being out of the building?), and, unexpectedly, Torture (coincidentally, the last show I gave at the Dungeon in 2013). On finishing my shift, I annotate my script over a pot of tea, then proceed to my class in the Alexander Technique: tonight, a pleasing mish-mash of tightrope-walking, saddle-sitting and back-lying. Of all my efforts to exalt my spine from the dimensions of a slightly crushed paper cup, the Alexander Technique has been the most effective. On getting home in the evening, I set up a Facebook Page for the show (which looked very much like this) and select a film to put me in the Sikes & Nancy mood. Having read so many of the Newgate novels that swirled about Oliver Twist on its first serialisation – Jack Sheppard, Eugene Aram, Paul Clifford – I’m trying to connect to films with a like sensibility. I settle on Hammer’s Edwardian murder-fest Hands of the Ripper. I last about half an hour, dropping off some time after Dora Bryan is impaled on a door.

2ND SEPTEMBER. Another anxiety dream: this time, I sit reading the newspaper reviews for Sikes & Nancy. They fill me with bowel-clenching dread, brimming as they do with negatives phrased as positives: ‘this was one of the least disastrous moments in Swanton’s performance’ and the like. I’ve already vowed to abstain from all reviews of the show – but, as in the dream, I’ll be dying to know what’s been said. Today proves little more productive than brooding on one’s own reviews: every time I get working on the script, the phone seems to ring with a new production issue. One such call reminds me to start booking digs for the tour. I get five or six places sorted – hotels, houses, hovels, all – and read Peter Ackroyd’s mighty tome Dickens come afternoon. Dickens’s mixed response to being pushed about America steel me somewhat for my shufflings across England. Dickens’s thoughts on the Separate System in American prisons are also helpful: ‘I looked at them with the same awe as I should have looked at men who had been buried alive, and dug up again’ and (Dickens’s italics) ‘What if ghosts be one of the terrors of these jails?’ Sikes & Nancy unfolds in precisely that uncanny valley: the Narrator looks on scurrilous criminality from afar, yet succumbs to all its blackest terrors. My Alexander class passes in a haze of foot-rubbing, chest-compressing and cushion-strapping. A slightly harassed and lonely day. That night, I watch more of Hands of the Ripper. As I do so, I make out my Sikes coat, burning through the darkness against the white wardrobe door. Perhaps it’s Krook, dispatched from Bleak House to torment me. Or one of those ghosts that haunt the American prisons.

3RD SEPTEMBER. Certain I had another dream. Can’t for the life of me remember it. Perhaps the coat beat it back. In any case, finishing Hands of the Ripper is a fine substitute. It’s sorely overlooked, even by Hammer standards: beautiful music, the most atmospheric use of St Paul’s since Mary Poppins and a fog-bound cityscape that could comfortably house Fagin and Sikes. I’m always deeply touched by the idea of the April-December romance, here between the middle-aged doctor and the Ripper’s virginal daughter. What makes that so? The idea of love beating back death? A permutation of Beauty and the Beast? It may be even simpler: so much of Sikes & Nancy is primed on inappropriate loving feeling. Endlessly relatable, these loves we are told should simply not be – and central, I think, to my dabblings in the grotesque. As I annotate the script, I’m struck by the need to more carefully pattern Nancy’s speech; to lessen that generalised gloss where my brain clicks into the ‘EMOTE!’ setting. Perhaps mining the Narrator will be key. He’s my enigmatic quarry. To say that the Narrator is really Dickens, or me, or a complete non-entity (ah: already said ‘me’) is a cheat. And a simplification. For the Narrator is everyone: an embodiment of multiple characters, a fulcrum of unspooling grotesques. He’s somewhat like Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Past: ‘being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body…’ The Narrator becomes a crucible for the textured nastiness disclosed within Sikes & Nancy; the figure that makes it possible for the actor to step forth and embody an entire world. More practical, today was my first attempt to limit my dairy intake to keep down my catarrh. Whoever the Narrator is, he should not be mucusy. Nor should he be self-conscious: today’s dose of Alexander Technique is beset by this. My teacher notes that my eyes turn inwards and I cease to breathe when running lines in my head. This cannot be! Some business with finding the feet and pointing, and, better yet, bean bags, goes some way towards remedying this. The self-consciousness is senseless, all told. The main point of Sikes & Nancy is to look the audience square in the eye and tell the story. An evening of reading (Oliver Twist and The Invention of Murder), admin and admin-lite (for ‘admin-lite’ read ‘pratting about on Facebook’), before starting The Spiral Staircase, another film with the phunk of the Newgate gallows.

4TH SEPTEMBER. A pleasing morning. The script grows ever deeper, a headlong plunge into a black lagoon. It’s a register that reminds me of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: I sense a near-impenetrable blackness, from which objects briefly emerge before descending from view. Perhaps I’m lured into this trance by the bean bag technique. This requires throwing a bean bag in the air and catching it to correspond with phrases in the script, all the while directing your eyes to specific focuses through a window. A difficult adjustment, but thereafter helpful: no longer is my focus turned inward. The Alexander Technique is more encouraging today, trying to get my thighs to ease up and do less work (I have a peculiar gait where my knees seem to propel my legs about). Then to the Dungeon’s end-of-season party. I enjoy parties, really I do, but I’m never sure how to behave at them. I’ve lately settled on a garrulous buffoonery – a success, in that it brings me more joy than awkwardness. Yet I can never shake the feeling that, were I only to crack how to act at parties, I would stumble, quite naturally, on the much better party going on in the next room. Acting and personal dislocation go hand in hand. We’re a race terrified of being left out, overlooked, forgotten, transferring our professional anxieties to day-to-day life. Or is it the other way round? The best diagnosis I’ve found is in Gordon Craig’s visionary biography of Henry Irving, which I read in February. Craig is romantic yet profound in asserting that Irving was all actor:

It was not only in his face – it was all over him. It was not put-on – not acting in that sense – but it was such a concentrated essence of love for that to which he had devoted his soul that it became positively terrifying, unless by chance you knew what it was that he was thinking of, seeing, hearing, and noting … For it meant the whole of this world and the next, with Irving, to be an ACTOR, and in his innocence, his proud innocence, he supposed it meant as much to every other performer.

As with Irving, I feel that virtually everything in my life is either founded on or pointing towards acting. A blessing and a curse. Irving’s personal life was by no means good. It may also be true that the finest actors have something in their lives which has nothing to do with acting. Yet as I type, I can discern Irving’s lanky spectre at my shoulder: ‘So, er – why, um, have a party, m’boy? Why, the acting was the party!’ Fortunately, the one-man form transforms this monomania into a positive virtue. Besides, I’ve never been so good at anything that I can afford to go at it on a part-time or non-obsessive basis. If you’re after a real go at acting, what other way to do it?

5TH SEPTEMBER. The sort of day where exceptionally little gets done. I manage a few line-runs: first at home with the bean bags, then in walking through the countryside (or what passes for countryside in the sterilised wilds of Acomb and Poppleton). I also attend my last Alexander Technique class, which contains some practical, play-focused advice. I am now forbidden to think about the Technique whilst acting. You learn it in order to forget it. You trust that it’s there on some level and then you get on with your craft. Reassuring, as I believe that a conservative degree of ‘over-doing’ is indispensable to Sikes & Nancy. I belong to the Henry Irving school of murder: you can’t orchestrate killings in the theatre without some stormier madness at work. An audience will sense you faking. In playing Mathias in The Bells, Irving would, by sheer imaginative force, cause the blood to drain from his face and his pulse to soar. He employed the same in reciting ‘The Dream of Eugene Aram’ (an item that Dickens’s ‘Sikes and Nancy’ may have been designed to top):

Oh, God! that horrid, horrid dream
Besets me now awake!
Again – again, with dizzy brain,
The human life I take;
And my right red hand grows raging hot,
Like Cranmer’s at the stake.

The above perfectly encapsulates Sikes’s flight through the countryside. I’m perplexed that the poem is all but forgotten. A good deal juicier than Poe’s ‘The Raven’. On walking home, I listen to Damien Rice’s ‘Rootless Tree’ and ‘Loving You’ from Sondheim’s Passion. Both strike me as a distillation of Nancy’s predicament, the latter especially: ‘I will live and I would die for you.’ My acting must aspire to the condition of music – something quite possible within the one-man form, where it’s down to set the rhythms. Had a nice conversation with Jack Gamble, which returned me to madness, this time in the form of Ruskin’s haunting self-portraiture. More of The Spiral Staircase, then sleep. A week tomorrow till rehearsals start in London. And so tomorrow I must speak the text.

6TH SEPTEMBER. Great productivity. Great happiness. With the house empty and the windows closed – to be overheard is unendurable – I wander about and speak the words. I do this for just under three hours, ruminating on the first two-thirds of the script: shaping and reshaping the sounds (it’s not sufficient to parrot the old rhythms), listening all the while to the vibrations. The sensation is enjoyable. And, as though conducting a séance, I’m luring back the old character voices (this after luring back my higher register – always a fatality at the Dungeon). Fagin and Sikes will take a few weeks to materialise, but the others come on splendidly. Some new discoveries: Nancy requires a certain breathiness to take hold, Bolter an oily gusto; the Narrator, meanwhile, can borrow much more from my own voice. I also feel I’m seeing the piece more clearly: seeing the people I’m addressing, seeing a London drenched in perpetual night, seeing as far as I can into the black lagoon. After this exhilaration, it’s back to assembling quotations for the Sikes & Nancy post-show discussions. In doing so, I’m reading (usually re-reading) the words of Dickens and his contemporaries, as well as passages from The Jew of Malta and Macbeth. In Barabas I find the monstrous essence of Fagin: ‘For so I live, perish may all the world.’ In Macbeth I access the visual qualities of the piece: ‘light thickens’ – and in his Lady those bloodstains that never go away: ‘all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand’. That night, I dream I’m backstage on Broadway for The Phantom of the Opera. Cavernous wing space – quite unlike any real theatre – into which dry ice and organ music flood. A sign, I hope, that the melodrama’s entering the blood and the bones.

Happier Tortures

My last torture essay focused on The Raven (1935) and – as much as I relish that juicy melodrama – wasn’t especially kind to it. Here, then, is an attempt to make amends: a study of those tortures in classic horror that remain legitimately horrifying. To simplify (as much as I ever manage that), I’ve divided my argument into three basic points. The whole involves somewhat less Raven-bashing – though a total absintence proved impossible.

First: torture must be hidden away to horrify. The dungeons of the Inquisition are the ideal example – the setting, incidentally, for Poe’s story ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, one of the dubious inspirations for The Raven. No attempt was made to translate Poe’s oppressive seclusion: Vollin invites four house guests as additional audience for his torture spree – and, presumably, witnesses to his crimes. This dimension turns The Raven into the equivalent of the public execution: repulsive to be sure, but more straightforward entertainment for the masses; auto-da-fé rather than sheltered dungeon.

The Black Cat (1934) – Universal’s Poe-inspired predecessor to The Raven – did get this principle of hiding spectacularly right. The film climaxes with Bela Lugosi skinning Boris Karloff alive, but with an admirable reliance on suggestion. The Black Cat invites favourable comparison with Paramount’s Island of Lost Souls (1933), which ends with Charles Laughton suffering vivisection without anaesthetic. In both films, Lugosi is chief torturer, anticipating the cruelty with dialogue that makes the best of his unique grasp of intuitive rhythm. In The Black Cat, Lugosi’s passion is such that he invents a new verb for skinning: ‘Did you ever see an animal skinned, Hjalmar? That’s what I’m going to do to you now! Tear/pare/flare the skin from your body! Slowly… Bit by bit!’ Meanwhile, Island of Lost Souls requires no more than Lugosi’s rhapsodic upward inflection as he utters ‘the House of Pain…!’ Both films then proceed to shots of gleaming razors being collected. This is particularly nauseating in Island of Lost Souls, as the razors are taken up by the island’s hideous beast-men. It creates a quite striking contrast of glass and metal – gleaming, polished, manufactured – and beast-flesh – dirty, atavistic, repulsively organic. Much of the terror is that these filth-encrusted beings are not organic but, like the razors, created.

Most importantly, though, both films hide their tortures at the crucial moment. The Black Cat collapses into a chain of shock cuts: the screaming heroine, Karloff’s writhing hand, and a crucifixion-like shadow of Karloff on the rack, Lugosi’s razor merrily flicking away. Island of Lost Souls has the camera discreetly glide away, eventually settling on an exterior shot of the House of Pain. The viewer’s last glimpse of Laughton is of the beast-men swarming in on him. As they block him from sight, the nauseating, Frankenstein-like contrast is completed, the dazzling white suit of Laughton’s civilised scientist surrounded and encased by hairy horrors. Interestingly, both sequences are completed by a scream. Laughton’s scream is an orgasmic hollering, drawn-out and discomforting (but quite in keeping with Laughton’s gallery of sex-haunted monsters, from Nero to Moulton-Barrett to Quasimodo). Karloff’s scream is so bizarre that it seems doubtful it was even performed by the actor: a sudden wolfish eruption, part heave and part hiccup. The early sound film was well-equipped for suggesting its tortures. It clung to the silent cinema’s aesthetic of images teased from shadows, whilst contributing a visceral edge through primitive sound techniques. The interferences of the burgeoning Production Code didn’t hurt either.

Second: torture is more horrifying when women are the victims. There are deep-rooted reasons for this disturbing truth – too tangled to go into here, but probably best distilled in the fact that men are biologically stronger than women. It’s disturbing also to find a general historical bias: whilst the execution and even torture of men often went on in public, it was hidden away when done to women. (For example, female ‘witches’ were seldom left hanging from trees in England. It was thought distasteful that decomposition should produce female nudity. A sadly misjudged modesty.) The few instances of women being tortured in Golden Age horror are downright horrifying. Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) is particularly vile, with Lugosi (again!) draining the blood of a prostitute bound to a beam in his laboratory. Her ‘rotten blood’ gives rise to misogynistic rantings of ‘You cheated me! Your beauty was a lie!’ and an unceremonious dumping through a trapdoor into the River Seine. Universal may have learned their lesson: in The Raven, it’s Bateman’s outrage at the thought of a woman being crushed to death that leads him to betray Vollin.

Bondage scenarios were commonplace in classic horror – Fay Wray seldom got to the end of a film without being tied up – but interestingly it was usually men who were tortured in this context. The best example is The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), in which the naked torso of the young hero is stroked and ogled – across multiple scenes, beautifully photographed in the MGM house style – by Karloff’s gently gay Fu and his whip-crazed daughter. For a film about romantic obsession (one inspired by Poe, no less), The Raven is, by contrast, almost bashfully sexless.

Even unrealized horror tortures depended more on sadistic women torturing men. In 1933, John Balderston was planning all manner of whip-and-chain scenarios for Dracula’s Daughter (1936), none of which made it into the film:

The use of a female Vampire instead of male gives us the chance to play up SEX and CRUELTY legitimately … We profit by making Dracula’s Daughter amorous of her victims … The seduction of young men will be tolerated whereas we had to eliminate seduction of girls from the original as obviously censorable.

Unbelievably, bondage was also considered for Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Still in existence is a detailed story treatment called ‘The Captured Prince’ (the link provides some eye-opening production information). Yet the gendering renders the torture a mild thrill rather than an out-and-out horror show.

At the outset of the sixties, however, actress Barbara Steele became the centrepiece for two of horror cinema’s most nightmarish tortures. Bava’s The Mask of Satan (1960) opens with Steele tied to the stake, swearing vengeance on her tormenters as they prepare the eponymous iron mask. As the mask is brought forth, there comes a striking subjective shot of its inlaid spikes. Finally, the mask is hammered onto Steele’s skull with ghoulish zeal. There’s a quite startling attention to the resulting putrescent outpour – an effect repeated in Bava’s stomach-churning use of poached eggs to suggest regenerating witch-eyes.

Even more effective is the ending of Corman’s Pit and the Pendulum (1961). The film’s survivors stand atop a dungeon staircase. Their intention is to close the dungeon up for all time: ‘No one will ever enter this room again.’ Leaving, they close the door behind them. Then the camera whips round to an Iron Maiden. Steele’s still-living eyes gaze, catatonic, through the device’s window. Fadeout. Credits. The film’s climax has been so packed with event – notably a certain outsize pendulum and Vincent Price running amok in full Inquisitorial dress – that the viewer has forgotten Steele’s dilemma completely. It’s an exquisite variation on torture by suggestion (now set in a literal Inquisition site), with the viewer’s imagination left to complete the agony.

The gender problem is central to the tortures in both films. Each torture is (in part) a punishment for untamed female sexuality: vampire-witch seductions in The Mask of Satan, adultery in Pit and the Pendulum. This is accentuated by the dual horror of constraint and penetration (by tapered iron spikes) that defines the tortures, an unpleasant sexual analogy. But most effective is the focus that both films provide the eyes, ensconced and engirdled in medieval wrought iron. There is no more emotive image to sum up the human pain at the experience’s centre.

Third: torture is most horrifying when it makes least sense. Now, The Raven very often fails to make sense, but in a way that draws attention to its absurdity. How, for example, has Vollin constructed his numerous industrial torture devices? Why is his modest American house undermined by a cavernous medieval dungeon? What made him such an idiot as to attempt all this – and on the flimsiest of justifications? Regrettably, the answer to all three is that The Raven is just an assembly-line potboiler. Yet the best of the Golden Age horrors (such as The Black Cat, made by the same studio only a year earlier) transcended mere formula to become genuine classics. As Karloff later commented on The Raven: ‘Here was an attempt to pile on the thrills without much logic.’ The Raven presents Vollin as a supreme egotist: early on, he describes himself as ‘a god – with the taint of human emotions’ (conceited devil). But to truly threaten, torture has to represent something much more threatening, and much less explicable, than one man’s ego. George Orwell’s 1984 is an excellent example of this orchestrated senselessness. The tortures of Room 101 can’t be traced to any one individual – least of all the shadowy Big Brother, who, like Goldstein, may not even exist. The ambiguity is central to the horror.

With The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) and Theatre of Blood (1973) – two artful proto-slasher films starring Vincent Price – much comedy comes from the tortures making an over-abundance of sense. In each film, the murders follow a pattern delineated by a canonical literary source. The Abominable Dr. Phibes seizes on the Bible’s Ten Plagues of Egypt. It’s appropriate to the god-like aura of Phibes himself, a being neither living nor dead who smites down those who invoke his wrath. Memorably gruesome is a re-engineering of the frog-plague as an oversized frog mask at a masquerade – a mask fitted with a device that makes it tighten, inexorably, about the victim’s throat. Cue much writhing and blood-splattering.

Theatre of Blood improves on even this, in harnessing the god-like delusions of (certain) actors. The film has an old Shakespearean, Edward Lionheart, pick off his critics with murders culled from the Complete Works. This is a pedant’s darkest dream: beheading from Cymbeline, cannibalism from Titus Andronicus, even burning alive from the little-known Henry VI. There are also a few tortures that never made it into Shakespeare – such as a version of The Merchant of Venice where Shylock finally gets his pound of flesh.

Yet the Price films commit so thoroughly to their premises that they become disturbing as well as funny. Price’s supreme gift as a horror actor was in portraying fanaticism. He pushed his characters to the limits of self-parody – and then kept on going, where meeker actors feared to tread. So committed are Phibes and Lionheart to following their literary sources, that they pass into the vale of a frightening internal logic. This is aided by the parallel plotting in both films, alternating between scenes of gaudy bloodshed and the surrounding police investigation. These investigation scenes are funnier than even the murders, with the arbiters of law and order expressing baleful admiration for Price’s homicidal genius. Particularly good is a one-liner from Ian Hendry in Theatre of Blood: ‘It’s him all right. Only Lionheart would have the temerity to rewrite Shakespeare.’ The Raven never quite makes the same leap; Lugosi never quite grasps the joke of fanaticism and runs with it. Had he been equipped to do so, Price would have had a hard act to follow.

In closing, it’s worth acknowledging the project that’s provoking these sadistic ramblings: In the Penal Colony at the Arts Theatre, West End. I urge you to book your tickets as soon as possible. I’ve the distinct feeling it’ll provoke more varied and searching reflections on suffering than any number of Bela Lugosi films.

The Comedy of Torture

In preparing for In the Penal Colony at the Arts Theatre, I’ve been examining torture through the reliable prism of the classic horror film. This entry focuses on the Holy Grail of Golden Age torture-horror, Universal’s The Raven (1935); the next entry will take in snapshots of more successful tortures in the wider horror cinema.

Torture has often uprooted a good horror film. For example, there are the Hammer films that don’t feel like Hammer films – The Camp on Blood Island (1958) and The Terror of the Tongs (1961) – in light of their focus on tortures plucked from recent history. None of Jesus Franco’s torture-horrors have ever worked, except, perhaps, as legitimate torture: his 1970 version of de Sade’s Eugenie is excrement marvellous rare. Franco’s The Bloody Judge (1970), starring Christopher Lee as Judge Jeffries, might be the dubious exception. Yet it’s a film that Lee refuses to see:

In the film, instead of somebody just being hanged – it’s worth noting that Lee was a witness to the last public execution in France – I gather that [they filmed] the most hideous scenes, about which I knew absolutely nothing at all, because they were done long after I’d finished my part: hideous and appalling scenes of torture and brutality and mutilation – hanging and drawing and quartering and worse … That’s why I’ve never seen it. I can’t bring myself to look at things like that.

Like Lee, I won’t pretend I’ve endured the torture porn rigours of Saw and Hostel and The Human Centipede – although I do hold a candle for the fiendishly inventive Cube (1997).

But what of torture in the Golden Age of horror? The founding Gothic in the Hollywood canon is The Phantom of the Opera (1925), which constantly hints at torture as the reason for the Phantom’s deformity. The Phantom’s back story, outlined in a curt police clipping, brims with tantalising inference: ‘Born during the Boulevard Massacre. Self educated musician and master of Black Art. Exiled to Devil’s Island for criminal insane.’ Here are three potential reasons that the Phantom bears a death’s head: torture through revolution or devilry or incarceration. Matters are complicated by the Phantom’s appearance at the Bal Masque, where he imperiously states: ‘Beneath your dancing feet are the tombs of tortured men – thus does the Red Death rebuke your merriment!’ The reference to Edgar Allan Poe – author of torture paradigm ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ – is suggestive, though not so much as the eleventh-hour revelation of the Phantom’s underground torture chamber. Later versions explained the Phantom’s deformity by subjecting him to a face full of acid. Horrific, yes, but never again as interesting.

Whipping became commonplace in the early horror film. Frankenstein (1931) contains a memorable torture scene: Boris Karloff’s Monster howling in chains, enduring the whippings and tauntings of the hunchbacked Fritz. The chains may be painful enough (the Chinese once had the torture of ‘kneeling on chains’); the whip reminds of flogging’s prime place in torture across all ages and all cultures (because a painful but ‘clean’ means of punishment). In the same year’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, whipping rears its head more sadistically. Ivy the streetwalker exposes her naked back to Jekyll – revealing the marks that he, as Hyde, has inflicted on her: ‘Pretty, ain’t it? It’s a whip, that’s what it is – a whip!’ The sadism went up a notch in the 1941 remake, where Spencer Tracy’s Jekyll whips the women in his life in a Freudian dream sequence.

Most potent is the reliance on suggestion. There’s Cleopatra’s transformation into a legless, shrieking ‘bird woman’ in Freaks (1932), where the audience sees only the aftermath; the waking vivisection of Dr Moreau (another chap fond of the whip) in Island of Lost Souls (also 1932), the camera discreetly pulling away as Moreau’s creations pull him apart; and Karloff’s Expressionist ‘crucifixion’ in The Black Cat (1934), conveyed almost entirely in shadow. Perhaps surprisingly, suggestion was usually the result of censorship as much as artistic vision. Freaks originally laid out Cleo’s destruction in gory detail, a tree felling her in a storm before her torturers swarmed in on her (surviving prints substitute a very abrupt fade); The Black Cat had some ghastly script business where a skinless Karloff hobbles across the floor to frighten Lugosi. Island of Lost Souls never required more than the half-laughing screams of Charles Laughton – at once darkly comic, kinky and blood-curdling. Sound can be graphic.

It was The Raven (1935) that handled torture most brazenly. To the point where it got horror banned in England for a few years, thus shutting down Hollywood production of horror. And yet it’s utterly ridiculous. The Raven has a sister film in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) – almost equally gaudy in its approach to torture, filtering its devices through comic-book exaggeration, MGM production gloss and regrettable Chinese stereotypes. There’s a later comparison in Tower of London (1939), in which prisoners flop from iron maidens like boneless fish. But neither film approached torture with the concentration – and therefore absurdity – of The Raven.

The plot deals with Dr Richard Vollin (Bela Lugosi), an eminent neurosurgeon and Poe obsessive, who falls in love with Jean Thatcher after saving her on the operating table. But when her father, Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds), intervenes to prevent the budding psychotic infatuation, Vollin snaps. After imprisoning and mutilating on-the-run gangster Edmond Bateman (Boris Karloff), Vollin exploits him as his pawn in subjecting Judge, Jean, fiancé and friends to the Poe-inspired torture devices in his cellar.

There’s always something gently amusing about Samuel Hinds moaning under Lugosi’s great big pendulum – politely accepting his fate, now and then mouthing such serene platitudes as ‘Oh, try to be sane, Vollin!’ Given that torture is the blackest of all human practices, it becomes staggeringly funny in The Raven.

The hilarity might stem from the strangeness of time in The Raven: medievalism rooted in a modern context. In our first trip to the cellars, Vollin declares his collection ‘a most unique museum of torture’. But it’s only really unique for clearing out the ‘torture’ section of Universal’s prop warehouse. We see balls-and-chains, a mysterious leaden coffin, the rack, a tiny cage (‘Little Ease’ perhaps?) and what looks to be the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg; there’s even one of the gibbets that turned up in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948; it goes without saying that every onscreen prop would be recycled for 1939’s Tower of London). The mood of ancient Gothic is enhanced by the wrap-around dungeon background. It’s another direct steal, this time from Universal’s Frankenstein series: the sets are taken from Charles D. Hall’s jail and watch-tower scenes in Bride of Frankenstein (also 1935). In the context of The Raven, the schlocky medievalism becomes fairly distancing. It’s an illustration of Henry Fielding’s famous remark: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ The moment Vollin enters his museum, The Raven may as well take place in Oz or Narnia.

Vollin’s fixation on Edgar Allan Poe is complicit in the distancing effect. The long-dead author extends the anachronism in yet another direction, adding his own weird patina of New England gaslight to the generic swirl of ‘The Past’. Although even the apparent present of The Raven is desperately strange: it’s a deranged, never-neverland 1930s, teeming with yuppies who play at horse-racing in the drawing-room. What else can you expect with supporting players named ‘Spencer Charters’ and ‘Maidel Turner’? It was probably just as distancing in 1935.

Aside from his air of anachronism, Poe has been so ritually demonised in western culture that it’s become ridiculous. A fine example is the film Torture Garden (1967); a Bloch-derived portmanteau rather than an adaptation of Mirbeau. The best segment by far is ‘The Man Who Collected Poe’. It’s a satire on fanatical (and Vollin-like) collectors: in this case, a fellow who’s so mad on Poe that he has, quite literally, collected the long-dead author – by resurrecting him via a pact with the Devil. As in the villain song tradition, Poe becomes, for all intents and purposes, the Devil himself; cackling, deranged, at the centre of a blazing inferno, as he damns the soul of a human victim.

Such demonisation of Poe is vital to The Raven. Bela Lugosi’s big speech is a minor masterpiece of melodramatic dialogue:

Poe was a great genius. Like all great geniuses, there was in him the insistent will to do something big, great, constructive in the world. He had the brain to do it. But – he fell in love. Her name was Lenore… ‘Longing for the lost Lenore’… Something happened. Someone took her away from him. When a man of genius is denied of his great love, he goes mad. His brain, instead of being clear to do his work, is tortured. So he begins to think of torture. Torture for those who have tortured him.

On balance, though, David Boehm’s screenplay for The Raven is badly written – or at least badly conceived, which amounts to much the same. Now, the fruitiness of the dialogue can be one of the highlights of classic horror. And there is a delight in hearing Bela Lugosi give shape to such lines as the following:

I am the sanest man who ever lived. But I will not be tortured. I tear torture out of myself by torturing you! Fifteen minutes… There’s the clock – you can see it… Torture! Waiting! Waiting! Death will be sweet, Judge Thatcher!

Yet there’s something stubbornly uncinematic about such dialogue in The Raven. It seems to be trying to do the work of the images – and, regrettably, umpteen configurations of the word ‘torture’ do not make up for an absence of well-presented torture. Witness, once again, Samuel Hinds under that great big pendulum. Or the lovers in the room where the walls come together (they seem as politely unaffected as Hinds). Properly contained, the dialogue of classic horror can galvanise a film, its theatrical bravado animating that which is already living (see The Old Dark House, 1932, where great dialogue melds with an appropriately great production). Given that Vollin’s endless epistles to torture never take the shape of a believable reason for the character’s machinations – that is, beyond stultifying sadism – its foregrounding in the script becomes a nagging irritation. The dialogue in The Raven seems to be searching for a container. Devoid of one, it’s just unbridled excess.

The strangeness of The Raven is felt keenest in the imbalance of the lead performances, the now-legendary Lugosi and Karloff. As Vollin, Lugosi takes the film almost too seriously. In doing so, Lugosi does a great service to his audiences, following the formula for melodrama laid out in Gordon Craig’s Henry Irving: ‘Melodrama was not and is not afraid of the spectacular or the heroic, of bravura, or the impossible. It shuns one thing purposely – the matter-of-fact.’ Certainly, the sight and sound of Lugosi throughout The Raven is alarming: an unending cavalcade of bat-like grimaces, staccato cackles and throat-rending eruptions of Hungarian passion, all delivered with Shakespearean aplomb. Even today, it’s unnerving how much Lugosi seems to believe in the script’s cardboard character. And that really is the problem: Lugosi can never do more than dress the cardboard. Which he does effectively enough – just as the art department dresses its ill-conceived setting with a stock ball-and-chain, or the screenplay dresses its dearth of character motivation with a repetition of the word ‘torture’. Of course, to really work, melodrama requires an equal force of belief from everyone involved in the enterprise. And had director Lew Landers believed in the project to the extent of Lugosi, it’s probable that The Raven couldn’t have been released at all. The Marquis de Sade would have made it to Hollywood.

Karloff, always the more astute judge of scripts, takes and plays his character as simple pulp. Karloff’s Edmond Bateman is perversely memorable, and certainly no weaker than Lugosi’s characterisation: a breathy, petulant, fish-eyed grotesque. This studied detachment probably relieved Karloff of a lot of unnecessary pressure: his infamous onset remark that ‘this whole place is a toilet’ is a measure of his disenchantment with rinky-dink Universal. Nonetheless, Karloff is responsible for the film’s only potent emotional stab at torture, on awaking to discover his disfigurement at the hands of Lugosi. Even here, the scene is effective against the odds: the Jack Pierce makeup, not bad in principle, is so inadequately lit and photographed that it appears flat, grey and (paradoxically detrimental) lifeless.

Still, The Raven survives as a valuable insight into how differently the premier gentlemen of horror attacked their craft. Lugosi was almost naively diabolic, erupting from within his pedantic cage of calculated baroque stylings; Karloff, more dangerous (and following the example of Lon Chaney), went to the heart to horrify. But seemingly everyone entangled in The Raven appears to be acting in a different film. The imbalance is at least interesting, even if it makes the film that much harder to take seriously.

Despite so much pecking, my affection for The Raven isn’t greatly diminished. On its own borderline psychotic terms (and perhaps there’s no other way to take it), it’s delirious, breathless fun – in spite of (possibly because of) its tasteless subject matter. It does, however, beg a question: when does the representation of torture become hideous, monstrous, unacceptable? I have three strong thoughts on this, all of which bolster The Raven as an unintended burlesque. I’ll save them till next time; we’ve suffered enough for now.

In closing, it’s worth observing that The Raven was remade in 1963. This time as an intentional horror-comedy. One torture-focused sequence featured Boris Karloff (back again, now a wizard) threatening to singe Vincent Price’s daughter with a magically floating red-hot poker. ‘I offer you a choice!’ he fawns. ‘The secret of your hand manipulations, or this – against this!’

A fair effort. But I still think of Samuel Hinds under that great big pendulum.

Fires of Industry

Much to my surprise, I’m feeling very content at present. I think because I’m immersed in abundant work. Everything’s expanding wonderfully after the minor annus horribilis of 2013. Whilst last year was soothed by the fulfilling dual tonic of Dickens and Dungeon, it sagged appallingly over the summer. This was principally the fault of some reprehensibly mediocre Shakespeare: low budget, low preparation, low ambition, low care for the company’s feelings, low everything to be honest – except misery (high). These stillborn productions are encapsulated in Lear’s words: ‘Nothing can come of nothing’ (and not for lack of trying from an admirable cast).

So: after mourning for what should have been, I feel I’m finding my feet again. As an aged Bette Davis said, bleakly but honestly: ‘It has been my experience that one cannot depend on human relations for any lasting reward. It is only work that truly satisfies.’ Which can leave you in the shit when the work goes wrong – but that’s a worthwhile trade-off for the moments of satisfaction.

In the spirit of nourishing work then, I have three events to announce: the eagerly awaited (by me, anyway) nationwide tour of Sikes & Nancy; my West End appearance as part of In the Penal Colony; and the bustling preparations for the Tyrannical Tudors show at The York Dungeon. I’ll go through them one by one…

Last week, I received final confirmation that Sikes & Nancy will tour the country – from September through November this year. Just me, a long black coat and six wooden chairs, attempting to do justice to the darkest tale that Charles Dickens ever wrote. I find Sikes & Nancy an utter joy to perform. It’s a play that taps into so much that I revere: it demands huge reserves of energy, a relish for vocal and physical transformation, and that monomaniacal desire to step onto a stage and create an entire world (essential, I believe, for any one-person performance). Best of all is the direct contact with an audience: the chance to meet them head on, lock eyes, and give them a story. Magic.

In one light, ‘Sikes and Nancy’ exemplifies Dickens’ passionate devotion to work. It’s all over Dickens’ letters to friends. This, for example, in relation to his domestic strife:

I do suppose that there never was a man so seized and rended by one spirit. In this condition, though nothing can alter or soften it, I have a turning notion that the mere physical effort and change of the Readings would be good, as another means of bearing it.

Or this:

I must do something, or I shall wear my heart away. I can see no better thing to do that is half so hopeful in itself, or half so well suited to my restless state.

And not forgetting:

Too late to say, put the curb on, and don’t rush at hills – the wrong man to say it to. I have now no relief but in action. I am incapable of rest. I am quite confident I should rust, break, and die, if I spared myself. Much better to die, doing. What I am in that way, nature made me first, and my way of life has of late, alas! confirmed.

With ‘Sikes and Nancy’, Dickens’ work ethic spiralled, uncontrollable, from the manic to the purely maniacal. He worked himself up to multiple strokes – and died only months after renouncing the acting drug. Terrifying. Along with the blood-spotted Gothicism of The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Dickens’ final, unfinished novel), ‘Sikes and Nancy’ can be seen as the baroque climax to Dickens’ tempestuous life.

As with the show’s previous revivals (it’s just over a year since I last performed it), I’m hoping to engage more deeply with the material. Previously, I’ve looked at images, at Dickens’ other texts of crime and murder, and at the script itself, with microscopic intensity (a study which culminated in reintegrating fragments of the novel). My plan this time is to look outward rather than inward, and approach the piece as an echo chamber. Everything I study will resonate, no matter how faintly, in the final performances.

For Fagin’s sake, I want to look into how the nineteenth century created its Jews. There’s the uneasy, reactionary double-standard in allegedly sympathetic literature: Maria Edgeworth wrote the Jew-happy Harrington after she was criticised for the anti-Semitism of Castle Rackrent; Dickens himself tried to diffuse the impact of Fagin with an unconvincing Jewish philanthropist in Our Mutual Friend. Henry Irving’s production of The Merchant of Venice, today famous for its sympathetic Shylock, may have been equally manipulative: less political protest than a warping of text and audience emotions to command attention. Irving’s private belief about his performance – that ‘mine is the only great Shylock’ – suggests self-investment before genuine sympathy.

There’s also the Victorian popular obsession with crime, which broke out in a trail of forgotten sensation novels. These works memorialise dread criminals reminiscent of Bill Sikes: Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford and Eugene Aram, for instance – or William Ainsworth’s Rookwood and Jack Sheppard (the latter was published in Bentley’s Miscellany at the same time as Oliver Twist). Then there are the works of Poe (the first-person murder narratives) and The String of Pearls, that inaugural eruption of the Sweeney Todd legend, which good-naturedly plagiarises Oliver Twist‘s slew of beadles, bloodshed and persecuted orphans.

I’ll also be looking at the piece through a theatrical lens. There’s Henry Irving in his numerous crime melodramas: The Lyons Mail, The Iron Chest, but particularly The Bells, which in places reads like a transcript of ‘Sikes and Nancy’. But there’s also the exalted precedent of Edmund Kean in such lightning-crack roles as Sir Giles Overreach, Richard III, and – surprise, surprise – Shylock the Jew (the ferocious interpretation that Irving pulled against). Bernard Masters has usefully described such performances as Dionysian – ‘they make one feel the power of trance and hypnosis, that splendid but anxious sensation of being possessed’ – and this attack is indispensable for ‘Sikes and Nancy’.

The idea of touring is very exciting to me. It’s in the spirit of what Dickens did in the nineteenth century. By the end of the tour, I will have performed the reading more often than Dickens himself (Dickens gave his ‘Sikes and Nancy’ for the public on 27 occasions – albeit to audiences of thousands apiece). In what may be another milestone, this will also be the first time that ‘Sikes and Nancy’ has toured since Dickens’ time. None of my ‘Sikes and Nancy’ forbears – the Williamses Bransby and Emlyn, Donald Wolfit, Simon Callow – have taken the piece on tour. And whilst figures such as Dickens’ great great grandson Gerald Dickens continue to perform the Reading, it still hasn’t toured in isolation. (Not even Dickens did this, to be fair – he constantly changed the bill, and always paired ‘Sikes’ with a mood-lightening afterpiece.) So I owe it to this sensational drama to do it as well as it can be done.

As soon as I have details of dates and venues, I’ll post them up here and on my website. Stay vigilant!

Moving on, I’ve been cast in a production of In the Penal Colony at the Arts Theatre, West End. The production is from the short story by Franz Kafka, reframed as an opera by Philip Glass. I primarily know Glass from his revisionist score to Tod Browning’s Dracula – and, like much of Glass’s music, it’s surrounded by controversy. I like Glass’s Dracula score well enough, but I agree with those who claim it plays better in isolation, divorced from the film that provoked it. This may shed light on the development of the Gothic. Browning’s Dracula stands less for the tradition of Stoker (which is disarmingly rationalistic) than that of Walpole and Radcliffe. Theirs is a heavily medieval Gothic, founded on fustian layering: tapestries, cobwebs, shadows, fogs. Layer upon layer upon layer – and all of these elements (crystallised in Bela Lugosi’s heavy, Kabuki-like performance) are present in Browning’s Dracula.

By contrast, In the Penal Colony represents the modern Gothic: a stripping away of layers; the search for the monster beneath the skin. I imagine Glass’s music is ideally suited. This penetrative quality is distilled in the torture device at the centre of Kafka’s story. Which is so unbearably horrible that it rattled even me. It’s a sensation that I only reliably get from H. P. Lovecraft. For Penal Colony, I’ll be reading not only Lovecraft, but as much Kafka as possible. I don’t know his work at all well, and given how often I’m splashing about in the grotesque, that’s quite an omission. (Have I even read The Metamorphosis? Don’t remember. Shameful.)

The Arts Theatre is where Waiting for Godot had its English language premiere; and, much more recently, where Simon Callow performed A Christmas Carol two years running. In the Penal Colony will play a two-night stand during the run of Ghost Stories. I’ve done one-day stands in the West End – my showcase at the Actors’ Church, Sikes & Nancy at the Tristan Bates – so two feels like a minor progress. It’s also worth mentioning that I’ll be acting, not singing.

So scribble down those dates: 16th and 30th June. Two Monday evenings. Be sure to book your tickets soon, via the Arts Theatre website. A sell-out is expected!

Thus, long-windedly, do we reach the third point of interest. It’s the constant Gothic in my life: The York Dungeon. There’s a new show going in – ‘Tyrannical Tudors’ – which opens t0 the public on 4th April.

The Tudor show is a strong one, seizing and extending on a number of the Dungeon’s stocks-in-trade. As expected, there are the atmospheric (and heavily Gothic) sets and lighting – this time recreating St Mary’s Abbey, one of my favourite York landmarks. There’s gag after gag after gag – with some low-tech, pleasingly tactile elements jostling with more advanced tricks of light and sound. There’s also the timeless premise of a faceless monster hunting down the audience. This time, Henry VIII has been recast as the bogeyman. Like our Dick Turpin, we hear rather than see him; and like our William Brown, he can be glimpsed, but only at a remove (stained glass for Henry; Pepper’s Ghost for Brown). For the Easter period, there’s also going to be a disenfranchised monk entertaining the queue. To complete the effect, my comrades and I are being supplied with some monkly padding. Improbable in my case, but eagerly anticipated: it’s as close as I’ll come to playing Falstaff for the foreseeable future.

The Tudor show has been created on the former site of the mouldering dock scene, which formed the entrance to the plague surgery. So that means goodbye to the last bastions of the plague-ravaged street scene – something I fondly remember scarring me in childhood. I and a few other acolytes have salvaged the severed fingers of Clive, the old plague surgery’s notorious ‘jumping man’. This exemplary plaster digit lives on my desk now, a holy relic of a recent past.

The Dungeon’s slow transformation fascinates me. In part, it’s been organic, adapting to suit public demand: thus the transition from a humourless Chamber of Horrors to an immersive horror-themed pantomime. But the Dungeon’s transformation has also been crazy, fitful, uncharted; it’s gathered up the same crinkles and accretions as the histories represented within. The only places in the Dungeon that have stayed the same from my arrival (way back in 2008!) have been the Golden Fleece and courtroom sets, as well as a few spare oddments – the mannequins for Guy Fawkes, for example, or the writing-desk in Dick Turpin’s cell. Like Clive, these bastions of the past will one day be gone. But echoes will remain. If only in finger form.

The Dungeon remains dear to me for so many reasons. It may be the last attenuated gasp of repertory theatre. Where else do you get the chance to act with the same company of actors, sometimes for years on end? Or encounter so many different audiences? Nothing comes close. The Dungeon been (and continues to be) an ideal training ground. And a wonderful surrogate family. For all that, I honour it.

I’m hopeful that this year’s summer – and everything to follow – will be uncomplicatedly great. I’ll be hanging fire on the ol’ blog for at least the next month, to try and batter Henry Irving into shape. I’ll let you know how – and if – it all goes…

Devil Music

I’m ever more convinced that the villain song is the modern equivalent of Victorian melodrama: that wonderful tradition of plays that set a dazzlingly charismatic evil-doer at centre stage. The villain song accomplishes this, if only for a few minutes. A villain song is a set number in a musical (or movie musical) where the villain explains and justifies their wickedness, or puts some wicked scheme into practice, or simply gloats over the joys of being wicked. The opening soliloquy in Richard III – ‘I am determined to prove a villain’ – accomplishes all of the above; were it set to music, it would prove the most comprehensive of villain songs.

But that does little to explain the unexpected complexities that turn up. ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ from, er, The Phantom of the Opera disperses its villain’s aura across an overture, umpteen orchestral reprises, a twisted love duet, and the hysterical cries of chorus girls. The result is, to put it mildly, distancing. In like fashion, villainy is transferred to the crowd for ‘The Mob Song’ in Beauty and the Beast and ‘Savages’ in Pocahontas. As echoes both of James Whale’s Frankenstein, this transference makes sense: angry villagers are the real villains, not the so-called Monster. And a song such as ‘Die unstillbare Gier’ from Tanz der Vampire builds sympathy for the villain out of all proportion to the story’s alleged goodies, completing the monster’s conversion to tragic hero.

‘Hellfire’ from The Hunchback of Notre Dame is also atypical. Judge Claude Frollo is certain that he is ‘a righteous man’, and his song is angst-ridden wail rather than moustache-twirling villainy. Yet I’ve never really doubted that ‘Hellfire’ is the greatest of all villain songs. It stills floods me with deranged elation. I can’t conceive of a time before ‘Hellfire’ entered my brain; like most of the highlights of childhood (or a Lovecraftian Elder God), it feels as though it always existed.

I can try to deconstruct ‘Hellfire’, but it’s a very tall order. So many elements make it ignite. At the centre, there’s the acting: the Shakespearean villainy of Tony Jay. In my estimation, Jay possessed the greatest voice of all time: a tight-coiled spring, crackling with dark, sepulchral majesty. It’s about the only voice that could make ‘the common, vulgar, weak, licentious crowd’ ring true (Frollo surely has the most literate vocabulary of any Disney villain: ‘Why invite their calumny and consternation?’ is another favourite). That Alan Menken raised the pitch of ‘Hellfire’ to make it a slight strain on Jay’s voice may account for the performance’s tattered emotion.

It’s vindicating to know that Frollo was Tony Jay’s salvation from a lifetime of junky (if fun) roles in Western animation. As he said at the time: ‘It’s my bid for immortality.’ Jay also had some outspoken views on the Hunchback, as this rare interview makes clear:

It’s a marvellous movie, you know … Disney pushed the envelope there, in an evolutionary sense. They took it a little farther than they normally do, and a lot of people stayed away because of that. There were things they couldn’t understand, but it wouldn’t maim them for life … It only made $102 million. By Disney standards, that is disappointing. It was not as much as Pocahontas made, but it was ten times the film Pocahontas was.

Jay’s voice completes the remarkable character design of Frollo, derived in part from the formalised paintings of van Eyck: the incredibly complex head (Frollo has to be the hardest Disney character to draw; his face has the emaciated complication of Peter Cushing circa Twins of Evil), the black-and-purple robes ever-swirling (a classic Disney colour combination, imported from Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty), the spindly legs. It’s wonderful, perfect. All credit to supervising animator Kathy Zielinski, a more powerful actor than the vast majority of actors. I can hang up my performing shoes in peace once I’ve achieved anything as incendiary as Frollo.

On top of that, there’s the sound design. The roaring fire and the howling winds; the Latin chanting; the full-blooded organ-heavy orchestrations. And the art direction is glorious. We are privy to nightmare figures: a disarmingly sensual Esmeralda (reanimated by a worried studio, to make clear she’s wearing at least some clothing), a choir of red-robed monks. It’s also profoundly disorienting, with stone walls shifting – in seemingly every other shot – into a cycloramic expressionist void. The climax of the song is especially powerful. What’s casting these trailing shadows? The red-robed monks again? Knight paladins? Crusaders? Figures plucked from burial tombs – or Notre Dame herself? It’s never explained (how could it be?), and more unsettling for it. There are select moments where Disney enters onto the sublime – tracts in Fantasia, the evocation of St Paul’s in Mary Poppins – and this is certainly one of them.

There are so many other gems in ‘Hellfire’. There’s fact that the Latin comes from the Confiteor (the ‘mea culpa’ refrain also opens Judge Turpin’s ‘Johanna’ in Sweeney Todd, a likely source for ‘Hellfire’). There’s the way the song’s full perversity only insinuates itself when children turn adult, having lost their primary innocence, and entered, in a sense, into the Frollo way of life. But most thrilling of all? The fact that ‘Hellfire’ is a minor-key reprise of the Hunchback‘s title song, ‘The Bells of Notre Dame’. For me, that locates it at the dark heart of the melodrama. For all of its wisecracking gargoyles – an ill-conceived effort to wrest stone monsters into inoffensive play – it’s the purely Gothic that dwells at the film’s core.

I remain adamant that The Hunchback of Notre Dame was the last glorious laugh of the Disney Renaissance. The next year’s Hercules is tremendous fun, but a few steps down in my reckoning. I think largely because it no longer takes its villain seriously (or provides him a song, a trend that continued in Mulan and Tarzan). A good melodrama needs something to pull against.

Really, it needs the Devil.

It strikes me that ‘Hellfire’ has an exalted precedent – in the Brocken scene of Henry Irving’s 1885 Faust. The Brocken scene was a shameless and spectacular reimagining of the Witches’ Sabbath found in Goethe’s original Faust (Irving’s play was the work of Lyceum stalwart W.G. Wills). The scale was breath-taking, reckless, prodigal: the Brocken’s inaugural stagings boasted up to 500 supernumeraries clad as goblins, imps, witches, sprites, and associated nasties. As Michael Booth wrote in his Victorian Spectacular Theatre: ‘The Brocken scene was one of the grand spectacles of nineteenth-century theatre, and probably the most extraordinary scene of its kind ever performed on the English stage.’

There are numerous echoes of the Brocken in ‘Hellfire’. There’s the use of infernal choirs and music (Faust had a pit orchestra of between 35 and 37 – less theatre than grand opera); the vision of a maiden through the chaos (Ellen Terry’s Margaret); most importantly, the all-pervading fire, produced by a rain of gold tinsel, sparks of electricity and red-tinted gaslight. And then there’s the dominating figure at the centre: in this case, Irving’s red-clad Mephistopheles, who controls and manipulates the fire. The best compliment I can pay ‘Hellfire’ is that Sir Henry would have approved of it. And possibly even have thought it indecent. Incidentally, Irving would have made a fascinating Frollo. His most renowned performances (particularly Mathias in The Bells) were centred on a soul-destroying guilt. One of Irving’s greatest roles was as Louis XI, who Victor Hugo makes into a comically black villain in Notre Dame de Paris.

There’s a long-standing nonsense put about that W. G. Wills’ version of Faust was astonishingly bad. I took it upon myself to read it in the British Library and it’s a good deal better than its detractors give it credit for. Its verse is rough-hewn, yes, but always robust, pitched somewhere between John Webster and Dr Seuss. In the Brocken scene, Wills’ raucous verse aspires to music:

What a crowding, pushing, squealing!
What a roaring, grinning, screaming!
Whirl! leap and chatter! shine and spirt!
Give us the true witch element!

Wills also seems to gather inspiration from his contemporary, W. S. Gilbert – whose ghost-suffused Ruddigore might be another contribution to this Witches’ Sabbath on stage. Faust may not be high art, but it is very far from bad – and (returning to ‘Hellfire’) I think that Stephen Schwartz’s lyrics are often underrated in this respect. As with any good lyric, the words are completed by the music – and, more than that, the event. It’s as Irving’s Mephistopheles closed the Brocken: ‘Now music wild, hellish, infernal, and then mad!’

The theological origins of the Witches’ Sabbath are fairly murky. The Sabbath creeps into fiction with the likes of Lewis’s The Monk and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, in which dubious Catholic officials persecute their ‘witches’ in the dungeons of the Inquisition (not so far removed from Frollo’s treatment of Esmeralda). The Sabbath found a still-unrivalled realistic depiction in the silent cinema, with a vivid sequence in Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 Haxan. It’s a film that demands to be seen, matching (and exceeding) The Exorcist in giving a sense of real evil forces. In a curious twist, it was Disney itself that created the twentieth century’s most enduring Witches’ Sabbath, via the ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ sequence in Fantasia. Here, again, are the elements that make ‘Hellfire’ so bewitching: pervasive flame, undefinable demons, and a glorious musical accompaniment. It’s also, ironically, a villain song without words. The dreadful fellow looming from the mountaintop, Chernabog, speaks nary a word, yet remains the studio’s purest evocation of evil. The dark side of Disney should (and possibly does) have a book devoted to it. It’s the aspect of their imagination that’s stayed with me.

These elements fall into yet sharper focus in later villain songs, in which witchcraft becomes explicit. Take, for example, ‘In the Dark of the Night’ from Don Bluth’s Anastasia – the honorary Disney villain song (from the film everyone assumes was made by Disney). Anastasia is a campy and diverting mess of a movie, worlds removed from Bluth’s The Secret of NIMH: punch-drunk Broadway spectacle rather than considered chamber piece. Its villain might be its most successful aspect. Rasputin is an interesting proposition: a decaying litch (‘a corpse falling to bits!’) in a children’s film. And this a good few years before Voldemort started growing his body back. Happily, Rasputin ensures that voiceover king Jim Cummings gets his day in the sun; he’s the actor who filled in (uncredited) for Jeremy Irons in the last verse of ‘Be Prepared’ in The Lion King. Then there’s ‘Friends on the Other Side’ from Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, sung by ‘Shadow Man’ sorcerer Dr Facilier. It’s something of a masterpiece, particularly come the frenzied climax, suffused in ghost-train pinks and greens. The music blooms into a variation on Raymond Scott’s ‘Powerhouse’ – the insistent ‘bohm-bohm-bohm-bohm’ from the Voodoo masks seems a direct channeling – helped along immeasurably by Keith David’s vocal pyrotechnics, alternately cavernous and oozing.

It’s interesting too that most villain songs find a way to get the Devil in. We need look no further than the offbeat selections of the second paragraph. ‘Die unstillbare Gier’ turns positively Miltonic with the line: ‘I want to be an Angel or the Devil himself…’ ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ doesn’t mention the Devil – but the Phantom casts himself in that mould later on: ‘this loathsome gargoyle / Who burns in hell…’ (quite a falling-off from the Angel of Music). The imagery of ‘The Mob Song’ derives from the baby-eating antics of the Witches’ Sabbath: ‘Set to sacrifice our children to his monstrous appetite’ wouldn’t look out of place on a Haxan intertitle. Meanwhile, ‘Savages’ hits satanic saturation point: ‘their skins are hellish red’, ‘dirty shrieking devils’, ‘the paleface is a demon’ and (most bombastic of all) ‘Demon! Devil! Kill them!’

‘Hellfire’ is a particularly strong villain song in light of the above. It converts Frollo into a surrogate wizard – like a Rasputin or a Dr Facilier, he manipulates the forces of darkness even as they engulf him. The idea that the self-deluding Frollo is in unconscious league with the Devil is compelling in light of Victor Hugo’s novel, in which the citizens of Paris suspect Frollo of sorcery: ‘From the cloister, his reputation as a learned man had passed to the people, among whom it had changed a little, a frequent occurrence at that time, into reputation as a sorcerer.’ Although Disney – toiling as they do in religion-happy America – chose to downgrade Frollo’s official standing from archdeacon to justice (the same change that shaped the 1939 film), there remains that confrontation with religion. Not with the church institution, as such, but the underlying idea of religion – it’s the very notion of good that comes under siege.

Perhaps the true greatness of the villain song is in troubling the divisions between good and evil. In ‘Hellfire’, religion and devilry play out in symbiosis – yes, the Devil may attack the Church; but then, the Church might create a Devil and deploy it as a weapon. It’s these shifting relations that make this Devil Music so thrilling to listen to. One of the finest lines in ‘Hellfire’ goes: ‘He made the Devil so much stronger than a man…’ But thanks to the infernal mechanics of the villain song, this remains a debateable proposition.

Living in Film (2011-13)

A continuation from last time. For 2008-10, as well as the rationale behind these film lists, kindly click this link.

2011

1. The Elephant Man (dir. David Lynch, 1980)
2. The Blood on Satan’s Claw (dir. Piers Haggard, 1971)
3. Suddenly, Last Summer (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959)
4. Scarface (dir. Howard Hawks, Richard Rosson, 1932)
5. The King’s Speech (dir. Tom Hooper, 2010)
6. The Leopard Man (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1943)
7. Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1998)
8. Now, Voyager (dir. Irving Rapper, 1942)
9. Stranger on the Third Floor (dir. Boris Ingster, 1942)
10. The Dresser (dir. Peter Yates, 1983)

Four entries on this list exemplify a running theme: legitimate cinema fighting horror. Stranger on the Third Floor is a realistic (if noirish) drama, yet with a courtroom dream sequence worthy of The Bells; similarly, Scarface places Boris Karloff, fantastical horror personified, in the middle of Chicago mob-land. Suddenly, Last Summer boasts the legitimising presence of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, thus glossing over its Bacchic stew of depraved sexualities and orgiastic cannibalism. (It’s worth noting that playwright Tennessee Williams has since acquired a patina of respectability – one that certainly didn’t exist in censor-happy 1959.) The Elephant Man consolidates these clashes of style, veering between weepy sentimentality and dark carnival histrionics that outdo Tod Browning. This schizophrenia resounds in the gulf between John Gielgud’s saintly Carr Gomm and Freddie Jones’ dyspeptic Bytes. It’s a character coupling worthy of Dickens: they seem not to belong in the same universe. I find it satisfying to see these semi-horrors alongside unabashed (and relatively obscure) horrors. I will stand up any day and defend The Blood on Satan’s Claw, in all its supernatural, folky absurdity, over the better known Witchfinder General (1968; rarely has Vincent Price appeared more ill at ease). Likewise, The Leopard Man is a good deal better than some of the more critically lauded Lewton pictures, particularly The Seventh Victim (1943; so obtuse it ceases to engage).

There’s a high concentration of British films on this list, including two Geoffrey Rush starrers: Shakespeare in Love and The King’s Speech (a dull choice, I know; I’ll chalk it up to the delight of the cinema experience). Rush is Australian (nothing wrong with that), but the other Brit flicks are made for me by their homegrown theatrical talents: The Dresser has Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney, both playing wonderfully dangerously; Shakespeare in Love is worthwhile for the chance to see theatrical Geminis Simon Callow and Antony Sher in the same film. My old favourite Bette Davis has sunk below the water-line on other lists, so it’s particularly satisfying to see Now, Voyager here. These previous films were also fighting in more competitive years: for example, Davis’s Dark Victory (1939), Old Acquaintance (1943) and Mr. Skeffington (1944) all made it into the top twenty – but not the top ten – for 2009. (The pattern struck with a vengeance in 2013, with The Old Maid (1939), The Letter (1940), In This Our Life (1942) and Deception (1946) all making the top twenty.) Historically, America’s greatest actors have been women rather than men; another of these sacred monsters, Gladys Cooper, makes a fine villainess in Now, Voyager.

2012

1. The Lady Vanishes (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)
2. Les Triplettes de Belleville (dir. Sylvain Chomet, 2003)
3. Three Cases of Murder (dir. David Eady, George More O’Ferrall, Wendy Toye, Orson Welles, 1955)
4. House of Whipcord (dir. Pete Waler, 1974)
5. The Uninvited (dir. Lewis Allen, 1944)
6. Hamlet (dir. Laurence Olivier, 1948)
7. Fanatic (dir. Silvio Narizzano, 1965)
8. The Clairvoyant (dir. Maurice Elvey, 1935)
9. Death Line (dir. Gary Sherman, 1973)
10. They Knew What They Wanted (dir. Garson Kanin, 1940)

2012 seems to be a year that gestures to other films I like – and sometimes much better than the ones on the list! The Lady Vanishes ensures that a Hitchcock has at last come out top, though I’m not sure I admire it as much as some that featured lower down in previous years (The 39 Steps and Vertigo in particular). Three Cases of Murder stands for the portmanteau film, a British horror institution that runs from 1945’s Dead of Night (featuring Charters and Caldicott of The Lady Vanishes!) to Amicus, whose best efforts are probably Tales from the Crypt (1972) and From Beyond the Grave (1974). Fanatic represents the psycho woman subgenre: triumphantly started by Bette Davis’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and thereafter propped up by a series of fading dames (in this case, Tallulah Bankhead, pleasingly unsettling). And The Uninvited and Hamlet stand for the ghost film. The Uninvited is compelling and at times poetic but lacks the cast-iron conviction of The Innocents (1961; a film I seem to be watching almost every month lately); even its (very good) apparitions can’t compete with the unexpected scariness of the Ghost in Olivier’s Hamlet (a film worthy but somewhat dull in other respects – Peter Cushing’s peacock Osric excepted). The titles above are a superb illustration of how diversely cinema attacks the Gothic. Horizons stretch further than monochrome monster movies.

2012 also contains a number of films that are made gripping by their actors. Claude Rains raises The Clairvoyant to the status of forgotten classic, whilst Charles Laughton makes his improbable casting (a rotund, almost offensively Italian grape farmer) in They Knew What They Wanted almost cosmically heart-breaking. I’m still at a loss to explain how Laughton does it. Lesser lights also shine brightly: Sheila Keith (chillingly androgynous) startlingly prefigures Roald Dahl’s Miss Trunchbull in House of Whipcord; Donald Pleasence brightens the sewer-rat aesthetics of Death Line with an off-kilter slew of very British tea-rejections. It’s appropriate that these acting highlights are rounded off by Les Triplettes de Belleville – an animation inventive, attenuated and bottomlessly grotesque. The grotesque is that primordial ooze from which my own acting gremlins hobble (go on, have a click), and animation one of the arts that started me on the journey (that one too).

2013

1. It’s a Wonderful Life (dir. Frank Capra, 1946)
2. This Land Is Mine (dir. Jean Renoir, 1943)
3. Portrait of Jennie (dir. William Dieterle, 1947)
4. Up (dir. Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, 2009)
5. Cash on Demand (dir. Quentin Lawrence, 1962)
6. Never Take Sweets from a Stranger (dir. Cyril Frankel, 1960)
7. Gladiator (dir. Ridley Scott, 2000)
8. All This, and Heaven Too (dir. Anatole Litvak, 1940)
9. Witness for the Prosecution (dir. Billy Wilder, 1957)
10. The Penalty (dir. Wallace Worsley, 1920)

This list reminds me how much the forties appeal to me for film. What was it about the ambience of that decade? Scrutinising the four entries here, it strikes me as a time when Hollywood turned to making hopeful stories, human interest stories; love stories, I suppose – and yet always interestingly overshadowed. By World War most obviously, the First of which figures in It’s a Wonderful Life, the Second in the almost unbearably moving This Land Is Mine. Although the spirit of War creeps into subjects where it’s not explicitly mentioned: I’ve heard The Wolf Man (1941) discussed in this light (come to think of it, I argued the case in my Tragedy paper at Cambridge); it certainly holds for the more fragile and melancholy Portrait of Jennie. There’s a more sensual punch too: the studio system in full, seductive swing. The glossiness of this era’s black and white film stock is something I increasingly relish. It’s also to do with the orchestral music, the impossibly deep sets and the star power: three elements which make All This, and Heaven Too so beguiling (partly because so little known), a near-perfect melding of Gone with the Wind (1939) and Rebecca (1940). I wrote on Portrait of Jennie in this earlier blog post. It might be my favourite of director William Dieterle’s unofficial Gothic trinity, the previous entries in which are also exquisite: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and All That Money Can Buy (1940). I also wrote on The Penalty in that entry, so I won’t bother harping on about it here. But it is fantastically good.

Also on the list are two low-key thrillers from Hammer Films, whose outer limits I’m delving into more and more. Cash on Demand is a remarkably tense update of A Christmas Carol (and a cynical British antidote to the forgivable schmaltz of It’s a Wonderful Life), with Peter Cushing and Andre Morrell delivering razor-sharp, Pinter-style performances (I want to see them in No Man’s Land now). Never Take Sweets from a Stranger is a horrifying drama (but not really a horror) centred on paedophilia; Hammer’s version of M, perhaps. It boasts a transformed Felix Aylmer, worlds away from the doddering old man schtick that enlivened Olivier’s Hamlet and Kenneth Williams’ repertoire of talk-show impressions. Witness for the Prosecution adds a third black and white British-made thriller to the list: like This Land Is Mine, it’s made by Charles Laughton. There are also two relatively modern films on the list. Up was another blessed reminder that I really love animation. All the same, I think Pixar’s grown into itself: I remember finding Toy Story (1995) visually ugly and astoundingly charmless as a child. Gladiator was just plain good. If modern film serves a purpose for me, it’s fitting that it’s in giving utter believability to the past.

Living in Film (2008-10)

Last week, I saw Citizen Kane for the first time. Predictably, I loved it. But this milestone did get me to thinking: Why did I love it? And why was that predictable?

Film-watching, like book-reading, is one of the supreme joys of my life. Like any great love affair, it works the miracle of taking me out of myself. And yet it makes me more fully myself than I’m likely to understand. Over my (not quite) twenty-three years, I’ve spent countless hours taking in many hundreds of films. ‘Taking in’ is one of those pleasingly old-timey picture-going expressions. But in this context, it makes a lot of sense. Film after film has slipped its spool and entered my brain via four discreet head-holes: two at the sides, two out front. What all that light and sound and noise and bustle has been doing in there since is a bit of a mystery. Certainly, I have an eerily good memory for the minutiae of film. There are particular films that I can hum, almost from start to finish. Memory, lightly exercised, brings up title cards, stock footage, musical cues, and (most sinister to me) the vocal inflections of actors – many of them long since dead, yet alive in my brain as ghosts. Perhaps these ghosts have shaped me somewhat.

Then again, the process might be less romantic: that I’ve just shaped which films have gotten to me. This year, the BAFTAs have rolled by and, as usual, I’ve seen only one or two of the nominated films. Simply put, they didn’t interest me that much. This isn’t some pose designed to impress – because, Lord knows, I’m a merciless populist in my film-watching habits. It’s more than I’m an antiquarian by nature. There are only two films in the ether that I’m hoping to see: Saving Mr Banks and The Invisible Woman. Despite being newly made, both are history in motion, a kind of living cultural criticism: biopics covering Disney and Dickens both. Even when I engage with the present, it seems to take me further into the past.

I do at times feel like an archivist of my own life: a shuffling, bespectacled librarian, armed with filing cabinets stuffed with useless papers. I’m a compulsive list-maker. I’ve kept lists of every film I’ve watched since the mid-2000s, chronologically ordered by month. This is a very particular obsession. It’s not as though I’ve ever attempted this with books or plays. I suppose it’s the collector’s instinct: the idea of films as tangible commodities; artefacts to be studied and analysed. This can surface reductively: star ratings seem to have begun with film criticism, and they’re a canker that keeps on spreading. And yet, despite Dogberry’s advice to the contrary (‘comparisons are odious’), there’s much to be learned from asking yourself why you value one film over another. To that end, I marshalled these films into the orders in which I enjoyed them.

Looking over the three lists below (spanning 2008 to 2010), I discern a series of patterns that confirm where my interests lie. A few of them take me back to Citizen Kane. It’s often to do with the words: A Man for All Seasons, adapted from Robert Bolt’s most literate of stage plays, tops one list; All About Eve – written, like Kane, by screenwriting genius Herman J. Mankiewicz – tops another. In contrast, many of my favourites are determined by a stunning visual aesthetic, thus the high-ranking presence of silent films (and the all but silent M, which tops the third list). I like films that make me feel some strong emotion – many, I suppose, are modern melodramas (women’s pictures, as they were once derisively termed). Whether they make me want to weep or cheer is besides the point: some confirmation that I’m not utterly hardened is always welcome. I also like a film that shocks me – although that hardening means it takes a lot to really shock me.

Then there are the dark and sheltered and moody films. I refer, of course, to the Gothics (a tradition I’ve elsewhere toyed with calling ‘Fantasy Noir’). Citizen Kane is a Gothic in certain lights. Xanadu dissolves neatly into Dracula’s castle; the presence of Gregg Toland, master cinematographer on Peter Lorre’s Mad Love, completes the transformation. (It’s worth pointing out that Welles’ Macbeth was purposefully shot in the style of Bride of Frankenstein.) Almost inevitably, Gothic cinema trickles into the more formulaic niche of genre cinema. This came back to me early on in Kane, in the scene with his mother. Instead of thinking ‘Why, what a fine performance from Agnes Moorehead’ (and it is) my first instinct was to think ‘Why, it’s the campy mystery writer from The Bat with Vincent Price! Perhaps she’ll harp on about the cat dropping its dentures!’

Above all (and believe me, this is as close to a summation as we will ever likely get), I go for cinema that fuses art and populism. After all, there should be no distinction. Yes, Citizen Kane can be seen as art – but it’s so often quoted in The Simpsons that there’s another side to the coin. High Art and Cornball Americana go hand in hand: the Charlie Kane song (‘There is a man, / A certain man…’) was introduced to me as a song about Mr Burns (‘To friends he’s known as Monty, / But to you it’s Mr Burns!’). Along the same lines, I was impressed to hear Christopher Frayling say the following (in a jolly good edition of Desert Island Discs). It’s tricky to transcribe the bubblings of free-form conversation, but these thoughts largely correspond with my views on film:

I think there’s a cultural snobbery. Everyone erects hierarchies, particularly in this country – that we’re interested in literary rather than visual things … My view is there’s good movies and there’s bad movies, just like there’s good poetry and bad poetry … Culture is a very, very broad church, and nothing’s to be gained from erecting artificial hierarchies … I think you can do a PhD about anything: it’s a matter of approach, seriousness, vocabulary, concept … There’s nothing intrinsically trivial about any subject matter.

My hierarchies only have meaning where I’m concerned – beyond me, they’re curios only. I’m reminded also of a saying from film historian Bill Warren: ‘You can only see a film for the first time once.’ I look back on these lists and envy myself for getting to see these wonderful films for the first time. But the journey continues, and I keep being surprised at what gold turns up.

Let’s dig into the lists then! I’ll provide a bit of commentary, but also try to quell my logorrhea to let them speak for themselves.

2008

1. M (dir. Fritz Lang, 1931)
2. Metropolis (dir. Fritz Lang, 1927)
3. The Grapes of Wrath (dir. John Ford, 1940)
4. Haxan (dir. Benjamin Christensen, 1922)
5. Sunset Blvd. (dir. Billy Wilder, 1955)
6. The Birds (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)
7. Rear Window (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)
8. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (dir. Tim Burton, 2008)
9. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (dir. Don Siegel, 1956)
10. Bonnie and Clyde (dir. Arthur Penn, 1967)

M kicks off a distinctive trend of ‘on the run’ movies: narratives that follow social outcasts in their struggle to escape some life-suppressing, anti-human force. Cue sweeping landscape shots, suspenseful chase scenes and plucky heroism against the odds (and often against pre-existing moral imperatives). Although Peter Lorre is the nominal villain of M (paedophile serial killers generally are), the film’s final sequence displaces all terror onto the mob. Following suit, Bonnie and Clyde pits charismatic criminals against largely faceless lawmen; Invasion of the Body Snatchers takes facelessness to the next level. Of the two Hitchcocks, The Birds also fits the pattern, but Rear Window cleverly inverts it: the criminal is divorced from the viewer’s vantage point, which remains anchored throughout.

The Grapes of Wrath is another ‘on the run’ tale. I was then in the midst of my Steinbeck phase, going through the major novels as well as the minor fiction. I’m guessing this was tangential preparation for the interview at Cambridge – nonsensical, really, given that American literature wasn’t much on the agenda. More purely, I’ll have watched it for John Carradine, who I knew and liked from Bluebeard (less so from his under-cooked Dracula). I’m surprised at how much I enjoyed Sweeney Todd. When I was writing my dissertation on the Demon Barber, I couldn’t stand more than half an hour of the desaturated, cheerless film. I suppose it came down to the simple pleasure of seeing and liking something at the cinema with everybody else; being able to enter the happy throng for a change and say ‘me too!’ (I’ve since seen Metropolis in the cinema, and that was an outstanding event.) The two other Gothics on the list – Haxan and Sunset Blvd. – are more unexpected, durable, exciting.

2009

1. All About Eve (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)
2. North by Northwest (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)
3. Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
4. The 39 Steps (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)
5. Les Yeux Sans Visage (dir. Georges Franju, 1960)
6. Scum (dir. Alan Clarke, 1979)
7. The Wicker Man (dir. Robin Hardy, 1973)
8. Amadeus (dir. Milos Forman, 1984)
9. Les Miserables (dir. Richard Boleslawski, 1935)
10. All That Money Can Buy (dir. William Dieterle, 1940)

The films of 2009 are often tied to academic milestones. I was watching Les Yeux Sans Visage when I received the phone call telling me I’d got into Cambridge; equally, I remember watching Amadeus when I was smarting at home after my first term there. And The Wicker Man was seen on one of those joyous, sun-spoiled May afternoons when you knew you’d done all your work (less of that nowadays). Scum is a harrowing refugee from the classroom of A-level Film Studies – allegedly the kind of course that should have disqualified me from a decent university. How appropriate then that the film is an indictment of the British education system. I later discovered I was the highest achieving Film Studies pupil in the country, which should have been a vindication, but I think only confirmed the limitations of the exam system (words like ‘non-diegetic’ still bring the bile to the back of my throat).

Looking back, I’d probably raise All That Money Can Buy a little higher (its Dickensian tale of soul-selling rewards repeat viewings; was instrumental, indeed, in redeveloping Scrooge & Marley) – and certainly drop North by Northwest beneath Vertigo and The 39 Steps. I probably rated North by Northwest so highly as another of these ‘on the run’ adventures I go so dotty about – but I think now that The 39 Steps does this much better. (Les Miserables is another such tale – and one I need to rewatch, now I’m obsessed with Charles Laughton.) All About Eve is untouchable; the perfect film – and as happy a combination of art and populism as I can well imagine.

2010

1. A Man for All Seasons (dir. Fred Zinnemann, 1966)
2. Laura (dir. Otto Preminger, 1944)
3. Saboteur (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1942)
4. Touch of Evil (dir. Orson Welles, 1958)
5. The Queen of Spades (dir. Thorold Dickinson, 1949)
6. The Trials of Oscar Wilde (dir. Ken Hughes, 1960)
7. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1947)
8. The Woman in the Window (dir. Fritz Lang, 1944)
9. The Fly (dir. David Cronenberg, 1986)
10. Rope (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1948)

A Man for All Seasons is a film that I was genetically hard-wired to adore – my grandma’s all-time favourite. Seeing the stage play at York Theatre Royal in 2008 (starring my all-time hero of everything ever, the great David Leonard) was a formative experience. It’s just as well I got round to the film. It represents almost everything I can’t do in theatre (as exemplified by the godly Paul Scofield), but, perhaps for that reason, I love it very dearly. The Trials of Oscar Wilde I find a good deal better than Stephen Fry’s Wilde (which I did like a fair bit). There’s a profound charge from having an Oscar as unrelentingly butch as Peter Finch. Lionel Jeffries’ Marquess of Queensberry is about the most thoroughly hateful villain in any film I can recall – like Freddie Jones, he comes just the right side of over-the-top. And the date of the film, 1960, guarantees a reticence that makes the danger quite electrifying.

Wilde has long stirred mixed emotions in me: this also goes for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (a woman’s picture if ever there was one) and The Fly (Beauty and the Beast shot through with razor blades). Saboteur did surprisingly well for a second-tier Hitchcock (an ‘on the run’ plot again – which I believe goes for The Woman in the Window too), beating off critical favourite Rope (although a lot of minor Hitches came lower down on the 2010 list: Stage Fright, I Confess, The Wrong Man, the execrable Family Plot). However, I have a profound buried crush on Robert Cummings – one that’s only just come back to me – so that may well account for it. Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil troubles me somewhat. I clearly liked it, but, at the same time, I can remember almost nothing about it. 2010 was a busy year, though, and I find much the same applying to Laura and The Queen of Spades by this point (I remember their outstanding gay aesthetes, Clifton Webb and Anton Walbrook, but precious little else). I hope this won’t happen with Citizen Kane.

A follow-up entry, covering 2011 to 2013, will no doubt follow soon. Lucky, lucky you.