Dominic Dromgole ‘Stratfordian and wonderful man of theatre’ is my next ammendment to this blog featuring a great teacher I have recently encountered, Elspeth Owen, Greenham Common pioneer and artist with a wicked sense of humour and: http://nickwardscenarios.wordpress.com/2009/12/26/blue-moon-on-new-years-eve/
this kind of stuff really freaks Dom out. It’s cowpat time, Dromgoole.
Added Saturday 6 Feb.
One of the standout paragraphs in Dom’s lively and humane ‘Will & Me’ (Penguin 2006) is when Dom and his great mate Quentin Seddon have woken up after a kip within the magic, sacred, Rollright Stones Circle and it sums up both what is adorable about Dom and what is most dumfoundingly anti-mystical about him. First here’s Dom’s description of the circle, underwhelmed and accurate:
‘We find them behind a hedge. We are a little underwhelmed. They are a low-key Stonehenge, an almost perfect circle of three-foot-high, weather bashed and beaten prehistoric stones. The diameter of the circle is about a hundred feet – exactly the same as the Globe, by a strange coincidence.’
It’s no coincidence, Dom! Here’s one I did earlier (and not as a result of reading Dromgoole!):
The Theatre of the Future and ‘Stonehenge (2008)’
(2008)
When knackered Dom wakes up: ‘I purloin some rods’ (from chaotic diviners) ‘and set out across the middle. At regular intervals, every three paces, the wire rod twangs violently in one directions and then another. Gratified, I cross back, and they twang with perfect symmetry in the opposite direction. Brought up near Glastonbury, and over-burdened with ley-line, hippy-dippy mythology as I had been, I had always successfully rejected the idea of earth forces. The crude instruments in my hand contradicts me. Quentin gives me a long ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in you philosophy’ look, and we move on.’
Bravo Quentin! I wonder what Dom thinks used to happen inside these stones. Who presided and with what invocations, riddles and ritual (sacrifice)? To what purpose?
Why were the earliest London theatres (or story-telling circles, what you will) located near wells and places of exceptional earth power?
Why do Churches make, arguably, the best provisional theatres? Check out the ancient chapel in Ely Place, London, and imagine a production of Macbeth in there. If you dare having read up about the human-sacrificial purpose this (originally) pre-Christian chapel used to entertain.
That’s not speculation. No crosses in there, Dom, (originally) just a profoundly spooky atmosphere. oooooohhhhh!
If a theatre-maker were to come to Dom with a ’show’ which delves into this stuff would he get all ironic and sceptical or would he remember the twanging rod?
Here’s an Anglo Saxon Riddle (Number 85, p 82; The Earliest English Poems, Penguin Classics 1996), written many thousands of years after the construction of the Rollright Stones but about the earliest written-down record we have of some kind of spectator-event.
Many were met, men of discretion
wisdom and wit, when in there walked…
Two ears it had, and one eye solo,
two feet and twelve hundred heads,
back, belly, a brace of hands
a pair of sides and shoulders and arms
and one neck. Name, please.
(Michael Alexander’s translation)
Don’t worry, Dom, its one of the unsolved riddles. When I read it I see the 1,200 heads becoming one in the presence of a story-teller. The playwright-performer with as many heads as there are spectators. Something like that. No subject. No object. The unifying force of the theatre remembered?
And just to prove that Anglo Saxon Riddlers could out-do Samuel Beckett and Peter Brook, here’s number 75 from the same sequence:
I saw a woman sit alone.
Dom writes wonderfully throughout on Shakespeare’s resistance to concept-heavy interpretation (academic or directorial), most tellingly on King Lear (as an ‘exploded play) and on Macbeth Dom’s writing-hand seems to tremble with the very same childlike fear this blast of occult lore and infinite ‘word-drunkeness’ (F R Leavis) insitils.
‘Sunburst’ (2008)
I was less impressed with Dom’s wrong-headed ‘go’ at Queen Elizabeth 2 when she commented early in her reign that it was hard to believe the filthy Thames was the magical river of dreams it had been for Liza. It was declared a dead river in the early 1960s and I believe the Queen’s comment may have helped bring about one of the greatest environmental turnarounds ever, anywhere in the world. Why is it so fashionable to knock the Queen in subsidised theatre circles?
I’ll come back to this subject. I’m in Cambridge City Library right now and I’m about to be timed-out on the computer. Hence forgive uncorrected text. This blog could grow into something – perhaps I’ve found a home to put into words my experience of clearing a theatre circle for my Master in 1997 which led to one of the most unforgettable nights of my life. Two fires either side and four tribes together dancing and singing (story) to the sound of three digeridoos and clapping sticks which created such a volume of sound and such a sight that cars were stopping on the Great Northern Highway. ‘Can you see the bird?’
Old man Old man with a message for you
There’s a bird if you look in the sound of the digeridoo.
Oh, Dom – why do you have this effect on me? Wanting to tell you things I’ve told no-one else. Perhaps its because directing The Present at the Bush was my London highlight – and you saved the play after it had been rejected by the Court.
Read Stowe for more on the great story-telling marathons around the London Wells – the true source of the histories (apart from Hollinshed, of course).
me sculling (2009)
Must dash… — love you Dom you beery and caky old cunt… wish I’d been there to row you down the river. The ’short-cut’ through Staines was a cuntishly dumb-arsed thing to do rather than follow the magestic sweeps of Silver Thames.
Added Monday 8 Feb:
Woke up this morning with the absolute conviction that I was back in my childhood bedroom in the attic of the Queen’s Hall, Ely. I just lay there and tried to work out why. I must have been transported by sticking-dreams brought on by yesterday’s blog, which I leave uncorrected.
NOTES
‘Notes’ – how academic of me! (On the day of The Guardian’s front page story about arch-philistine New labour war-maker Peter Mandelson’s 5% cut in Government funding to Higher Education. Not such a bad idea you might think if they were to target the ghastlystrators (a coinage meaning ghastly university administrators caused by the very annoying ‘over-ride’ facility which I have no idea how to de-activate) but they won’t, they’ll target the kinds of departments like Anglo-Saxon where brilliant accademics like Michael Alexander used to do their work.)
Here is Alexander quoted from his introduction to The Earliest English Poems. ‘At the opening of a conference on the medieval and renaissance literature of Scotland held in 1981 at the University of Stirling the news was received that the Conservative government, led by a former Minister of Education, had cut the grant to universities by one tenth. Stirling had to cut its intake by a quatrer’.
He cannot bear to speak her name. I remember very clearly (1981) receiving in my Corpus Christi College (Cambridge) pidgeon-hole a memo (distributed by College!) claiming that we were to have our grants turned into loans and how did we feel about that? When we Freshmen bemusedly asked the Senior Tutor’s Office what the hell this was all about we were told it was just a prank. I would like to check this with Corpus as it seemed such a strange and unfunny joke. Was extreme right-wing Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, willingly pushing the thatcherite cause of grant-cutting? Another question for Stuart Laing, the current Master. A career Classicist. Diplomat. Embattled man of Peace, by his own admission. Kick out the middle-men, Stuart – invest in the eccentrics – swim upstream. Kick ass!
Letter to Stuart Laing, Master, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
The Ruin
Well-wrougt this wall – Wieards (origin of my English surname, Weard: Ward = ‘protector’; ‘Druidical clan leader’, I’m very proud to say)broke it. The stonghold burst…Snapped roof trees, towers fallen, the work of Giants (Romans)…the stonesmiths mouldereth. (Alexander’s translation, my punctuation and ‘notes’).
Here are the full quotes from Dominic Dromgoole’s ‘Will & Me, How Shakespeare Took Over My Life’.
1. P.37-8. On Macbeth (10 out of 10)
Macbeth:
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
Dom: …this (speech) was one that popped up unbidden in the head in that terrifying moment before sleep, the moment when your mind starts whirring just as your body is shutting doen. Everything in one side of the brain is screaming stop, go to sleep, while the other side is like a computer screen invaded by spam. Ideas and images and connections pop up deliriously all over the screen. ‘My mind is ruling me. I can’t rule my mind!’ my eldest daughter wails, when this moment hits. The same invasion of mental effervescence harrassed me – it still returns to haunt me once or twice a year – but as a child it was daily torture. The questions are starker as a child, the connections more fierce, since they have wider chasms to bridge.
Nick: Here it comes. Dromgoole brilliance.
Dom: Nothing provoked those nights more than that speech. The mind reeled and twisted back to the begining of the universe and swooped towards the end of the world, all decorated in the same unknowability.
Jester: In my strutting image, Dom, in my strutting and fretting image.
2. P.277 (1 out of 10. When and on which channel was this television interview?).
‘The Queen remembered once on television sailing up the river towards Westminster with Winston Churchill shortly after her coronation. She said, in her stangulated accent. ‘I remember Churchill looking down on the Thames and speaking of it as ‘the silver thread that runs through history’, and I looked out on this dirty, commercial river and thought, ‘Can this really be true?’ Well there is poetry in some souls, and not in others.’
Dom, do you have any idea what a stinking channel the Thames had become by the early 1950s? When my father was sculling the river at Putney in the late 40s – early 50s it was a dreaded imperative that stomachs were pumped if there was a capsize. It stank. This was the foul and shamefull river Churchill was looking at at and grandiloquently over-looking in his purple prose. He could have said to the Queen. ‘Let’s clean the Thames up’. No. You have got it totally the wrong way around. And you should apologise to Her Majesty and invite her to a show. She might have a Ball and really let her hair down – and commission a new barge from my friends at Richmond Bridge Boathouses and get rowed down the river with a grand flotilla and wave graciously at her adoring subjects.
(me teaching in ‘Ivan’ in 2007 at Hammersmith as Boatman at Furnivall Sculling Club).
For the first time in her reign. Who would be the loser? You call her speech patterns ’strangulated’. I think that is unnecessarily rude. Would you prefer her to affect ‘Estuary’?
3…
well we know Tarleton was part of it LOL
I am the Boatman (2009)
Liza, Liza, dream with me
I’ll meet you by the willow at the house of John Dee
Liza, Liza, boat with me
I’ll take you down the river all the way to the sea
I am the Boatman
Liza, Liza, standing tall
I am the Boatman with a crystal ball
I can drown or I can burn
Either way I don’t return
I am the Boatman
We embark when the tide is slack
This time round there’s no turning back
The mystic paintings on the cabin wall
The stork and the book and the burning fall
I am the Boatman
Liza, Liza, calling back
Stop the day from turning black
Who’s to say that it was just a dream?
floating down in the Tideway stream
I am the Boatman
http://bdoza.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/a-dailys-crusade-to-save-our-rivers/#comment-2895
4. nickwardscenarios – October 22, 2009
