‘Domestic Monad’ (2008) – I sent a print of this painting to my former agent Judy Daish in Spring of 2009 – it is based on a design by John Dee. Her colours – if I remember rightly.

A lamrim teaching comes to mind. I was given this on CD by Geshe Thubten Tenzin (the Dalai Lama’s blood brother) in Darwin, Australia in late 2004. The recording was made by an extraordinary American former diamond-trading Geshe, Michael Roach, and I’m repeating it here from memory having listening twice in early 2005, with Miri.

Atisha

Lamrim is the Tibetan name for Atisa’s Stages in the Path as defined by Je Tsongkhapa. Atisha (984 – 1054) is credited with taking Buddhism to Tibet from India.

Je Tongkhapa (1357 – 1419) is an emanation of the Wisdom Buddha, Manjushri (he with the double-edged sword).

‘If things you desire do not come, it is due to karma created long ago, therefore keep a happy and relaxed mind’.

warm up:

A verse from ‘Diamond Mind’, Song For Syd Barrett (2005)

ammended 10th May 2011, a Pink Floyd tribute quoting ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and based on the same tune, slightly changed (D/G7/D/G7/D/E/G/D)

The flaming sword is double-double edged (x2)

The flaming sword, sharp as a butcher’s knife

cuts through twin fears of death and life

And diamond mind is shining still (x2)

I’ll sing my song beneath your window pain

You song, my friend, is very fine.

A dedication

Here goes. Imagine your ‘enemy’. Imagine you are in the same room facing each other. I am imagining  her sitting in a comfortable position with her legs crossed. She is sitting on a cushion which has been embroidered with white lilies with which she identifies.

She is looking straight into my eyes and she is concentrating all her energy in a vindictive way. The hatred begins to manifest physically. She feels a congealing around her heart – emanating from her heart – it becomes liquid-air – a ball of sticky black smoke.

I smile at her – seeing her not as my enemy but as my mother in a different life. The smile provokes a greater intensity of hatred and she opens her mouth. At first nothing comes out. She opens her mouth wide. The glob of foulness removes itself from her heart chakra and begins to rise up through her throat – leaving no trace. It emerges through her mouth and leaves her body. From this point on she  is no longer able to maintain her animosity – it has left her body for ever– but she can still see it! Floating just in front of her nose – and she can smell it. Imagine rotting lilies smelling far worse than weeds (that’s it…) at least she has got it out!

Next comes the dangerous stage. Very gently I use my mind to draw the foul floating gunge towards my own mouth. I open my mouth wide and with the softest of in-breaths I draw the venemous mass into my own mouth… and down my throat. It is heading for my heart. I visualise the cause and effect of this whole damned business as it is about to congeal on my heart. Then an extraordinary thing happens – if the practice has gone according to plan (and if it hasn’t you’re in big trouble) – as it touches my heart it explodes in a puff of pure white light and is no more. It just disappears.

I might try it on Pauline Neville-Jones.

Pauline Neville-Jones, Arms Trader and Shadow Security Minister and National Security Advisor to David Cameron: hard as nail-bombs and much more deadly. Very wealthy too. Why mention that? I hear the Tory-New Labour chorus. Why mention the brokering fee on the sale of Serbian Telecommunications to Italy? The MOD bonuses on the arming of genocidists like Pauline’s old friend Momcilo Krajisnik. Ask no questions and tell no lies, dearies. Pay no tax on smoke and mirror arms deals but squeeze Middle England (and the rest) until the the pips squeak.  Things like that.

Note: Judy Daish was my agent until 2001.

The legal basis for my case against Judy Daish was that she entered into unauthorised dealings with Casa Ricordi (representing Battistelli) after I had left the agency in 2001 (having found out that my rights in the Cenci were unprotected when it was performed in Berlin).

Cornelia Schmaus as Lucrezia Cenci – Photo: © Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk

German first performance:
5^th November 1999    Hebbel-Theater

Charles Dickens (Bleak House): This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire; which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse,  and its dead in every churchyard; which has its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s aquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearing out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give – who does not often give – warning ‘Suffer any wrong that can be done to you rather than come here’.

I stand by my right to produce The Cenci without Battistelli’s music – and I will continue to make this case until it is ratified by Casa Ricordi – Judy Daish should, by rights, be fighting my corner. The credit: a music-theatre adaptation with Giorgio Battistelli. Text: Nick Ward; from a literal-literal translation from Antonin Artaud by Miram Asharki. (19/6/2011).  Am I averse to sharing the writing credit? No, nor have I ever been – if there is just cause. I am agreeing to share the writing credit with Adam Spreadbury Mayer on his upcoming prodution of Strindburg’s Ghost Sonata (because he knows Swedish and I know, now, that my 1986 lean and stripped-down version for the National Theatre Studio cut too much, ie the colours of the hyacinths and the song). Really this play is and always has been a music-theatre text. (20 May 2011 – ‘the colours of the hyacinths and the song’ are all that are missing – so I don’t need to share the writing credit! It is an ideal text:  Ghost Sonata (National Theatre Studio, 1986, from a literal-literal translation by ?) for an operatic treatment, for many reasons.)

added here 20 May 2011:

diamond

20th May (posted on Shenton’s View):

nick.ward said on May 20, 2011 3:46 PM: Report this comment

Compare and contrast Shenton’s view with formidable opera critic Michael Tanner’s view of Terry Gilliam’s ‘electrifying new production’ of The Damnation of Faust in The Spectator:

‘Anyone who has read Berlioz’s great Memoirs will know how much he suffered from being ignored. If he had seen this production he would have reluctantly agreed that being ignored is not the worst fate’.

Seems to me (The Cenci, Almeida, 1997) that the best way of challenging the form (ie in formal aesthetic terms not just hiring splashy directors-designers with no sense of opera’s defining ‘logic’) is to remove the conductor when the rehearsal phase is complete. For that you need rehearsal time. Big subject generating a tiny amount of switched-on debate, in my view.

nick.ward said on June 10, 2011 12:59 PM: Report this comment

which is to say that if Ian had continued with the rehearsal trajectory he would, quite naturally, have emerged as the conductor of the orchestra (in character)-and the experiment would have been truly revolutionary, in my view. Battistelli bottled out! Does ‘opera’ mean ‘conducted’? What does ‘conducted’ mean?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/mar/11/sacred-music-simon-russell-beale

Ghost Sonata (the opera!). What a joy to see Simon Russell Beale as Hummel and  Arvo Pärt scoring it (Pärt’s right up there for me : heart-mystic.) That is not to say he is not a good conductor. Or, indeed, that Giorgio is not an innovator. Apart from being ripped off by this monster, this Diabilo (he’ll like that!)  of the international avant-guard, the experience was amazing, the houses were full and the reviews almost universally full of praise. We pulled of Artaud’s Cenci – that is something to be very proud of and as I have made clear I would never attempt to block a revival of the ‘opera’. I’m just not that kind of guy. When Judy Daish took me back on her books last year – without any consultation – I objected.

‘A tear can be ego.  Anger can be compassion.  It depends where it comes from’. (H.E.Tsem Tulku Rinpoche – Nov 23 2009)

with thanks to Geshe Michael Roach

.

and for Miriam Asharki (pictured above in my production of Boccaccio’s Decameron at The Gate Theatre, Notting Hill, 1996 – me, on the right) , who provided the literal-literal translation which formed the basis for the text I wrote for Giorgio Battistelli – The Cenci (1997). I did the writing in Rome, in a room, on my own – and showed what I had done to the composer when it was finished. He liked it so much that he didn’t want a word changed and set about composing the music to the cadences of my text – ie, he composed the score without bars – unusually. We did not write the script together – although I liked what Giorgio had done with regards to cutting the original 5 Act play of Shelley/Artuad – up to a point.

Why Card 23? (‘to be equal to the Tao’) It’s the Queen’s perogative to have the bonus possibility, however unconsciously drawn; arrrived at. It was an accident of fate.

Oh, and there’s always the revisions to the Nick Ward Scenarios blogs to be getting on with and all these plays to put on songs to learn boats to row love to give love to receive… following…

Dark Goddess: ?

Jester: That’s interesting.

cut 11 may 2010

added 19th November 2011

Splendid Isolation feedback to Gari Jones – sent by e-mail

You want the truth, Gari?

 

Peter has forgotten, it seems, that the reason I wrote Splendid Isolation (2011) for the Playground, without a commission, was because I had reminded him that I owed him a commissioned play, dating from 2001, ‘Lily Wilde’, and wanted to put that right. I was very pleased, however, to be paid an advance for Splendid Isolation, thanks to the good services of Gaby Vautier, the producer, and Peter’s generosity in this regard, as executive producer.

 

On a deeper level what is going on here is simply a symptom of the unstable disregard for the power of non-directorial authorship in the contemporary theatre – the same contempt, in a milder form, that I first experienced in the hands of Judy Daish when she ‘sold’ my rights of authorship in The Cenci to her professional associates at the Almeida in 1997, thinking I should be happy to have a directing asignment in such a prestigious theatre, even if the script was crap.

 

The theatre is so far gone to ‘Directors’ Eventing’– and all I can say is that it has probably been this way for a lot longer than I realised when I was a precocious, self-sufficient, theatre-maker in the early-mid eighties – I was always a playwright-director, and like you, a director first. Good one too. These days I have Banjo Nick – a character I have taken ten years to develop and that only I can play – so I’m immune to all this… directorial eventing, this nonsense. My painting and songwriting I love – and the Nick Ward Scenarios also fulfil a function.

 

Peter has no rights whatsoever in ‘lily’ – if it gets written you will be free to cast it with whomsoever you wish. Peter could make a wondeful Malcolm, however that will be your call. If, big if, it gets written, that is, for my prognosis below regarding the reasons I am stuck is spot on.

 

One of my favourite lines in Splendid Isolation (2011) was Kayerts’ aside ‘Forcing him to speak’ early on, about Carlier – a line which speaks volumes about Nick Ward, theatre stylist (and ‘frame-breaker’) – and a line which is best delivered with complete neutrality by the actor playing the character… Peter loves my work, I know that, but at the same time, I have to wonder if his reasons for loving it are the same as the reasons that make it uniquely mine, as a playwright, as a theatre-maker. He had great difficulty saying this line – a line I am proud of for all sorts of reasons – not least very simply ones. Aesthetics is my thing.

 

Having said that I must also say that Peter’s performance did deliver in Edinburgh, as you know – great power was unleashed at the end  – and I admired him for that – given all the producorial shit he was forced to shovel – like complaints about accommodation and slack, inconsistent, technical provision on behalf of the unscrupulous Pleasance – cheap sound system – and bad advice (contrary to mine) on pricing, etc, etc. More than most mortals could handle – so this is probably also a very understandable delayed reaction. Peter is like an athlete – tough – and he hates to lose money. Who doesn’t? Pain all round?

 

Anyway, I hope this makes my position clear in very few words. I am very proud of Splendid Isolation; pleased and thankful that Peter instigated the writing of the 2011 version; and look forward to a production which really gets to grips with it as a pearling play set very precisely on the ‘One Arm Point’ penninsula north of Broome in North-Western Australia. The land of the Bardi aboriginal people where I was deeply inspired in the late nineties and later. Splendid Isolation, my deep engagement with Joseph Conrad, a non-playwright, could not have been written otherwise. The next production could, though not easily, be with the same cast and director as in Edinburgh, if the necessary shifts in thinking were to come about – with only live music and live sound fx. That could be a lot of fun, Peter, and even make money.

 

Come and visit me in Cambridge sometime. I am a regular performer at the Portland Arms Folk session on Sunday nights – great variety – and great value. All sorts of  stories and interesting roots-music cross-overs happening in the current Folk Revival, without denting investors’ wallets or being entrapped by our proto-fascist inclined subsidised sector. Over-statement?

 

 

Big subjects worthy of debate with anyone who is not a ‘professional’ theatre practitioner, I find. Most of my current friends cannot afford to go to the theatre  – or they are just too damned famous to be in small enclosed performance spaces without distracting or causing some kind of riot. That’s a different kind of hell, that I can only guess at, of course.

 

Either way, terrible times for the playwright, Mr Harbottle! I am thankful to directors like Gari Jones in Colchester– he is a rare theatre beast indeed…and loves great play-writing.

 

I’m over-running here. Theatre is largely irrelevant, sad to say, and the people who work in it dreadfully self-important, on the whole.

 

…and a true friend, Gazza. Harold would be proud of you, of that Judy Daish should have absolutely no doubt.

 

Cheers, mate,

 

Nick x

magic

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