On the faithful northern line (not sure how long that will last now the court jester’s pilfered the capital’s crown), I’m trying to learn speeches.  What with a strict regime of waking up/rehearsing/one cup Earl Grey/scribbling/Scrabble/bed, this is the only place for it.   

The iambic is a boon for memorization.  Be dum be dum be dum be dum be dum.  The lines go in.  The breath goes out.  The character speaks.  The fellow passenger taps me on the shoulder. 

‘Do you mind?’ 

It’s jam-packed and several commuters are eyeing me up.  One man is patting at his bald patch with a hankerchief, ogling me suspiciously. 

‘Sorry?’ 

‘Would you mind not doing that here on the tube?’ 

‘Oh.  Really?  Okay.’ 

A

Racine fan, I presume. 

The anxious commuter gets back to his paper.  Then he sighs, and says with difficulty: 

‘It’s not that we don’t respect your religion.  But it’s a bit inconsiderate.  People get spooked easily, after everything.’ 

Ah.  Right.  He thought I was praying. 

This is ironic, because the times I’ve been approached by disreputable types on a dark street, I’ve managed to spook the spookers by throwing a sonnet their way.  True story.  Nothing confuses a would-be criminal more than an audio time-slip back to Mrs Naylor’s English class. 

It’s the age-old question.  How do you learn your lines?  Well, how do you learn your pin number?  Repetition?  Same as actors.  Hitting the right buttons?  Same as actors.  Scrawling it on a surreptitious piece of paper?  Same as actors.  I wonder how many people recite things by heart, day to day.  Salesmen with their pitches.  Lovers plan their confessions word by word.  Brawlers the ultimate ‘diss’.  Where do those pesky words live, exactly?  Michael Caine says you have to stand there not thinking of that line — you have to take it off the other actor’s face.  Contrary to this, there is a school of thought for remembering called mnemonics, which has been bandying about since Elizabethan times.  For example, in order to memorize that little-known Hamlet soliloquy, one might employ this route: 

To be, or not to be; that is the question: 

(think, dear reader, of equations on a blackboard) 

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to sufferThe slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, 

(think, esteemed reader, of someone who is outrageously fortunate.  Like Paris Hilton, or Boris Johnson, or Clive who’s been working non-stop at the Nash.  Now imagine them with their arms in slings and arrows sticking out of their head) 

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,And, by opposing, end them— 

(think, noble reader, of strewing limbs into a rolling ocean of unpaid bills…etc) 

Poppycock.  The human brain is a clever old thing and doesn’t need these tricks.  There’s only one way of learning lines.  Courageously.  Which is, of course, the reason why I’m sat here writing this instead of knuckling down and getting knee-deep into punctuation.  But thank you, dear reader, for indulging my cowardice.   

 

I hate complainers.  All they do is focus on the negatives.  Moan, moan, moan… Wait a minute…do I detect the deployment of irony?  Well, probably not, depending on your definition of irony, which you’re probably mentally complaining about already as you read this. I try not to complain.  I really do.  It’s a terrible habit.  I try not to complain about the Turkish Swimming Cats that somehow live in my house, spraying their acrid scent everywhere:  ‘It’s your fault for attempting to domesticate such beautiful, wild beasts’, Inner Monologue tells me.  I try not to complain about the tinny, senseless music commonly encountered on the top deck of buses: ‘Listen to the bass-line, you pernickety old sod.  It’s really rather galvanizing’, Inner Monologue reproaches.  I try not to complain as my upstairs neighbour clomps and stomps and hurls abuse at his girlfriend:  ‘Don’t go up there with a baseball bat’, Inner Monologue suggests, ‘Just call that nice policeman that spends his beat in the local Subway eating free sandwiches’.  It’s very easy to complain.  Especially in a profession built on subjectivity.  I have nothing but admiration for my first bad review.  Touching nerves makes a nice noise.  Love and hate still stem from the same old frontal insula. I’m writing a play about ex-servicemen and the difficulties they face readjusting to civilian life.  The BBC screens a depressive slice of codswallop about ex-soldiers, presented by a bilious and self-congratulatory ex-serviceman obviously desperate enough to switch from the military to brief televisual celebrity.  I mean, come on.  The program is about ex-servicemen on the streets, and he interviews, erm, three of them?  On the street.  No coffee, no sofa, no attempt to make them feel comfortable or to actually pierce the heart of their stories.  Just a wallow in despondency and kudos to him for his socially acceptable drinking habits.  And not a solution in sight.  But wait!  This is OffWestEnd.com, not OffPrimeTime.com.  Why am I talking about television?  Well.  You have to be even more grateful for theatre when schmucks like this worm their way into the public domain.  At least with theatre the very process of putting on a play denotes a collaborative effort between dozens of people.  You don’t often get a complete turkey if it has to pass through that many hands (unless it’s Hollywood, where power is wholly disproportionate).  But theatre is incredibly unique, particularly the fringe, because the very act of working for free or thereabouts ensures, if not perfection, a fellowship pledged to bagging the same prize. 

Which was why I was saddened to sit through almost three hours at one of our most lauded subsidized theatres and watch a show that appeared to have had money thrown at it like custard pies at a circus.  And all you could see was the money, loosely held together by solipsistic ideas.  So excuse the complaining this week.  It’s not an attractive quality.  We can all do a little better.  Even my cats. 

Remember the Liverpuddlian preacher who, much like a gargoyle sluicing rainwater, used to spiel damnation through a megaphone by Oxford Circus?  Where did he go?  He was admirably relentless.  Now that was mind-numbing show for performer and participants alike.  Even Peter Pan El Musical seems preferable to

Santos Pedro El Diablo Lengua.  One of my favourite comedians has a yarn in which our vociferous priest of the put-down was pointing wildly at Saturday shoppers, screaming: 

‘You’re going to hell!  You’re going to hell!  You’re going to hell!’ 

A big fellow, hooded and sun-glassed, came bouncing by. 

‘You’re going to hell!’ 

The big fellow turns, and without breaking his stride, says: 

‘Nah, mate…H-M-V.’ 

You can’t deal with damnation better than that.  It is a pity more religions don’t have the boon of a sense of humour.  It’s a useful piece of artillery in the battle royale for peace. 

Oxfam called me up today.  They addressed Miss P Snowdon, and wouldn’t quite believe me when I informed them that Miss P Snowdon was, in fact, me with the baritone.  They asked for credit card details for future donations when I’m finally off menial wage and I explained I didn’t really trust my numbers with them just yet, what with the sex change they’d allocated me and all.  He was interminably sweet, though, and confided to me that: 

‘All my family are actors too!  It’s alright, I understand!’ 

I saw a very unusual show this week.  It was called Deliverance, and was set in the convenience of my own living-room.  The performance lasted about three hours with no interval, and was a true story (though, I suspect, heavily mythologized).  Having recently enjoyed Douglas Henshaw’s turn as Satan at the Almeida, I happily entertained this tale of a lost woman’s redemption.  But my, erm, philosophical enquiries were met with scoffing and doublespeak.  This is faith, I suppose.  I join Oscar Wilde in the wish for a Confraternity of the Faithless, an order for people who simply cannot believe. 

As much as the sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins are on my constant To-Learn List, organized religion sometimes raises my hackles. Is it professional deformation?  My last Shakespeare job was crammed with devoted Hawkins enthusiasts.  Still preaching, albeit from the wolf, not the lamb. 

When the performer of our one-woman-show called Deliverance regaled us with her possession and exorcism of a parade of devils, I was surprised to hear that ‘Fantasy’ was the name of one of them.  Fantasy?  Really?  Is it so pernicious that it gets its very own demon?  Maybe we on this side of the curtain need our demons to act and write.  Maybe each performance is a duel to reclaim some unfathomable acre of soul. 

Again, I agree with Oscar Wilde.  His whole conception of humanity sprang out of imagination and could only be realised by it.  Invention, empathy, reliance on the intangible…Well, it all sounds pretty sacred to me.   

That said, HMV sounds pretty good, too.

Apologies to those anticipating a call-to-arms for Sir Alan to hit the boards of the Nash.  The lambasting of Lloyd-Webber’s thirteen-week promotion for his own musical shows off the backs of tax-payers seems mightily overdue.  Damn straight bring back the Play For Today — A venture last seen in 1984, briefly glimpsed in 2006 but now missing-presumed-dead…25 year revival, anyone? 

The question to be asked —to utilize a pilfered phrase from a presidential hopeful— concerns the audacity of hope.  You can’t deny the popularity of I’d Do Anything et al (whilst we’re on it, does the chorus of children singing that line send shivers down anyone else’s spines?  Where is The Daily Mail when you actually need it?).  It could be that the alternative of Dad’s Army reruns or You’ve Been Framed fails to stir revolt in the country’s remote-fingers.  But why do so many mindlessly enjoy these advertisements cloaked in culture’s clothing? 

Because everyone loves a success story.  That is, everyone likes to think that at some point in their life someone will notice their potential and fling them into a position of power, fame, wealth, whichever your particular poison may happen to be.  And to see a shelf-stacker catapulted into the dubious net of stardom is something that resonates deeply in the ambitious pockets of people’s souls. 

Of course, this is in a sense a right-wing coup.  The slavering desire to yank yourself to the top, cutting bloody swathes in the competition…it’s not for everyone.  As Mammet says, there’s nothing more unsatisfying than a character suddenly discovering that ‘oh, they can do it!  They do have the ability’.  They’ve always had the ability.  It’s a very romantic idea that pre-dates Young Skywalker and ‘The Force’.  But plot-wise?  It’s a cop-out.   

The reality of these shows (ha ha) is that they perpetuate the idea that anyone can, in a flick of fate (or in this case, a producer’s eye) get what they want.  Which sidesteps the idea that the best way of getting where you want in this domineering world is good old-fashioned graft.  I think it was Henry Irving said it takes 11 years to train as an actor.  Not six auditions and a televised vote-off.  

There is a reason why you’ve never seen an Olivier or Oscar acceptance speech go something like this: 

‘I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank…me.  Thank me so much.  Thank me for all the hard work, thank me for the blood, sweat and tears, the prodigious talent…’ 

Hard work speaks for itself.  But the residual talent, from whereof it comes is and always will be a thing of mystery.  You can toil over flint for fire, but you can’t stop it raining.  Which is why I’m still dumbfounded that I’ve manage to land a role in one of my favourite theatres.  Someone somewhere must be pulling some strings, because last time I checked I’m only on year 9 of my training.  Sorry Mr Irving.  I’m still learning.  Promise.

Actually, Joseph is a sore subject.  When I was eleven, I auditioned for Joseph and The Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, which was a veritable Hamlet to this budding attention-seeker.  I got up to sing I Close My Eyes, closing my eyes (a particularly revolutionary creative decision at the time, but I, ladies and gentlemen, have always been a maverick), and belted my little voice out.  Problem being that my little voice was experiencing a little transition called ‘puberty’.  So I cracked and wailed my way through the song and sat down with a proud little smile, as the teachers smiled patronizingly and prodded their eardrums to check for perforations.  Then my friend Hal got up.  Hal was brilliant.  Everyone loved Hal.  In fact, one of the pinnacles of my childhood was confessing to Hal that I thought he might be the one: my best friend.  We were sat in the branches of the tallest tree in the alleyway by school, and my sentiment was reciprocated. This, I thought, this, is love. 

But it wasn’t.  Hal got up and trounced my efforts with the silkiest voice we’d heard since Bryan Adam’s recent smash hit, Everything I Do.  To top it off, he usurped the affections of my first crush, Alicia Snow (a girl who had rejected my advances on account of our surnames being similar enough to insinuate incest — clever lass).  The very long point of this being that me and Joseph don’t have the greatest of relationships.  In fact, we’ve only got one thing in common: A great appreciation of dreams.  Example: At drama school, I was struggling with Gorky, playing a pre-revolutionary murderer.  I couldn’t quite get the part together, the weight of guilt was missing.  Then one night I had a dream I had killed my esteemed friend Dani (very talented and very undeserving of assassination, ala dream or otherwise).  I woke up in an icy sweat, pleading forgiveness, vowing to abandon the superficial pursuits of the arts if only she could be resurrected. 

I arrived at college, and there she was, gesticulating in the canteen and complaining about English weather.  Phew.  Our teacher agreed that dreams have an eerie power to feed into our performances.  He had to experience being shot for a telly once and, graciously, had never been so.  But he had had an incredibly grisly dream about being shot in the leg.  So he used that. There’s a Pharotic plague of drama schools these days.  And most teach the same old thing; the same broad Method/Commedia Dell’arte/Trevor Nunn style of acting.  So what about a Dreama School? 

Dreama

School is made up of a theatre surrounded by clusters of bean bags and a maze of hammocks.  And the rule is, if you want to act it, dream it first. 

As a connoisseur of sleep and theatre in equal measures, I can’t think of anything better.  Students for the class of 2008, feel free to sign up at the bottom of this page.  Zzzz.  

Smoking ban getting you down? Not enjoying that carcinogenic buzz al fresco? Wanting to ensure that if emphysema has the impudence to take you out you can bring down a few others with you? Well. Move to America, land of the free. Land of the loopists.

Imagine this: you mosey on down to your local watering-hole and come to a black curtain that says STAGE ENTRANCE. You pass a table labelled PROPS DEPT, but the only props required for this particular production are piles of black ashtrays. The security staff and barpersons each have a ‘character name’ and you are referred to by your own…because you are playing yourself. A year ago. Before the smoking ban. In a production of the impishly entitled Tobacco Monologues. And yes, you may smoke freely.

In Minnesota, several bars have gotten around those pesky general health laws using a legal exception that allows notified and approving patrons at given ‘theatre-nights’ to smoke, as they did pre-ban. Who’d have thought a game of Let’s Pretend would prove so popular? More and more bars in the good old U S of A have started hosting vintage nights, where everyone in the bar can come to play themselves a year ago, before the smoking ban. Clever, huh? It’s the brainchild of a lawyer who first discovered the loophole. Who says a Harvard legal training and the fine art of mixology are mutually exclusive? However, it has opened a can of wheezing worms.

I mean, come on, what next? The Importance Of Kissing Strangers? In which folk saunter up to a bar for a theatre night where everyone’s ‘acting’, so any misdemeanours of infidelity are perfectly legit? Or how about Knock Back In Anger, now showing at your nearest bar, where disciples of sadism can pummel the pickled eggs out of each other in a brutal but perfectly, erm, legal and haphazardly choreographed routine?

You’ve got to applaud the audacity of this smokers’ rebellion. But not necessarily the mishandling of theatrical aspiration. My bet is there’s a few bars out there that really are eager to host genuine theatre nights, whether they involve the ‘actors’ smoking or not. And now that the Health Department is issuing fines of up to $10,000 to bars staging theatre nights under the (wait for it, it’s brilliant) Freedom To Breathe Act, the whole thing seems a little unfair. One or two bad apples rot the ashtray.

It’s hardly the greatest injustice the world has known, although there may be a very fine Willy Loman out there denied his performance because of all this. But it is all connected. Smoking in public places encourages chain-puffing and secondary inhalation, leading to illnesses, straining the healthcare system and diverting money from more ‘frivolous’ governmental initiatives. Such as theatre subsidies.

Now if the audiences in these bars really had to sit through smoky performances of Eugene O’Neill’s backlog or Arthur Miller’s lesser known plays, then I’d be happy. No pain, no gain, smokers.

For anyone who ever wanted to step into the shoes of a ‘resting’ actor…don’t bother.  Here’s a simple seven-step guide:

Monday: It has been an eternal hell of a whole weekend since your big, life-changing, make-or-break audition.  Although every actor since the dawn of iambic condemns the act, you talk about the play/part/director non-stop as if your wagging tongue were the only antidote to a particularly nasty bout of failure-flu.  It’s very much like being in love: you nauseate everyone around you with incomprehensible dithering about when and what will happen if who and where give you the part.  It’s pathetic. 

Tuesday: You (reasonably) begin to think that things might not work out as your delicate and fairytale heart hopes.  So you buy a Lonely Planet guide to Cambodia/Siberia/Bolivia in the hope that if Equity minimum doesn’t bring you inner-peace, perhaps a poorly-built shack on unfamiliar territory will do.  Genius. 

Wednesday: You forget about said audition just long enough to deal with a flooded flat/sickly moggies/uncle being held captive in Thai prison.  Phew!  The pressure’s off.  For a day, at least.  Don’t worry though: soon you’ll be back to obsessing over your fabulous lifestyle. 

Thursday: Another audition!  But for something you don’t particularly want, and probably wouldn’t be seen dead doing, using an accent from a country you’ve never even heard of, in a costume donated by People Disappointed By Pete Doherty’s Offerings On Ebay. 

Friday: Spent worrying that Job You Don’t Really Want will offer itself up and your agent will be forced accept on your behalf seeing as Job You Really Want are still making up their minds. 

Saturday/Sunday: Spent stricken with rigor-mortis-of-the-personality, pretending that nothing in particular is on your mind.  Friends presume a family member has died, and vice versa.  Shameless self-absorption.   

Everything dulls into grey, and you become amazed at what a cruel mistress life has become to one so obviously destined for success.  You consider putting your cats up for adoption, as you are clearly an unfit provider in the grand jungle of life. You still manage to check your phone about thirty times throughout the day.  Even though it’s a weekend.  Just in case. 

Monday: The agent calls again.  A strange wash of clamouring terror and frantic hope make your voice erupt like a guinea-pig on meth.  Apparently you’re still ‘in-the-mix’.  Sigh.   

By now, kind readers, you realize that as much as waitering is inevitable in struggling actors’ lives, so too is waiting.  Some wise fool said:  Walk in there like you’ve got the part; forget it as soon as you leave.  But a slightly wiser fool called Stanislavski said:  Stakes are everything.  The only antidote is being too busy to care.  Which is why I’m considering putting on a wonderful play about Shelley and Byron.  If anyone knows of a big dusty library that feels like garnering Time Out Critic’s Choice for a few weeks, answers on a postcard please. See?  Distracted myself already.

Join me on a stark sojourn through the sordid and controversial corridors of my past.  Shiver as you discover I used to wax lyrical about Commodore 64s.  Squeal as I titillate you with tales of painting lead figurines deep into the night.  Shudder as I relay the fact that once upon a time I really was very keen on Role-Playing Games. 

Whenever successful actors adorn the pages of the weekend glossies, their previous lives always come across as righteously hip.  Many of them were going to be professional football players.  I, alas, was not.  The closest I got was being regularly deposited in goal on account of my ball-repellant layers of puppy-fat.  The important thing of course is that I can laugh about it now.  Ha ha ha. 

No, I spent most of my childhood playing games.  Not in the Olympic sense; certainly not in the spin-the-bottle, cool-kids-skiving-off-RE-sense.  I mean Role-Playing Games.  Easy now.  I need to be careful writing this, and have probably already condemned myself, ironically.  My grandfather, a sweet fellow of the evangelical ilk, really would tremble and spew like Vesuvius if he knew I’d ever whiled away my weekend over a Dungeons & Dragons set.  But I did.  Out and proud. 

Over the past week I’ve seen two very fine pieces of theatre:  The Sea, at the Haymarket, and Brief Encounter, just opposite.  Their geography also reflects their opposition in style.  Whereas The Sea —set in as traditional a theatre as the West End can offer— was a parody of the theatre-going experience in itself, Brief Encounter commandeered the actual Haymarket cinema, and welcomed you with a serenading cast resplendent in old-style Usherette uniforms.  The theatre felt like a time-machine.  You might even say that the way forward, in this particular case, was the way back.  Although both productions were of a certain degree of genius (that said, Bond’s depths easily overwhelm Coward’s shimmer), it was the flair of the adapted film in an old cinema that won over the audience response.    More to come?  The selling-out of Masque of the Red Death was marred only by the critique that allowing the audience to roam freely disrupted the traditional narrative.  But in a theatre where didacticism is losing its appeal, what better way to engage with the audience than by letting them choose which route the story takes.  And for the producers out there, I need only say the words ‘it’s my third time here’ as incentive for a play that offers multiple narratives. 

Drama Centre taught us to respect the proscenium arch as a hallowed passage, an altar on which the masses could appreciate tradition and history unfurling.  But the boundaries are breaking down.  A strange sort of socialism is treading the boards, where the audience’s desire to step into the fantasy is being increasingly respected. 

Sorry, Grandpa Lee.  But the imagination craves indulgence, and moral subversion or not, audiences are getting tempted down the rabbit-hole more and more.  Wonderland ho.   

There’s an old wives’ tale about Woody Allen casting for his fair-weather film Match Point.  Judge for yourself: Woody was casting for the part of a washed-up table-tennis champion who loses a big match.  Two actors had been battling it out for the role, and seeing as each of them had passed the time-old test of possessing a full, clean, driver’s license, it was neck and neck.  So they called up Woody on the video-link, and Woody said,  

‘Well, hey, maybe, how about this: maybe we should let them play table-tennis for it!’ As every actor knows, somewhere in each casting department there lies a dust-caked table-tennis table.  So they get them to play against each other for the part.  They play a sweltering game, and eventually, one of the actors emerges victorious.  The loser slumps, sobs, reconsiders that Tree Surgery NVQ, etc. 

They take them down to see video-Woody, and video-Woody asks who won the match, and they tell him, and he says: ‘Great!  Well done him!  Now give the part to the other guy.’ 

Because of course, it was a casting for a failed table-tennis champion. Part of me likes this approach, however haphazard.  I mean, come on, we’ve done this cold-reading stuff to death now; surely the process can evolve — Having ‘sick-offs’ to cast hospital dramas, in which auditionees are subjected to various tropical diseases and the last to be hospitalized wins.  An ‘etiquette-off’ for period plays, where only the politest prevail.  A televised ‘fame-off’ to cast the lead in a musical, where only the most attention-starved and desperate make it through a gauntlet of bloated producers and toady impresarios…oh, no, wait, that’s been done.  

This week I get a big audition, and the omens come thick and fast.  Firstly, I have a dream about myself and the Old Vic’s artistic director having a blazing row over where to put a bust of Shakespeare.  It results in him setting the whole place alight.  Secondly, I’m given a cursed Buddha that promptly bursts into flames and has to be thrown into the sink, burning my thumb into a big blistering bubble-topped ogre-digit.  Finally, I get to the Globe for the audition and everyone in the building has been evacuated due to a fire alarm.  What all these ‘fire’ omens mean I do not know.  Perhaps I need to pay my gas bill.  My mind is very clever in that way. Anyway.  Walking along the South Bank, waiting for the Globe to un-evacuate, I smoke a rollie, Guardian under arm, and gaze out to the river, muttering my iambic.   

I bump into a young man with a Guardian under his arm, smoking a rollie.  He is muttering iambic to himself. ‘Here for the audition?’ 

‘Who’s not.’ (There now comes a point when both actors presume that they are up for the same part) 

‘You up for…?’ ‘Tybalt.’ 

‘Ah.  Romeo.’ (Both actors sigh in relief, and scour the thatching on the Globe for tell-tale signs of smoke)

I’m in fisticuffs with my director.  Irony aside, we’re arguing over whether the act of watching violence encourages violence itself.  It doesn’t help that we’ve spent the day working on a film script about Vikings - possibly the bloodiest culture since primordial man fell out of his soup. 

We’ve come away on a mini-sabbatical to Paris to work the script (how we’ve managed to convince our other-halves that leaving Greenwich Mean Time is an essential part of the creative process is as much your guess as mine).  So far so good.  We’re in a cottage by a lake, cocooned by forest, and the Louvre only thirty minutes from our door-stump. 

But back to the mêlée.  The violence in movies is harmless, he argues.  In films, we buy into a fantasy that nothing is real, and are able to watch unpalatable scenes, safe behind our popcorn (this would explain why horror-theatre, other than The Woman In Black, has never really caught on in the West End).  However, he thinks that violence doesn’t work onstage.  It’s too real.  

Do we shy away from brutality on stage?  Bond has a baby stoned in Saved.  That’s as violent an act as I can think of.  But the ‘violence’ happens in the audience’s imagination – there is no close-up, graciously.  Most of my experiences of the Bard’s battles have seemed woefully unconvincing – they sort of have to, otherwise the audience starts worrying about loose battle-axes twirling into the cheap seats and heads really rolling in the aisles. 

Do we need more drama in drama?  When a conflict is the physical manifestation of the drama itself, it should only really happen when all other means of psychological activity have been used.  A dramaturg of mine told me a playwright only sticks in a slap or a kiss when they’re at a dead end for vital interaction between the characters.  That makes me fairly guilty.  Although the animal in us is as fascinating as anything, the brute is not — I’d rather see playful decimation than a frustrated thump. 

Vengeance aside, I can’t think of any satisfaction in violence unless it comes from an unworthy opponent, like the moment in Wuthering Heights where Cathy’s weedy husband, humiliated by the towering Heathcliff, jumps to his feet and strikes him dead in the throat.  Heathcliff may be the virile lead, but you’ve got to admire Edgar’s spunk.  In theatre, there’s something attractive about the threat of violence without the violence itself.  I suppose it’s the same thing that attracts atheists like Richard Dawkins to the idea of God: we obsess over the things we can’t believe in.  Monsieur Le Realisateur has us up at 4am to get cracking with the Norsemen, so here’s me signing off to retire to Valhalla for an hour or two.  And what with being in a different time zone, I’ve briefly relinquished my un-carnivorous regime.  What better way to think like a Viking than to eat like a Gladiator?