In 28 December 1967, David Bowie made his theatrical debut at the Oxford New Theater, in Lindsay Kemp’s mime Pierrot in Turquoise or, The Looking Glass Murders. Bowie wrote and performed the music. He also starred as Cloud alongside Kemp’s Pierrot, Jack Birkett’s Harlequin, and Annie Stainer’s Columbine.

The production was still in rehearsal when it played for its one night at the New Theater, which perhaps explains why the Oxford Mail described the show as “something of a pot-pourri,” though it highlighted Bowie’s contribution for praise:

David Bowie has composed some haunting songs, which he sings in a superb, dreamlike voice. But beguilingly as he plays Cloud, and vigorously as Jack Birkett mimes Harlequin, the pantomime isn’t a completely satisfactory framework for some of the items from his repertoire that Mr Kemp, who plays Pierrot, chooses to present….

...No doubt these are shortcomings Mr. Kemp will attend to before he presents Pierrot in Turquoise at the Prague Festival at the invitation of Marceau and Fialka next summer. No mean honour for an English mime troupe.

The mime told the story of Pierrot and his attempts to win the love of his life, Columbine. Of course things are never simple, and Columbine falls for Harlequin, and is then killed by Pierrot.

After a few tweaks, Pierrot in Turquoise opened at the Rosehill Theater, Whitehaven, before its proper run at the Mercury Theater, and Intimate Theater, both London, in March 1968.

Bowie’s career throughout the sixties exemplifies Thomas Edison’s adage “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration,” as the young hopeful musician worked hard and toured the length and breadth of the UK under various guises: The Konrads, The Hookers, Davie Jones and The King Bees, The Manish Boys, the Blues influenced Davie Jones and The Lower Third, Davie Jones and The Buzz, and The Riot Squad, a band described as:

“The Complete Musical Entertainers covering Pop, Tableaux, Burlesque and Parody”

Even at this early stage, Bowie was shedding musical styles quicker than he changed his hairstyle - from beat thru Blues to Music Hall and Pop. With hindsight you can see where his career was going. But by 1967 the teenager’s first recording career had come to a halt with the release of Laughing Gnome after which Bowie didn’t release a record for another two years.

It was during this time Bowie fell under the influence of mime artist and performer Lindsay Kemp. He helped Bowie channel his talent towards Space Oddity and later Ziggy Stardust. As Kemp told journalist Mick Brown for Crawdaddy in 1974:

“I taught David to free his body,” says Kemp, smiling wickedly.

“Even before meeting, David and I had felt the need to work together. I’d identified myself with his songs, and he’d seen my performances and identified himself with my songs. I was singing the songs of my life with my body; he was singing the songs of his life very fabulously with his voice, and we reckoned that by putting the two together the audience couldn’t help but be enthralled. In other words, one large gin is very nice, but two large gins are even nicer.”

The two large gins became Pierrot in Turquoise, which was filmed by Scottish Television in 1969 and broadcast in July 1970. How a small regional TV station like STV came to film this rather strange theatrical show is no doubt a tale in itself, but thankfully they did, even if one cataloguer at Scottish Screen Archives “found this quite creepy,” it is still well worth watching.

The cast:

David Bowie as Cloud
Lindsay Kemp as Pierrot
Jack Birkett as Harlequin
Annie Stainer as Columbine
Michael Garret as Piano Player

It was filmed at the Scottish Television’s Gateway Theater in Edinburgh, and was directed by Brian Mahoney. Now if only STV made programs like this today…
 
  Previously on DM

Lindsay Kemp’s Last Dance

David Bowie comes to life in ‘The Image’

 
Jack MacGowran was a frail-looking, bird-like man, whose frame belied his power and talent as an actor. You’ll recognize him from The Excorcist, where he played alcoholic director Burke Dennings, or perhaps from Polanski’s Cul-de-Sac, or as Professor Abronsius, in The Fearless Vampire Killers.

If Billie Whitelaw was Samuel Beckett’s favorite actress, then MacGowran was his favored actor. The pair met in the bar of a shabby London hotel, an unlikely start to an “intimate alliance” that saw MacGowran collaborate with Beckett on the definitive versions of Waiting for Godot and Endgame. From this, their partnership led to a further legendary collaboration Beginning to End. As Jordan R. Young noted in his book, The Beckett Actor:

...Jack MacGowran in the Works of Samuel Beckett (aka Beginning to End) [is] one of the most highly-acclaimed one-man shows in the history of theatre, [which] changed forever the public perception of Beckett from a purveyor of gloom and despair, to a writer of wit, humanity and courage. It also brought the actor widespread recognition as Beckett’s foremost interpreter. “The first time I saw Jack, in Endgame… I came away haunted by the impression he made on me,” said Paul Scofield. “I have remained so ever since.”

The production was filmed to celebrate Beckett’s sixtieth birthday:

Beginning to End [which] features the peerless Jack MacGowran in his one-man show, devised with Beckett and recorded for RTÉ Television in 1966. “Jack’s stage presence stays with me more than anything,” said Peter O’Toole. “This frail thing with this enormous power. He walked a tightrope as if it were a three-lane highway.” Martin Esslin, in The Theatre of the Absurd, commented on Beckett’s deep affection for MacGowran: “If ever there was a perfect congruence between a great poet’s imagination and an actor, this was it ... Jack MacGowran’s individual quality and life story are an essential ingredient in our understanding of the life and work of one of the outstanding creative minds of our time.”

Rarely seen, and long thought lost, this is a must-see, for it is one of the greatest stage performances ever committed to film.
 

 
Previously on DM

Billie Whitelaw’s stunning performance in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Not I’, 1973

 
The actress Billie Whitelaw couldn’t imagine what it was like. The theater darkened, apart from a spotlight on Whitelaw’s mouth, as she delivered Samuel Beckett’s babbling stream of consciousness Not I.

It’s one of the most disturbing images in theater: a disembodied mouth, telling its tale “at the speed of thought.” It takes incredible discipline and strength for the actor to perform: the text isn’t easy to learn, its full of difficult instructions, pauses, repetitions and disjointed phrases; add to this the speed of delivery, which means the actor has to learn circular breathing in order to deliver the lines. Jessica Tandy once gave a performance that lasted twenty-four minutes, only to be told by Beckett that she had “ruined” his play. And let’s not forget the rigidity of the piece: the actor’s lack of mobility, the mouth tethered to a spotlight, all of which says everything for Whitelaw’s brilliance as an actor.

Here, Whitelaw introduces Not I in the short documentary, A Wake for Sam, and explains the effect it had on her:

Plenty of writers can write a play about a state of mind, but [Beckett] actually put that state of mind on the stage, in front of your eyes. And I think a lot of people recognized it. I recognized it. When I first read it at home, I just burst in to tears, because I recognized the inner scream. Perhaps that’s not what it is, I don’t know, but for me, that’s what I recognized, an inner scream, in there, and no escaping it.

 
Previously on DM

 
With thanks to Tim Lucas
 

 
The Pentagon has organized a trip for a north London theater group to perform its play on Afghanistan to hundreds of its military personnel. It is believed that The Great Game: Afghanistan, a 7 hour production examining 170 years of Afghan history, will help give greater understanding to the cultural, political and historical factors involved in the war - now reaching its tenth year.

The performances have been put together by the Tricycle Theater, in conjunction with the British Council and the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, after an invitation from the Pentagon. The Great Game: Afghanistan premiered at the Tricycle in 2009 and returned last year after strong reviews.

The drama is organized into three sections, each of four plays, and takes its name from the 19th and 20th century “Great Game” played out between the Russian and British Empires for supremacy over Central Asia. The UK feared Russia would use Afghanistan as a staging post to take over India, the “Jewel in the Crown” of the British Empire. This led to the first Anglo-Afghan War in 1838.

The Great Game: Afghanistan is performed by the Tricycle Theater, a highly respected theater company, which has established “a unique reputation for presenting plays that reflect the cultural diversity of its community, in particular by Black, Irish, Jewish, Asian and South African writers, as well as for responding to contemporary issues and events with its ground-breaking ‘tribunal plays’ and political work.” Its director Nicholas Kent said last month to the London Evening Standard:

“I think it shows the open-mindedness of the current military both in the United States and here, that people are willing to learn and try to understand foreign cultures,” he said.

“It is very exciting because you don’t often get the chance as an actor to do something as important as that. I’m very honoured that they want us to do it.

“Anything that means these people know more about the history of Afghanistan can only help the whole intervention there. It’s very important people have knowledge of the story they’re dealing with.”

The Daily Telegraph reports that Douglas Wilson, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Pentagon, “said he faced doubts within the department that the plays would be anti-war and would deliver a counterproductive, negative message to a military audience.”

Addressing the apparent culture clash of a liberal theatre and a vast war machine, he said: “There is an assumption that the arts and our men and women in uniform are from different planets. It’s not the case,” he said.

“The arts can provide a means to discuss and explore and in this case learn about the history and culture of a very complicated country. It is tremendous food for thought,” he said.”

Indu Rubasingham, who directed half the plays, said her own “naive” anti-war views had matured while researching the subject matter.

“I realised I was prejudiced and judgmental. The international community has to take responsibility there, otherwise there will be a vacuum,” she said.

Last night was the first night of the production for Pentagon staff, and it received a standing ovation. It will be interesting to see if the play’s examination of the dangers and folly of imperialism will have any effect on current policy.
 

 
Previously on DM

Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan

 
Further clips from the play ‘The Great Game: Afghanistan’, after the jump…
 

 
You wouldn’t mess with Klaus Kinski. He had a look that said it all - a cross between Iggy Pop and a drug-addled psycho. His mental health had been an issue. In the 1950s, Kinski spent three days in a psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. In 1955, having failed to find any work as an actor, he attempted suicide - twice.

By the late 1950s, he had slowly established himself as an actor in Vienna, but the anger, the passions, that fueled his performances meant he was always labeled difficult. To overcome this, Kinski started performing one-man shows, reciting Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Francois Villon.

In the sixties he found some security as a bit player in Spaghetti Westerns such as For a Few Dollars More, but Kinski had an ambitious ego that inspired him to greater, more confrontational things.

In 1971, Kinski hired the Deutschlandhalle to perform his own 30-page interpretation of Jesus Christ. It was no ordinary show, and the audience was a mix of radical students, religious followers and those intrigued to see the “mad man Kinski”. Even then, before his work with Werner Herzog, the public thought of Kinski as either mad man or genius.

Moreover, there was some confusion amongst the audience, who seemed to think Kinski was an evangelist, rather than an actor interpreting a role. This led to constant heckling from the spectators - both the happy-clappy Christians, who thought he was blaspheming; and those on the Left, who though he was soft-soaping Christianity. Kinski was doing neither. His Christ was part Kinski, part Anarchist-Revolutionary, and he repsonded fulsomely to the abuse, as Twitch Film notes:

For example, after someone stated that shouting down people who disagreed with him was unlike Christ, Kinski responded with a different take on how Christ might respond: “No, he didn’t say ‘shut your mouths’, he took a whip and beat them. That’s what he did, you stupid sow!”

In another scene, he brow beats the audience by saying “can’t you see that when someone lectures thirty typewritten pages of text in this way, that you must shut your mouths? If you can’t see that, please let someone bang it into your brain with a hammer!” The evening’s festivities also turned physical as an audience member is shown getting bounced from the stage by a bodyguard. Someone responds that “Kinski just let his bodyguard push a peaceful guy, who only wanted to have a discussion, down the stairs! That is a fascist statement, Kinski is a fascist, a psychopath!”

Kinski continued undaunted:

“I’m not the official Church-Christ, who is accepted by policemen, bankers, judges, executioneers, officers, chruch-heads, politicians and other representatives of the powers that be. - I’m not your super-star!”

The evening was filmed by Peter Geyer, who later assembled the footage together into an incredible documentary film Jesus Christus Erlöser (Jesus Christ Saviour) in 2008. It is a film well worth seeing for Kinski’s powerful, passionate and unforgettable performance, which gives an unflinching insight into the man, the ego and the mad genius that was Klaus Kinski.
 

 
Bonus clip in color, after the jump…
 
Previously on DM

 
With thanks to Little Stone
 

 
While I was never a fan of Anthony Minghella, or his limp entry in the Ripley sweepstakes (for some truly great Ripley action see this, or definitely this, then, if you’re curious about Patricia Highsmith, maybe read this), I’m a huge fan of both Beckett, and the always entertaining Alan Rickman (not that Beckett, too, can’t entertain).  The 4-disc Beckett On Film ranges, in my mind, all over the place in quality, but I think the set’s standout is definitely the Minghella-helmed version of Play, starring the melancholy Snape himself.  Let’s see…Rickman’s in an urn between the also-urned Kristen Scott Thomas and Juliet Stevenson, and, well…just push “play!”  (You’ll need to push it twice, though: Play II follows below.)

Play II

Check out this “credit card commercial” from Derek Jarman’s “The Garden” (1990). Sums up our current situation rather well?