Author Archives: Ben

The Perilous Particulars of Putting on a Passion Play, Part 1

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I said no at first. Rather, I didn’t say anything, when the casting calls started going out. It sounded like too much hard work. I was in sympathy with the aims; I thought an Abingdon Passion Play would be nice to do. It was going to be performed in the Abbey Gardens, on Palm Sunday, with different locations for different scenes. All very traditional. But …

And then the pleas started getting more impassioned. Simple arithmetic – they just didn’t have enough parts. And it would be a shame for such a noble venture to fail for reasons of apathy, wouldn’t it? There was to be another audition (and another, and another, as it turned out) in early January. So I asked about the time commitment and was told rehearsals would be every Wednesday until Palm Sunday. And it’s a relatively early Easter this year. How hard could it be? We would hit the ground running in 2013, I thought, and off we would go.

Well, we hit the ground all right. The running was the harder bit. Auditions were a case of turn up, and if you’re still interested, come to a rehearsal. The sneaking suspicion started to sink in that we were in the hands of well-meaning but not especially ept amateurs, all pulling in different directions. Like, at one point we were told the next rehearsal would be in two weeks’ time; then we got an email saying the next rehearsal was next week, so we duly turned up. Turned out it wasn’t a rehearsal. When we pointed this out to the producer the week after, we got no sympathy for having foolishly taken an email from a member of the committee at face value. “Did I send the email? No? Well, only believe emails from me.” Not encouraging.

But I stuck with it …

Finally, a script was produced and all interested parties invited to a read-through. The script was slightly longer than the Ring Cycle and with slightly more musical numbers, but it was a start. That was the first really positive development. The next was that even though parts for the read-through were more or less randomly handed out, all present were unanimous that we had our Caiaphas. John C produced a tone of voice that was at once sarcastic, vicious and oleaginous – everything the villainous High Priest should be. I believe he’s a lecturer in real life.

But still it hung in the balance. The original producer dropped out for personal reasons. So did Jesus, and then so did the next Jesus, which in a Passion Play is kind of important. John C asked me if I thought I was “being set up to play the Christos”. Christos, I hope not, I thought.

At the end of January the whole thing hung in the balance for 48 hours or so as the committee deliberated. Should we call it quits? Should we postpone and put it on after Easter – say, Pentecost? Which would be doable, but would raise the obvious question of why, say, we weren’t doing a Pentecost play. Or maybe, with quite a substantial rewrite, we would.

But no. Meanwhile, the new producer asked me if I could do an edit of the script. Finally, something to sink my teeth into, so I waded in. I left the musical numbers in – not my problem – and also a lot of the somewhat specific stage directions, e.g. “Jesus breaks into a sweat”. But I got the Ring Cycle down to about 2 hours; I honed the dialogue so that people spoke to each other more or less colloquially, rather than in slightly out of context Bible quotes; and I gave it some narrative drive so that one scene – and indeed the actions within each scene – should lead logically and naturally into the next. In many ways a Passion Play is like a requiem or a panto – you already know what elements go into it, the enjoyment is in seeing what the performers do with them – but even so it should all make sense as a whole.

(My draft was further polished by other hands, mostly to streamline the opening and closing scenes.)

The temptation to give Pilate an amusing speech impediment was almost overwhelming – but I didn’t, not least because I quite fancied the part for myself. And I took huge delight in taking out Pilate’s final line – “What have I done?” – because there are two lines that just shouldn’t appear in any serious work and that is one of them. (The other is “No-o-o-o-…!”)

And then – oh, frabjous day! – then the new producer brought in the new director, the utterly wonderful and amazing Sam Pullen-Campbell. Sam walked around the proposed performance site, the Abbey Gardens, and saw how it could be done, and said yes, she would do it. That was the day the play took off.

The next rehearsal actually involved auditioning – a producer and director looking at you to see what you could do. (And acting exercises, like: put your two index fingers together, rotate one clockwise and the other anticlockwise. “Droopy but you’ve got the right idea,” she told me. “Probably not the first time you’ve been told that,” whispered the future Simon Peter, displaying a shocking lack of reverence towards his former youth leader.) This was 30th January – a mere, oh, 7.5 weeks before the scheduled performance. Who’s worried?

Courtesy of the Abingdon Passion Play website – www.abingdonpassionplay.org.uk

Sam imported some of the key roles, not least Jesus himself, from her own contacts. The Man was Chris Young, who is 18 and still at school, but can act 30 better than many 30 year olds. He wants to be a professional and I’ve no doubt he will be. I want to get a t-shirt made saying “I knew Chris Young before he was famous.” [Edited to add: young Chris is now officially Kit Young and does indeed already have an impressive career behind and ahead of him.]

And we were away. I wasn’t Pilate, I was the Centurion. Well, he had some good lines too. Out of respect and a sense of humanity for whoever ended up with the part I had already changed the John Wayne favourite “Surely this was the Son of God” line to “He must have been the Son of God,” which is a lot easier to say naturally. Economy of characters meant that he also got the one-liners previously attributed to a couple of walk-on soldier parts, which was even better because it meant I got to channel my inner Michael Caine and tell the High Priest and his entourage that Pilate does not come at the beck and call of a bunch of religious nutters. And I supervised the flogging of Our Lord.

Then came my next unexpected role: soldier coordinator. Soldiers are also quite important to a Passion Play but they were probably the hardest groups to get volunteers for. I mean, for the Apostles all you need is Simon Peter and a cricket team, but the soldiers …

flogging

Courtesy of the Abingdon Passion Play website – www.abingdonpassionplay.org.uk

They were gradually pulled in from left, right and centre, and needed someone to work out their deployments throughout the play. And who better than the Centurion? Apart from anything else, oral directions – “stand there!” – could be given, entirely in character. The Abingdon Dojo provided some, others came in bit by bit, one by one; eventually we had a credible squad, including a trained paramedic to take Jesus off the Cross (I know, maybe a bit late for a paramedic but hey …) and a real live Redcap as drummer. Carl S, whose wife said he had never volunteered for anything in 25 years of marriage until this, became the man who flogs Jesus and got so into it that at his first rehearsal I actually had to improvise the command to stop when the lashes got up to 39.

Betrayed with a kiss

Courtesy of the Abingdon Passion Play website – www.abingdonpassionplay.org.uk

And so the day approached. Rehearsals soon got to be more than every Wednesday – every Monday, Wednesday and Friday by the end of it. I can’t speak for the others, but I was buzzing. I believed in this. I wanted this. Some of the scenes were so astonishing and powerful they brought tears to the eyes, and I don’t mean just because the Temple Guards threw Jesus to the ground wuffly – I mean, roughly – or Carl got a bit too close with the lash. I mean because the words and the story were speaking to us.

St Helen’s and St Michael’s churches lent us their space. Rehearsing in St Michael’s, the highest of the Anglo churches in Abingdon (like, purple clothes over the statues for Lent) meant that when we rehearsed taking Jesus from the Cross and laying him in his mother’s arms, we had a pieta on hand for reference.

The day kept approaching, and we started to look askance at the weather. Palm Sunday 2012 I happen to remember quite clearly, mostly because I spent a lot of it sitting vigil at the bedside of a dying friend in Sobell House. But I also remember being able to sit outside on the terrace and read a book.

Palm Sunday 2013, it soon became clear, was going to be blinkin’ cold, and quite possibly wet …

To be continued!

The Bens 2013

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Being my awards in various categories for movies watched during 2012. It’s not what it’s about, it’s how it’s about it. See here for the full list of contenders.

Best movie

Winner: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. It wins for many reasons, not least doing a good job of compressing the plot that the BBC took 6 episodes to relate into a couple of hours, and also of making it plainer. Sadly I already knew who the Circus mole is (again, having seen the Beeb version) but I understood better how the apparently unrelated stories of Jim Prideaux and Ricky’s Russian girlfriend all fit together with the secret Witchcraft thingy.

It was also a wonderful recreation of the seventies – I could almost smell the tobacco smoke arising from the impregnated fabrics.

Tintin is here for being a darn good Tintin adventure with an astonishing combination of lifelike CGI graphics that actually look like the artwork of a Tintin movie. Word-perfect casting for our hero and for Captain Haddock.

Skyfall … well, under most circumstances a Bond movie wouldn’t make the shortlist for this category, even though any direction from Quantum of Solace is up (bringing Roger Moore back would be about the only possible way of going further downhill). But it scores for taking the traditional Bond parameters and pushing them up to 11, at the same time as reaffirming some venerable Bond traditions. And for the very clever way two machine guns pointing in a fixed direction manage to spray enough bullets to bring down a dispersed crowd of hoodlums.

Best animation

Winner: The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. See above for one reason why. Also, extra extra cudos for fidelity to the original. So often a movie recreation of a childhood friend loses all the magic. This wasn’t an updating or a re-imagining that completely misses the point of why the original is so fondly remembered (looking at  you, Thunderbirds). No, it was a Tintin adventure. Done for the cinema. An expert merging of media that played to the strengths and the requirements of both.

The Pirates! also scores in a less flattering category – see below. But an Aardman animation is never less than excellent, at least in technical terms.

Rio – well, Rio was fun. CGI, yeah; brain candy, yeah; but fun.

Best offbeat indie thingy

Winner: Dean Spanley. Two of these I had never heard of before and this is one. We only watched because it was New Year’s Day and the TV was still on following the concert from Vienna. Father/son bonding as Edwardian Englishmen, rather than Hollywood, would do it, with wonderfully understated roles for Peter O’Toole and Jeremy Northam and Sam Neill, of whom see more below.

The other I hadn’t heard of is A Serious Man, a Coen Brothers movie set in 1950s mid-America and based loosely on the story of Job. Funny, offbeat, and an underplayed ending that seems like a sudden anticlimax, then becomes suddenly chilling when you remember what happened to Job’s children.

Margin Call is a gripping tale, strongly overlapping with reality, of a New York finance firm realising it is way too over-exposed and dumping its toxic assets … and incidentally triggering a financial crisis, and knowing that will happen, but doing it anyway because a firm’s job is to protect itself, not the world. A great cast including Kevin Spacey, Spock Jr, Dr Maturin and Jeremy Irons, and if it weren’t for Dean Spanley it would be the clear winner.

Best actor

  • Sam Neill – Dean Spanley
  • Nigel – Rio
  • Al Pacino – Glengarry Glen Ross

Winner: Sam Neill. Neill is usually seen with a knowing/knowledgeable/smart-ass (delete according to role) smirk, but it is completely absent from this. Instead we get a po-faced, dignified clergyman with a taste for Tokay and a previous existence as a dog.

Nigel is the villain of Rio, an obnoxious, English cockatoo, with a great musical number about why he is so evil. Includes the line ““I poop on people and I blame it on seagulls!”

Al Pacino does Al Pacino – in this case a dodgy salesman who will stoop to anything, and I mean anything, to make his sale.

And now the offbeats …

Most unexpectedly good

Winner: The Sentinel. Michael Douglas achieves the almost impossible task of making us believe he actually could (still) be a Secret Service agent with the life of the US President in the palm of his hand. And Keifer Sutherland is pretty good too.

Most disappointing

Winner: Private Peaceful. There’s two, count ’em, two adaptations of Michael Morpurgo novels here: how did neither come to be much good? Especially this one. I was almost in tears at the end of the novel. The movie suffers badly from trying to be clever and making us think that two unjust executions are about to take place, rather than the one of the novel … and tying itself into knots to maintain the illusion, when all it had to do was stick to the story to get it right.

I’ve commented above on The Pirates! as an animation – and sadly that is all it has going for it. An Aardman animation is usually heart warming and fun too. This wasn’t. It almost dies of inertia in the first half hour.

Most Oh Good Grief Is It Still Going On?

Winner: The Hobbit. At least the other two weren’t actively padding just for the sake of having lots of cool 3D effects.

Best despite knowing how it would end, really

Winner: Young Adult. We all knew, didn’t we, really, that the seducer of virgins would turn out to be a bounder and a cad, and Clooney’s character would be an idol with feet of clay, and Charlise wouldn’t break up the guy’s happy marriage and would end up as sad and lonely and non-wise at the end as she was at the start. But Young Adult wins because, as well as Charlise’s performance, and some sly digs at the art of ghostwriting, we have fun with other characters along the way. A mature and grown-up look at what marriage is like between two adult, grown-up people who have put their pasts behind them.

Most actually I really didn’t see that coming

Winner: Looper. Well, I didn’t. The Descendants almost makes it, except that I had a strong feeling there would be a happy(ish) ending even if I couldn’t see what. But Looper – wow.

Mondeo Man and proud of it

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My ownership of cars can also be used as a barometer of my own fortunes and a condensed indicator of how the motor industry has developed over the last century.

Our story begins in 1990, when I lived within cycling distance of Farnborough station and commuted into London, so had no intention of saddling myself with auto-ownership. Until, one particularly irritating New Year’s Day, I found myself stranded at the family home. I had been promised a lift back to my own home but had not been informed said lift would not be until teatime. Back home, I had writing to do and preparations to make for returning to work the next day. I was frustrated and seething.

I solemnly swore it would never happen again and so purchased:

1) A seven-year old Renault 4. Pure mechanical-electrical in a style that probably hadn’t changed since the early twentieth century. A slight list to starboard, such that any single passengers in the rear seats were asked to sit on the left. Renault 4s look like straight-backed versions of 2CVs but are no relation – more a product of convergent evolution like wolves and thylacines. One feature of the make that everyone remembers is the gearstick that disappeared straight into the dash, just below the rear view mirror which was also dash-mounted. The reverse position was at bottom right, so you risked dislocating your shoulder every time you wanted to backwards. If you opened the bonnet, you saw that the gearstick was actually just one end of a rod that reached across the top of the engine. It ended in a loop, and inside this loop was a second gearstick that was actually connected to the transmission at the front of the engine.

Finance was 100% parent-provided and repaid with interest, which I worked out on a spreadsheet. For 1990 and the office software available on Amstrad PCWs, I maintain this was pretty cool.

Lasted four years, died of rust. The end was diagnosed as being nigh when I noticed a small puddle of rainwater around my feet …

2) A seven-year-old Ford Escort. I suppose it must have been partly electronic, but only partly, in that it had a radio and tape player, and the radio had presettable channels and an LCD display. In terms of car development it was actually comfortable, with metallic paint and, wait for it, five gears!

Finance partly parental, partly self-funded. My car career also mirrors the finances of the parent in question, who had forgotten that interest was charged by the time I came to buy my second car. I asked what rate of interest should go into the spreadsheet this time.

“Oh, don’t worry about that.”

“You know you charged me interest last time?”

“Did I? What kind of parent am I, charging interest to my own son?”

“Well, if you feel that badly about it, you could refund the interest.”

[cough] “Tell you what, let’s just put it down to experience …”

Cash was paid in the carpark behind Milton Keynes station, that being the most convenient halfway point between Abingdon and where the vendor lived. Felt strangely like a drug smuggler, or maybe a drug buyer given that I was the one parting with the money. The car’s finest moment was getting me to Glasgow and back, which I wouldn’t have done in the Renault. Got progressively worse at starting after prolonged exposure to the wet and cold, but otherwise a very nice little runner. Lasted six years and also died of rust, but only after its successor had already been lined up …

3) Two year old Vauxhall Vectra. Lasted 12 years and was still going strong, though the amount of money needed to get it through its MOT was gradually increasing each year. The final straw was a whump-whump-whump sound that was traced to incipient clutch and/or flywheel failure, which would cost more than the car was worth to fix.

Air conditioning, power steering, remote locking and generally more electronics than before, though just to remind me that no one actually needs half these gadgets, several of them went wrong and never got fixed. The remote locking stopped after about a year. The LED display that was meant to show things like time, date and radio station gradually deteriorated until it was only showing very strange, eldritch hieroglyphics. Every now and then the power steering decided it would be fun to drain all its fluid and make strange concrete grinder noises as I drove.

But, this was the car that oversaw the greatest change in my fortunes, from penurious struggling writer ex-publisher bachelor to reasonably well-paid doing-okay author and technical writer family man. It was the car that took us on honeymoon one sweltering summer and drove us around Cornwall in air conditioned comfort. Sadly missed.

So, what should its replacement be?

I wanted a Ford. I fell in love with Fords – or specifically their heated windscreens that make scraping ice a thing of the past – a couple of years ago when I had a hire Mondeo for a couple of weeks. After that I decided the next car should be a Ford too. I like to think our choice was a collaborative venture, but Beloved pretty soon got the idea that I was set on it. We decided it was a choice between a Mondeo and a Focus. (Even then she may say this is an overly generous definition of “we”.) We test drove one of each and both had their pluses and minuses, but I think she still suspected where my heart lay, and gamely came up with some reasons why the Focus wasn’t quite what we were after. Mostly, we felt it would be unwise to say that our days of driving large carloads around the country are over, and it was a bit too cramped – seats not great for long journeys and a rear view like a letter box. So …

4) Four year old Mondeo. As electronic and gadget-filled as a very gadget-filled, electronic thing. Possibly also slightly bigger inside than out. Still working through the electronics. I suppose the piston action must be mechanical by definition but I’m not sure what else is. One gripe so far is that the bonnet release catch is on the left hand side of the passenger footwell, which is a blinkin’ stupid place to put it in a right hand drive car. Still wresting the sound system to my will but I have high hopes.

I can now feel myself turning into Clarkson and will stop.