filling the theatre

saturday night we celebrated the return of CHAPTER THEATRE. for the past year we have been using the LLOFFT space above the bar (limited as it can only fit 40 people) and outside spaces for shows and it has felt a bit like doing a show in a school hall at times so it was a relief and a joy to finally open the theatre for the new show by TANYA RAMAN called TRACES. it was a shame we couldn't have had a more grand reopening with champagne and party poppers because the show itself was simply one of the best things i have seen in the theatre and the perfect way to show off the staff and facilities here at chapter. we started off in complete darkness then old photographs appeared on the screen and we were surrounded by voices talking of memories and the lapping of water and a low drone. the photographs bled into the image of a woman in the dressing room looking into the mirror, barely moving. after a few beats there was another woman in there, a replicated image moving differently. then there was another. she looked out from the screen to us. this in turn faded and we could see the woman appearing at the back of the stage. she moved carefully around the stage and stopped for us to see this repeated on a projection on the screen in front of her. her movements would overlap with the movements of the ghost people on the screen and then went black. the next stage was her costume of light moving around the stage with her movements, only to be captured and flashed back on the screen. john collingsworth then took a light pen and drew around her body in its pose and these flashed on, then he tried to pin her down in pencil drawings. it grew more fevered and exciting and then faded again. it was so intense and beautiful it made me cry. it is difficult to describe how this effected me, it was only part way through the show that i recognised my voice amongst the whispering sounds on stage. my friend jon had asked me months ago to contribute a few memories to be used for his soundscape for the piece but i had entirely forgotten about this. one of the memories i had was being in the village where i was born, me and my brother being woken up early in the morning by my mum to see the cove near our house that had frozen over with the frost. i was overcome by the beauty of the images in front of me, by the movement of tanya's body and the swell of the music, by the realisation that all our memories will one day fade but that we leave traces of ourselves behind. it was a wonderful experience.

we were jolted out of that to go see our friend colin have a birthday do in the landsdowne pub. it was fancy dress and the theme was "characters from S4C". we couldn't go from the theatre to fancy dress so i just went in red and black (sort of welsh dress). it was fab evening with many sali malis, farmers, a superted and lots of cheesey dance music. we spent most of the time hanging out by the amazing buffet with gar, ange, rich and rhian and pedro and darren. good times.

sunday was a marathon cinema day. my matinee was an italian film MID AUGUST LUNCH (which is a bit of a crap meaningless title, they should have kept it as FERRAGOSTO, which is actually the religious holiday that makes the lunch special). it was absolutely delightful. written, directed and starring gianni di gregorio it is the simple tale of a middle aged man who lives with his elderly mother in a shabby but tidy apartment in rome and is behind with the rent and a bit down on his luck. the landlord persuades him to take in his mother for the ferragosto weekend in exchange for the arrears and a bit of extra cash and when he turns up he has also brought his elderly aunt. the doctor comes to see his mother and mentions that his own mother will be on her own for the festival as he has to work in the hospital. gianni agrees to take her in too, in exchange for the medical bill. finding himself in the company of four elderly slightly fussy ladies gianni is graceful if a little beleaguered, smoking cooking and pouring wine sometimes all at once and trying to keep everyone happy. the farce element of the story is played down and the tone is kept light. it never feels patronising to the old ladies, they are people rather than dotty old biddies, the warmth of the family and community just glows and the whole thing feels like a perfectly baked souffle. a lovely little film.

up next was a really interesting set of documentaries by HUMPHREY JENNINGS. he made some important films around the second world war about life in britain, some of them for the purpose of propaganda. the first one was called "spare time" and talked about the working man in mining and manufacturing towns and what they did when they no longer had to be in the dark dank factories and mines. there was dancing, drinking, games and meals with the family. it had some lovely footage of ballroom dancing in blackpool and pubs in pontypridd. the next film was "the silent village" a wonderful propaganda piece about a mining village poland that had been taken over by the nazis. jennings cleverly mirrored this with a mining village in west wales. we watched the people of the village getting on with their business: going to the local shop for food, working down the mine, going to the pub, going to community meetings only to have this interrupted by the nazi invasion. we never saw more than one soldier but heard the german accented message barked out that the village had been taken over by the nazi party and that they had to obey orders. the villagers saboutaged the mine resulting in the men being shot and the women and children taken to concentration camps. all this happened to the village lidice in poland and the reality of it really hit home. using the people of the village rather than actors gave it a tinge of reality and steely resolve at the end not to let happen in britain what happened in poland. the pit manager at the end said that although the village was wiped off the map with the people gone and buildings destroyed they would not be forgotten as they had been through that experience. the film was really effective, gave a real sense of the way the people of britain reacted to the humanity of the war and the community spirit. the one feeling the documentaries left me with was the sadness that the nazis may not have taken away our way of life but thatcher managed to destroy the mines in the 80s and how different things are now. it was odd looking at that life that is only our grandparents' generation but to today's children must seem like the stone age. things are so so different now. its stupid to say everything is shit these days but the simple, gentle life of the people humphrey jennings shows makes you feel incredibly selfish and shallow and long for the past.

i didn't leave the cinema once i'd finished ushering but instead changed screen and went to cinema 2 for the BAD FILM CLUB: SNAKES ON A TRAIN. i was glad i'd got tickets for will and i and that our friend katy had got in since the cinema was packed, in fact bizarrely they had oversold the tickets. as i work in the box office i know that this is not possible to do unless something has gone very wrong! i think it was something about switching screens but nicko was surprised as anyone that they had sold out. clint did the commentary with her but it hardly needed any, it was a very stupid wonderfully bad film. the first 15 minutes was entirely in spanish which is fine but when they got on the train itself the characters spoke in english so that didn't even make any sense. a lot didn't make any sense. the main character was throwing up snakes and her boyfriend was keeping them in a jar. the reason he is doing this is because she has been cursed by her family. she "has snakes" is the explanation. riiiight. once on the train we meet some of the other, pointless cliched characters and their way of sort of spurring on the plot and we see a lot more snakes thrown up by this poor woman. at one point they have sort of overtaken her and this giant snake comes out of her or she becomes a giant snake or something and everyone jumps off the train just in time before she swallows the train whole. an amulet that was being used by her boyfriend finally comes in handy as it glows white and causes a huge tornado to swallow up the giant snake as if nothing happened. rubbish. it was so silly and ridiculous. nicko cleverly makes it seem like we've all been through this terrible experience together, taking you out of the usual film experience of sitting in the dark with the images coming into your head and turns it into almost a music hall style theatre show.

monday we were back in the cinema but this time for CHAPTER MOVIEMAKER for the premiere of two of the music videos we've worked on in the last few months. ryan owen and ben reed's work on RACE HORSES "cake" and ewan and casey (raymo)'s work on CATE LE BON's "hollow trees house hounds". they are both really good and very different from each other. race horses video is fun, featuring steen being hit in the face by a big cream cake and cate's is trippy and psychey with great mutant animations and you get to see me and my friends burn. the moviemaker is a strange little entity where all sorts of things are shown, from amateur shorts that people are trying out to professional films. we also saw the pilot of a tv show that didn't get picked up, a small documentary about a singer who was killed by pinochet's troups in chile and the new one from the fiction factory. afterwards we went for a drink with raymo and the gang but i was hideously broke and tired (i'd already spent far too much time in chapter over the last 72 hours) so went home to watch MEAN GIRLS instead and muse on the fact that lindsay lohan had the world at her feet and chucked it all for crack and hanging out with paris hilton.

tuesday i was ushering for one of michael kelligan's readings, this month it was the new patrick jones play DANDELION. it was a real treat as it was well acted and full of wonderful lines. the cast had the script in their hands but already seemed to know the characters really well. the setting was an old folks home where earnest is trying to rebel, get the old ladies thinking about the world around them. at times it felt a bit like ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOOS NEST when the characters talk about fleeing, but what to? this is a world that has finished with them. i thought it was a bit overlong, the romance element seeming to be a bit tacked on but it was wonderful and made you think about how we treat the elderly, especially after seeing MID AUGUST LUNCH.

on wednesday i was ushering for SLEEP FURIOUSLY again (wonderful every time but still makes me sleepy) and then was doing some cover for the cinema department in the evening. first up was the BAFTA PREVIEW SCREENING of THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE. a little thrill of excitement went through me when i heard that this is what it was, i had hoped to see it at some point so it was nice to get to go to the preview. the september issue of vogue magazine is the most important of the year, one commentator said that it is like the new year for fashion, out with the old in with the new and everyone wants to know what the new is. what is new is partly determined by anna wintour, the editor of vogue. she and her team go around all the fashion shows and decide what the narratives of the collections are, what ideas are put forward and who should be showcased. anna wintour is a very powerful lady, many know her better as "nuclear wintour" for her icy demeanour. she is the person who they based the scary editor of the magazine in THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA, for years she has been a sort of archetype of fashion women and career women. this film gave her and her industry more depth and showed just what they do. someone who shone throughout the film was the magazine's stylist grace coddington. grace started at vogue at the same time as anna and the two know and respect each other a great deal, despite the odd disagreement about dropping pages from a photoshoot. grace is obviously very good at her job that she clearly loves and feels passionately about. to put it in a simplistic way grace is the beauty and anna is the brains but of course the truth is a lot more complicated than that. the film made the jobs of these people very important, almost seeming to be life or death but it also exposed how silly the whole thing is. a lot of the fashion industry seems to be like the emporers' new clothes. anna decides something is good so it is good and no-one questions her. they fuss and pout about these things (behind her back, to her face they just agree) but no-one challenges her. the one person allowed to challenge her was her daughter. in a bubble bursting moment she mentioned that her mother wants her to be an editor (to follow in the family tradition, anna's father was the editor of the evening standard) but she wants to be a lawyer as she finds it all a bit stupid, anna was not present for this interview. there was a real sadness about anna wintour that came out in the film. despite its protestations the commercial side of fashion tends to make people despise themselves and you got the feeling that its a profession that makes you in turn feel a bit worthless in the end. it was thrilling to be taken on this journey with them.

the next film was the epic MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS. i went to this not sure what to expect. i'd heard it was well respected and that paul schrader, george lucas and francis ford coppola all contributed to it in their early 80s heyday (part of their well known worship of japanese film and mythology) but that was all. it turned out to be a highly stylised facinating study of a man's life. again, i had heard of japanese writer yukio mishima but did not know the details. the film attempted to illuminate his life through his works, the chapters beauty "the temple of the golden pavillion", art "kyko's house", action "runaway horses" and the harmony between the pen and the sword which runs throughout the film and culminates in mishima's death by suicide. this film is so controversial in japan that it is officially banned, mishima's politics that hark back to the days of imperialism being too difficult to discuss. the film was interesting and intense and as an experiment in illustrating a man's life via his work it really worked. the famous score by phillip glass was just amazing and it was a thrill to be surrounded by those vivid colours and the escalating cascade of synths and strings. however, it did seem a little old fashioned and i was very aware all the way through that it was a film made by bunch of foreigners, i wasn't convinced that they were not too in love with the idea of mishima and took him a little too seriously. his politics and the way he lived his life made him seem very callous and petty at times.

i went home after that and will had bought a lovely bottle of wine and we drank and chatted happily, as we got to spend the next day together! we don't get many days off together since i work on a sunday. we both had thursday off and steen decided that since i'd been paid it was time for a bit of a day out so we went to penarth to see the new FFOTOGALLERY ANNA FOX: COCKROACH DIARIES show and did some charity shopping and had an ice cream on the pier. perfect! the exhibition was interesting, she lived in a shared house in london in the early 90s and documented the strange things previous tenants had left there or drawn on the walls and the infestation that reading the diary entries made her life seem not really a britpop era fun time but instead a few scenes from THE YELLOW WALLPAPER. we found some good bargains in the brilliant charity shops in town (i think we counted 6) including the FABER BOOK OF POP MUSIC, essays edited by hanif kareshi, THE GANGS OF NEW YORK (a book i read and owned but left with another student in america), a hip flask and a brilliant bag covered with racing cars. i tried on a couple of dresses that didn't look right and steen tried on a coat that he didn't like but i loved (i took a photo of it to remind myself). we dashed back to cardiff to catch early orders at ICHIBAN.

we got back and played with the cat for a bit before i had to head back to chapter to usher for EMti, the new play from angharad evans by the real life theatre company. my friends cathryn and hef were planning to go and i was excited to see them but also dreading it, i'd seen the last play they'd put on and thought it was one of the worst things i'd seen: horribly pretentious and horrible acting. luckily, it wasn't as bad as that! they had a very good cast and the play was well put together. inspired by her own brother's suicide the play was about a young man struggling between an oppressive family and the release of death. apart from the unnecessary and frankly humourous "movement" from dominque fester (was she supposed to be an angel? i'm not sure, but her presence was intrusive and unhelpful) the scenes were powerful and grew increasingly intense. evans' work still suffers from the feeling that it could have been written by a younger more inexperienced playwright but here there was at least hope that the company will improve, the inclusion of other performers seemed to truly be a good path to take. i had a lovely drink with cathryn and hefin, it was lovely to see them again after so long.

friday i was ushering for MESRINE: PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER 1 (PART2). this was fairly annoying since i'd not yet seen part 1 but ho hum. it wasn't hard to follow. jacques mesrine was the most notorious gangster of the 70s in france, a charismatic self aggrandiser who liked being known as an "honest gangster" and even tried to style himself into a baader-meinhof revolutionary towards the end of his career. he wrote a book bragging of his deeds and gave interviews with the press to increase his notoriety and enjoyed the idea of being the number one hate figure with the police, thinking of himself as a modern day robin hood. although i've missed the first (and apparently better) half of the story, the central performance by vincent cassell made the whole thing very easy to follow, you were drawn to mesrine. you didn't know whether he would be loving and affectionate or murderous and frightening, i don't know many actors who could have pulled that off.

well, i end this week looking forward to maybe a night off from chapter. for all the wonderful things i get to do here i will be savouring a night in maybe just listening to music or reading. it is great to see it busy and full and we have such great shows here its well deserved. but it has been a busy week, as usual and i am looking forward to playing with the cat and being away for the evening.