Liar's Quartet , livre ebook

September Publishing - Thomas Mark

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115 pages

English

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Funny, provocative and moving, The Liar's Quartet includes the scripts with brand new commentary from Mark Thomas' most acclaimed comic, political theatre.'There is a battle of narratives. The working-class narrative is being erased. And as you erase that narrative, you erase truths with it.' Layered with political insight (and insult), and peppered with anecdote, The Liar's Quartet is a bravura performance in its own right. Each multi-award winning show examines Thomas' obsession with the bonds that bind us, those of family, friends and communities.Beginning with Bravo Figaro!, Mark puts on an opera in his dying father's living room (with the help of Royal Opera House singers) to explore their relationship. In Cuckooed, he unpicks the betrayal of a friend and a fellow activist who was in fact employed to spy for the UK's biggest arms company, BAE systems. And in The Red Shed, Mark returns to his political roots to harness the power of collective memory and celebrate the importance of working-class struggles and narratives in a story he describes as 'a topical tale about the miners' strike'.Laughter, anger and connection. Mark Thomas is more essential than ever ...

Sujets

Activism

Humour

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Publié par	September Publishing
Date de parution	09 mai 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781910463703
Langue	English

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Extrait

THE LIAR S QUARTET
Also by Mark Thomas from September Publishing:
100 Acts of Minor Dissent

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
First published in 2017 by September Publishing
Copyright Mark Thomas 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017
Bravo Figaro! was first published by Mr Sands in 2012
Cuckooed was first published by Mr Sands in 2014
The Red Shed was first published by Mr Sands in 2016
The right of Mark Thomas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder
Typeset by Ed Pickford
Printed in Poland on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by Hussar Books
eISBN: 978-1-910463-70-3 Kindle ISBN: 978-1-910463-71-0
September Publishing
www.septemberpublishing.org
CONTENTS
Introduction
Bravo Figaro!
Cuckooed
The Red Shed
Production Details
About the Author
INTRODUCTION BY DR OLLIE DOUBLE
I ve been following Mark Thomas s work for the best part of thirty years. I first became aware of him in 1988, when he did a short spot on Channel 4 s Friday Night Live , in which he started out by asking, incredulously, What - are they talking about - in opera? After taking the piss out of that venerated musical form, he went on to suggest that you could start a revolution by swapping the muzak in supermarkets for records by The Clash and The Damned, inciting the customers to riot. Meanwhile, you d pump the muzak into police cars, making the officers within so docile that they d observe the riot with benign disinterest.
A few months later I found myself on the same bill as Mark, at a comedy night in a snooker club in Coventry run by the theatre company TICTOC. Mark was top of the bill and I was a lowly open mike spot, and to say I was impressed would be an understatement. My abiding memory of that gig was of how he dealt with a persistent, drunk heckler. There used to be a standard ploy on the comedy circuit that if somebody like that went out to the toilet, the comedian would say to the audience, Let s all hide! The audience would laugh at the very idea of playing such a prank on the heckler. On this occasion, Mark actually followed through with it, persuading the entire audience of about 100 people to hide (behind some screens, I think), so that when the drunk returned he was faced with an empty auditorium.
In these early examples, all the things that make Mark s work so distinctive are there - politics, punk and an ability to take the audience somewhere they didn t expect to go. He has gone on to develop these envelope-pushing qualities in all the full-length shows he has created this century, whether it s finishing Dambusters (2001) with a furious, punchline-free rant about human rights abuses in Turkey, asking the audience for their suggestions for a better world in It s the Stupid Economy (2009), or playing the campaigning prankster in 100 Acts of Minor Dissent (2013).
He is often pigeonholed as a political comedian, but just as important is his love of playing about with the form of stand-up comedy, and the three scripts collected in this volume are an excellent example of that. In each of these shows, Mark places stand-up into a more formal theatrical frame, particularly in the staging which incorporates sophisticated sets, lighting cues and recorded voices. In a long telephone conversation, I ask him about the politics and the key creative decisions behind them.
Bravo Figaro started after an appearance on BBC Radio 4 s Saturday Live with Fi Glover. She said, We ve got this idea for a section called Inheritance Tracks, where people talk about the songs they inherit from their family and the songs they pass onto their family. We re doing loads of interviews for the first programme to see if we can get a story. Have you got anything? And I told her the story of how my dad, who was a working-class builder, a self-educated man who left school with no qualifications, discovers a love of opera. And how embarrassing it was for me that he would play this music on the building site, because I m a punk rocker!
Mark also talked about the fact that his father had developed progressive supranuclear palsy, a degenerative illness which encompasses dementia. In an attempt to reach out to him, I found myself singing and remembering these arias. When I used to bath my daughter, I used to put soap between her toes and I would sing bursts of Figaro s aria from The Barber of Seville . And I talked about how I d now started to go to opera, as a way to communicate with him, really.
Somebody from the Royal Opera House heard the programme, and Mark was invited to meet Mike Figgis, who asked him if he d like to develop a show about class and opera for a festival he was directing. Mark agreed: I said, Alright, I will, but I want opera singers and I m going to try and put an opera on in my dad s bungalow - because he can t get out, he can t move much. And he agreed to do it. So he lent me these opera singers and we rehearsed a programme of arias, and we did a performance in my mum and dad s living room in their bungalow in Bournemouth. And then, because my dad was really awakened by the event, I did interviews with him and my mum, and we had sound recordists with us so we could record them.
About ten days before the show, Mark started to rehearse with the director Hamish Pirie and work on the material, and they realised, We ve got something interesting here. They showed this early version at the Royal Opera House Deloitte festival and the reception it received inspired them to develop it more fully, taking it up to the Edinburgh Fringe before touring it.
I ve always been pushing to do more stories, Mark says. If you look back, you have Dambusters , which is a story. Serious Organised Criminal (2007), that s a full story. Walking the Wall (2011) is a story. They are narratives. And I love the idea of telling stories, but now there was a chance to tell a story in a theatrical way, that utilised all the dramatic devices to recreate it and show the truth of it - and get those other voices onto the stage. Because I think one of the interesting things about stand-up is the fact that it s you impersonating other people, but it s essentially your voice. So it s literally a question of how do you get other people onto the stage? Well, you record them and you play it. It was the most theatrical thing I d done to date. I d done stand-up. And then I was telling stories but still in the stand-up mode. And this was like a clean break into a much more theatrical way of doing it.
It was also a break in the sense that it was the most personal show he had done. Yet there was still an underlying political motivation: It sounds really weird, but it s about sticking my fingers up at the liberals. It s about celebrating a working-class Tory. My dad had more faults than you could shake a stick at, but there are things that he achieved in terms of his life and in terms of the idea of self-improvement. You might not like his politics, and you might not have liked him, but he fucking came from a bad place and ended up in a good place. And the idea of working-class self-improvement is one that s just forgotten.
Undoubtedly, though, doing such a personal show surprised an audience that had come to know him as an overtly political comedian. What I like doing is defying expectation, I think we should all try and defy expectations to create new things. I love doing that. I think it s really exciting. For me, stand-up was the foundation. It s what I fell in love with and it gave me a certain set of skills, and I thought, OK, where can we go with this? What can we do with this? How can we play with this? How do we make shows which are really different? Because you know and I know that of all the comics we ve seen in all the years, 90 per cent of it is wallpaper. Can you remember 90 per cent of the stuff you ve seen? So how do you stand out in that? How do you go, OK, here s something that you won t have thought of, here s something you won t have seen before, here s putting a spanner in the works to make you look at it again ? Playing with the form of it is really exciting.
One way that Bravo Figaro plays with the form of stand-up is to expand its emotional palette, taking the audience through peaks and troughs of love and loss as well as allowing them to laugh at the gags. The thing about theatre is that it offers you the chance to empathise and feel emotions. All jokes are stories. There s a beginning, a middle and the wrong ending. That s how it works. Basically, this is taking that and just going, Let s fill in the gaps, let s colour in what s in the rest of the story.
Cuckooed is a more overtly political show, telling the true tale of how Mark and fellow campaigners in the organisation Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) had been spied on for years by a man called Martin - who they believed to be their friend and comrade but had been employed to spy for the arms company BAE Systems. In an era rife with stories about espionage perpetrated by governments, police, secret services and even - as in this case - corporations, this show has much to say about breaches of privacy and the exercise of power. However, like Bravo Figaro , it also explores emotion. Mark says, The thing that motivates you to do it is explaining complexities. I wanted to do a show that showed the emotional impact of the betrayal of being spied upon.
Mark was close to Martin, and initially dismissed the suspicions that were starting to be raised about him. He even took Martin out on tour with him. This made it all the harder when he eventually saw the evidence which showed that his friend was actually a spy. I just stopped talking with him. That