Beginnings

THE PLAY
'The Local Stigmatic' is hardly the best known play going around. Written in the mid-sixties by Heathcote Williams (perhaps best-known for his 1988 book-length poem 'Whale Nation'), it peers briefly into the ambiguous, taunting relationship of two men, Graham and Ray, as they wind themselves up to victimise a famous film-actor, David.

Despite its lack of reputation, the play does have one notable voice in its corner. Al Pacino first played the part of Graham in 1968 and then a couple more times after that before eventually appearing in a filmed version in the late eighties. I say 'filmed version' because it's not exactly a film, more a kind of tele-play. In its long gestation, it was referred to by those in the know as 'Pacino's secret project'. In a 1990 interview, he had this interesting ramble about it:

"Well, there was no getting away from it. There was a violent act committed in this piece. See, we had a different problem, because it is a play, and at the same time as this act is taking place he’s performing a ritual of sorts, and he’s speaking in ironies, and you have to hear that. And how do you have this act take place and hear it at the same time? And I think that was the reason it failed on stage, quite frankly. It was hard for an audience to hear what was going on while that was happening, literally, in front of them. And Heathcote had said that he felt his play leaked at that point, and he would never do that again. That violence dwarfed what was going on and therefore, people were confused by what they saw. They just took it as a brutal, gratuitous act."

Pacino seems to have had an ongoing relationship with the script and has, reportedly, re-edited the film more than once. Both he and Paul Guilfoyle's English accents are pretty off-putting (sorry Al) but the acting's terrific. Pacino's switch into fanboi mode at 27:40 is creepy as hell.

The script is hard to get hold of. You can read it online here.

HOW WE GOT HERE
In February, Castlemaine Theatre Company invited directors ('experienced or first timers') to propose a work to be performed as part of their 'New Directors' season in 2012. The only prerequisite was that you must not have directed for CTC before. No problem. Apart from a production of Harold Pinter's 'A Slight Ache' back when I was a drama student in the late 80s, I've never directed for anyone. Of course, I've thought about directing a lot, so that should stand me in good stead, right?

Hmm, okay. Well, what I do have is a mish mash of hopefully relevant experience, some from my early twenties when I was fresh out of drama school and still living the fantasy that I was the next DeNiro, while bolstering my very occasional acting jobs with stints as a lighting operator, stage manager (terrifying, never-to-be-repeated experience), rigger, opera dresser and, you know, general all-round-theatre-dogsbody. All of that probably should have been more fun than it actually was. I was a little bitter about not having fame and fortune thrust upon me and didn't really appreciate the unfettered joy of being twenty-something and kicking around the Adelaide theatre scene rather than, say, working at the oil refinery near where I grew up. I did appreciate not being a junior clerical officer at the AMP Society though, which was pretty much the only real job I had before the age of 25. (I lasted 5 months. Never worked in an office again.Whew.)

Aaaanyway, by the early 90s I'd had enough of people not recognising my talent. I moved to Melbourne where people didn't recognise anything about me and started writing plays (getting in at the other end of the creative process, see?). Okay, hitting the fastforward button now: few plays, couple of years in Edinburgh where I wrote just one play in the first few weeks then spent the rest of the time earning £3 an hour discovering what the word 'menial' meant, back in Australia a radio play for the ABC (Lorraine Bayly plays the lead, ha!), then a half hour telefilm for SBS, which I win an Australian Writer's Guild Award for - am I on the up, or what?

Well, 'or what' as it transpires. Nothing much from that time on as far as the performing arts are concerned. Fulsome and happy in other ways with wife, children, house in the country. I write lots of advertising stuff instead. It's okay. Then in 2010, I have a go at acting again. I get a part in a locally written, somewhat fucked up family drama called 'Separating The Dust' in which I play a deranged homophobe who, at his mother's funeral, picks a fight with his gay brother, abuses him, beats him up, forces him to watch while he has sex with his missus on a table, then at gunpoint compels him to almost fellate him before turning the gun on himself. . . . Blackout!

Ingrid Gaeng played my femme fatale wife. The lucky guy who played the brother is Aston Elliot. Aston is an ex-cop and has a pretty full resume of theatre and films (which I'll no doubt come and edit in here once he gets round to sending me his bio) and is a blessing to have on stage with you. Unpretentious, but smart and analytical, he helped turn that messed up un-brotherly miasma into something we could both make sense of.

This a couple of pics I made for STD. That's me trying my best to look mean, Aston doing stoic and victimised down below.

Aston and I get on. We say, 'we should do something else together'. Aston pulls out 'The Local Stigmatic'. Where he's come across it, I have no idea. He's even got the book. He puts me on to the CTC offer. Suddenly, we're pitching to do it. Suddenly we're doing it.

THE PLAN
There is no plan. Not yet. Aston's suggestion is to set the play in the 70's. Nice idea. This thing is a period piece, but the sixties are so culturally remote. Something about the 70s still seems relevant and Australian. Maybe that's just because I grew up in them.

Here's what I pitched to CTC:

'I am a fan of Steven Berkoff and the ideas of ‘total theatre’. With its uncontextualised narrative, abrupt scene changes, and scripted audio effects, TLS is well-suited to an approach which creates a theatrical montage of movement, sound, visual image and text.

I would juxtapose the naturalistic passages of Graham and Ray’s tense banter with stylised tableaus at the scene transitions. I would explore the use of non-naturalistic movement for the street scenes and the violent attack on David. Set and props, if any, would be minimal and figurative; I believe the play could be effectively staged with none at all. Instead I would look to evoke the different locations of the play (and the emotional arc of the narrative) with lighting states and electronic audio (music and sound effects).

Lighting will depend on the theatre set-up and so on. I would adjust the scope according to availability. Broadly speaking, I imagine the design to be pretty stark. Different areas of the stage will be hidden/revealed by defined ‘pools’ of light. I imagine the space to go from generally lit at the beginning to claustrophobically confined at the violent climax. I imagine, at times, the actors to interact from separate pools of light.

The audio will consist of three elements: location indicators (street/bar ambience), music (probably for transitions but maybe for the beating-up scene also) and atmospherics (such as the sound of the dog-track when Graham is recounting his experiences there).

While I’m interested in these overtly theatrical devices, the heart of this play is the disturbing relationship between Graham and Ray. This is a character piece and depends on strong, seductive performances. I would be looking for emotionally nuanced, naturalistic representations, framed and counterpointed by the non-naturalistic elements, not overwhelmed by them.

Ultimately, I would be trying to create a piece of theatre that is emotionally compelling, as well as visually and audially inventive.'

Steven Berkoff. . . ! I am so pretentious.

If we followed the dynamic that worked for STD, I'd be Graham, Aston would be Ray. I think that's what Aston had in mind at first. But CTC are nervous about me acting and directing. Fair enough. So, Ray's got less to say. I'll play him. And Aston is actually perfect for Graham. He's a natural front man, big and charismatic. He'll do nasty well and find the nuances. Graham's a complex character I haven't got a hold of yet, smart but tragically limited in his tiny world view. Or maybe not. His game, as Pacino says, is confusing, not just brutal and gratuitous. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of Aston as Graham. And the more I look forward to playing the needling nihilist, Ray.

We'll need a David that is dynamically different to us, either a young bloke who can play him as one of those handsome effortlessly successful young actors that I wanted to be when I was young (this is a play about the politics of envy after all) or, like the David in the film, an urbane silver fox, complacent and shallow. There's a drunk too, that Graham toys with briefly. Could the same actor play the two minor parts? They appear separately. I wonder whether the drunk could be an imaginary figure, played to by Graham. Maybe the drunk's short rant could be pre-recorded? Graham could play to the audience as though they are the drunk. I wonder, fleetingly, if David and/or the drunk could be played by women. Not sure what that does to the meaning of the play. Probably distorts it too much.

So, we'll see what comes up in the auditions. CTC are mounting 6 productions for this 'New Directors' season. Rather oddly, they are running auditions for all 6 simultaneously. Not really sure how that will work. There's a meeting of all the directors this Sunday where, I guess, some of that will be explored.

auditions!

Yep, should some of you in the flood of traffic to this blog (22 at last count, and I think 19 of them were me) happen to live in central Victoria (or even in Melbourne - hey, we're not that far) fancy a walk-on part as an articulate drunk or the more substantial role of David the somewhat-famous-and-soon-to-be-bashed film actor. . . here's the chance.

I might just say, by way of further enhancing the appeal, that both these parts have something to get your teeth into and will not require a huge commitment in time. You might even consider trying out for both roles. I'm particularly interested in, and hopeful of seeing, people who have never acted before. A small cast and nice director like me is perfect for dipping your toe in the water.

So, to the details:

Auditions will be held on 
SUNDAY 11 MARCH
10-6pm
WEST END HALL, VIEW ST, CASTLEMAINE

Book your time with Kate on 0431 998 707 or katestonesdattner@gmail.com. Kate is the Secretary of Castlemaine Theatre Company and also very nice.

Alternatively, if you'd like to contact me directly, or just want to express an interest in the play try stigmatic@newham.vic.au.

Richmond 1976(ish)

Okay, let's take a step back for a moment.

The trouble of course with pitching an idea in a hurry about a script that you've read one-and-a-half times is that it's a classic cart-before-the-equine-quadruped situation. Inevitably, you impose stuff from the outside and then spend the rest of the time trying to make those choices work. It's easy to say, 'Oh, let's move the action of the play to Australia and set in the 70s,' but is that a legitimate transposition?

Graham and Ray's world is Heathcote Williams' London of the 60s. Not swinging London, not Carnaby Street or Drury Lane or Abbey Road - all that cool, hipster, oh-so-mythologised snowglobe of an era is very much off to one side, casting a distant, lurid sidelight across the dull streets that our lads prowl about in.

This is a world of dingy flats, buildings greyed out by the grime of age. The streets aren't so much mean, as grubby and stupefyingly ordinary. Graham and Ray dive into the calculated uncertainties of the dog track and confected celebrity gossip like an escape tunnel from anonymity.

Funny, when you search the net for pics of that era, you mostly get celebrities and protestors. Google 'London pub 60s' you get quite a lot of pictures of Mick and Keith. Nevertheless, I imagine a less glamorous perspective looked like this:

It's a world of humdrum pubs filled with the same people having the same drink at the same table at the same time, day after day. It's the cheap excitement of the dog track, the betting shop, the form guide folded in the pocket. Unsurprisingly, none of it quite satisfies.

So. . . . . does it have an Australian equivalent? Let's simplify.

WORKING CLASS INNER CITY + GREYHOUNDS + PUBS = ?

Well, Melbourne in the 70s may well provide a pretty interesting echo. Turns out the dogs were a popular night out back then. A betting ring was built for greyhound meetings held at Arden St (North Melbourne Football Club's home ground) in the 50s and served until a £50,000 investment by the Melbourne Greyhound Racing Association saw it moved to a redeveloped Olympic Park in 1962, where 6000 punters braved the cold for the first meeting. In 1973, a new $6m 2200 seat grandstand was built for greyhounds, soccer and rugby. The new facilities provided the basis for the dishlickers' halcyon days which lasted until the 1980s.

And of course, just across Punt Rd from the Olympic Park precinct is Melbourne's own struggletown. . . Richmond. Forget the boutiques, cafes, antique stores and bourgeois townhouses that since the 1990s have made it another yuppie poster suburb. Richmond in the 70s was seedy. And a little bit dangerous.

And while Richmond feels lighter, more carefree than London, where the weight of hierarchies can bear down as heavily as the weight of centuries, Australia (particularly in the 60s and 70s) is equally oppressive in its cultural isolation, a sense of being becalmed in a regressive backwater, where to get tickets on yourself, stick your head up, is an invitation to have it knocked off.

What's more, Bendigo Street in Richmond was famous as the home of the Channel 9 studios. With some of the posher homes on Richmond Hill and across the Yarra in nearby Hawthorn and Kew, it seems entirely feasible that Graham and Ray could stumble across, and even keep regular tabs on, a whole bunch of minor celebs.

Am I making the case yet?

Something else. I lived in Richmond in the 90s, renting a little terraced house with an outdoor dunny in the shadows of the Lennox St housing trust flats. The house was at that time unrenovated but, judging by the explosions of post-modern interventions that were happening in the streets around us even then, I doubt it stayed that way. The All Nations Pub was our local, where you could get a T-bone that hung off the side of the plate, and Molly Meldrum lived a street away.

I lived there for two years but, funnily, the memories of Richmond that stay with me the most are someone else's. . . 

Des was a roof plumber that I worked for. He was Richmond born and bred, working class, intelligent, and very widely read. He was also as canny as they come and gave the impression that in his younger days he had rubbed shoulders with people at both ends of the social spectrum. He had also kept company with a set that you would comfortably class as criminals, who were part and parcel of Richmond's underbelly. Des clearly felt uncomfortable about those associations. He would often have one eye over his shoulder and spoke on a few occasions about having to avoid certain Tigers supporters who he would catch sight of at the footy. Des was both close-mouthed and loquacious and in a year or so of sitting next to him in the ute, I got enough fragments to put together a picture of an earlier life that probably put him within a whisker of prison.

One story always stayed me as emblematic of the dark side of Richmond. One night, Des was selected to go for a drive with one of the local leaders. He was 17 at the time and pretty sure that there was some sort of 'initiation' planned for him. They headed to a local footy oval, drove out to the middle and stopped there with the lights on. Before long, a second car arrived and parked opposite, so that the two sets of headlights illuminated the grass between them. More cars turned up, each one filling in the spaces until there was a circle of them, lighting up an arena between them with their headlights. The last couple of cars were crammed full of girls. Des was told to stand by the bonnet of his car, where a nervous young woman was sent over to him. She had no interest in him, nor he in her particularly, but they both knew what was expected of them, and along with everyone else, they did it on the bonnet in that floodlit circle. Afterwards, they all went to the pub and got hammered.

I haven't mentioned Sharon so far. She's Ray's girlfriend. Well, presumably. Although she never appears, she's mentioned three times in ways that are vast with implication. This is the first:

GRAHAM

Sharon.....she coming round.....bringing any food?

RAY

I didn’t ask her to. I didn’t give her any money.

GRAHAM

I never pay for sex, Ray, because Jesus Christ

paid for our sins.

I wonder if Sharon and Graham and Ray may have all found themselves on some footy oval, barely out of childhood, pressed into an act implicit with the suggestion of reward and punishment. I wonder if, at the onset of their adult lives, they had some part of their feelings for themselves and others erased. And I wonder if they went to the pub afterwards and got hammered.

stalker

"Fame is the perversion of the natural instinct for validation and attention."

Heathcote Williams

Any idea who this is? Yes, he is as crazy as he looks, although the US legal system didn't seem to think so. He was tried and convicted as what you might call 'sane enough'. His name is John Hinckley. He's the guy who shot (but failed to kill) Ronald Reagan back in 1981.

And this man? Yeah, the mug shot kind of tells the story, doesn't it? Also a bad guy. His name is Mark Chapman. Just four months before Hinckley rocketed to infamy, he shot and killed John Lennon.

With the help of the US tabloid media, these two men catapulted the notion of stalking into the full glare of public consciousness. Until this time, a 'stalker' would more likely be defined as some sort of prowler. Stalking was not even a specific crime until 1990. Ten years later, it had spread to all US criminal jurisdictions and was being adopted elsewhere in the world. It reached Australia when Queensland introduced anti-stalking legislation in 1993.

So. . . ?

Well, Graham is a stalker.

When Ray first spots David in the pub, he says to Graham. . . . . 'one of those people you follow.' It seems an innocuous enough statement but it reverberates through all the succeeding scenes. Graham reveals, first, an encyclopaedic knowledge of David's personal history, then increasingly intimate details of his private life, as he bludgeons him with a triumphant demonstration of his omnipresence.

As the latter half of the play unfolds, it is impossible not to reflect on the implications of David being just 'one of those people'. Possibly, this is not the first of these attacks. Graham hints as much during the beating. But there is some suggestion that he has a tendency to elaborate on the truth. Whether this is the first time or the tenth, you have to wonder if they are escalating towards actual homicide. Suddenly, the psychology of men like Hinckley and Chapman become very interesting.

Chapman was a born-again Christian. (Remember Graham's reference to Jesus dying for our sins? I really can't decide just yet whether he means that, or is just being sneeringly ironic. But the play does use the the word 'stigmatic' in the title. Someone here is suffering the sins of the world.) Chapman is also intelligent, charming, obsessive - all adjectives that fit Graham. He carries around Catcher In The Rye and invests it with deep, personal meaning in a way that is more than echoed by Graham's constant soliloquising from the Greyhounds form guide. Like Chapman, Graham seems to construct from his gospel text - in his case the lists of dog placings and assessments and prognostications - some sort of grand justification of self.

Interestingly, like Graham, Chapman had more than one celebrity target; Johnny Carson, Elizabeth Taylor, George C. Scott, and Jacqueline Onassis were all on his radar. Chapman said of his reasons for killing Lennon (from Wikipedia):

"The result would be that I would be famous, the result would be that my life would change and I would receive a tremendous amount of attention, which I did receive... I was in a very confused, dark place. I was looking for reasons to vent all that anger and confusion and low self esteem."

John Hinckley too was driven, in part, by a desire to eliminate the dismissive hierarchy of fame.

He became obsessed with the 1976 film Taxi Driver (the 1980 film Ordinary People also featured strongly in Chapman's pathology), and developed an infatuation with actress Jodie Foster. When Foster entered Yale University, Hinckley moved to Connecticut, enrolled in a Yale writing class, began slipping poems and messages under her door and repeatedly phoning her.

Failing to develop any meaningful contact, Hinckley considered hijacking an airplane or committing suicide in front of her to get her attention. Eventually he settled on a scheme to impress her by assassinating the president, reasoning that by doing so he would achieve some sort of social parity.

He wrote to her, (according to Wikipedia):

“Over the past seven months I've left you dozens of poems, letters and love messages in the faint hope that you could develop an interest in me. Although we talked on the phone a couple of times I never had the nerve to simply approach you and introduce myself. [. . .] the reason I'm going ahead with this attempt now is because I cannot wait any longer to impress you."

Yikes. Lucky Jodie. Hinckley is the kind of stalker that psychologists call an erotomaniac. He has an obsessive love attachment to a famous person. He targets Reagan, like Chapman with Lennon, in order to elevate himself to a status whereby his mania will be fulfilled.

What exactly Graham seeks to achieve is somewhat more murky but the equalisation of status seems a clue to an overt, political intent.

I do occasionally find information somwhere other than Wikipedia but this too comes from there:

"The 2002 National Victim Association Academy defines an additional form of stalking: The vengeance/terrorist stalker. Both the vengeance stalker and terrorist stalker (the latter sometimes called the political stalker) do not....seek a personal relationship with their victims but rather force them to emit a certain response favourable to the stalker...the political stalker intends to accomplish a political agenda, also using threats and intimidation to force his/her target to refrain and/or become involved in some particular activity, regardless of the victim’s consent."

Graham is simultaneously fascinated and disgusted by celebrity. He tells David, "You’re a dirty leper, you’re a hideous cripple..." He undoubtedly has an agenda and is outraged when, at the end of the play, his 'lesson' seems to have been wasted: "Made the game very simple for him so he could understand it, and he blatantly chooses to ignore the rules."

That is Graham's endgame. . . but what drives him to it? Chapman said that as a boy, he lived in fear of his father, who he said was physically abusive towards his mother and unloving towards him. He began to fantasise about having king-like power over a group of imaginary 'little people' who lived in the walls.

This comes from Katherine Ramsland:

"Stalkers who are also psychopaths, Meloy says, experience only low levels of empathy or an absence of it altogether. Their relationships tend to be sadistic, based in power over others. He said he believes that this is associated with a lack of early attachment to others in the family. Meloy claims that psychopaths are biologically predisposed to antisocial activity because they have a hyper-reactive autonomic nervous system. Crime or exploiting others excites them. That means they're motivated to do things that heighten their nervous system and have no real conscience about hurting others.

Stalkers tend to be unemployed or underemployed, but are smarter than other criminals. They often have a history of failed intimate relationships. They tend to devalue their victims and to sexualize them. They also idealize certain people, minimize what they are doing to resist, project onto people motives and actions that have no basis in truth, and rationalize that the target person deserves to be harassed and violated."

Finally, just returning to the connection with cinema. . . At the beginning of the second scene, Graham and Ray are on the street, talking about 'the pictures' in a way that suggests they have just emerged from seeing a movie. In the Al Pacino film, they are actually standing on the steps of the cinema. The scene is notable for Ray's attempt to expose the (un)truthfulness of one of Graham's stories, suggesting that, like the fantasist Hinckley, Graham may be prone to inventing such anecdotes. It occurs to me that, as part of our 70s milieu, it would be entirely appropriate for Graham and Ray to be emerging from a screening of Taxi Driver.

posters

You know, I'm really not sure how many people go to shows because they've seen a poster. But I like making them. . . so, what the hell, I suppose. The first of these is a teaser, just to get people to visit this blog and find out what it's about. If you are here because you saw it: HURRAH! It worked! What's the mental jack russell go to do with The Local Stigmatic? Not a real lot. It's a crazy looking dog. I know. . . tenuous. But it's really just to pique your interest.

The second is the actual poster. CTC are doing they're own publicity, so this serves to create a distinct identity for TLS separate from the companion plays. Again, is it an effective marketing tool? Who knows.

 

Below is Castlemaine Theatre Company's poster to promote all six productions. I don't want to be unneccessarily critical of this, but I am going to be a bit critical, so I'll just preface it by saying that it isn't all that easy to find some sort of unifying concept that is attention-grabbing and yet true to the spirit of each and every show. And, on the whole, this is a good-looking poster. Nevertheless, there are three things about it that kinda irk me.

The first is the boxer image. It's a metaphor, right, but 99% of people are going to take it literally and expect that the shows have something to do with boxing. As far as I know, none of them do. I think they could have come up with an image that didn't lure people into jumping to the wrong conclusion. Secondly, the triple-layer of titles - too confusing. I would have dispensed with 'Agency' and 'Absolution'. They've already called it Night 1 & 2 anyway. The third is probably just a bit of copywriter's nit-picking but. . . there is a lot of superfluous info on here that doesn't sell the show. The names of the directors are immaterial, as are the plays' countries of origin. The asterisked stuff baffles me as to why it's there and I also wouldn't bother with 'Inc.' or 'at' either. What would work better to sell a bunch of unknown plays by unknown directors, in my opinion, would be a short tag-line for each play that gives a clue to what they're about.

Rehearsal 27th June

rehearsal 13th July

In the Phee - dress rehearsals

 

Endings

There were two things that took me somewhat unawares as we hit the theatre.

The notion of acting and directing was always one that I expected to be demanding but in fact wasn't - at least not in the rehearsal room. I had a pretty clear idea of how I thought the scenes could be moved and the dynamics of the two main characters were something that Aston and I were able to extract naturally as we got deeper into it. The emotional shape of the drama was embedded in William's script, albeit ambiguously at times, and Graham and Ray's trajectories grew organically from the interplay of character. That part of things was really quite easy.  Directing and acting were almost one and the same thing.

I had a well-defined audio-visual concept in mind too. So, in the theatre, it was just a matter of taking the techs through that. What I didn't anticipate there, though, was just how much I needed to be outside the play at that stage, fine-tuning the performances, bringing all those elements into harmony. There are simply  some things you cannot judge from inside a scene. Sometimes it's timing. Sometimes it's the forcefulness of delivery. Sometimes it's just making sure the actors are all bringing the same sense of style and energy to a change or tableau. In watching the video of the performance, I think that the audio-visual concept of the show is strong and cohesive. The performances I wish I could just bring into focus a little bit more. It's all those details that when you sit and watch, you can draw an actor's attention to, bring little moments together so that they click. Like, point out the unconscious actor tics that distract from the character. Smooth away the awkward bits that just don't work. In watching myself in particular, I am able to like some of the choices but I also want at times to shout out, 'No, no, no! Let's do that differently.'

The other thing I didn't anticipate was the meeting of this play with this audience. When I first read this script, I thought it was interesting, evocative. By the time we'd finished, I loved it - loved it for its completeness, its utter evocation of a micro-society, for its implications about humanity and society and masculinity, for its creepy, relentless power. What neither I nor the audience could love it for was as a feelgood night of fun at the theatre, no matter how much theatricality I tried to invest it with. This is a dark and disturbing piece of drama, with hard-to-like characters. It is profoundly ironic, constantly keeping you at arm's length from the drama, insisting you guess and second guess at the actions unfolding before you. That's not an easy offer for a community theatre audience. Not that such an audience needs to be condescended to, but the play remains an awkward morsel to digest, in particular alongside the other productions in CTC's 'New Blood' offering.

One last thing. A friend of my was appalled at the alterations I made to the script in order to relocate it to Melbourne in the 1970s. Personally, I felt those changes were minor and did not undermine the intent, feel or language of the script. As a writer myself, I have always held the opinion that scripts are not works that exist in their own right. No-one reads a script except as a template for performance - and performance always introduces interpretation and alteration, deliberate and accidental. It is in performance that a script becomes relevant and meaningful. I'd say a performance almost never stays utterly word perfect and of course characterisations/staging can differ wildly from whatever a playwright might have conceived. Obviously HW conceived of his story as occurring in London at a particular time but I would hope he would have been pleased to see its scope expanded to another time and place in a way that made the story and characters relevant to an audience watching nearly 50 years after it was first performed. While I don't think a handful of name changes is disrespectful to the play, I am more than happy to consider taking this video down if friends, family or associates of Heathcote Williams feel that I have corrupted the work.