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.