Adrian Wiszniewski is in a world of his own. Sitting in a corner of Oran Mor’s bar area, the Glasgow trained artist stays removed from the smatterings of west end literati who flit about the lunchtime hub after spilling out of the latest contribution to A Play, A Pie And A Pint’s series of lunchtime plays that’s just taken place in the venue’s clubland underworld. Wiszniewski’s world, however, is about to be made flesh in the most dramatic fashion.
His own play, G.B.H., which opens this coming Monday, not only marks Wiszniewski’s public debut as a writer. In what’s usually perceived as a small-scale venture, the bijou space will be filled, not just with Wiszniewski’s own fantastical musings, but with a score composed by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Gordon Rigby, and performed by some 25 of his colleagues. Breaking out of the frame even further, an accompanying exhibition of 25 etchings, woodcuts, paintings and drawings which illustrate the play opens today at The Cyril Gerber Gallery.
As if that wasn’t enough, Wiszniewski has finished the first draft of a film script, which, through composer Craig Armstrong, has reached the desk of equally mercurial film director Baz Luhrman. A version of the script has been adapted into a novel, which Wiszniewski aims to finish this summer.
“Craig Armstrong asked if he could write the music for it,” Wiszniewski gushes. “He thought Baz Luhrman would really be interested in directing it. Baz’s people said they really liked it, but he’s doing a film just now, so can you do another draft? I said, I can’t really do another draft until he’s read it and we can discuss it, so I decided to write a novel based on the first draft of the film script, and give that to him as a second draft. That was better than writing against a brick wall, and trying to rewrite something I didn’t know why I was rewriting it. Doing it in a different format has made it better.”
Wiszniwski leafs through a sketchbook containing visual notes about “two girls who live together, at an olive green window in France, and there’s revolution on the streets. It’s a musical comedy murder mystery type thing,” he says without blinking.
All a far cry, then, from Wiszniewski’s rise to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of the ‘New Image Glasgow’ school of figurative painters, who included Steven Campbell, Stephen Conroy and Ken Currie.
Where some of his contemporaries leaned towards the more muscular strains of social-realism, for every cherub-faced boy taking a tweedy constitutional in Wiszniewski’s expansively painted hillocks, some mythical beast or other was befriending them. Such preoccupations have clearly trickled down to G.B.H. As well as its inherent threat of violence, after all, the play’s title refers to the self-styled myth of The Girl, The Boy And The Hag.
“There are two stories that I never thought had complete endings to them,” Wiszniewski says of the play’s roots. One of them is Giselle, and the other is the story of Galahad. So I’ve brought these two characters together, so they can get involved with each other. The play’s set in a contemporary night club called The Glade. As soon as you come in you’ll be surrounded by it, and at the bar will be the owner, who’s called Gabby, and who looks after these Goth girls, who come to The Glade to dance the night away.”
G.B.H. is a monologue, then, but one punctuated by its score, as well as what Wisziewski calls “real violence. The opening’s quite dark, and there’s a hag in it. It’s very descriptive at the beginning, then the gaps between the music and words get bigger and bigger. I’ve been working with lighting designers and actors and director who really know what they’re doing, and it feels like I’m the only weak link in the whole thing.”
G.B.H. was born out of a conversation with Rigby, a neighbour in Lochwinnoch, the Renfrewshire village where Wiszniewski and his wife Diane and their three children have lived since 1999 following a decade based in its outskirts. With little outside the festive staples of Prokofiev and The Snowman to keep him busy, Rigby gave Wiszniewski the “small task” of writing a new story. After a couple of weeks, G.B.H. poured out, alongside a slew of drawings and sketches. Wiszniewski hadn’t been sure how serious Rigby was, but “It seemed like a good thing to do anyway, because even if the music hadn’t turned up, at least I had something to keep me going as some kind of project.” The music, however, did turn up, and sounded “great.”
Next, a chance meeting with A Play, A Pie And A Pint producer David MacLennan at the opening of Craig Armstrong’s collaboration with artists Dalziel and Scullion at Kelvingrove Art Gallery sealed G.B.H.’s fate, despite the scale of the play’s mythological content.
At first glance, a globally successful artist making the leap into the theatre might appear unusual. Wiszniewski, however, has always had theatrical leanings, ever since his UB40 blagged him free entry to The Marquis De Sade Show at The Citizens Theatre during its most flamboyant years.
“I never realised a theatre could be so welcoming,” he says. “I saw Hamlet and Oscar Wilde stuff as well. There were a lot of really good actors coming up on the way to Hollywood, and a small thing like that can actually have huge repercussions on a whole generation.”
Dance too, has always appealed to Wiszniewski, particularly pure dance rather than more narrative work, which he thinks can often end up looking like illustrative mime. He’s not the first artist to see dance as a form of living sculpture. Neither is he the first graduate of Glasgow School Of Art to turn to playwriting. Liz Lochead, John Byrne and Alasdair Gray have all achieved varying degrees of greatness with their writing.
“When I went to art school, there was a feeling that you could just do anything. That may have changed now, because of university status and people having to get Masters degrees, but the attitude then was that we were all going to fail anyway as artists, so you may as well enjoy yourself and do what you want. I’d do drawings for my Degree show with captions, so the words were always important in a poetic way. Originally I wanted to be a poet, but I found out you couldn’t make any money out of it. Then I thought I’d be an architect, then a sculptor, and so on.”
Wiszniewski defines himself as an image-maker rather than a painter, allowing himself the same freedoms he had at art school, where he made short films and performance pieces.
“I’ve kind of wandered into things I’ve never been to before,” he says. “But it’s not that different for me actually coming up with images. I enjoy making images, but it can be through words as much as it can be through colour or paint.”
Common to all forms, though, are Wisniewski’s leanings towards some noticeably dark imaginings. An informal read-through of G.B.H. in Lochwinnoch even led to some of the village children having nightmares.
“It might be part of my Polish stroke Irish background,” Wisniewski muses pan-culturally, “and the Celtic and Eastern European coming together. But I suppose every culture’s got that, haven’t they. I suppose I’ve not got that cold and Nordic, Puritan, Calvinist thing. There’s a lyrical Scottish thing, and there’s a dark side that comes from Eastern Europe. When I was a kid there was a programme called Tales From Europe. They had The Singing Ringing Tree on and stuff. That may have had an influence.”
Plans for G.B.H. include a lavish publication containing text, images and a CD of Rigby’s score. The text itself may be expanded, possibly to a multi-cast play, an animation, or even a ballet. Wiszniewski insists, however, he isn’t creating his own world, but that “It already exists, and this is just me revealing it. There’s truths there in my subconscious, and this is about me sharing it quite easily with people so they know what I’m talking about.”
Wiszniewski doesn’t baulk from the term, ‘Magical Realism,’ and insists that his play is “As dark as it has to be. Everything’s got to have light and shade, so I don’t mind how dark it is, as long as it reveals the truth. Some of the imagery is quite familiar, like a unicorn, and a lot of the things are slightly hallucinogenic as well. I don’t take drugs, but G.B.H. is probably a combination of LSD and Ecstacy. Someone said life’s strange, but compared to what? Life is magical, and so is reality. They’re bizarre, and art should try and hold a mirror up to that bizarreness. I mean, I enjoy life. Thoroughly. I’m 48 now,” says the other-worldly image maker, before retiring to the shadows once more, “and I still get excited about everything I do.
G.B.H. runs as part of A Play, A Pie And A Pint at Oran Mor, Glasgow, February 19-24. The accompanying exhibition runs at Cyril Gerber Fine Art, February 17-March 3
The Herald, February 17th 2007
ends
His own play, G.B.H., which opens this coming Monday, not only marks Wiszniewski’s public debut as a writer. In what’s usually perceived as a small-scale venture, the bijou space will be filled, not just with Wiszniewski’s own fantastical musings, but with a score composed by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Gordon Rigby, and performed by some 25 of his colleagues. Breaking out of the frame even further, an accompanying exhibition of 25 etchings, woodcuts, paintings and drawings which illustrate the play opens today at The Cyril Gerber Gallery.
As if that wasn’t enough, Wiszniewski has finished the first draft of a film script, which, through composer Craig Armstrong, has reached the desk of equally mercurial film director Baz Luhrman. A version of the script has been adapted into a novel, which Wiszniewski aims to finish this summer.
“Craig Armstrong asked if he could write the music for it,” Wiszniewski gushes. “He thought Baz Luhrman would really be interested in directing it. Baz’s people said they really liked it, but he’s doing a film just now, so can you do another draft? I said, I can’t really do another draft until he’s read it and we can discuss it, so I decided to write a novel based on the first draft of the film script, and give that to him as a second draft. That was better than writing against a brick wall, and trying to rewrite something I didn’t know why I was rewriting it. Doing it in a different format has made it better.”
Wiszniwski leafs through a sketchbook containing visual notes about “two girls who live together, at an olive green window in France, and there’s revolution on the streets. It’s a musical comedy murder mystery type thing,” he says without blinking.
All a far cry, then, from Wiszniewski’s rise to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of the ‘New Image Glasgow’ school of figurative painters, who included Steven Campbell, Stephen Conroy and Ken Currie.
Where some of his contemporaries leaned towards the more muscular strains of social-realism, for every cherub-faced boy taking a tweedy constitutional in Wiszniewski’s expansively painted hillocks, some mythical beast or other was befriending them. Such preoccupations have clearly trickled down to G.B.H. As well as its inherent threat of violence, after all, the play’s title refers to the self-styled myth of The Girl, The Boy And The Hag.
“There are two stories that I never thought had complete endings to them,” Wiszniewski says of the play’s roots. One of them is Giselle, and the other is the story of Galahad. So I’ve brought these two characters together, so they can get involved with each other. The play’s set in a contemporary night club called The Glade. As soon as you come in you’ll be surrounded by it, and at the bar will be the owner, who’s called Gabby, and who looks after these Goth girls, who come to The Glade to dance the night away.”
G.B.H. is a monologue, then, but one punctuated by its score, as well as what Wisziewski calls “real violence. The opening’s quite dark, and there’s a hag in it. It’s very descriptive at the beginning, then the gaps between the music and words get bigger and bigger. I’ve been working with lighting designers and actors and director who really know what they’re doing, and it feels like I’m the only weak link in the whole thing.”
G.B.H. was born out of a conversation with Rigby, a neighbour in Lochwinnoch, the Renfrewshire village where Wiszniewski and his wife Diane and their three children have lived since 1999 following a decade based in its outskirts. With little outside the festive staples of Prokofiev and The Snowman to keep him busy, Rigby gave Wiszniewski the “small task” of writing a new story. After a couple of weeks, G.B.H. poured out, alongside a slew of drawings and sketches. Wiszniewski hadn’t been sure how serious Rigby was, but “It seemed like a good thing to do anyway, because even if the music hadn’t turned up, at least I had something to keep me going as some kind of project.” The music, however, did turn up, and sounded “great.”
Next, a chance meeting with A Play, A Pie And A Pint producer David MacLennan at the opening of Craig Armstrong’s collaboration with artists Dalziel and Scullion at Kelvingrove Art Gallery sealed G.B.H.’s fate, despite the scale of the play’s mythological content.
At first glance, a globally successful artist making the leap into the theatre might appear unusual. Wiszniewski, however, has always had theatrical leanings, ever since his UB40 blagged him free entry to The Marquis De Sade Show at The Citizens Theatre during its most flamboyant years.
“I never realised a theatre could be so welcoming,” he says. “I saw Hamlet and Oscar Wilde stuff as well. There were a lot of really good actors coming up on the way to Hollywood, and a small thing like that can actually have huge repercussions on a whole generation.”
Dance too, has always appealed to Wiszniewski, particularly pure dance rather than more narrative work, which he thinks can often end up looking like illustrative mime. He’s not the first artist to see dance as a form of living sculpture. Neither is he the first graduate of Glasgow School Of Art to turn to playwriting. Liz Lochead, John Byrne and Alasdair Gray have all achieved varying degrees of greatness with their writing.
“When I went to art school, there was a feeling that you could just do anything. That may have changed now, because of university status and people having to get Masters degrees, but the attitude then was that we were all going to fail anyway as artists, so you may as well enjoy yourself and do what you want. I’d do drawings for my Degree show with captions, so the words were always important in a poetic way. Originally I wanted to be a poet, but I found out you couldn’t make any money out of it. Then I thought I’d be an architect, then a sculptor, and so on.”
Wiszniewski defines himself as an image-maker rather than a painter, allowing himself the same freedoms he had at art school, where he made short films and performance pieces.
“I’ve kind of wandered into things I’ve never been to before,” he says. “But it’s not that different for me actually coming up with images. I enjoy making images, but it can be through words as much as it can be through colour or paint.”
Common to all forms, though, are Wisniewski’s leanings towards some noticeably dark imaginings. An informal read-through of G.B.H. in Lochwinnoch even led to some of the village children having nightmares.
“It might be part of my Polish stroke Irish background,” Wisniewski muses pan-culturally, “and the Celtic and Eastern European coming together. But I suppose every culture’s got that, haven’t they. I suppose I’ve not got that cold and Nordic, Puritan, Calvinist thing. There’s a lyrical Scottish thing, and there’s a dark side that comes from Eastern Europe. When I was a kid there was a programme called Tales From Europe. They had The Singing Ringing Tree on and stuff. That may have had an influence.”
Plans for G.B.H. include a lavish publication containing text, images and a CD of Rigby’s score. The text itself may be expanded, possibly to a multi-cast play, an animation, or even a ballet. Wiszniewski insists, however, he isn’t creating his own world, but that “It already exists, and this is just me revealing it. There’s truths there in my subconscious, and this is about me sharing it quite easily with people so they know what I’m talking about.”
Wiszniewski doesn’t baulk from the term, ‘Magical Realism,’ and insists that his play is “As dark as it has to be. Everything’s got to have light and shade, so I don’t mind how dark it is, as long as it reveals the truth. Some of the imagery is quite familiar, like a unicorn, and a lot of the things are slightly hallucinogenic as well. I don’t take drugs, but G.B.H. is probably a combination of LSD and Ecstacy. Someone said life’s strange, but compared to what? Life is magical, and so is reality. They’re bizarre, and art should try and hold a mirror up to that bizarreness. I mean, I enjoy life. Thoroughly. I’m 48 now,” says the other-worldly image maker, before retiring to the shadows once more, “and I still get excited about everything I do.
G.B.H. runs as part of A Play, A Pie And A Pint at Oran Mor, Glasgow, February 19-24. The accompanying exhibition runs at Cyril Gerber Fine Art, February 17-March 3
The Herald, February 17th 2007
ends
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