When a lone trumpeter
found himself beguiled by an alien spectacle populated by strange
creatures, he was inspired to do something similar. So, enlisting a
pair of fellow travellers, the trumpeter and his comrades decreed to
set out on a mission and boldly go where they'd never been before.
The result of the endeavours of Mick Cooke, Gordon Davidson and Alan
Wilkinson is Cannibal Women of Mars, a brand new science-fiction
comedy musical involving a planet-load of man-eating women, an
over-crowded Earth offering cheap emigration deals to Mars, and a set
of brand new songs in the best rock and roll musical tradition.
“I went to see Avenue
Q,” says Cooke of the left-field musical behind his initial
inspiration. “I hadn't been to many musicals, but this seemed
really different, and I felt there was maybe more room for something
like that. Then at the start of 2011 I got together with Gordy and
Alan, and said how do you fancy writing a musical. All I knew at that
stage was that it was going to be set on Mars, and that there would
be men transmitted to Mars, but I didn't know why that was the case.”
The three co-writers
brainstormed for a couple of weeks, “then we decided that maybe the
women up there were going to be cannibals,” Wilkinson continues.
“Then because of the current times, we decided that Mars could be a
waste disposal unit for the unemployed. It's set a hundred years in
the future, there's been a hundred year-long recession, and
unemployment's got ridiculous, so sex has been banned, and the
politicians discover these cannibal women so decide to send the
unemployed up there to be eaten. It's a very broad satire,”
Wilkinson deadpans.
As with all
science-fiction, there is a hint of truth in even the silliest of
stories.
“At the time we were
writing the play,” says Cooke, “there was a lot of talk about the
possibility of manned missions to Mars. I read an article about it,
and on the same page there was another article about the pilgrims
going to America, and how, when all the crops failed, they resorted
to cannibalism, so the two things combined in this ridiculous
fashion”
The trio behind
Cannibal Women of Mars come from very different backgrounds. Cooke,
of course, is best known as trumpet player with Belle and Sebastian,
whose vocalist and chief songwriter Stuart Murdoch has also been
struck down with the musical bug by way of his God Help the girl
project, which is currently being made into a feature film. Cooke
also plays with top-notch ska band The Amphetameanies, and composes
for TV and film, including the Scottish BAFTA winning animation, The
Happy Duckling.
Davidson too is from a
musical background, having released early records by Mogwai, Yummy
Fur and Alex Kapranos' pre Franz Ferdinand outfit, The Karelia on his
F&J records label. As a performer, when not overseeing the news
pages of The Scottish Farmer magazine, he is the driving force and
main song-writer with The Amphetameanies alongside Cooke.
Wilkinson, meanwhile,
is a journalist and children's author, whose first book, a comedy
thriller entitled The Christmas Files: Operation Snowstorm, was
published in 2012.
Despite such a
disparate set of pedigrees, Cannibal Women of Mars is the first
theatrical outing for all three co-writers.
“We went to the
National Theatre of Scotland,” says Cooke, “who gave is a couple
of weeks development. We were adamant from the start that we didn't
want to do something that wouldn't fit in a Scottish subsidised
theatre,” he continues with a philosophy in-keeping with recent
pocket-sized indie musicals such as Midsummer and Whatever Gets You
Through the Night.
As any sci-fi geek will
tell you, no doubt at length, the precedents for Cannibal Women of
Mars are many. While on the one hand, planets dominated by
Amazonian-type women have long been the stuff of fantasy fiction both
in dog-eared paperback and on the big-screen, rock and roll and
sci-fi have shared stages many times in the last millennium.
The former includes
Zardoz, John Boorman's trippy 1974 excursion into sexual politics in
which a pony-tailed and nappied-ip Sean Connery attempts to reassert
a planet's masculinity among a race of women who declare the penis to
be evil. Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Show which first appeared
at the Royal Court Upstairs not only gave rise to a cult movie that
made a star of Tim Curry, but became a commercial success story that
finds the play still packing them in on the touring circuit some
forty years after it first appeared.
Science-fiction was all
the rage in the 1970s, with crazed genius Ken Campbell going so far
as to found The Science Fiction of Liverpool to perform an anarchic
nine-hour version of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's trilogy of
novels, The Illuminatus. With a cast that included Bill Nighy and a
house band featuring the nexus of the Liverpool music scene including
Bill Drummond and future Lightning Seed Ian Broudie, The Illuminatus
transferred to the National Theatre in London, where it opened the
Cottesloe Theatre. Campbell went on to another sci-fi project with
Neil Oram's The Warp, a cycle of ten plays first scene at the ICA in
1979 before being seen in five marathon performances when the company
squatted the old Regent Theatre during that year's Edinburgh Festival
Fringe. Campbell went on to stage Douglas Adams' The Hitchhikers
Guide to the Galaxy at the ICA.
A few years later Bob
Carlton's Return to the Forbidden Planet grafted rock and roll hits
onto a yarn derived from the 1950s film, Forbidden Planet, which in
turn was a sci-fi rendering of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Return to
the Forbidden Planet went on to win an Olivier award for Best
Musical, and has toured the world.
More recent excursions
into the sci-fi rock and roll universe include 1995 Edinburgh Fringe
hit, Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens, which moved onto the west end
in 2006. The burgeoning jukebox musical genre, meanwhile, moved into
fantastical territory with the Ben Elton scripted Queen compendium,
We Will Rock You.
“Science-fiction
lends itself to camp,” Wilkinson points out. “You can take things
to extremes and really go overboard. We had quite a few discussions
about why the women were cannibals, but in the end it didn't matter.
I don't think we need to get someone like Brian Cox in as adviser.”
Cannibal Women From
Mars, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, July 5th-20th.
ends
The Modern Scottish
Musical – A User's Guide
Stiff! - Forbes Masson
arguably kick-started the contemporary Caledonian musical tend in
1999 with this quasi-Faustian camp-fest which he wrote and starred
in, before penning two sequels, Mince and Pants.
Sunshine on Leith –
Stephen Greenhorn wrote the book for this Proclaimers-soundtracked
jukebox musical which is currently being turned into a feature film.
Midsummer –
Playwright David Greig teamed up with Ballboy's Gordon McIntyre for
this lo-fi two-hander about a very eventful one-night stand in
Edinburgh. The play has toured the world.
Whatever Gets You
Through The Night – A pot-pourri of writers and musicians raging
from Withered Hand and composer John Kielty to Deacon Blue's Ricky
Ross combined for a compedium of stories set after dark.
Glasgow Girls – Cora
Bissett was the driving force behind this politically charged musical
about young asylum seekers, which fused hip hop, rap and world music
sounds to powerful effect.
The Herald, July 2nd 2013
ends
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