On a stage full of
musical clutter, there's a man playing a harmonium. The drones
emanating from the instrument are mournful, and as familiar sounding
as the school assembly piano tinkles coming from the other side of
the stage. Yet, only when a voice comes in does everything click into
place. It's a voice that doesn't so much speak as intone in a doleful
and deadpan baritone that's instantly recognisable as one Ivor
Cutler, the Glasgow-born poet, songwriter and performer whose
minimalist absurdism captured several generations of left-field
humour-loving listeners to BBC radio. This relationship began in the
1950s and 1960s on Monday Night at Home, broadening Cutler's appeal
in the 1980s and 1990s via John Peel and Andy Kershaw's shows before
Cutler passed away in 2006.
The above scene opened
the third day of a week's development at Inverness' Eden Court
Theatre for Matthew Lenton's Vanishing Point theatre company's
forthcoming show. This co-production with the National Theatre of
Scotland has the working title of The Beautiful Cosmos of Ivor
Cutler, and will be one of two Vanishing Point projects set to appear
in 2014. The second, set to be produced with partners in Russia and
Brazil, will look at old age and caring. Which, judging by the very
early stages of the Ivor Cutler show, looks set to be thematically
related.
As a four piece band
led by musical director James Fortune, who worked recently on west
end hit, Posh, stand by, actors Sandy Grierson and Elicia Daly sit
opposite each other at a small square table bedecked with microphones
and two water-filled glasses. With a flat-capped Grierson doing a
pitch-perfect impression of Cutler's voice, the pair engage in a sad
and sweet little dialogue that suggests the pair are saying goodbye
for the final time. As their exchange reaches a natural impasse,
Grierson and Daly circle their fingers along the rim of the glasses,
setting off a set of amplified chimes which the band quietly pick up
on, not just with harmonium and piano, but with violin, musical saw
and brushed drums.
These underscore
Grierson's funereal rendition of Cutler's song, I'm Going in A Field,
a ditty first heard on Cutler's 1967 George Martin produced album,
Ludo, recorded after Cutler appeared as Buster Bloodvessel in The
Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour film. The song was more recently heard
in Paisley Patter, part of Scottish Ballet's 2010 Off Kilter dance
compendium. As Grierson repeats Cutler's erotically inclined mantra
with increasing abandon, its sentiments and melody may sound not
unlike Louis Armstrong's take on Wonderful World, but, with Grierson
up on his feet and pacing the floor like a pop star, the music rises
and swells with equal abandon. The effect is spine-tinglingly
elegiac. As a card-carrying member of the Noise Abatement Society, Mr
Cutler, as he preferred to be called, would not approve.
“Now and again we're
very intentionally disturbing Ivor Cutler's cosmos,” Fortune
confesses, “but at the same time respecting his world view by
trying to find justification for that. You can get away with it if
you have the character of Ivor Cutler come onstage and say I hated
that. I'm also thinking of it like a gig, in that we'll write down a
list of songs, and think, what would that be like? He's got a lot of
love songs.”
For Lenton too, the
roots of the project are musical, dating all the way back to
Vanishing Point's 2007 show, Subway. That show saw company associate
Grierson onstage with a seven-piece Balkan band the company came
across in a bar while on tour.
““When we were
workshoping Subway, we had a violin in the room,” Lenton explains,
“and would do improvisations where we'd just tell a story and
someone would play some music. In all that improv we would always use
that song, I'm Going in a Field, which I loved.”
Fortune observes that
Cutler's distinctive musical style itself has its roots in klezmer, a
musical form that combines the joyous with the melancholy in a way
that chimes with Lenton and Grierson's outlook.
“The thing that
worried me about it was of being too twee or too cosy,” says
Lenton. “I talked myself around that by imagining if Ivor Cutler
was Russian rather than Scottish, he'd maybe be thought of more as
someone like Gogol or one of those absurd Russians.
Grierson goes further,
likening Cutler to Polish-born Jewish American novelist, Isaac
Bashevis Singer.
“Cutler was Jewish, “
Grierson says, “so you see his Scottishness, but his Jewishness
also comes through in his work, and you see all sorts of
similarities.”
If such sentiments
tally with Vanishing Point's internationalist outlook, the company's
second 2014 production looks set to make their approach even more
concrete. Following previous partnerships with companies in Italy and
Portugal on Interiors and Saturday Night, this new work with the
working title of Growing Old looks set to be developed with
collaborators in Glasgow, Brasilia and Moscow, before premiering at
the Brighton Festival. Before this, Interiors looks set to tour to
Buenos Aires, Santiago and Lima, with other possibilities beyond
those dates.
“It's an interesting
time to be doing all that,” Lenton says, “It's something that
I've always wanted to do, and, instinctively, I've always looked
outside this country for my influences, but at this time, you also
get these different perspectives of Scotland from all these different
places. With the independence referendum coming up, you get a lot of
people in different countries who are interested in Scotland and
ideas of Scottishness.”
Lenton, who recently
decamped his living arrangements from Glasgow to Nairn, talks
seriously about relocating Vanishing Point's operations solely to a
highland base, where he would be able to operate in a manner which
again resembles more holistically inclined European ensembles who
step off the artistic production line to operate on their own terms.
“Part of me just
wants to do the Pina Bausch thing, buying a barn up here, making the
company based here, having a place where artists can stay, and having
a partnership with Eden Court, where we can maybe present a show a
year as well as touring work out from here. It's easy for companies
to get too comfortable with a particular aesthetic, and I think
that's dangerous. Not just with the work we do, but how we work. It's
all about being curious, and not seeing boundaries or borders, and
wanting to work with people from different places. Vanishing Point
have always ploughed our own furrow, and found ways that we want to
work. As an artist, and as a person, you have to keep moving
forward, and you have to keep trying things that you don't know you
can do.”
Mr Cutler might have
approved.
Vanishing Point's Ivor
Cutler project will premiere in co-production with the National
Theatre of Scotland in April 2014.
Vanishing Point –
Theatre, Music and Internationalism.
2004/5 - Lost Ones –
Vanishing Point's breakthrough show featured original music by
Alasdair Macrae, and featured an international cast who toured
Scotland, Kosovo, Macedonia and Sri Lanka.
2007 – Subway –
Sandy Grierson and a seven piece Balkan band discovered while on tour
featured in this dystopian tale of a prodigal's return to the city he
left behind.
2009 - The Beggar's
Opera – This startling cyberpunk reinvention of John Gay's
eighteenth century satire featured a live score performed by A Band
Called Quinn.
Ivor Cutler in Words
and Music
Ivor Cutler was born in
Glasgow in 1923, and first recoded his songs and poems for Monday
Night at Home, which he appeared on thirty-eight times between 1959
and 1963.
Paul McCartney spotted
Cutler on a late night television show, and invited him to play
Buster Bloodvessel in the Beatles film, Magical Mystery Tour.
Beatles producer George
Martin worked on Cutler's first album, Ludo.
Cutler recorded his
first session for John Peel's BBC Radio 1 programme in 1969. Another
twenty-one followed.
Cutler released fifteen
records on labels that included Virgin, Rough Trade and Creation.
Life in a Scotch
Sitting Room, Volume 2 was recorded live at the Third Eye Centre in
Glasgow, and released in 1978.
Cutler published twelve
books of poetry, six prose works and fourteen children's books,
before he passed away in 2006 aged eighty-three.
The Herald, July 9th 2013
ends
Comments