The Halfling Laws @ The Alma Tavern, Bristol

still experimenting with workflows and being more spontaneous.

It is the autumn of 2010. New Zealand Actor's Equity has threatened to boycott Peter Jackson's Hobbit series unless Kiwi actors are paid the same minimum rate as their US and European counterparts. Warner Brothers say that if the boycott goes ahead, they will take production of the Hobbit out of N.Z altogether. The camera crews and set designers and caterers who will lose their job if the film is closed down are demonstrating against the actors' union, who even start to receive death threats. But they stand their ground and demand a living wage for their profession. In a back office of the studio where a big battle scene is being hastily rewritten, the union representatives meet Peter Jackson to try to find a solution. 

The Alma Tavern is Bristol's smallest theatrical space. One never knows quite what one is going to get there. Initial portents this evening were a little alarming: I was handed a small feedback form with my ticket ("was there any part of the show you didn't understand"); and there was a slight friends-of-the-cast vibe in the 50-seater auditorium. The action of the play starts with an ill-judged meta-textual cough in which everyone in the cast breaks character and starts to argue about whether the play can really be said to be "based on true story", points out that all but one of the characters is fictitious, that the the play is condensing weeks of industrial dispute into an hour and we could look up the facts on Wikipedia when we get home. This would have been better covered in the programme. (There was no programme.) 

False start over, "The Halfing Laws" -- rapidly retitled from "The Hobbit Laws" for obvious reasons -- quickly establishes itself as a very small but rather special piece of work: just the kind of thing which the Alma's intimate space is so well suited for. 

The actors side of the argument is represented by Hamish Lynes and Millie Walsman. Hamish, the more militant unionist, is (ironically) a Lord of the Rings enthusiast and fan of Peter Jackson; Millie is more willing to compromise but less invested in the material. The script resists any temptation to make Hamish into a stereotypical fantasy nerd. Millie isn't as anti-fantasy as she might have been, although she does describe the men of Harrad as "the evil maori elephant people"; which is fair enough. 

Jackson himself and his (fictional) assistant Charlie Dewberrie remain sympathetic throughout.  Jacskon wants to support the union case but is not willing to further endanger his already faltering production. (The news that the two film series as been expanded to a trilogy comes through during the negotiations.) As a further wrinkle, Jackson brings in Edward Hamilton who plays one of the dwarves ("the one with the beard") as a witness for the defense. Hamilton doesn't want the Union to kill the production -- after a long career it is his last chance to make it big. But he turns out to be bitter at about the endless delays and rewrites and because Jackson has cast Kiwi actors in subordinate roles while giving the big dwarf part to an American actor. 

The best moments are when the personal, the literary, and the cinematic come together. There is a very fine moment -- at least one member of the audience applauded -- when "Sir Peter" admits that the Hobbit is not going to be a very good film. ("It's turning into a Donkey Kong level"). Charlie, the P.A wonders if all the dubious changes of direction -- the extra movie, the dwarf/elf love story, the introduction of characters who aren't in the book at all -- are truly Peter Jackson's dramatic calls, or if they are being forced on him by the studio. Either way, she fears he may be losing his touch.  While everyone is despairing about the Hobbit, Jackson suddenly produces a copy of Mortal Engines and starts enthusing about it like a schoolboy. When it appears that he has stabbed them all in the back, Hamish tells Jackson just how much the Lord of the Rings means to him, and Jackson just replies "thank you".

In the end, the studio steps in and the New Zealand government redefine actors as freelance contractors with no right to unionize, so it has all been for nothing. Jackson starts to say that even this darkness must pass, and when the new days comes the sun will shine out the clearer...and Hamish roundly tells him to fuck off.  

The play doesn't really come to a point or offer any answers -- everyone just shuts the door and walks away. But in the hour we have learned a good deal about New Zealand employment law and the troubled history of the Hobbit; been made to think about idealism and pragmatics; and even seen how a decent person can start sending out death-threats Without being at all geekish, the play seems to "get" the importance that cinema and fantasy can have in all of our lives. Theater too. If we all valued tiny little productions in small rooms over pubs above billion dollar epics, it would be a merrier world.

I'm Andrew. I write about about folk music, God, comic books, Star Wars and Jeremy Corbyn.

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The Spooky Men’s Chorale @ St . George’s Bristol

still thinking about workflows

The Spooky Men’s Chorale as they always remind us, are not a Men’s Group. They are not really a folk group either, but they have ended up in a folkie space. (As a matter of fact they are playing Sidmouth next week.) They started out as a Georgian Choir, and they still do a couple of proper Georgian dance songs and an Icelandic hymn in the Georgian style in all their shows. ("You know what it is like", says the conductor or as he prefers to style himself, the Spookmiester. "You go to the theatre or the ballet, and there is no Georgian section. Or you just go out for a meal with the in-laws and feel vaguely cheated because there was a Georgian section, but it was shit.") Georgian choral music differs from other choral music in that there is no melody line: the different sections make no musical sense until they are put together.

I think that the men are “Spooky” in an Australian, Dame Edna sense — certainly there is nothing ghostly or creepy about them, although they do dress in black. It was a weekday evening so I went in my normal work clothes. The lady sitting next to me congratulated me for taking the trouble to look spooky. This happened at the Men Who Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing, as well. I went dressed in my normal clothes and was congratulated on my steampunk gear.

Apart from the aforesaid Georgian section, the Spookies mostly sing contemporary music in a choral style. This fits into three boxes. Firstly, there are sensible covers of popular songs: we had Tom Waits Picture in a Frame and a remarkable version of Joni Mitchell’s The Fiddle and the Drum. They nearly always end with the folkie version of Tennyson's Crossing the Bar, the same version which Jim Moray rocks up with False Lights. Proper not-a-dry-eye-in-the-house material. I shouldn’t like to chose between the two versions. [Mem to self: find a more obscure version that no one else will know and claim to prefer that.] They can also do extremely silly versions of pop songs. They finished their main act on a choral version of Bohemian Rhapsody which someone turned into a thigh slapping lederhosen inspired knees up. It turns out you can yodel “Galileo Figaro” quite successfully.

The most characteristically Spooky material, though, is essentially sung stand up comedy material: comic monologue set to exquisite harmony. Sort of like the Baron Knights only good. So we have the aforementioned “we all have unresolved issues with our fathers / but we are not a men's group” and “you haven’t got one/ everyone else has got one/ you think you probably need one / so you do decide to get one / but it doesn't fit” and a very clever piece about waiting for baggage reclaim in an airport which turns into a political metaphor.

Like Monty Python, this kind of material is funny only once, and also like Monty Python, the audience consists largely of people who have heard it a lot of times before. I was glad they had toned down the “blokish” element of their comedy material. I get that if you say “men and sheds” everyone laughs in the same way that if you say “women and shoes” everyone laughs but it doesn’t actually apply to nay real life man or woman I ever met.

The Spookies  mak shau better than almost anybody. Their encore was possibly a James Brown number about love raining down during which which as many of the audience as possible were pulled up on to the stage to join in and sing along. I sometimes have a problem with bands that have become brands, cults, or even franchises; but the Spooky Men’s Chorale do it so well it is impossible not to be uplifted.

I'm Andrew. I write about about folk music, God, comic books, Star Wars and Jeremy Corbyn.

If you are enjoying my essays, please buy me a "coffee" (by dropping £3 in the tip jar)

Or consider supporting me on Patreon (by pledging $1 for each essay)

thinking about workflows

Thinking about workflow.

Went to Priddy folk festival last week end. I had hoped to write a review, but by the time the festival is over, it almost feels too late to write about it. I live tweeted some of my reactions at the time, and that was quite fun. There is some down time at any festival, after all. So here I am in my 53rd year, trying to type with my IPad on my knee. Oh, Susanna, don’t you for me. Typing into the Ipad is easy the hard thing to do is edit particularly if you write the way I do, chucking words down and working out what order they come in afterwards. One really needs a mouse for that.


I am off to another Festival next week, and I am wondering how it would be if I wrote a daily diary, pretty unedited, and chucked it straight onto this blog with links to MyFace and Twitter.


I could even do a certain amount of dictation although text to speech is not infallible.


Only yesterday I found myself telling a friend that I was going to the Fuck festival at Shit Mouth

There is a new way to tell me how much you like my writing....