Cartoon de Salvo: three more stories from nowhere
Monday, April 14th, 2008The Continuing Chronicle of ‘Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories’ on tour… www.cartoondesalvo.com
Soliciting for a title is one of the trickiest aspects of this show. We’ve had all sorts over the course of our tour so far, from the thrilling ‘The Unseen’ and the matter-of-fact ‘Mud’, via the urgent ‘Not Before Time’ (proposed by a lady in the audience who was impatient for us to start the show…), to the do-what-it-says-on-the-tin classic, ‘Alien Robots Take Over the World’. The latter, as you might guess, was suggested by a child. We had two more this week from enthusiastic tots in the front row – ‘The Riders of Dragons’ last Friday in rural Herefordshire, and on Saturday night, this one from another junior sci-fi buff: ‘Jason and the Space Aliens’.
The deal is, the audience suggest a title and select a handful of songs from our repertoire – and we use those ingredients to improvise a new play. ‘The Riders of Dragons’ evolved into a tender drama about a pensioner in a care home remembering his days in a biker gang in the 1950s (cue flashbacks…); and about how, with the help of his grandson, he absolves the heartbreak he’s nursed for fifty years. ‘Jason and the Space Aliens’ was about a fugitive from another planet being hunted down to a snowy English village, and about a lonely local boy embroiled in the intergalactic manhunt.
We don’t plan these stories. They evolve somehow as Alex, myself and our co-star Neil Haigh cooperate and compete to get some kind of drama out there onstage. (Not to mention production manager Naomi Pirie, extemporising heroically on lights and sound.) The results constantly amaze me; doing this show is so instructive about how stories work, and about what our subconscious does to generate them.
On Thursday, Neil and I were chatting in the tour van about the start of the US Masters golf. That evening, in Whitchurch, the three of us launched ourselves into an intricate new play featuring three story strands. In one, a man-eating tiger escaped from the zoo. In another, a young English aristocrat walks in the woods with his commoner sweetheart. And in the third, a sociopath bides his time on death row, somewhere in the USA. We spent half the show panicking about how to dovetail these disparate stories, and the second half marvelling as they united in an unclassifiable modern melodrama about buried secrets and the laying of ghosts to rest.
The following day, Neil said: ‘did you realise that after talking about the golf we ended up doing a show about a tiger in some woods?’ I hadn’t realised. And I doubt Tiger Woods had anything to do with how we spirited our play into being. But can we be sure?