Urban Scrawl - one amazing year in the life of a capital city
Monday, January 4th, 2010Of course, you could say that I’m naturally partisan in favour of this project. If I hadn’t had a peculiar, rather inebriated brainwave one night on the Tube around two years ago, counting up the stops on the Piccadilly Line, and deciding - hey, presto! - that the neat-ish fit of 53 stations would make an ideal year-long series, then none of this would have happened.
I wouldn’t have approached Tim Roseman and Paul Robinson at Theatre 503. They wouldn’t in turn have designated Gene David Kirk as artistic director and chief fixer extraordinaire of this wild scheme. Rose Bruford College, which mulled over the idea of major participation and then ran with it, would have found other things for their staff and students to crack on with. And Gene himself wouldn’t have ended up slaving over the whole business for many a stressful month, collaborating with what I estimate to be about 200 other people, taking account of the writers, who gave their scripts gratis, together with the actors and technical crews - who helped out on pretty much a voluntary basis. Just run your eye over the credits list for each ‘episode’, and you’ll see how many people need to be thanked. Right here, right now - THANKS to all. It’s not a big enough word for such an effort, but please accept it, in lieu of greater reward, people.
I was fully prepared to take the flak if the whole thing fell apart at some point down the line (and who would have blamed any of the parties for getting cold feet as the scale of the undertaking dawned on them?). I can’t, though, take any of the credit for the fact that the project has been delivered on time, on a modest budget, and with such panache. Hand on heart, I can honestly say that it has exceeded my expectations in terms of quality, and disproved all of my gloomiest fears about it grinding to a creative halt within months of the journey starting.
I’d be delighted to hear what people think about the dramatic content of Urban Scrawl, which must be the most sustained attempt yet to put original audio material on the web (although I willingly concede that in its first 18 months, wirelesstheatrecompany.co.uk, which started out before us, has reportedly recorded more than 35 original productions).
To my mind, what’s been particularly fascinating is the way that, while the challenge of every station has been met with a distinctive approach, common threads have emerged in terms of theme and tone. We said the constituent bits would join together to form a panoramic survey of London at the end of the decade and I believe they do; the capital that we glimpse above the rattle and hum of London Underground trains is a place teeming with youthful energy, diversity and possibility - but also melancholy and anxiety. You could explain away the fact that so many of the pod-casts flirt with, and quite often end with, Death as having much to do with expedience and inexperience. The short-form demands a speedy, punchy climax and nothing wraps things up more quickly than a terminal departure. You could argue that Gene David Kirk should have rationed the number of fatalities - but if you listen closely you discern that suicide, as well as deaths accidental and pre-meditated, are of a piece with the highly charged atmosphere of this netherworld.
Writers weren’t obliged to home in on the Piccadilly Line itself - the remit allowed for overground - and quite elliptical - excursions; but more often than not they gravitated down towards the tracks, drawn by the smells, the history, the ominous noises (beautifully rendered in the sound-scapes) and the darkness. For many of the writers, it seems, the Tube acts as a locus of psychological confrontation, a place of emotional extremes experienced by millions every week but rarely commented upon; in the organised chaos of the Tube network lie countless possible departure-points of opportunity - for romance, adventure and so on - but also the crushing embodiment of deadening routines and tunnel-visioned lives. In transit, in those fleeting moments of private reflection rammed hard against the most public, exposing situations - all kinds of sudden crises and cries for help arise; hence the persuasive way, I think, in which magic realism keeps leaking into the mix. Here, the unexpected lurks in the most unremarkable corners of the quotidian, because something profound and existential and, yes, poetic is going on, beneath it all.
One thinks of those lines from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets:
As, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about..
Some of these plays dig deep into that ‘growing terror‘, and extract much fertile soil for horrid comedy and specially tailored tragedy.
How often is there a pining for escape, for a rural bliss that can’t possibly be achievable in the murk and materialist mayhem of the capital, which stretches its tendrils far out into the non-places and bogus retreats of the suburbs?
I see that I’ve already written in excess of a thousand words on the series and I’ve only just swiped my Oyster Card, as it were, at the starting-point of a discussion. Rather than detain you much further, I’d simply urge you to listen to some of the dramas while they’re still on the site; or, if you’ve already heard most of them, to give some another hearing. It’s surprising how many stand up to a repeat-listen. For those just encountering Urban Scrawl for the first time, I can’t help recommending Laura Wade’s Hounslow East, starring that recent British Comedy Award winner Katherine Parkinson - not because it’s ‘the best’, although it’s pretty damned perfect. But because this aching interior monologue serves as an ideal introduction to the highly particular, yet thoroughly universal, Tube-line agonies I’ve referred to above: here is the kind of Londoner who doesn’t make it to the front-cover of Time Out magazine, not cool or funky, but awkward and introverted and frustrated. The kind of Londoner one wants recorded for posterity so that in a hundred years’ time they’ll know not to fall for any lie that the city once grew kinder to its own.
Of course, as soon as I say ‘listen to Laura Wade’, other voices immediately pop up into my head and ask - what about Mark Ravenhill’s majestic Manor House, that haunting experiment in high distress, cold calculation and slippery accusation? Or the time-travelling marvels of Sarah Grochala’s Covent Garden and Clare Bayley’s ingenious period-delight Heathrow (as worthy as any, surely, of life on Radio 4)? Or how about the nicely poised drunkenness and dread of Ali Taylor’s Eastcote? Or the sweet desolation of Stuart Permutt’s Bounds Green? Or the urban chutzpah of Bola Agbaje’s Ealing Common, which plays like a mini-Ealing Comedy for the iPod generation? And how could I miss out mentioning Park Royal by Effie Woods, one of the winners of our Time Out competition? She had the simple but inspired idea of imagining what would happen if a husband chose life on a station-platform over returning home - and fleshed it out beautifully. But why stop there? Any must-click list would have to include Janie Bodie’s model of dramatic compression King’s Cross, and Chips Hardy’s barking Ickenham and Jessica Beck’s outlandish Orson Welles ‘noir’ parody Hatton Cross; and what, also, about the musicals, almost another branch of the line entirely? I could go on, I can’t go on. Maybe another bunch of writers will do it all entirely differently, and even better, in 10 years time. For now, though, why not celebrate what we’ve got here - which is one heck of a lot….
