Martin Belk

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      ‘A BALLAD OF READING IN GAOL’
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      SILENCE = DEATH
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      Farewell website done with & for the late Iain Banks
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Playwright, Author, Editor
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Martin’s Minute (short post, big idea): How John Lahr saved me from September, 2015.

September 8, 2015 by martinbelk

Screen Shot 2015-09-08 at 14.51.47The usual relentless stentorian bombast of the ‘McBillion tickets served!’ aside, this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival left me generally underwhelmed.

A recent conversation with a bigwig producer in NYC about the dumbing down of our society, and the mediocrity of the agora gave me pause.

The thought of having to re-word & re-submit that funding application o-n-e m-o-r-e t-i-m-e gives me agida.

Other than the shrill of January, September is perhaps my least favourite time of year. If according to Rimbaud, “Spring brought the idiots’ frightful laughter,” September brings their precocious Christmas chatter. ach-em.

But then, this budding playwright wanders into Mr Barr’s London Literary Salon, and a talk with fellow expat New Yorker John Lahr – probably the only living man qualified to speak on a grand, global scale about acting, performance and theatre. He reads and discusses his new book: Joy Ride.

“Part of the theater’s big magic is its ability to exhilarate; […] to put us beside ourselves, to banish gravity, to call out our most buried feelings, to make the moment unforgettable, to kill time. That’s its joy ride.”

“If we need better plays—and we do—we also need better audiences.

Quoting Tallulah Bankhead to a would-be actress: “If you want to help the American theater don’t be an actress, dahling, be an audience.”

“Theater is an artisanal industry in a ethnological age. Everything about it goes against the grain of our distracted, fast-moving cultural moment. A play requires an audience to work […] in a film, the audience sees what the director wants it to see; with a live production, the audience must take more responsibility…”

Quoting George Bernard Shaw: “The play was good but the audience was terrible.”

Quoting Fanny Brice: “There’s no director who can direct you like an audience.”

“Terrorism makes a spectacle of absurdity, in which pain unmakes the world. Theatre, which attempts to understand our pain, makes a spectacle of meaning and coherence.

Now, more than ever, theatre is not only a demonstration of courage but an engineer of it.”

Thank you, Mr Lahr. You saved me from September. I’ve always relied upon the strangeness of kindreds.

-MLB

Filed Under: M-L-BLOG:, People to Know: Tagged With: Damian Barr's Literary Salon, John Lahr, Joy Ride, London, New York City, Theater, Theatre

HEDWIG. TONYS. CONGRATS.

June 9, 2014 by martinbelk

Screen Shot 2014-06-09 at 10.52.01
John Cameron Mitchell 8 June 2014 enroute to Tony Awards.

“Wait a minute: Madonna came? Bowie came? all manner of folks came. The big musical debut at SqueezeBox!, circa 1997, had been a smash hit. Crowds went ape for the music and were going ape for it. And why wouldn’t they? It had a glam drag-queen transsexual, and a story that touched every generation from the Boomers on. By putting a band on stage with Greek myths, offering a new angle to the Berlin Wall, and floating the whole boy-becomes-girl meets boy-loses-boy who then becomes a redeemed rock god taking the entire audience on a glittering catharsis, Hedwig raised the bar. Who needed Vagina Monologues when Mitchell & Company tore the roof off with his Angry Inch? Over a decade later I entered the Jane Street Theatre from the front. [Read more…]

Filed Under: People to Know: Tagged With: Angry Inch, Hedwig, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, John Cameron Mitchell, Mike Potter, Neil Patrick Harris, New York City, NYC, Squeezebox!, Stephen Trask, Tony Awards

People to Know: JohnCalder – The New Poems

December 17, 2013 by martinbelk

 

some things need no introduction.

MLB-Calder-Poem

 

JOHN CALDER

Without hyperbole, the most important publisher in Britain (and one of the most in the world). John Calder founded Calder Publications in 1949 aged 26. He was Samuel Beckett’s publisher; the first man to make the work of William Buroughs available in the UK; he ran (with Sonya Orwell and Jim Haynes) the infamous Edinburgh Conference on the Novel in 1962; stood in a landmark censorship trial after publishing Hubert Selby Jr.’s ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn‘; was chased from the US under McCarthyism; ran the Calder Bookshop in London, hosting weekly events for several decades with the best of the literary avant-garde; has published 17 Nobel Prize winners… He has also written the autobiography ‘Pursuit‘ and several books of criticism and poetry — including this from his latest ‘Being – Seeing – Feeling – Healing – Meaning’ available from Alma Books

Filed Under: Archives, People to Know:, Writing