The Liar's Quartet Read online

  THE LIAR’S QUARTET

  Also by Mark Thomas from September Publishing:

  100 Acts of Minor Dissent

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  First published in 2017 by September Publishing

  Copyright © Mark Thomas 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017

  Bravo Figaro! was first published by Mr Sands in 2012

  Cuckooed was first published by Mr Sands in 2014

  The Red Shed was first published by Mr Sands in 2016

  The right of Mark Thomas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder

  Typeset by Ed Pickford

  Printed in Poland on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by Hussar Books

  eISBN: 978-1-910463-70-3

  Kindle ISBN: 978-1-910463-71-0

  September Publishing

  www.septemberpublishing.org

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Bravo Figaro!

  Cuckooed

  The Red Shed

  Production Details

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION BY DR OLLIE DOUBLE

  I’ve been following Mark Thomas’s work for the best part of thirty years. I first became aware of him in 1988, when he did a short spot on Channel 4’s Friday Night Live, in which he started out by asking, incredulously, ‘What – are they talking about – in opera?’ After taking the piss out of that venerated musical form, he went on to suggest that you could start a revolution by swapping the muzak in supermarkets for records by The Clash and The Damned, inciting the customers to riot. Meanwhile, you’d pump the muzak into police cars, making the officers within so docile that they’d observe the riot with benign disinterest.

  A few months later I found myself on the same bill as Mark, at a comedy night in a snooker club in Coventry run by the theatre company TICTOC. Mark was top of the bill and I was a lowly open mike spot, and to say I was impressed would be an understatement. My abiding memory of that gig was of how he dealt with a persistent, drunk heckler. There used to be a standard ploy on the comedy circuit that if somebody like that went out to the toilet, the comedian would say to the audience, ‘Let’s all hide!’ The audience would laugh at the very idea of playing such a prank on the heckler. On this occasion, Mark actually followed through with it, persuading the entire audience of about 100 people to hide (behind some screens, I think), so that when the drunk returned he was faced with an empty auditorium.

  In these early examples, all the things that make Mark’s work so distinctive are there – politics, punk and an ability to take the audience somewhere they didn’t expect to go. He has gone on to develop these envelope-pushing qualities in all the full-length shows he has created this century, whether it’s finishing Dambusters (2001) with a furious, punchline-free rant about human rights abuses in Turkey, asking the audience for their suggestions for a better world in It’s the Stupid Economy (2009), or playing the campaigning prankster in 100 Acts of Minor Dissent (2013).

  He is often pigeonholed as a political comedian, but just as important is his love of playing about with the form of stand-up comedy, and the three scripts collected in this volume are an excellent example of that. In each of these shows, Mark places stand-up into a more formal theatrical frame, particularly in the staging which incorporates sophisticated sets, lighting cues and recorded voices. In a long telephone conversation, I ask him about the politics and the key creative decisions behind them.

  Bravo Figaro started after an appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Live with Fi Glover. ‘She said, “We’ve got this idea for a section called Inheritance Tracks, where people talk about the songs they inherit from their family and the songs they pass onto their family. We’re doing loads of interviews for the first programme to see if we can get a story. Have you got anything?” And I told her the story of how my dad, who was a working-class builder, a self-educated man who left school with no qualifications, discovers a love of opera. And how embarrassing it was for me that he would play this music on the building site, because I’m a punk rocker!’

  Mark also talked about the fact that his father had developed progressive supranuclear palsy, a degenerative illness which encompasses dementia. ‘In an attempt to reach out to him, I found myself singing and remembering these arias. When I used to bath my daughter, I used to put soap between her toes and I would sing bursts of Figaro’s aria from The Barber of Seville. And I talked about how I’d now started to go to opera, as a way to communicate with him, really.’

  Somebody from the Royal Opera House heard the programme, and Mark was invited to meet Mike Figgis, who asked him if he’d like to develop a show about class and opera for a festival he was directing. Mark agreed: ‘I said, “Alright, I will, but I want opera singers and I’m going to try and put an opera on in my dad’s bungalow – because he can’t get out, he can’t move much.” And he agreed to do it. So he lent me these opera singers and we rehearsed a programme of arias, and we did a performance in my mum and dad’s living room in their bungalow in Bournemouth. And then, because my dad was really awakened by the event, I did interviews with him and my mum, and we had sound recordists with us so we could record them.’

  About ten days before the show, Mark started to rehearse with the director Hamish Pirie and work on the material, and they realised, ‘We’ve got something interesting here.’ They showed this early version at the Royal Opera House Deloitte festival and the reception it received inspired them to develop it more fully, taking it up to the Edinburgh Fringe before touring it.

  ‘I’ve always been pushing to do more stories,’ Mark says. ‘If you look back, you have Dambusters, which is a story. Serious Organised Criminal (2007), that’s a full story. Walking the Wall (2011) is a story. They are narratives. And I love the idea of telling stories, but now there was a chance to tell a story in a theatrical way, that utilised all the dramatic devices to recreate it and show the truth of it – and get those other voices onto the stage. Because I think one of the interesting things about stand-up is the fact that it’s you impersonating other people, but it’s essentially your voice. So it’s literally a question of how do you get other people onto the stage? Well, you record them and you play it. It was the most theatrical thing I’d done to date. I’d done stand-up. And then I was telling stories but still in the stand-up mode. And this was like a clean break into a much more theatrical way of doing it.’

  It was also a break in the sense that it was the most personal show he had done. Yet there was still an underlying political motivation: ‘It sounds really weird, but it’s about sticking my fingers up at the liberals. It’s about celebrating a working-class Tory. My dad had more faults than you could shake a stick at, but there are things that he achieved in terms of his life and in terms of the idea of self-improvement. You might not like his politics, and you might not have liked him, but he fucking came from a bad place and ended up in a good place. And the idea of working-class self-improvement is one that’s just forgotten.’

  Undoubtedly, though, doing such a personal show surprised an audience that had come to know him as an overtly political comedian. ‘What I like doing is defying expectation, I think we should all try and defy expectations to create new things. I love doing that. I think it’s really exciting. For me, stand-up was the foundation. It’s what I fell in love with and it gave me a certain set of skills, and I thought, “OK, where can we go with this? What can we do with this? How can we play w
ith this? How do we make shows which are really different?” Because you know and I know that of all the comics we’ve seen in all the years, 90 per cent of it is wallpaper. Can you remember 90 per cent of the stuff you’ve seen? So how do you stand out in that? How do you go, “OK, here’s something that you won’t have thought of, here’s something you won’t have seen before, here’s putting a spanner in the works to make you look at it again”? Playing with the form of it is really exciting.’

  One way that Bravo Figaro plays with the form of stand-up is to expand its emotional palette, taking the audience through peaks and troughs of love and loss as well as allowing them to laugh at the gags. ‘The thing about theatre is that it offers you the chance to empathise and feel emotions. All jokes are stories. There’s a beginning, a middle and the wrong ending. That’s how it works. Basically, this is taking that and just going, “Let’s fill in the gaps, let’s colour in what’s in the rest of the story.”’

  Cuckooed is a more overtly political show, telling the true tale of how Mark and fellow campaigners in the organisation Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) had been spied on for years by a man called Martin – who they believed to be their friend and comrade but had been employed to spy for the arms company BAE Systems. In an era rife with stories about espionage perpetrated by governments, police, secret services and even – as in this case – corporations, this show has much to say about breaches of privacy and the exercise of power. However, like Bravo Figaro, it also explores emotion. Mark says, ‘The thing that motivates you to do it is explaining complexities. I wanted to do a show that showed the emotional impact of the betrayal of being spied upon.’

  Mark was close to Martin, and initially dismissed the suspicions that were starting to be raised about him. He even took Martin out on tour with him. This made it all the harder when he eventually saw the evidence which showed that his friend was actually a spy. ‘I just stopped talking with him. That was it, we just dropped it. And I was really embarrassed and shamed. I think this thing with betrayal is it’s the shame that exists in you that is generated. If there was any moral logic to the world, the shame should be generated in the betrayer. But actually it’s the shame that you feel within yourself for having been deceived, for having not been clever enough, for not spotting the signs, for allowing it to happen.’

  Cuckooed, like Bravo Figaro, incorporates the recorded voices of other people involved in the story. Mark’s fellow campaigners gave video interviews which are seen on screens that appear when drawers of the filing cabinets in the set – a recreation of the CAAT office – are opened. Interacting with the recorded footage requires pinpoint timing, and I ask Mark how much the technical business of having to hit precise cues limits his ability to play and improvise as he would in a more regular stand-up show.

  ‘I started to do the scripts because the technicians were demanding them. They were saying, “We need to know when to press the buttons.” Tine, who has been my tour tech and manager for a while now, is amazing because she knows that actually the tightness and the rigour and the discipline happens within those exchanges on screen. And the stuff that happens around that – we have a series of points to get to, we have a story to tell, but there’s always room to play, there’s always things we’ll add in, there’s always bits that will be slightly different. And so there’s a bit in the show where I’d play around with where the audience were at and it changed every night. There’s a little bit where I directly address them as the audience. There’s this idea that actually one can speak to the audience and you can speak to the audience in a whole fucking load of different terms and in a myriad of ways. But if you’re actually addressing the now, addressing where we are right now, right here, in this room, in this place – you know, that’s a different way of doing it. And we’d always have bits to play with, that would be in the show. And I like to think that we built into the structure of it a degree of playfulness.’

  Like Bravo Figaro, Cuckooed was developed with a director. This time, Mark worked with Emma Callander. It’s not unheard of for comedians to work with a director to create a full-length show, but it’s still far from the norm, so I ask Mark how it changed things. ‘I think the great thing about working with directors who are good – and both Emma and Hamish are very good – is the ruthlessness with which they approach questioning you and what you do. Why are you doing that? What is the truth? What is motivating you at this point? Why do you want to tell me this story and not another story? What’s import ant about it? I think that working with them challenged how I work as a performer, and they were very rigorous in the method of how they did that. And that was really exciting. I really like working with directors, particularly the discipline of it. And the fact that you explore things that you might not have explored by yourself.’

  The Red Shed explores something quite different, celebrating the Wakefield Labour Club – which, as the name suggests, is a wooden shed which is painted red. It was centrally important to Mark when he studied Theatre Arts at Bretton Hall in the 1980s because it was, ‘The place where I started to perform in public and it is a place that’s very important for me for the political awakening.’

  The Red Shed was coming up to its fiftieth anniversary and Mark was asked to come up with some ideas for its celebrations. He responded by creating the show, which he did with the help of another director, Joe Douglas. Its central narrative arc begins with a memory of Mark’s involvement in supporting the miners’ strike of 1984–85. He recalled being in a pit village and seeing the miners marching back to work after the strike was over, while the children of the local primary school watched through the railings of the playground and sang ‘Solidarity Forever’.

  The problem was that although he had told the story many times, Mark couldn’t be sure how much of it was true, so he set out to track down the village and the school in a quest to find out. The show tells the story of this quest. Mark says, ‘The ideas of collective memory, of remembering and of working-class stories are really, really important, and we’re in a state where we’ve lost an enormous amount of working-class identity. It’s absolutely a quest show, it’s absolutely about intervention, and I believe firmly in this: that when we tell stories, it’s no good just repeating the old facts. We have to intervene to create the narrative.’

  The form the show takes reflects its themes. Individual audience members sit on stage with Mark, holding up stick-masks with photographs of faces to represent the real people he talks about in the story, and the audience as a whole contribute by singing, whistling and letting off party poppers at key moments. ‘I think that idea of community and community action is a brilliant and important thing. I wanted people in the audience to feel like the show couldn’t exist without their help – that the show is made by the audience.’

  One of the delights of seeing The Red Shed performed is that sometimes when something funny happens, we see the masks wobble and we realise that the punters holding them are laughing. Thus, we simultaneously see the characters Mark describes and the punter-performers who are playing them. ‘We build up these layers. There’s Pete and there’s Sandra. There’s also the person playing Pete and Sandra. And the fun that we have on stage, it is about play, it is about that community. I love it when things go slightly wrong – or right, as I like to think of it. Somebody does something and you think, “Well that wasn’t in the script but let’s celebrate that!”’

  As with Bravo Figaro and Cuckooed, The Red Shed uses the recorded voices of the people involved in the story, and I put it to Mark that this is an authenticating strategy. ‘Yeah, I mean, if you’ve gone to the trouble of fucking doing all this research and running around the Yorkshire countryside with these people looking for a fucking school, people at least know it’s fucking true. You’re absolutely right, it is an authenticating strategy and it says, “this is true”, but it’s also a way of making other voices appear. Literally, other voices appear. And they lay claim to some of the story.’

  The Red Shed is
centred on events that took place over thirty years ago, but its political themes are very current in the era of Brexit, Donald Trump and the post-truth world. ‘There is a battle of narratives. The working-class narrative is being erased. And as you erase that narrative, you erase truths with it. When Trump is literally trying to manipulate departments of state for disproving his narrative, it’s a really fucking dangerous time. And so for me to do a show that is about the importance of working-class narratives is really exciting.’

  I finish by asking Mark whether he feels, given the publication of these three scripts, that they could be restaged by other performers. ‘One of the things about stand-up is how a stand-up has a persona – rather than a character. And the persona is very, very different. It’s an amplified, selected version of yourself. So what I do is I play a persona in telling the story. I narrate myself, almost. Could another performer do it? Yes, of course they could. These are very tight structures and narratives. I think the people that play me should be slightly more handsome and thinner – to represent the inner me. And possibly younger.’

  Dr Ollie Double

  Deputy Head, School of Arts and Director of Comedy and Popular Performance

  University of Kent

  2017

  Each playscript and much of the original programme matter is printed verbatim, with new annotations for this collection.

  CREDIT: JANE HOBSON

  MY DAD AND I

  In the second week of March 2000, my dad, Colin Alec Todd Thomas, was diagnosed with a disease called Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP) a degenerative and incurable condition, which is often misdiagnosed as MS. Now, he is nearly blind, can’t walk, can barely talk, can’t swallow properly, has diabetes and dementia and last week, my mum, his carer, was told she could add gout to the list. In most likelihood he will die of hyper-static pneumonia.1 Frankly he was a grumpy bastard to begin with and none of this has improved his mood.