Wheeeeeeeeeeeee
…Is what it felt like having a play on at the Arcola for the last month.
If you want a wedding without having to choose table settings I would recommend it. It’s like being in a month-long episode of This Is Your Life where you sit in the theatre bar and see everyone – friends, friends-of-friends, ex-colleagues, dates and mutuals - without having to buy a drink or leave your chair.
Here’s a flashback to us in the rehearsal room (me on the right).
On top of that, theatre is an incredible bootcamp for writing. It’s a completely unforgiving medium where nothing else matters except the characters, the conflict and how it changes them. I hope to take what I’ve learned (in my bones, the only way to do it) onto my next project. Also people said this and we got named an Offie Assessor’s Choice, which was lovely.
And afterwards, the stage manager shared this incredible post-it from the booth.
This is what you missed if you missed it, people.
Following on my from deep dive into Dirty Grandpa, I’ve also been back on film podcast Smershpod talking about one of my favourite films, Ingmar Bergman’s adaptation of The Magic Flute. If you can’t be bothered to listen to the whole opera I recommend listening to this one duet which is perfectly balanced between the silly and the beautiful.
It’s a delight. A little celebration of two weirdos clicking.
I also have three work-in-progress gigs coming up in London on April 13th, the legendary Machnylleth Comedy Festival on May 3rd and Brighton on May 11th. You can buy tickets to all of them here.
Here’s me having a very fun gig at Secret Comedy Club. It’ll be like this but with more props.
Meanwhile a proposal I’d like to make to you, the reader…
…Is this.
Write to me with your problems and I will give you the worst advice possible.
Like genuinely I will give you advice that will ruin your life.
No more trying!
Imagine the relief!
Here are the rules:
Real problems only. Use this is either a spur to thinking about what you should actually do, entertainment for other luckier people or advice you actually follow and for which I take no legal responsibility. We need stakes, people, stakes.
Give me details. Not enough to identify you (unless you want me to) but enough for me to get my teeth into and elaborately plot out your demise.
Be happy to see your letter published (please use whatever name you’d like to be called by or alternatively I’ll make one up for you).
So who’s game? Who’s ready to allow me to be the Tyler Durden of their pointless existence? Who’s ready to get messy?
Your problems can be anything, big or small. I promise I will find a way to make them snowball out of all sensible control.
Email me at mbluxuryfilth@gmail.com without delay and destroy your life NOW!
Most advice columns are run by entirely unqualified people and I will make that a virtue by promising you ZERO improvements right from the off.
This newsletter’s been getting too serious. I need to get down and depraved in the gutter and chew on the raw mince of human misery. And you could be that mince.
How could you refuse? You know what to do… email mbluxuryfilth@gmail.com today.
Something I read…
Reading the only Russian author that would call a bike’s rear light an “anal ruby.”
Anyway, two pages in and a man has contemplated his dead wife and looked at a puddle.
Me *salivating*: that’s the stuff.
Something I like…
Loved this, from the writer and performer Jamie Demetriou.
I was at a morning screening of some short comedy films we’d been asked to write and produce …The biggest laugh I got was for a sight gag – a shot of me seemingly pleasuring myself was revealed to be no more than me furiously shaking a felt-tip to get the ink to the tip. Haha?
In the post-screening discussion, my tutor Alex referenced this moment and asked what the class thought of it. A dead-eyed chuckle filled the room as my peers mentally relived my dizzying brilliance (I assumed). They loved it, how could they not have?
My tutor then asked me: “Did you like it?”
Like it?! Of course I liked it! I wrote it! It killed. Everyone laughed. Why was he asking me that?
“Yeah,” I replied.
“Why did you like it?” He asked.
A seemingly simple question. But I couldn’t respond, because my answer was … “Because it worked.”
…Fifteen years later, I still find myself getting creatively lost and falling down the cracks between my love of an idea and my fear of bad feedback. But when I can access “Do you actually like it?”, it still acts as a simple but substantial rope to pull me up.
Important that the lesson here is not “is something low brow” or “don’t be crass” it’s “do you like it?”
If the answer is yes, even if it’s a dick joke, stick it in.*
*Like I just did.
Something I thought..
There.
Something I saw…
Two more bits on aliveness, the quest to make things that are in touch with something real and unpremeditated, which I wrote about in the last newsletter.
From Rachel Cusk in The Paris Review:
“It hadn’t come out of my insides.”
And from another newsletter:
Also…
From the bus.
Bye for now, mates.