Festival Theatre
IN VINO VERITAS Steve Cramer meets the creative team behind Barflies, Grid Iron’s new piece about drinking and creativity. In the pub, obviously
‘A n alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you.’ Dylan Thomas’s observation about alcohol abuse and the selective moralism that goes with it, seems an apt way in to the new show from Grid Iron in which the work of another tippler – this time from the great tradition of alcoholism that is American literature – is adapted for the stage.
The work of Charles Bukowski, that inheritor of the mantle of Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway, is explored through a site specific piece that takes place entirely in Edinburgh’s Barony bar. I’m sitting in another pub, the King’s Wark in Leith, to discuss the piece with director Ben Harrison, actors Keith Fleming and Gail Watson, and musical director David Paul Jones, who, pints in hand, are out to give me a flavour of the piece.
Ben Harrison The show is based on three stories from The Most Beautiful Woman in Town collection. We’re not putting in scenic elements, except the piano – we’re hoping regulars will walk in and not notice the difference. There are just some subtle little things. But we don’t have to change it, the play takes place in the Barony. Most of the words are his, we’re tweaking it here and there, because we didn’t want to make it a thing related entirely to America. Scotland, of course, has a very complex relationship with alcohol, and the site suggestiveness of doing it in the Barony led us to a Scottish voice.
Is there a connection between substance abuse and creativity?
BH Yes, there’s certainly a connection. There’s 50 THE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE 6–13 Aug 2009
so much hypocrisy about it. Look at Lewis Carroll – we love him and gloss over the drugs. Keith Fleming Look at all the absinthe drinkers, I think the genius is already there, but booze helps. Gail Watson We had a great rehearsal yesterday, and everyone was hungover! Alcohol makes you more fluid, you just flow. What we’re trying to convey is that sense of optimism and euphoria you find when you’re drunk. It’s not glorifying it, but that’s what happens. KF Bukowski’s a writer who shows no tendency to glorify what he does. He says, ‘That’s the world I’m in.’ He’s very direct in what he writes, he doesn’t romanticise, but he won’t pretend that he doesn’t drink. He says, ‘I was on a bender last night, and this is the world I see this morning – I write better when I’ve had a skinfull, so why change?’ BH There’s this great line in the text that says: ‘You fucked up your history, let me wallow in mine.’ In a way it’s like a paradoxical plea for privacy: ‘Judge my writing but don’t judge my drinking.’ It would be hypocritical of us to take any moral line. His only moral position was on drugs. He didn’t understand hippies, because why take LSD when you’ve got booze? That kind of fits with what we do at Grid Iron. Gargantua was an attack on Calvinistic Scotland. KF Yes, somebody saw the poster in which I’m smoking, and said my God, you can’t do that! I mean, what kind of society are we living in when a poster creates a stir? BH It’s frightening how we internalise this bullshit. Bukowski would have been amazed to find we couldn’t smoke when staging his work.