THE TRAVAILS of taking a one man show about Aleister Crowley to the Fringe.

John Burns does his menacing best (© PHH Sykes Photography)

It’s own fault, I have no one else to blame for the predicament I’m in.  I’m standing in the darkness backstage in a makeshift theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe.  In just a moment I will be pulling back the curtain and stepping on to the stage.

It’s that moment I dread, that moment that leaves me trembling and sweating behind the curtain.  If I could I’d flee from the theatre but it’s too late now, way too late.  For the next fifty-five minutes I’ll be performing my one man play about the Victorian occultist Aleister Crowley.

I’ll have to try and remember where to stand so the lights pick me up, remember which props go where and, of course, remember the words, all seven thousand of them.  I’m sure I know all the lines but, to quote Eric Morecambe, “Not necessarily in the right order.”

I first encountered Crowley, also known as The Beast, many years ago in the log book of the Inverness mountaineering club; they had adopted him as a dark mascot.  Crowley has a reputation second to none as a libertine, a drug user, master of the dark arts and is frequently regarded as a lunatic.

I also knew that he had some association with mountaineering, but had no idea what he had done other than hearing stories of him threatening fellow climbers with a revolver if they tried to descend.  For a long time he remained in the back of my mind as a dark mysterious character.  It was only when I began to research the play that I discovered what a fascinating and multi-faceted individual Crowley really was.

When I began to develop my skills as a writer some ten years ago it was always with an eye on performance. When I started writing I began, as many people do, with poetry, and published a small collection of poems about life with my autistic daughter, entitled Wind Dancer.

The play was my creation in just about every way.  I’d written the show, painted the scenery and was about to perform it before a Fringe audience.  I was about to be exposed not only to the audiences eyes but also to the critics who circle above the Fringe, like birds of prey, dealing death to those they consider unworthy and elevating those to stardom who become their chosen.

The process of writing the play had been a difficult one.  Crowley was a prodigious writer and a man who lived as much in myth as in reality.  Finding the real Crowley was much harder than with most people as he was so full of contradictions.  He was supremely arrogant and yet at times compassionate and caring.

The real Crowley remains elusive.  I needed a device to make him seem human, and decided to have him down on his luck, performing as a stage magician, sitting in his dressing room and reliving the seminal moments in his life.   This allowed me to let him reflect on his actions and to show the forces that shaped him.

After writing the first draft of the play I submitted it, via Eden Court’s play wrighting group, to HI~Arts.  At that point I had got the play to the point where I felt it worked on some levels, but that it needed some dramatic twist, something to bring it to life, although I couldn’t work out what that might be.

A Passion for Evil poster designed by Russel McGovern

Pamela MacQueen reviewed the play as part of the HI~Arts writing development project and did a great job of making the play more coherent and dramatically effective.  She reminded me of a time I was learning joinery and couldn’t get a door frame to fit together.  The instructor came over to me, took a look at the frame, and kicked it, where upon it fell into place.  When I asked him how he’d done it he said, “Well, you have to know where to kick it.”

Pamela knew where to kick it.   Her suggestions were simply to change some of the structure and not to change any of the dialogue, in other words to move the scenes around.  Once we did that the play took on a new dimension and when I rehearsed it seemed to flow much better and to take me on the sort of journey I had wanted to follow.

On that first night as I stood behind the curtain, fighting the urge to flee and hearing the audience settle in their seats, I couldn’t quite believe what I was about to do.  I learned, late in the production of the play, that a one man show is one of the biggest challenges in acting.

Had I known that at the outset I doubt if I would even have begun the project.  In the fringe I was working alongside real actors, people who greeted me with the words, “Break a leg, darling,” (yes, they really do say that).  Some of these people had been to RADA; I’d been to Eden Court’s Drama Lab; they’d been in Othello at the Royal, and I’d been a stand up comedian at a Soho comedy club telling jokes about pies. Could I really do this?  The lights went down and I stepped out into the glare of the stage lights.

John Burns and another weel-kent Edinburgh beast (© PHH Sykes Photography)

The prospect of reviews held particular terror for me.  An actor performing a play written by someone else who gets a bad review can at least blame the author, but as I’d written Crowley I didn’t have that luxury.  About three days in to the Fringe run we got our first review.  To my immense relief it was good and it was followed by another two reviews that were also positive, one of which gave us the much needed four stars.

These we hurriedly plastered across our posters, hoping to lure in bigger audiences.  I soon discovered that although reviews are important in the Fringe, they are perhaps not the deciding factor in putting bums on seats.  A more important influence on audience size seems to be word of mouth amongst Fringe audiences.

Fringe goers form their own community in Edinburgh; they drink together, fall over each other and stand in queues together, lots and lots of queues. And then they talk.

In Edinburgh during the fringe the perennial British source of conversation, the weather, is supplanted by discussion of the shows people have seen.  Every audience member is a critic and they tell everyone they meet about what they have seen.  We were lucky, audiences responded well to the show, some with huge enthusiasm, and they told other people who came to see the show as a result.

This had a significant effect on our audiences.  We never sold out but we consistently got good audiences by Fringe standards while other shows with five star reviews in the same venue struggled for audiences.  The most important critics of all, the people who parted with hard earned cash to see us, liked the show.

It can be disconcerting performing in a small venue where you can almost touch the audience.  People did odd things, one person left right in the middle of the show and returned after a short comfort break, some people fidget or even text their friends. During one show a large pool of straw coloured liquid trickled out of the audience and formed on the stage. I think someone had spilt their pint of lager; at least, I hope it was lager.

At first these little incidents distracted me and I struggled to concentrate, but later in the run the play had become welded into my brain and little short of the place burning down would have bothered me.  About half way through our run I noticed that people stopped fidgeting in the audience and my performance began to develop as I grew in confidence.  I think that I had learned how to engage with the audience, something you can only learn through repeated performances in an intimate venue.

John Burns on stage as Aleister Crowley

Now the fringe is behind me I can reflect on the experience of taking my one man show through the fires of this cultural cauldron.  The experience was at once exhilarating and terrifying, exhausting and inspiring.  I spent almost a full day on stage as the man they called The Great Beast; theatre staff inadvertently started calling me Aleister and I replied without noticing my identity had changed.

Our Fringe run was a success and I came away with offers of bookings for performances as far away as Wales and Manchester.  Now I’m planning to tour the show throughout the North of Scotland and the UK.  There is even a whiff of the possibility of a show in the USA.

As an actor I moved on enormously, my time at Eden Court’s Drama Lab did me proud.  I may never play Hamlet, but if I stick to the Fringe diet of beer and chips I might manage Falstaff.  If you are thinking of taking a show to the Fringe I’d recommend it as a unique almost life changing experience.  For me it was a huge leap but one immeasurably worth taking.
Break a leg, darling.

© John Burns, 2010

Links

• Beast – A One Man Play
• John Burns at Purple Comedy
• PHH Sykes Photography