It’s months since the last entry. I documented the process of creating The Trickster, and after the first performances the impetus and purpose of the blog came apparently to a natural end. And yet…

I’ve performed The Trickster 12 times so far, at the Soho Theatre, storytelling festivals in Wales and Stockholm, intimate storytelling clubs and medium-sized regional theatres, and to crowds of secondary school teenagers. But the creative process with a piece never ends: I’ve plenty more to learn about Trickster and John Henry Williams (if you don’t know who he is, you’ll have to come and see the show!) and the ways his story can be told…

I listen to recordings of previous performances in the run-up to the next, in order to choose a new question to focus on in each performance. I told it a week ago at The European Festival of the Night - at Korpilombolo in Arctic Sweden, which enjoys December temeratures of -25… The standard of English there is a little lower than in more cosmopolitan areas. I wondered how the piece would  work. So, for clarity, and to avoid swamping the audience with the English, I focussed on redundancy: did I need to say ‘he opened the door and went inside’ at that moment? Wasn’t that obvious by what happened next? Describing him pointing his pistol: Wasn’t I showing it with my body? Why say it as well? This editing went on, in the moment, through the show. The gaps it left created space for more complicity with the audience, more spontaneity and improvisation in the telling, more room for laughter to develop… more tightness and relaxation at the same time. When working with the rapid-fire, on-to-the-next-thing-ness of Trickster, this all proved to be great.

There are other developments in the air: I’m very interested in how storytelling performance can attain the same production values as theatre performances, whilst maintaining their unique character. Can technical lighting be used to improve the clarity of the story? How much care and deliberation have I put into what I wear whilst performing? And I’m working on a promotional video for the piece (many theatres’ programming decisions now revolve around watching these.). I love this ongoing process of discovery, growth and exploration.

For the last word, I’m going back to that great 20thC trickster who so fascinated me throughout this journey: Percy Topliss. Recently I was performing in Penrith, the town where Topliss was buried in an unmarked grave (I painstakingly tracked down the spot one bitterly cold evening almost a year ago). The day before the show, I wandered into Penrith Museum on a whim, and found myself face to face with Percy’s gold monocle – the very item that gave him the name, The Monocled Mutineer. And the next day, who should one of the event organisers be but a retired police officer from the town. I told him about my work on the Percy Topliss story. He grinned: “You know”, he said, “people ring up the police station here - journalists and so on – and they want to know what information we have on him. Most of all, they want to know about the shooting - what really happened? They get told, ‘No, we’ve no information here on file’ “. He leaned a little closer, and his grin broadened: “But it’s not true: there’s a file in that building. It’s secret, and you’ll get none of them to admit it, but it’s there”. He crinkled his eyes and walked off. I watched him go with the image in my mind of that pile of truth locked up only a few hundred yards from where I stood – the obscured truth about the end of a trickster who’d survived as long as he had by obscuring other truths. Is there something so infectious about tricksterism, I wondered, that – like the tricksters of folktale – it never dies but lives on in its immortal irrepressible way, even beyond the grave…

The stories I’m working with for this piece have become increasingly woven together, which is satisfying – to see a shape emerging that makes something new of its various parts. But for this piece, I’m really concerned that all the stories in its fabric also work by themselves in my telling. There’s a magic in creating a performance that combines stories, and sometimes other elements, into a cohesive, immersive journey for the audience and teller; but I’m also aware that I can lean on the composition as a crutch during the telling of a piece – it can allow some sections to remain slightly weak or neglected in favour of an emphasis on the greater whole. To avoid this I’m finding opportunities to tell all the stories in their entirety – even those where only a small section may end up being present in the piece. Last night I told two of the stories at Fabula’s stage in Stockholm – and in ways very different to how they’ll appear in Trickster. Telling them ‘in the original’ seems important in ensuring I can try and get to the heart of what really makes each of them tick, and what it is that allows each story to do its work onstage.

I’ve been back on the Percy Toplis trail – at the pretty-much-impossible task of separating out truth from all the fictions around him.. He spent his short life pretending to be people he wasn’t to get what he wanted – money, possessions, an advantage, women, or just a laugh – and it seems clear that – like Abagnale – he loved the game of it too, though in a darker way at times. Parts of his story read like a 20th C. versions of native American Coyote or Skeleton Man trickster tales.

Born into a gritty northern mining community in 1896, he spent years impersonating upper class gents and army officers, and slipping in and out of the military with impunity – their plodding bureaucracy unable to keep up with his mercurial twists and turns. The actor Paul McGann – who played him in the significantly fictional The Monocled Mutineer, says,

“As long as I live I’ll never be as good an actor as he was. In modern times, with radio and TV, it’s possible for an actor like me to learn how to do different voices, this walk, that walk… Topliss had no terms of reference except raw talent, his ear, his eye, his absolute balls.”

Fittingly, it’s impossible to even know how his last name should be spelt – he has two birth certificates, one with his name spelt Toplis and one with it spelt Topliss. I’ve tracked down a  research fellow at Glasgow University who has done some very interesting work linking psychogeopgraphy with Toplis’ final journey through north Cumbria, and we’re due to talk soon by phone, which I’m really looking forward to. The resonances between Toplis’ life and archetypal trickster tales is an undercurrent through my work on this piece that won’t go away.

Just re-read this fantastic essay about Trickster in Ted Hughes’ book Winter Pollen. As so often, Hughes cuts to the core of things. He says, “Trickster literature draws..from the unkillable biological optimism that supports a society… whose world is not yet fully created, and whose metaphysical beliefs are only just struggling out of the dream stage”.  Unkillable biological optimism. What a great phrase. And I like the implied link between trickster and creativity and the perception of ‘possibility’ in the world.

Hughes clearly thinks this trickster creativity and vitality is in us all and may be what gets us back out of our present mess as a race: “The recurrent quest of Trickster… is… a deep biological imprint, and one of our most useful bits of kit…Trickster expresses the vital factor compressed beneath the affliction of such times, the renewing spirit, searching its depths for new resources and directives, exploring towards new emergence and growth”.

And he expresses wonderfully that perpetual quality of the mythical or folktale trickster: “No matter what mistakes he makes…he refuses to let sufferings or death detain him, but always circumvents them and never despairs… he rattles along on biological glee”.

Yes, we need a bit of all of that. No wonder we’re drawn to these stories like metal to a magnet. So in addition to the attraction of ‘life as a game’ and the easy breaking free of boundaries discussed in yesterday’s blog, there is the attraction to  - and need for – this eternally optimistic feeling of possibility that Trickster carries for us. When I think about the feelings that come with that word, it seems to encapsulate the essence of life as a vital experience.

Apologies for the length of this post, but this guy I’ve been looking up is the nearest I’ve come across to a modern day Trickster. There are television interviews with Frank William Abagnale Jr, a book of his exploits, a feature film. It’s a little like being able to watch an interview with Peik, or Percy Toplis… well, except Abagnale wasn’t as dark as these full-bloodied tricksters..

He passed himself off as an airline pilot, doctor, teacher and lawyer, slipping through colleges, airports, lawcourts and hospitals like quicksilver whilst forging and cashing cheques for $2.5 million in 26 countries. A BBC intererviewer asks him,  “Watching you talking about it, you were smiling… was it enjoyable, was it a game…?”. He replies, “I couldn’t help it becoming a game, I was just playing the game… All I was thinking was, Can I get away with this? Can I take it to this level?… and it was survival. It was moving to stay one step ahead… “.

He never planned the whole thing. Seeing an airline pilot on the street he thought if he could get a uniform it would be easier to cash cheques. Only at an airport did he realise they would let him fly anywhere for free, that he could stay in hotels and bill the airline… he took the opportunity, and siezing one opportunity led to another. This is one of the key things – Abagnale says,“I was just always willing to take advantage of an opportunity… and I was an adolescent, I didn’t have a fear of getting caught, wasn’t thinking about getting caught, wasn`t thinking about consequences”  Isn’t that part of trickster right there?

There are interesting examples of the escalation in which one lie leads to another, each untruth taking things to the next level, as happens in the modular trickster tales of Peik, Si Djeha & the Robbers etc…  In Abagnale’s story, a real world truth in that folktale trickster escalation shows itself. He talks of how he became a doctor, first giving it as an occupation when renting an apartment “I had no intention of being a doctor. This was just something to say that I was”. He met a real doctor in the same building, and read up in order to keep up in their conversations. The doctor invited him to a hospital, he was asked to cover a shift, was taken on from there -  one lie leading to another situation which requires a larger lie that leads to another situation that requires an even bigger deception. There’s no way out but to scramble higher up the house of cards Trickster has made – and is adding to all the time, each extension larger than the one before it, to cover all the lies that have already been put out there! “To me, says Abagnale, “It was survival. I was staying ahead of the game” - building his house of cards high enough to stay above the rising waters of reality, in which his illusions will wash away… Of course,  unlike Abagnale or Toplis in the real world, for Jack Peik, Si Djeha and others there’s always perpetual escape.

Abagnale says, “There was a real loneliness and sadness in me at the time in my life the film depicts”. Which resonates with an earlier question I asked on the blog about whether Trickster feels his own loneliness. … There was no-one to confide in, no-one even with whom to share what he was getting away with. “ The only time I was actually me was when I was alone in my room. There were no actual friends, because everyone took me to be someone else” 

A flipside to this is still the attractiveness of the trickster to us. In the face of Toplis or Abagnale, the boundaries within which the rest of us get hedged appear to be just an illusion. They passed backwards and forwards through these as a game. BOTH these attributes feel important in the appeal: life as a game, and the perceived freedom from the limitations that bind the rest of us. You can see in the lives of Toplis and Abagnale that this freedom is also an illusion in the long-term. But there is a truth there about the lives we create and the prisons we collaborate in making for ourselves. I think the tension between the loneliness and eventual come-upance for a character like Frank Abagnale, and the perpetually carefree and consequence-less career of the Trickster of folktale or myth is an interesting one to explore.

Here’s a last word from Abagnale, on Trickster’s place in today’s world: “…in a culture that falls all over itself to invest glamorous images with substance, any quick-witted trickster can have a field day pretending to be what he’s not.”

At the wonderful Festival of Fairy Tales for Grown-Ups at
the Bargehouse, South Bank, these last few days. Took the opportunity to visit the LCIS archive of Performance Storytelling (http://www.crickcrackclub.com/CRICRACK/ARCHIVEF.HTM)
at Cecil Sharp House – one of several places where this fantastic resource can be accessed. I listened to prominent tellers performing trickster tales, through the 1980s, 1990s and more recently.

The modular trickster tales  - Peik, Si Djeha & the Robbers etc… can
feel like throwing one handful of kindling after another onto a fire: trick after trick after trick. Each trick blazes brightly and briefly, but handfuls of
kindling don’t easily create a glowing heart to a fire. And the repeated little blazes can seem relentless. So I wanted to hear where these tellers had found that heart in the stories and how they kept it glowing.

Where the stories were working, much of that heart seemed to be in the complicity between teller and audience. The level of complicity seems more vital with trickster stories than with some others. The audience need a way in to a place of playful inclusion in the humour of it all, in there alongside the teller. Part of that way seems to come from the teller’s level of relaxation – I don’t mean telling in a overly laid-back or sloppy way: there seemed to be a place of balance where the teller is relaxed enough for the audience to feel they are enjoying the story together with him or her, but where they’re still embodying enough of that playful energy that keeps a trickster story alive. When the relaxed complicity was there but less of the playfulness, the audience’s energy seemed to wane about halfway through the story (as much as one can tell from an audio recording!). But when the teller was all high-energy without the relaxed complicity, the audience seem to be pushed out of the story almost from the start. How does one find one’s own way to that place where the three-sided relationship of story, teller and audience is alive in the right way for a trickster tale to fully work its own brand of magic? It makes me want to be out there telling and telling and telling this kind of story, just trying things, taking risks, seeing what works, feeling the mistakes and the moments where that magic’s present.

Had a good conversation about this piece with a friend last
week: alongside reading many, many trickster stories – enjoying them,
‘short-listing’ them, admiring them, or just being bemused by them and moving on – I’ve been thinking about what the form and structure will be of the piece that holds them, and pulls the themes and resonances I want to explore into that light. In experimental theatre, Andy was saying, a company may choose a number of forms and structures around which to base a new piece, and the artistic work develops from this skeleton of form. How different to storytelling, I said, where it feels to me that the content has to inform the form, not the other way round. This is one of the cruxes of working on a piece…perhaps an interesting way to think about this, he suggested, is to ask, “What does each story need from the others in the piece?”. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the days since.

Reading introduction to American Indian Trickster Tales by
Erdoes & Ortiz today, in which they quote Howard Norman describing one of the northern tribes’ trickster gods:

“Like a magical hermit, he must live outside civilisation, even though his life lessons, his mesmerizing tricks, nurture the human imagination, make people laugh, and animate life itself. Trickster can never fully marry into human life, just as he can never truly become physically human. Likewise neither can he inherit our human past, nor does he long for any future. He is the perfect embodiment of the present tense.”

I’ve thought much about that aloneness of Trickster’s lot: at one and the same time be to engaged as a culture hero, as a seducer, as a con-man, a charmer – worming his way into the middle of society to one devious end or another but destined never to be part of it; for he is always there in ways that separate him from that he has inveigled himself amongst – lying, shape-shifting, slipping away with what was most valuable to his hosts just when people have got used to having him around. It’s impossible for Trickster to have real relationships because trying
to truly meet him would be like grabbing mist – who is he really? Would he know who he was anyway, he who has spent his entire life pretending to be things he is not, constantly slipping on new masks? Percy Topliss, the Monocled Mutineer – as near as I have found to a real-life trickster archetype – spent his whole life pretending to be one person after another that he wasn’t: army officer, upper-class gent etc…. One has to suspect that in the constant (& admittedly admirably audacious and successful) changes of the mask, he must have lost sight of who Percy Topliss actually was. And did he not get lonely? Or did
the constant  scheming, acting, tricking, thinking up new ruses, and patting himself on the back over another successful trick, leave no brain-room for self-reflection?

As for ”…the perfect embodiment of the present tense” , I can see what he means: not for Trickster does there seem much anxiety about the future or reflection on the past. But he does have what Ted Hughes describes as ‘…the optimism of the sperm, still battling zestfully along…”. Optimism only exists in relation to the future, and there seems to be a quality to trickster that is always looking to the future, though it’s a short-term future -  one that’s just round the corner, as far away as the fulfilling of his latest sexual desire or the filling of his stomach.

This is a strange phase of working to write about: a long period of reading and thinking and reading and thinking and staring out of the window and walking and walking out in wet, dark Autumn evenings whilst ordering thoughts, and sitting with not knowing, and asking questions. I’m working on trickster tales for this piece, and wondering, why am I so drawn to them? Why are we as a race so drawn to them (because after all, my God, there SO many of these stories)? Who really is Trickster? I’m reading a lot of Native American and African stories just now, and a lot of writings about Trickster. And really delighting in discovering new stories – and realising that, by and large, as soon as Trickster’s in a tale, then I’m in: discovered a fantastic story about Coyote journeying to the world of the dead to bring back his wife, and it grabbed me in a way that the classical Orpheus never could. On the one hand I’m finding stories, looking for the ones that say, “tell Me!”. On the other hand I’m trying to get to what is at the heart of my relationship with these stories.

Watch this space…