Gormenghast: gormenghastly

Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast is, at least in my opinion, one of the towering achievements in modern literature. He presents a fully created world that is charged with vitality and is a celebration of raw imagination.

From the subterranean corridors of the castle-world to the heavy, ritual-based culture to the grotesque but still human characters, it is a world in which the reader becomes fully immersed. And not a hobbit in sight!

Peake also revels in the quality of language and descriptive prose. His writing, if spoken aloud, must be a sensual delight. So there is something in Peake that evokes performance – in both the quality of his writing and in the world he creates.

Which makes this stage adaptation by English playwright (and shaman!) John Constable so utterly shocking. This is quite possibly one of the worst scripts I’ve ever sat through. And I just covered the Fringe. I am in complete bewilderment as to why UBC chose to produce this mess. As a producer, I can imagine being intrigued by a stage adaption of Peake but I can also imagine that by the bottom of page 3 of Constable’s script thinking: ‘ah, no’.

Frankly it doesn’t matter what skill director Stephen Malloy brought to the proceedings – and he did get energetic and fully-committed performances from his cast – it was going to take a miracle of Biblical proportions to make this thing anything more than a car-wreck. And like a car-wreck there is something gruesomely fascinating about this production. The person I saw it with had a great time and so did I in the end. It was sort of like watching an Ed Wood film. And like an Ed Wood film, I can’t actually begin to describe what I witnessed. This thing travels so far off the rails that it is weirdly delightful and it was certainly more entertaining than Doubt at the Arts Club. In fact, Doubt might have been enlivened by a cheesy 80’s synthesizer sound-track and strange, mangled songs that come out of nowhere and then just stop. Almost as if the performers suddenly remembered that this isn’t a musical.

Malloy makes some unwise decisions that actually emphasize the weaknesses of the script, particularly its episodic nature. We had to endure endless blackouts that I think were meant to evoke glimpsing into the vast darkness of the castle caverns but just slowed the pacing down and highlighted the almost painful linear “and this happened and then this happened” narrative. The script reduced the story to your basic gothic adventure tale with characters so broad as to be human cartoons. Even Peake’s gorgeous language was stripped away to this bare (for bare, please read boring) prose. We are treated only to the occasional snippet of scripted beauty that I assume were sourced from the original.

There were some (intended) highlights. The costumes by Carmen Alatorre are fantastic and do evoke Peake’s world effectively (I can’t imagine what this show would have been without them). Again, the performers do mostly good work, providing broad physical humour that has nothing to do with Peake but is often entertaining. For me the standouts were Jocelyn Gauthier and Maryanne Renzetti as the synchronized-heaving aunts. Like Alatorre’s costumes, they felt like they were from the books.

There were other (not always intended) highlights. My companion nearly jumped out of her seat with excitement at the dagger-fight in the flooding castle at the end. We both loved the monkey puppet and I also loved the sequence where Titus Groan (Jeff Kaiser) as a grumpy teenager, denies his family heritance of becoming ruler of Gormenghast with a petulance (and hair do) that reminded me of Terry Jones in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in that scene where the King points to the window and says “one day all this will be yours” to which Jones says, “what, the curtains?”

And speaking of Monty Python, the following will probably give you a better sense of the script than my feeble attempts. This biographical nugget on John Constable was taken from the show program:

He is also widely known as John Crow, the south London shaman who channels a Winchester Goose, the spirit of a medieval prostitute allegedly buried in the Cross Bones graveyard, an unconsecrated graveyard going back to medieval times.

That probably tells you all need to know. In the interest of full-disclosure, my shamanic name is Ted.