DVD Extras! Deleted scene: Davit Monologue

For posterity, a few bits of text that never made the final cut. This monologue used to be delivered by Griffith (Fionn) in the second half of the show, when Howell (Martin) was about to cast his body to the waves. It starts with Griffith strung up on the davit, and Howell lowering him downwards.

Q&A with Lawrence Williams, ‘The Musician’ and sound designer/composer.

What part do you play in Keepers?

In the programme, I’m billed as The Musician. I do play a bit of music, but also a lot of sound design which in fact gives the piece a lot of shape – it’s almost like audio set design!

Q&A with Martin Bonger, aka Thomas Howell

What part do you play in Keepers?

I play Thomas Howell, the one who lives and goes mad…

Bringing it home.

A big show for us last night as Martin stepped forward onto the stage in Cardigan, Wales, and spoke the opening (changed) lines of the prologue:

“Twenty-two miles off this very coast

Q&A with Fionn Gill, aka Thomas Griffith

What part do you play in Keepers?

I play Thomas Griffith… well there has been some confusion about if it is Griffith or Howell who dies in the real story, reports seem to differ. We’re going with Griffith dying. So I play The Lighthouse Keeper Who Dies.

“A ship was built in Philadelphia…”

I found this today and thought I’d share it: the lyrics to an old Welsh Hymn that I brought into our first rehearsal for Keepers back in 2009.

Q&A with Simon Day, Director

What part do you play in Keepers?

Other than actually being in it, a little bit of everything! Officially I suppose, I have directed and produced the show, as well as doing a lot of the writing, but when you’re a new small company and it’s a devised piece it can all get quite blurry; I never could have ‘written’ or ‘produced’ Keepers without Martin and Fionn.

How did you get involved with The Plasticine Men and Keepers?

I started the group with two other brilliant performers in the Midlands (Matt and Chris from Spanner). I hadn’t made any of my own work for a while, and wanted to have a play again really. We started with a very small piece adapted from The Three Musketeers, and after that, made a show called Cargo about the phenomenon of ‘cargo-cults’ in the South Pacific. I’m still really proud of this stuff, although started to think I might make a better director if I wasn’t actually on-stage. These two pieces really helped me to work out what sort of theatre it was that I wanted to make, and when I heard the story of the Smalls, I leapt at the chance it seemed to offer me to make it. By this point, I had moved from the Midlands, so I hooked up with Martin, Fionn and Lawrence in the South-East, and got to work.

What have you most enjoyed about Keepers? Are there any moments that really stand out?

There’s been so much I’ve enjoyed and so many great moments. I’ll never forget watching the first very rough 10 minutes that we performed in early 2009 (at PILOT in Birmingham). We’d worked together for less than a week, and were coming up with some great stuff, but I had to go and work in Shropshire before we could actually bring any of the material together into any kind of shape, and had barely started working with Lawrence and the sound. The plan was to basically leave it with those three for a couple of days, and I’d see it for the first time along with everyone else in the audience. So I had this surreal experience of getting in a van and bombing off to Birmingham to watch ‘my show’ without really knowing what I was going to see! The lights came down, on they came, did their thing and I was utterly transfixed; that was the night I knew we had a show. Later on, I really enjoyed visiting St Davids in Wales to do some research and get a feel for the material as well.

What’s been your biggest challenge?

Well, I guess when you’re committed to devising (as opposed to writing or directing theatre in the conventional sense) then a big part of that is the kick you get out of creating in collaboration with talented practitioners. For me, that’s where the good stuff really starts to happen but obviously, when you’ve got four people in a room each with, quite rightly, strong ideas about the work, there can be points of contention! Part of my decision to step back a bit, and not be in this show, was a response to this. My challenge is to facilitate, and very rarely (hopefully), to know when to close things down and say ‘OK, but it’s going to be like this’.

What are you most looking forward to about the tour coming up?

I won’t be travelling with the show for the whole tour, so I’m really looking forward to those dates where I meet up with everyone again and see how it’s going. Aside from the work, I just really like being part of this group of people – it can be a lot of fun.

When you’re not being a Plasticine Man, what are you doing?

Putting together and trying to run this tour has been a lot of work, so at the moment, I’m not really doing a lot else! I’ve just moved to Brighton though, so I’m looking forward to settling in here a bit. I’m a bit of a bike-geek, so will be out and about a lot when the weather picks up with any luck.

Finally, do you think you would have made a good Lighthouse Keeper on The Smalls?

I think this is one reason that I found the story so fascinating: I’m not sure that today, any of us would. Our relationship to work, to communication and information makes that world and that role completely unrecognisable. Some people freak out when they lose phone-signal, imagine how they’d get on twenty miles out to sea without so much as a post-box? If I was stuck out there, I guess my sanity would really hinge on whoever I was stuck out there with.

Profiles of Top 10

The Smalls - Pembrokeshire, Wales – 1775

Guardian of the most delicious true story, and inspiration for our show, Keepers. Because of what happened on The Smalls in 1801, it was decreed that these remarkable structures should be manned by 3 instead of 2 keepers. Ah, the wisdom of hindsight…

The Pharos of Alexandria – Pharos, Egypt – C.250BC

One of the Seven Wonders of The World, and second only behind The Smalls in my Top 10, The Pharos was the mother of all lighthouses.

La Jument – Brittany, France – 1911

The poster-boy of the lighthouse world thanks to an extraordinary photo shot from a helicopter by Jean Guichard.

St Anthony’s – Falmouth, Cornwall – 1835

This lighthouse featured in the opening credits of Fraggle Rock. What more deserving accolade to thrust St Anthony’s into 4th place in my Top 10.

Cordouan – Gironde Estuary, France – 1611

A shoe-in for my Top 10 thanks to theatre’s debt to this lighthouse: the lighting rig’s workhorse, that good old fresnel lens, was first used here in 1823.

Winstanley’s Lighthouse on Eddystone Rocks – Devon/Cornwall – 1698

What isn’t there to love about the original Eddystone Lighthouse? It looks like a cuckoo clock, Henry Winstanley was, even by his contemporary’s standards, a colourful character, and upon his release from imprisonment by Louis XIV prompted the King to utter the lines “France is at war with England, not with humanity”.

North Foreland – Kent – 1691

The Plasticine Men salute Dermot Cronin, the UK’s last lighthouse keeper who hung up his wellies in 1998 when North Foreland became the last of Trinity House’s lighhouses to be automated.

Split Point – Victoria, Australia – 1891

OK, so it wasn’t as good as Fraggle Rock, but this location for hit children’s TV show, Round The Twist, earns Still Point 8th place in my Top 10.

Orfordness – Suffolk – C.1634

Not as much respect for the whole of humanity here, by a French Privateer who attached the Lighthouse in 1707, causing much damage and stealing the keepers’ beds, the scoundrel.

San Juan del Salvamento – Tierra del Fuego, Argentina – 1884

Better known as Faro del fin del mundo (“Lighthouse at the end of the world”), and made famous by inspiring Jules Verne’s book of the same name. Makes my Top 10 for Keeper’s indebtedness to this part of the world: a book of short stories called Tierra del Fuego by Francisco Coloane was really influential in early stages of development.

My Top 10 Lighthouses

I found out more about lighthouses than is probably healthy when making Keepers. What follows, is a list of the Top 10, in my humble opinion…

1. The Smalls
2. Pharos of Alexandria
3. La Jument
4. St Anthony’s
5. Cordouan
6. Winstanley’s at Eddystone
7. North Foreland
8. Split Point
9. Orfordness
10. San Juan del Salvamento

Take a look at the lighthouse profiles for more information.

May be you have a favourite that’s missing from my list, or are for some reason apoplectic that La Jumentis above Eddystone? I’d love to hear from you…