The Official Clive Barker Resource : Revelations - Theatre

"It's about an animator who comes home to his New York apartment to find that his magnum opus, Roscoe Rabbit, is in bed with his wife. It moves from that premise to a wild collision between cartoon characters and real life - the undertow being that here is a man whose mental creations have broken out into the real world, and all the rules which pertained to cartoons now pertain to the real world…. Horror and comedy are very similar. They both elicit immediate responses, gasps and shivers on the one hand and laughter on the other."
King of the Gory Tellers
By Neil Gaiman, Today, 19 October 1986

"The Secret Life of Cartoons had a great life on the fringe in England and in Europe and in Edinburgh - the festival. And then it had a disastrous life on the West End when it became a legitimate production. In part because I lost control of it. With all these movies and all this stuff, maybe I'm coming across as a control freak but I genuinely do think that sometimes things get lost. Some producers came in, they cast some stars and the thing was lost...The problem when you go into legitimate theatre in the West End is that it costs a lot of money to mount the thing and they have to clean up your act because they are cleaning it up for a tourist audience. Suddenly, you find that you're losing control of the stuff you really loved. And a lot of the nice stuff goes and it gets coarsened in a curious kind of way because it gets simplified. Suddenly it's Vaudeville, and it lost it. The reviews were disastrous. They deserved to be because it was a bad production. Maybe, one time down the line I'll let Roscoe out again but I'm not holding my breath while I wait."
An Interview with Clive Barker
Transcript of an interview on KPFA, San Francisco by Richard Lupoff, Richard Wolinsky and Lawrence Davidson, (i) Science Fiction Eye, No 4, August 1988, (ii) Masters of the Macabre II (as "A Talk with the King")

"We made certain that the characters in no way related to the Warner Brothers or the MGM or the Disney projects. The characters in the play are general portraits. All the studios created rabbits and mice...but we've tried to create characters that are the embodiment of the spirit of those cartoons rather than specific references to specific characters. It's about a whole tradition of American animation, that anarchic, life-affirming, outrageous tradition of the wise-cracking animal characters. There's only a limited number of animals you can choose, though, and it was mainly ones you could see about the house, with behaviour you could relate to. The joke is that one knows them, they're familiar to us.
Dog 1 (1976)

"There's a tie in with two other traditions of American humour: vaudeville, with the whole cross-talk element such as Bugs Bunny, and the movie tradition. The Marx brothers influenced Warner Brothers cartoons hugely. Bugs is derived from Groucho, and he never gets hurt. He just bounces back and the best of the cartoons are celebrations of a life-force, they're full of energy and full of positive feelings and appetites for food, sex, a warm burrow…They're outrageous, always flinging themselves into drag, doing a song and dance, they fall out of windows, get blown up and keep bouncing back."
Tap-Dancing Ducks and Hammer Murders
By Michael Darvell, What's On, 30 October 1986

"Might very seldom does it. It's usually wit that does it and imagination. So you get these characters using their abilities to change reality in some way, to snatch an identity from nowhere to overcome the bullies. The best cartoons are about making the world work without kicking the shit out of it. And I like that; it's very life- affirming."
Hell Hound
By Anne Billson, Time Out, 15-22 October 1986

"At the very time that The Secret Life of Cartoons opened in London's West End, to almost universal condemnation, I was in the midst of shooting Hellraiser. A study in contrasts. After two abortive experiences in the cinema, which had ended up resembling scarcely at all the projects I had first set on paper, here I was again - this time in the theatre - seeing work I had enjoyed writing, and which had been successful in another incarnation (as fringe and provincial shows) appearing in a form I barely recognised...
"So, by day Hellraiser: hammer-murders, lovers raised from the dead, sado-masochists from another dimension. By night, Cartoons: tap-dancing ducks, a transvestite pacifist rabbit, Technicolor anarchy. And travelling between them the conviction growing that I should never, repeat never, let work I loved, or even liked, out of my control. It's an oath easier in the making than in the keeping."
Footnote to Cartoons
By Clive Barker, Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden

The Day of the Dog takes place outside an abattoir.

The Morning

It is dawn, and the working day begins; the cleaning of the tiles, the sharpening of the knives; the preparations for the slaughter. To the Abattoir wall comes Dog, in search of meat. He is punished for attempted theft and instigates his revenge. The lovers meet in the rising heat of the day, part and go their ways. Dog dresses in offal and seduces the Butcher. All retire for a light lunch.

The Afternoon

It is getting hotter. The Butcher sleeps and dreams of the evening. Dog produces the second part of the revenge and goes on to wound the Lover. As the heat becomes unbearable, the Hunchback seems to see Dog transformed and the Butcher goes mad.

The Evening

The heat has soured and thunder threatens as Dog dines. There is no rain. The whore falls in love with Dog and remembers herself too late. The Butcher wakes, the unveiling takes place and there is slaughter outside the Abattoir. Dog plays his third trick; the Lovers are reunited, the Hunchback exits.
Night and rain.

CARDINAL
But Frankenstein, oh dear Joseph, he always loved humanity.

VERONIQUE
Never.

CARDINAL
Oh yes. He had a passion for its intricacies, its strength, its elasticity. So he wanted to stretch it, shape it, remake it by his own rules. To make a law for the flesh, a physical morality he called it. I just saw a blood-letter, a tormentor. And it pleased me, watching him silence their complaints, sluice out their minds with agonies. I'd put my finger, sometimes, into their hot heads, buried in thought up to the knuckle, and see their lives go out a little further with each prod. That pleased me too. He worked out of love, I out of loathing.

"Frankenstein In Love is a play of dark, airless places that have long been sealed from any hope of sanity. This claustrophobia is, of course, a common device in horror fiction, allowing the readers or spectators no escape from the source of their anxiety, and the theatre is arguably the easiest place to evoke it.
"In its obsessive way, the play creates a kind of alternative world, where everybody is corrupted or corrupt, dead or dying; monstrous in form, deed or both. A fantasia, if you will, on taboo themes, which refuses to offer much in the way of comfort to its audience. In that singularity of intention lies both its limitation and its potential for theatrical power."
Production Notes
by Clive Barker, Los Angeles, 1995

"'Frankenstein in Love' is a 'Grand Guignol' play. The 'Grand Guignol' tradition fascinates me. The idea that there was this theatre in Paris where you went just to watch people mutilated and dismembered onstage strikes me as fun. I thought I'd try my hand at a piece of shock theatre. "
Meet Clive Barker
By Philip Nutman & Stefan Jaworzyn, Fangoria, No 51, January 1986

"I came very late to genre writing - three, four years ago. But the plays always had an element of the fantastic. The History of the Devil and Frankenstein in Love have very strong horror elements and closely approximate the tone of my short stories. Vicious, farcical and metaphysical by turns and, at their best moments, all three simultaneously."
Clive Barker
By Kim Newman, Interzone, No 14, Winter 1985/86

"Mary Shelley's original ('Frankenstein') is a tale of what happens when you reach out too far beyond the scope of your humanity and violate the sacred trust that humans should have with God. I didn't think contemporary audiences were interested in metaphysics, regrettably. The thing I thought could be new, that I thought I could add new to the story, was about a man who begins to divide himself in the same way as a country divides itself.
"For a country to work as a fluid healthy machine, it must have all its parts working together. If all the parts don't work in harmony, you have a sort of mutiny. I like the idea of mutinous body parts, of a body coming apart at the seams."
Clive Barker And Rude Guerilla Theater Co. - A Mutual Admiration Society
By Eric Marchese, online at www.calactors.com, July 2001

MRS MOCATTA
The Dream Bureau is overworked, pressed to the limits. We need reliable agents in the field. If we lose you, we need to find somebody to replace you.

MR FOSS
But I'm incompetent. That dream that Dexter just created?

MRS MOCATTA
What about it?

MR FOSS
I couldn't have choreographed a Freudian spectacle like that. I haven't got the wit left. I'm reduced to stealing ideas from juveniles.

MRS MOCATTA
I'm sympathetic. Really I -

MR FOSS
(Furious now)
You are not! You don't give a damn for me. As long as you have your agents burrowing in the dream life of the nation, you're quite content. Bugger me! I'm just a cog! Well I won't do it! I won't!

MRS MOCATTA
(unmoved)
You will, Edward. You signed a contract.

MR FOSS
I've a good mind to spill the beans.

MRS MOCATTA
Now you're being silly.

MR FOSS
Tell the world about this conspiracy.

MRS MOCATTA
It's not a conspiracy, it's a science. What would your so-called dream-life of the nation be like without our nurturing it, shaping it? Once upon a time you thought it would be fine sport to paddle in the collective unconscious.

MR FOSS
Well, I've got my feet wet and it wasn't as advertised. Most of the minds I peer into are awash with trivia.

"'Subtle Bodies' is about a hotel in which the ghost of Edward Lear is manipulating a wedding party - giving them dreams and nightmares."
Transcript of talk at UCLA 25 February 1987
Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden

"Subtle Bodies...probably dramatizes the complexities and confusion of affection (sexual, familial and bestial) most elaborately [of the Forms of Heaven plays], the entire story is predicated upon a series of problematical relationships. The way these passions - whether failed, frenzied or simply Lenny the Clown from Crazy Face

foolish - shape the behaviour of the characters is at the heart of the play; the fantasy elements are simply entertaining methods of revelation ...[Subtle Bodies] takes some of its formal design from English farce - the cast of disparate charaters converging on a hotel over one calamitous day and night; the manic concealing of secrets and the inevitable humiliations when the plots these people have laid against one another unravel - but to this familiar mix I added a few wilder elements of my own. Chief amongst them, the politely anarchic person of Edward Lear, whose romantic nonsense poem 'The Owl and the Pussycat' had been a favourite from childhood.
"The notion of a ship setting out on a voyage across a dream-sea may be familiar to readers of The Great and Secret Show and Everville. In those novels, this sea is dubbed Quiddity, and in Everville a character called Joe Flicker takes a leaky vessel called the Fanacapan out across its wastes, only to have the ship finally founder. Beyond this, there are few similarities of detail between play and book, but have no doubt, the first mention of Quiddity is here in Subtle Bodies, and appropriately enough, that mention comes from the lips of Edward Lear himself."
Laughter, Love and Chocolate: An Introduction
by Clive Barker, Los Angeles, 1996

"This is a dream play; a comedy of altered stages in which images that have been shaped by the private rages, frustrations and desires of the characters take public, or at least semi-public, form. On occasion, these dream-images seep almost unnoticed into the 'real world' of the play, like the sand that is constantly blowing in under the doors of the Atlantic Hotel, where the story is laid. At other times they supplant that world entirely, the most spectacular example of which occurs in the Third Act, when the hotel becomes a ship and sails off into the night on what is to be its final voyage."
Production Notes
by Clive Barker, Los Angeles, 1996

On The Plays...(continued)