{THEATRE} Doris Day Can Fuck Off
ON SONG Greg McLaren has created a Fringe show about a month spent singing all of his conversations. But, asks Jonny Ensall, why is he so hostile to the artist formerly known as Doris Mary Ann Kappelhof?
I t’s a sunny Saturday in Stoke Newington, North London, and I’m competing in my very first ‘allotment Olympics’. Specifically, an alleyway shot putt event that swaps the usual metal balls for hefty, organic potatoes. The games have been organised by Stoke Newington International Airport – the collective name taken by the group of artists, musicians and performers who have colonised the surrounding warehouses. Later on, there’ll be sketches and some scratch theatre performances followed by drinking, feedback and back-slapping.
This is the sort of cheery creative environment that Greg McLaren is used to working in. The performer behind the Fringe show Doris Day Can Fuck Off lives by the Airport space, and catalysed the formation of this loose collective three years ago. It’s a group whose identity he still struggles to define. ‘We’re not a theatre company. Although we are a theatre company. We’re basically a youth club for grown-ups – no don’t print that.’ However, Doris Day . . . was developed away from the good clean fun of the Airport. The antagonistic title for McLaren’s show emerged over a two- week April residency in chilly Cambridge, during which time he pushed the boundaries of an idea: everything that he would usually say to people, he would instead sing. Not only that, but he would attempt to draw people into singing with him.
‘I don’t blame people for not taking it up,’ he says of the Cantabrigians’ unenthusiastic response. ‘In public people are quite keen to stick to their usual script. It’s the same as someone talking quite loudly on a train – it can annoy people. You’re pulling the usual social context out of shape and uncomfortable.’ it’s
just
experience into a one-man Fringe show about the joy of opening his throat. He also recorded the few people who didn’t just ignore him, and now uses some of these samples on stage – the natural melody of a traffic warden’s speech becomes, for example, the musical basis of a ballad. It gives McLaren some solace to sing over the strangers’ words. ‘Taking it back to the studio and working it into a song made me feel like there was, in the end, this posthumous relationship with him. I see it as a sort of duet really.’ And what about his relationship with Doris Day? Is that irretrievably
broken?
‘Well, Doris Day doesn’t exist. It’s a stage name. Her real name is Doris Mary Ann Kappelhof. Quite often in interviews she would say, “Oh I’m just Doris Mary Ann Kappelhof, from Minnesota. All that Doris Day stuff, that’s a different person.” I think it’s OK for the character of Doris Day – the avatar – to fuck off. Especially because she embodies the idea that singing and song is no longer something that everyone can do. That’s something that the X-Factor has helped make happen. ‘One of the things I’ve realised is that it’s unusual to hear singing from a real mouth that’s not attached to any kind of financial transaction. There is a link between music and money that it would be useful if we could uncouple.’ Corporate might is fighting back, however. The show’s Facebook page was taken down recently for contravening community guidelines, though McLaren is unphased. ‘I’ve put a lot of work into it, and I stand by it – even the title . . . Mark Zuckerberg? Yeah, well he can fuck off and all.’
Doris Day Can Fuck Off, Zoo Southside, 662 6892, 5–29 Aug (not 16), 6.15pm, £9 (£7).
Over a month of trying McLaren had little-to-no response singing to cyclists, professors . . . even buskers. Still, he has managed to build the
L A V I T S E F
APOCALYPSE NOW Steve Cramer is enticed by the prospect of Marc Almond singing songs of pestilence in Mark Ravenhill’s new musical inspired by the London Plague of 1665
66 THE LIST 4–11 Aug 2011
There’s something about apocalypse that has run through the human psyche, and a great deal of art, for over a century. Be it HG Wells’ Martian invasions or Ballard’s Great Droughts, these scenarios often question everyday life and our usual values while raising existential and ideological issues. This new piece, which features pop icon Marc Almond performing songs by Conor Mitchell with a libretto by Mark Ravenhill, looks like having the right credentials to cover the ground afresh.
Using a Biblical title and Daniel Defoe’s A
Journal of the Plague Year as his starting point, Ravenhill’s script, as director/designer Stewart Laing explains, has a much more contemporary edge than its pedigree might suggest.
‘I think it’s a feeling, having got past the AIDS epidemic, he can look back on it objectively about how people dealt with it,’ says Laing. ‘I think the piece is partly about how people deal with big issues; there’s a mixture of hysteria and rationality, and these things get confused.’
As the director points out, everything
Ravenhill writes is about the here and now. ‘You
can see things like avian flu in the story. There’s also something about how plague affects not just the people infected but the rest of society here, and turns the world upside down. In the Great Plague, people dreaded the spring and looked forward to the winter, because they knew the warm weather would bring plague.’
The piece amounts to a kind of concert by Almond, but there’s a significant thread through it, which Laing sees as critical. ‘I think Conor Mitchell is exploring the narrative nature of songs: there’s a Kurt Weill song sequence called The Seven Deadly Sins, and that’s kind of where he’s coming from. It’s definitely a narrative piece – there are 16 songs that can only be performed in the order that they’ll be performed. Each song has a consequence that follows on to the next. I think Marc’s a great storyteller, and that’s why he’s such a great singer of songs. It’s like Jacques Brel, where the words are as important as music.’ ■ Ten Plagues, Traverse Theatre, 228 1440, 6–28 Aug (not 8, 15, 22), times vary, £17– £19 (£12–£13). Previews 1, 6 Aug, £12 (£6).