There's a month til Edinburgh starts. Apparently my ticket sales are a third up on this time last year. It is really worth booking ahead if you know when you're coming.
Get your tickets here and the limited Collings and Herrin run seems even more likely to sell out quickly
So book now to avoid disappointment.
Tonight as I came home after another enjoyable preview at the Canal Cafe I had a very good feeling. I think this has a shot at being the best show yet. And that's not the kind of thing I would usually say, especially after the success of the Headmaster's Son. This show is very different, but I've got a good feeling. That's all. I am starting to shed the safety routines - the new bits that are funny but don't quite fit into the story and getting more confidence that the ridiculous quest to popularise this unpopular moustache is enough to keep people entertained. An hour is such a short amount of time. It whizzes by so fast and I don't quite get the chance to get everything I want to say in. After all this time an hour feels like the warming up period and then just as I'm hitting my stride it's time to stop.
I still need to do an awful lot of work on the show - I am still doing most of the labour on stage and in the hour before. But as long as I put in the hours I think we're on to something kids. I keep getting better at this. Book now.
I watched Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" today, along with a documentary about the film. I have never been a massive fan of Chaplin, but increasingly I am becoming one. At his best he is beautiful and imaginative and artistic. At his worst mawkish and obvious. But I had dismissed him as someone who liked to fall over and eat his shoes and there's a lot more to him that that.
I love the bit with him as Hitler, playing with the globe. It's beautiful and funny and chilling and a marvelous satire. It's made more astonishing when you know that Chaplin got the idea partly through having seen a massive globe in pictures of Hitler's offices and the fact that when that building is gutted and wrecked the same globe was one of the things that would survive.
Chaplin dared to satirise Hitler when no one else really cared and recognised that he was someone to stand up to as early as 1938, when the US was in danger of embracing fascism. It made me more determined to make my show and the moustache a tribute to him and his stand for democracy. Though the final speech of the film is equal parts inspiring and embarrassing, the sentiment behind it is wonderful and if anything more relevant than ever. He totally saw through Hitler and understood about his hateful world vision and I wonder how much that was down to similarities between the two men. Chaplin was a perfectionist and far from unflawed, but he was also a comedian. And I am starting to think that the mindset that makes a comedian and the mindset that makes a dictator are not diametrically opposed. The arrogance and self assurance can go one of two ways. Hopefully being a comedian is better than being a dictator. Nearly always. But I have met some right cuntish comedians. And according to one of his inner circle Hitler had a good sense of humour about himself. Ah who knows?
I was slightly freaked out to discover that one of the main characters in the film is called Herring. Goering and Goebbels become Herring and Garbage. Yet it was deeply odd to be watching this film with ideas of giving Chaplin acclaim for the only film in which he speaks to hear him saying my name over and over again. If I was a weaker and more superstitious man I would see it as a sign that I was heading in the right direction. Luckily I am no Collings, and yet even so, I found it a freaky coincidence. No one is ever called Herring in anything. Did Chaplin know that I would one day plan to turn his birthday into a time where we celebrated democracy, opposed fascism and tried to reclaim the toothbursh moustaches for him?
No he didn't.
But still.
I enjoyed watching this seventy year old film. A lot of it was great.
Fight fascism with comedy my friends. If you laugh in its face it can not survive.
