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Pirate Jenny!Dateline: 9th December, 2003It's a small world, the theatre. A couple of years ago, at the Edinburgh Fringe, I saw and reviewed a play called Michelle and the Landlady, which I liked enormously. A few days later I met actress Helen Gould, who played the eponymous landlady, in the Pleasance Courtyard and we got chatting. End of story, probably. But more than a year later I met, by email, a guy called Nick Ellis, who, it turns out, is Helen's partner. Just recently I discovered that he has a "poperetta" called Pirate Jenny, for which he is hunting for a London venue. We exchanged emails about his "struggles" with the piece and I asked him to write about it. Here's the result! With her memorable songs, tragicomedic action and video-projected animated graphics, Pirate Jenny has set sail again. Co-producers Ellis Multimedia and The New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich, will be telling her story across the country during 2004. Don't miss her! Pirate Jenny is the greatest story of adventure, disaster, romance and shipwreck on the high seas ever told. Well almost… From a suspicion... The idea for the multimedia poperetta came from a realisation that the song 'Pirate Jenny' in The Threepenny Opera was strangely out of place in the seminal Brecht/Weill work: it could either have been the root of another piece that the two men had never completed, or was a song that was just too good to leave out of their 'hit' musical. In the original opera, it is performed by Polly, an established prostitute and worldly associate of MacHeath. In its few verses it delivers a complete yet skeletal plot - the fantasy of Jenny, MacHeath's favourite whore. Jenny dreams of being a scivvy at a seaside boarding house, where she is much put upon, but is rescued by her fantasy pirate ship, which arrives to do her bidding - namely the torture, murder and decapitation of every man in sight. It is a truly great song of revenge - a clear melody delivering powerful lyrics supported by a simple, yet strange harmonic structure and a bass line with a mind of its own! I first heard the song performed by Judy Collins in an English translation, arranged by Joshua Rifkin. From the very first hearing, it has always been my favourite song. It also seemed that there was enough of a story within the piece to build a theatrical story on. And so I did… Jenny's story begins with her life as a young drudge at a seaside boarding house, and we follow her as she narrowly misses marriage to a local councillor, shacks up with a pirate captain and progresses to become the town dictator, a pirate queen, and beobub of a Caribbean island before returning to her inevitable fate. The town - Wellsley - is somewhere on the East coast of Britain. The action is set at some undetermined Victorian period. Pirate Jenny involves the following characters: Jenny Jones, Frederick Barstow, Old Man Snape, Black Jake, some townspeople and pirates! The piece is very much a tour de force for the woman concerned. She plays Jenny at 16 and 60 years! The play what I wrote… Frankly I was looking for a way of killing several birds with one stone; of promoting my illustrative skills, songwriting abilities, theatrical creativity and, well - the writing would just have to keep up! I came up with a novel theatrical medium. Pirate Jenny is actually a mixture of live performance and cartoon filmstrip, a genuine 'multimedia poperetta'. In keeping with Brechtian techniques, each scene, song and even comment is accompanied by projected full colour graphics. There are two back-projection 'scenery' screens on which the slides portray real or fantasy environments. Every scene has a set of these slides to form both a panoramic background to the action, eg. a room at Ivy House or the harbourside, or to illustrate the backdrop to a fantasy, such as the pirate ship sailing out to sea There is also a flying front-projection screen which displays specific points - such as a mirror the characters use, a flag fluttering in triumph or a detail, such as a wedding invitation. There are two paces for the frequency of slides. During scenes with dialogue, the slides remain as static background scenery. Sometimes, when they take over the action - such as to show the passing of time - they change every couple of seconds. The hand paintings were drafted at a specific degree of pre-distortion before being scanned, 'corrected' to rectangles to maintain the 3D 'look', colour enhanced and then processed into slides. There are over 1,000 of them. And then the trouble really began… My education into British theatre began confidently. I has already written and marketed two musicals with modest success: Lola Zymer and Lola Zymer in Cabaret for my partner Helen Gould, an actress (and wonderful singer). I was used to the commercial world. Marketing, mailing, telephoning, presenting… None of it caused too much anxiety. After producing a full colour brochure and collating a list of theatre people, the plan was to set up a series of visits all over the country. I got on the bone… I was a little surprised at the ubiquitous ansaphone (this was the days before voicemail) plus the endless pleas of she's on "study leave" or "on sabbatical". Other favourites were "in rehearsal", "in casting" or "away until next month". Something close to total indifference from British theatre at all levels greeted my magnum opus (this continues to the present day, of course). After several months I finally managed to strike a relationship with a small theatre company in the Midlands who were interested enough to consider working with me. Great. I started to market the show. Then they pulled out. Faced with finding another company, I went back to all the people I had approached previously. More phone calls, trips and visits. Months went by. I would travel overnight to Cornwall for a meeting and not even be offered a cup of coffee! I would arrive for a pre-arranged meeting at a large provincial theatre to find it shuttered up! I was finally rescued by Alasdair Ramsay of the Haymarket, Theatre Basingstoke, who fitted the show in for five nights of a festival - dedicated to "wimin's issues". They worked at it. I made more drawings, more slides. And kept away. They chopped my clunky writing down; they worked at the songs. Opening night finally came. I organised a group trip in a bus from my home town of Cambridge. We all trouped in. Wonder of wonders. The musical was finally on. The slides, which are an essential part of the show, looked bright and beautiful. People ood and ahhd. The overture struck up. Two minutes into the show and a slide projector jammed. At first there were a few moments of embarrassment as the cast struggled on in true theatrical tradition. The director finally stood up and told the audience that "as it was experimental", we should all go into of the car park and have a fag. Then the fire bell went… Surprisingly, when we finally got going again, the show went remarkably well, struggling along on one slide projector. A sort of Blitz spirit took over. The audience were very kind. The rest of the run went really well. But I had taken up smoking again… Since that I have prepared a video for American TV, been commissioned, then uncommissioned, started to organise a new series of runs for Pirate Jenny and yes, visited another dozen or so theatres. I have also developed the graphics. Now on the mighty screens we will have animated video, not just slides. Hopefully it won't all catch fire. We are looking for a brave London venue, people with a penchant for both Brechtian theatre and pantomime. Pirate Jenny is really a mainstream musical, with a little darkness and didacticism thrown in. We are fully funded and want no favours. We're looking for a three week run somewhere in central London in October or November of next year More info on Pirate Jenny is available from me, Nick Ellis, on 01223 500506. Email: nick.ellis@ntlworld.com There's also a temporary website at: www.piratejenny.co.uk. So, the trials and tribulations of bringing a musical to birth! Is there a London theatre manager in the house? Articles Indices:
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