Speaking to a professional storyteller about Shakespeare

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Prose the Nodi periodical, you radical Barts.

Welcome to the Blind Buy Podcast.

If this is your first podcast, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast.

There's a phrase called

Luce del Sud.

It means southern light.

It refers to

a very specific

peachy bluish haze

that's present in Renaissance landscapes of the late 1400s and early 1500s.

Landscape paintings that I'd be rich in

ochres and terracotta hues.

Paintings like

The Agony in the Garden by Giovanni Bellini

or Madonna della Laggia by Sandro Botticelli.

A very specifically beautiful fucking Italian type of sunlight, right?

Looks like a peach smoking a fag.

Looks like if a peach could smoke a fag and blow the smoke in your face, and then sunlight went through it.

Well, this is what I was thinking.

I was thinking this exact thing the other day

on my bicycle

as I was cycling at a very moderate pace

through Limerick City and I went down towards the Bardshit district.

And as I marveled at the

the wonderful peachy sunlight on the buildings

and thought to myself this is like fucking Loche del Sudas what this is like fuck me and just as I thought that my fucking my bicycle wheel started to slip on bird shit

I aquaplaned on I'd say a six meter layer of bird shit sliding along waiting for the bike to go sideways tensing up my muscles expecting to crack my head off the ground.

And then finally, I slide to the perimeter of the bard shit in the barred shit district, the perimeter of the barred shit.

I slide to the end of it, and then my tires gain traction again.

And thank fuck, I did not fall on the ground.

I think I made a seagull-like screeching noise as I did it.

But like,

as I was sliding along the barred shit on my bicycle, a man in front of me then turned around to witness me aquaplaning on bard shit on a bicycle.

He turns around and as he turns his fucking head, he then slips on bard shit and lands on his back and gets bard shit all up and down his back.

And I deserved it.

I deserved it.

It was as if the bard shit said, calm the fuck down.

you langer.

Don't be comparing Limerick City to the Mediterranean sunlight of a Renaissance painting.

Look at that.

Look at that in front of you.

That's a man called Noel.

And he's wiping starling shit off his shoulders.

Look at that.

While your heart is racing because you nearly cracked your skull open.

This is Limerick City.

And the bard shit was right.

The bard shit taught me a lesson.

I'd gotten carried away with myself.

But I was very annoyed.

I was pissed off.

If you're a regular listener to this podcast, you'll be familiar with the deep bird shit lore of this podcast.

You'll know about the bird shit district, which is a street in Limerick City called Bedford Raw, where

for about three months a year, in the summer, the starlings roast in the trees, and then they shit so much that the whole city smells like bird shit.

And you can literally slip when you walk because there's a one-inch layer of bird shit at all times.

And I was really annoyed.

I was annoyed because because I nearly came off my fucking bike, I nearly came off my bicycle because of bird shit.

So I

tagged the Limerick City Council on Instagram and said, Look,

I nearly come off my bike because of bird shit.

And when a man turned around to watch me coming off my bike because of bird shit, he then slipped in bird shit.

It was about 9:30 a.m.

Lots of people were out walking.

The council do that, they bring out the washers and they wash down the bird shit every day, every second day.

But to be honest, they don't start till like maybe half ten, eleven.

Sometimes I see them there at lunchtime.

It's not working.

You need to do it like they do in Spain.

Get out at three or four in the morning.

We all know when the starlings shit.

Not surprising everybody, they've got a strict routine.

Strict routine, it's a marmoration.

Consult with an ornithologist.

i can tell you

just as the sun goes down you can listen they they do so much bird shit that you can hear the slaps of a thousand shits from two streets over wait until the luce del sud

wait until the evening sunlight takes on the peachy appearance of a renaissance painting when that happens the starlings will shit

And then when it gets dark, they stop shitting, okay?

They stop shitting.

So wash the street.

At maybe 3 in the morning, 4 in the morning, 6 in the morning would do it.

6 in the morning would do it too.

So anyway, the local newspaper got on to me wanting to meet

to write an article about the bird shit situation in Limerick.

And you know my rule with local newspapers.

If I get nominated for an award or something,

Or if my books are selling well, this is the type of information I want in the local newspaper because then my ma can show it to her neighbors.

Okay, and that's why I like being in the local newspaper.

But now

I think I'm gonna write an article about the bard shit problem in the local newspaper.

I think that's where I'm at.

They're giving me space to write out my entire bard shit manifesto, my entire bard shit thesis.

I'm not gonna get into the seagull thesis.

But you know about my my bard shit thesis where I can I can trace bard shit to the reason that there's eight billion people in the world today and I'm being given a platform in the local newspaper to do that.

And I might just have to lean into it.

I might just have to lean into

I'm the middle-aged man who's complaining about hazardous bard shit in a pedestrianized street.

I'm not gonna give them a photograph of me sternly pointing at the bard shit.

But if they're willing to platform my bard shit thesis, then I'm gonna take that opportunity.

And then unfortunately

my ma's gonna have to deal with that because the neighbours then will be calling to my ma's house and it's not, oh I saw your son's getting an award, it's oh your son's a lunatic.

Oh I know your son, yeah, he's the fellow who wears a plastic bag in his head and has very strong opinions about the Limerick City Council's attitude towards bird shit cleaning.

So fuck it, I'm just gonna get balls deep into that.

There's quite quite alarming news coming in now from Limerick City about the bird shit situation.

We have on the air, we've got Blind Boy Boat Club here to talk to us about the bird shit situation.

Blind Boy, are you okay?

Yeah,

I nearly came off my bicycle.

I nearly came off my bicycle.

It was very difficult.

Blind Boy, I have with us on the air Limerick City Councillor Ignatius Fanoukin.

Ignatius, are Limerick City Council taking this seriously enough?

Appropriate response.

Appropriate response to the situation with the bird dropping we we we have steam cleaners

power washing 100 degree water but morning noon and night we are washing

and addressing the the bird going back to blind boy now blind boy do you agree with the the councillor's position uh are the are the bird droppings being being cleaned appropriately as as the councillor has suggested they're they're not cleaning the bird shit the machines are are merely they're distributing the bird shit more evenly across the pavement, and it doesn't solve the problem.

I've

I've seen, I've seen,

I've been in Spain, I've watched how they power wash streets in Spain.

Why are they in Spain?

I'm speaking

Luce del Sudden, excuse me,

excuse me, in the southern Mediterranean, you can see it represented in Renaissance paintings, in particular,

in particular in the work of Giovanni Bellini.

That there.

That's like a nightmare.

That's like a fucking nightmare that I would have.

That particular discourse

on the radio.

That's the type of shit that's...

I've dreams about things like that happening.

Not getting dragged into that shit.

Ending up on the radio arguing with a fucking counselor about bird bird shit and I need to make sure I don't get dragged into that.

But I couldn't resist doing a little bit of a fantasy roleplay.

A fantasy roleplay now that I have my beautiful PA here and that at any moment I can give you a sound as buttery.

As buttery as two of them, you fucking cunt.

It's my new studio lads.

Beautiful, gorgeous new studio.

Not Echo Postman.

Absolutely amazing studio.

And my new PA that I'm very grateful to have.

I love this sound.

But this week I've got a fucking live podcast for you.

A couple of months back,

I gigged in York.

Absolutely wonderful York.

Unfortunately I didn't get to visit the Viking Museum there because I just didn't have enough time in York.

But

I can't wait to come back to York to spend a bit of time.

How do I describe York?

it's like Cambridge if they sold it in TK Max

and I mean that as a compliment but I spoke to a magnificent guest in York called Debs Newbold and Debs is

she's a storyteller so she's a traditional storyteller a theatre maker, a director, multi-award winning and she spent years working with Shakespeare's Globe Theatre

reinterpreting the work of Shakespeare through storytelling.

So we had a chat about storytelling, about art, we had a chat about fucking everything because I learned loads about Shakespeare, lots about Shakespeare, in particular

that Shakespeare was influenced by oral storytelling.

I did not know that.

What I'm looking for for guests on this podcast,

I want to speak to anybody who is legitimately and genuinely passionate about what they do.

If they're passionate about what they do and they can communicate that passion to a person who's uninitiated, then that's who I want to speak to.

And Deb's New Bulld was amazing.

She was recommended to me by Claire Murphy, another astounding storyteller.

And I'll definitely be having Debs back on on the podcast.

But here we go.

Here's the chat that we had in York.

Also, her website is debsnewboldplays.com.

And also, she is debsnewbold plays on Instagram.

And hopefully, when I post this podcast on my Instagram, Blind by Bow Club, hopefully, I'll fucking remember to tag her and you can give her a follow.

You were recommended to me.

by Claire Murphy, the storyteller.

Good old Claire.

Who I had on this podcast in Bristol the last time and we had a wonderful time.

And I said to Claire, If you can recommend any fucking storytellers, please do.

And you were first on the list.

What what is it that you do?

I often ask myself that same question actually.

Um what do I do?

I

communicate with people, basically.

I communicate stories to people and I do it sometimes just with me and my body and some words on a stage, no set, no props, no costume.

Sometimes I do it with groups of actors, if there's money and musicians.

Sometimes I might do it with one or two actors, but essentially,

I quite like stories that are all about

trying to create a sense of compassion and understanding.

And what I mean by that is I'm drawn to stories where

characters in them are quite hard to understand, and their motives and their actions are sometimes reprehensible.

Challenge people, and in order to be present here, you have to have a bit of empathy for this despicable person.

Kind of, yeah.

I guess what

I think probably is that I'm trying to find

in myself empathy for them, and then when I perform,

it's something to do with because I mean, I don't know how much we want to get into the different types of performance that you can do, but I'm quite interested in performance that doesn't cost loads of you emotionally because I feel like that sometimes gets in the way of everybody else investing emotionally.

So, I'll find the empathy that I have for that character that'll drive drive my interest in trying to form a story around them.

But then, when I perform, I try and perform with sympathy rather than empathy, a little bit of a remove, which is why storytelling is ace

because you know you've got a direct address that you can go to, you know, you can step out of a character.

In fact, most of the time, if I'm storytelling, I'll be me more than I'll be the character.

I'll only step in for a few seconds, right?

But what I want to do is try and leave a space for the audience to have the empathy.

So I'm not trying to have an emotional effect on you as an audience member.

I'm trying to let the story do its job.

Do you know what I mean?

I don't want to transfer my emotion into you.

Does that make sense?

And

you've been working with Shakespeare's Globe for a good while, and

you're on this is the bit I'm trying to understand, right?

And what I like about it is I haven't a fucking clue what this looks like because I haven't seen it.

You're using storytelling to interpret the works of Shakespeare?

Yeah.

Like, what's that?

Yeah.

Well, so I worked with the Globe for about 17 years on and off, and I did loads of work in the education department.

And in that time, I got to know the stage really well.

I performed a couple of, you know, I performed on it a few times as well.

Got to know the stage.

Got to know this bizarre theatre space that we don't use anymore, but that used to exist, you know, 400 years ago, an outdoor round building.

Have you been there?

I actually gigged, I gigged there in about 2014.

Go away.

Just some of the, whoever was theatre director, his name was Dominic.

Dominic Jomgul was, yeah.

Yeah, so we were doing rubber bandit stuff, which was, I suppose, a bit like kneecap, but 10 years ago.

Oh, yeah, I remember you.

And we were in Soho Theatre, and the director of the Globe came along and said, that's mad, let's put it in the globe.

So they put us in the Sam Wanamaker.

It was great because I brought out like six of my friends and we were all dressed as the IRA and we had fucking AK-47s and everything.

It's like Shakespeare's Globe.

But you know what the biggest problem was?

There's candles, there's no lights.

Yeah.

So I'm there trying to sing up the ra with giant candelabras above my head and all the beeswax was melting and go and actually melt in my bag and threatened to reveal my face on stage.

So I hadn't planned for that.

So I do know the space.

It was, but a lot of it was just the people who have seasoned tickets for Shakespeare's Globe.

And they were like, oh, people were ready to.

Because they were like, what the fuck is this?

Because it was full tricolour AK-47 and up the raw.

Like, there was just.

They didn't know what to do, you know.

But some of them loved it.

Shakespeare would have loved that, the subversion of it.

That's why that's that's the thing.

That's why Dominic Book does.

'Cause he said, what you're doing reminds me of what Shakespeare initially tried to to do.

And that's the thing,

that's what I want to speak to you about.

I always thought that Shakespeare was mad posh inaccessible.

And then, after that gig, I went doing my research, and it was like, no, when Shakespeare first came out, it was like NWA.

Yeah.

I mean, can you tell us a bit about that?

Well, he was, I mean, he wasn't like from a working-class background.

He was middle-class, I suppose.

But his dad, I think, lost a lot of money, lost his fortune, fell on hard times, and

lost a lot of his reputation.

But Shakespeare did get an education, which is one of the I mean, this to be honest, the thing is, blind boy, this is if Shakespeare wrote the blooming plays, do you know what I mean?

I like the idea that he did because he's from Stratford up the road from me, do you know what I mean?

So, you know, I'm invested in it, but

if it was him,

he came out, you know, he got a family to support back in Stratford.

He was an actor first, but he decided to come together with 11 other fellas, put their own money together to open their own playhouse.

You know, theatre was only just starting to become a big thing again in London at that time.

You had the city fathers censoring what you were doing, so you had to try and be dead canny if there was stuff you wanted to say about the way the world was.

You had to get past the censor, you know.

But the original globe,

it's got no roof, so the daylight lights it, so you play at 2 p.m.

You can't afford to light it at night, so when do you rehearse?

You rehearse in the morning.

You're rehearsing a play in probably about four or five hours.

You know, that's mad because you're not doing the same play the next night, you're doing it afternoon, you're doing another play that afternoon.

So they're working like you wouldn't believe.

And the conditions that they were working in were

they were just incredible in terms of making you alive, ready, you know, ready to go.

I want to ask some questions, which may be complete myths about Shakespeare and see what you think of them, right?

So,

one thing I heard was

what made Shakespeare so revolutionary was to simply use the English language.

That posh people back then mostly spoke French because

the Norman thing a few hundred years ago, and that even using the English language would have been considered the language of the poor, the language of criminals, the language of the underclass.

So that by itself was revolutionary.

Is there truth in that?

I suspect there's a bit of truth in it because I think the court language was French at the time, wasn't it?

That was the courtly language.

And most people of higher classes had several languages and they could kind of pick and choose.

The other thing, as well, is if you think of food, right, and when it comes to England and class and food and the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons,

it's Norman on the plate and Anglo-Saxon in the field.

Yeah, so poultry is poulet, that's French, because you eat it, but then it's a chicken in the field, and that's Anglo-Saxon, that's who's raising it.

And then

beef, buff, that's French, but then cow in the field, so that's Anglo-Saxon.

So there's the class division between English and French.

So Shakespeare was what, like, 15 or late 1500s?

Yeah, started 1590s, right up to 1616.

So 1066, they're Normans, they're French.

So French was the language of the court for a couple of hundred years, and English would have been really looked down upon.

Yeah, there were no English dictionaries when he was writing.

And he also had the audacity to just make up words.

Fair fucking play at him for that.

But in innit?

Yeah, I know.

He was the first person to make use friend as a verb and unfriend actually, so very modern.

Yeah, he would turn nouns into verbs.

When we say made up, right?

Did he make them up or was this the language?

Were these words just happening's mouths

on the streets and no one was writing them down?

Was he the first to write these words down?

Yeah, that could be.

Oh, that's a bloody good question.

And I don't know the answer, if I'm honest.

But the estimate is that he introduced 1700 roughly English words into the language, at least into the written language.

And you're right, because we only have these plays because,

well, in the first instance, some of them were sold as quartos at the time of

it's like

a large bit of paper that you have to fold in quarters in order to make a little booklet.

So when they were down on the coffers, you know, maybe when they hadn't had enough people coming in, they needed to make a bit of money, they'd sell a copy of the copies of the play in a quarto,

which meant that other rival companies could do the plays because you kept your plays.

Do you know what I mean?

You didn't want other people to do them.

They were your calling card.

But if you needed the brass, you'd flog them.

So about 19 of them were released during Shakespeare's lifetime.

I think I've got that number right in quarto form.

But then things like Macbeth and Twelfth Night, they didn't release those in Shakespeare's life, and they only got written down in 1623 after Shakespeare was dead.

So so much of what we know about the, well, so much of what Shakespeare gave us wouldn't have existed without the quartos first, and then without these two guys, John Heminges, Henry Condell, they sat down and they dictated what they remembered.

So, yeah, so I mean,

we don't know exactly which bits he totally made up, which bits he was just getting from the street.

But he had a huge effect on spoken early modern English.

Massive.

This was a time when the Great Vowel Shift was going on as well.

The Great What?

The Great Vowel Shift.

What the fuck is this?

Oh, no, you're going to ask me that.

I can't really.

Look, I can't, I'm gonna tell you, I can't really explain what it is.

I just know it's a really massive fucking thing that happened to the way that English was pronounced and spoken back in the day.

You'll have to get someone on for that, and I'll listen to the podcast.

Another thing I heard about Shakespeare is

so

the theatre was outside the city walls.

Yeah, it was

eventually Shakespeare started becoming hip with rich people.

Yeah.

Like,

I don't don't know, like fucking hipsters listening to Grime.

Do you know what I mean?

And

they started going, oh, did you hear about this theater that's outside the city walls?

And he's doing plays in English.

This is real cool stuff.

And then rich people all of a sudden start going out, going to his theatre, and this is where we get the phrase slumming it from.

Is it?

I don't know.

This is what I heard.

Go on.

That's what I heard.

And now I'm going to...

This is the other thing I heard, right?

This could be fucking harsh shit, but it's entertaining harsh shit.

So

if you look at the sopranos, the wire, the writing and drama that we consider to be fucking amazing, right?

Apparently you can trace the way that's written to how Shakespeare theatre was physically built.

Now what I mean by that is

If you look at the soprano, we all know the sopranos, yeah?

So in the sopranos,

if you have a bit that's a little bit boring, what I mean is just straight dialogue, a bit of politics that needs to get done.

Yeah, a bit of exposition.

Exposition.

Yeah.

It tends to happen in the strip club.

Or if they have another bit that's a bit boring, just dialogue, straight after someone is shot.

So you have this sense of

sex or violence immediately follows something that's a little bit highbrow.

And you see this in The Wire, you see it in The Sopranos.

Well, I heard you can trace that to how Shakespeare's theatre was built.

And again, this could be fucking harsh shit.

You've got the pit, which is the people who are poor.

Yeah, the pay a penny.

The penny stinkers, as they were called.

And then you have around here the people who can afford a seat.

And I heard that this created issues with the plays because you have the people in the pit who aren't as well read and don't receive an

compared to the people over here who do have an education.

So, whenever Shakespeare would show a bit with a lot of exposition, it was immediately followed by romance or a sword fight to keep the people in the pit happy.

And it was that continual tension of, oh, this theatre here, for the first time, we've a class thing going on here.

People lucky enough to get an education, people who don't.

And that was the shape of the theatre then influenced how people write in the 20th and 21st century.

That's mad, isn't it?

I mean, it's a lovely story, isn't it?

It's, I mean, it sounds pretty plausible to me.

You think, well, you worked in the Shakespeare theatre for 20 years, so if you're agreeing with it,

I'm still an excellent, I'm still a student of it, really.

But it does make sense, and also to do with like the fact that they had to keep it moving dead fast as well.

A lot of Shakespeare is really long, innit?

What do you mean by that, Death?

You know, you know, you read the

prologue of Romeo and Juliet, right?

It says the two hours traffic of our stage.

How many people have been to a Romeo and and Juliet these days that lasts two hours?

Normally, it's a bit longer.

Back in the day, they used to just make it really snappy.

People would be entering on one side of the stage as they'd be exiting on the other.

You'd have this sort of almost overlap of two scenes, which could sometimes be really good, like drama-wise, when people are not supposed to overhear stuff, you know what I mean?

But it was also just to keep it fast because you had 3,000 people to keep happy, a thousand or more of them with the penny stinkers down

in the yard.

And

even in the writing of the soliloquies and things, this is the thing, right?

So, soliloquies, which are the speeches that are done when a character's on their own on the stage, they're not talking to themselves.

And I think a lot of the...

Who are they talking to?

They're talking to this lot.

So breaking the fourth wall.

There's no friggin' fourth wall.

There's no...

Pardon my French.

There's no fourth wall, blind boy.

There's no fourth wall.

There isn't, because if you're in a theatre that has no roof, right?

It's got pigeons, you know, crapping on the thatch at the top, and the daylight is flooding the place, you've got over a thousand people in the yard.

There had to have been Eklin.

There would definitely have been Eklin.

Of course there would.

Because you need to learn how to go to the theatre.

Exactly.

But maybe doing the theatre was about Eklin.

Maybe if we can all see each other, we can't pretend we're in Elsinore or Verona.

We have to know that we're here.

We have to look at each other and go, we are here.

This story is happening right here, right now.

So if I'm trying to think about whether I should

kill myself or not, I mean, I hesitate to say that because it's quite a heavy thing to say, isn't it?

But if I'm Hamlet and I'm saying to be or not to be, that is the question.

I'm not saying it to myself

in a late 20th century psychological realism kind of way.

I'm saying, right.

To be

or not to be, that's the question.

Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them to die,

to sleep.

You know what I mean?

I'm asking them, what should I do?

What am I supposed to do?

You know, this supernatural soliciting cannot be ill, cannot be good, says Macbeth.

Do I believe these witches or not?

Come on, what do you think?

I mean, that's for me, that's what really got me, Blind Boy, with

the daylight playing conditions, the fact that you could talk to, you could decide whether to ask the people in the yard or the people up in the gods, or there were people in the lords' rooms above the stage, because you paid more money to be seen.

So you'd actually pay the most money to sit up there.

Behind it, like the box.

Yeah.

But the box would be behind us at the top there.

And it's even in.

Are you fucking serious?

Ah, the bloody dude, the sit there and there, yeah, yeah, yeah.

'Cause they put their best clothes on, do you know?

That is just ridiculous.

I didn't know that.

Let people enjoy the show.

They won't be looking at the king's shirt.

I know.

But what's great is you've got you've then got this, like you said, this hierarchy that's visible and you can choose who to talk to.

And so, if you have a little aside that is maybe a bit underhand, maybe Richard III sent some of his asides to just two or three people down there.

Between you and me, I'm going to do this thing, watch this, gonna be brilliant.

And then, you know, so you know, the the King Edward comes on and he does the thing.

It sound that sounds very stand-uppy.

Like, that's it.

When you spoke about that, there, where you might have had a few people there, that's Stuart Lee.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, Stuart Lee, when he does crowd work,

he will, it's a very interesting thing, and he does it specifically.

He divides the audience.

Yeah, Stuart Lee will go, but ye up there know that, but ye don't know that.

And what it does is it creates a tension there and then stops hectin up here.

Yeah.

I just realized too.

So do you know I open the show with like talking about condoms and stuff, yeah?

I just I've been doing that for a long time.

I but I do start the show quite coarse and like that was a pretty coarse story there about the arseholes and stuff.

There is actually a method behind it, but I haven't I've only realized it now having this conversation with you is so my biggest fear is

that rubber bandits fans show up to my podcasts.

Seriously.

Now it's been happening less and less.

Thank fuck.

But they just want to check you you got a horse outside.

That

there's no one here because if you'd have, but if you'd have said that and there was, you'd have gotten out,

and then it's like, oh, we're in trouble.

We're in trouble.

But no, I'm dead fucking serious.

The audience that I had 10 years ago was so wildly different.

They would get fucking drunk and throw things like it was a whole and that was fine then because that energy was matched on stage.

But when I started doing this podcast, it was really difficult because you had

80% of the people, like, I'm here for the podcast hug, and then this 20% going, when's he gonna sing about the horse?

And it's like, that's not happening.

So, sometimes I start off a little bit vulgar to find out if any of them are out there.

It's diagnostic, yeah.

It is, and if I, if I, like, you were given a nice kind of a polite chuckle, you know, oh, he's talking about condoms, yeah, yeah.

Whereas if it was a horse outside person, they'd be like, fucking condoms, yeah.

And then I'd then I'd know, and then I'd go, oh, shit, okay.

So I'd be then thinking about how to moderate the gig from then on, because those people can ruin a podcast very quickly.

But that's actually not far off the Shakespeare thing.

It's that sense of,

it's not necessary, it's this is what you have to do sometimes with a crowd.

Yeah.

It's like the comedian who,

like, you know, Joanne McNally, yeah, my therapist ghosted me, you know, that podcast?

Yeah, so Joanne, like, she has been doing stand-up for fucking years, and she's a brilliant stand-up, and she's very well crafted at it.

And

she was doing it with moderate success, and then all of a sudden, she has this podcast that goes huge, massive, massive, too big.

And then she has this crowd showing up.

And she can't really do her stand-up anymore because people are literally pissed in the audience.

But she, then, because she has years of experience, then changes the show to accommodate that.

And everyone has to do that to an extent.

Yeah.

When I do, when I storytell Shakespeare, so I'm doing it on my own.

Yeah, that's the you're playing like 20 characters.

Yeah, but I'm mainly playing me though.

I come on as me.

It's kind of like theatrical stand-up in a way.

Are you going like and then King Lear said this?

And then.

Well,

sort of.

I mean, what I'll do first is I'll get them to speak Shakespeare.

So

there'll be a bit of chat and I'll ask them to create the storm with me.

Because there's some great text.

The great thing about Shakespeare is that the text is like, do you ever get, like, you're a writer and you're an artist, so do you ever get like a synesthesic response to words?

You know,

a lot of honor might pay her in there in there.

Absolutely.

So I'll get them to

speak some of the storm text with me and we'll mess about with it and we'll have a laugh with it.

So that's diagnostic.

And that's also going, look, I'm going to be with you mostly.

I'm not going to disappear into character.

Because I think if I do that, it's a bit eggy, and people, there's no space for people.

So mainly, I'll be talking, yeah, I'll be talking about.

Well, what I'll do is I'll either do one of three things.

I'll either report what happens, so I'll say something like, I don't know, Leah walked up the three stone steps onto the wooden podium and he surveyed the audience, right?

Or I'll

embody him.

So I will be, I will look, you know, so I might say, I don't know,

Leah had his arms open, head thrown up to the storm as though he were commanding it, and then I'll go, Blow winds and crack your cheeks, rage, blow, but only for a short while because it will really frighten them if I stay in a character for too long.

Or I'll do a thing that I call advocating, which is where you say you stay in your own,

you stay in the character's body,

but you kind of lean out and talk to them.

So you might have Leah standing looking, you know, furious

because he hadn't had much sleep, actually.

And also, he was a bit old, so he was losing his hearing.

And so it's really frustrating because he couldn't really hear what his daughters were saying.

And you kind of go back.

So, so you've got all you've got those three things to play with, and then you've got just chatting to the audience as well.

It sounds a bit like if someone forced you to do Shakespeare at a house party-is that the vibe where it's like, fuck it, I've got nothing but a fireplace and some people staring at me.

What can I do here?

Pretty much, yeah.

That is pretty much it.

That sounds incredible.

I mean, I've had some amazing experiences doing it, and it's informed my other storytelling practice where I make up my own stories or I use folklore.

It's informed my work as an actor, as a director, as a maker.

Everything about that breaking down of the Fourth War, declaring that we're together, it opens up so many possibilities.

And that thing of being present, Blind Boy, that thing of like, I am talking to you, actually.

I'm going to be here.

And it means also, because there's no script, I don't write it out and learn it.

It means that if I've got an audience that you can feel are really up for

the really dramatic stuff, you can stay in character a bit longer.

And if it's not that kind of audience, or if you're in a festival where there's a lot of stuff going on, you can distractions, yeah.

Yeah, you can be sit back on it a bit more.

So you can

you have to let the space play you, because you can rehearse a show, but really, two things are missing: one is the audience, and the other is the space.

And the space and the audience play you,

I think.

That's what I try to get at, so that it isn't, it never feels imposed on anybody.

It's an offer.

Really?

That sounds unreal.

Um,

I'm gonna let these lovely people of York have a pint and a piss.

Oh, yeah.

And then we're gonna come back out in about ten minutes to continue the chat.

God bless.

I do enjoy it when we get a bit of a natural, a natural break there in the podcast.

Let's have an ocarina pause before I go back to my chat with

Debs, Debs Newbold.

You don't want to miss the second half because Debs tells some riveting stories.

Wonderful storyteller.

Let's do an ocarina pause.

I don't have a fucking ocarina because I'm in my brand new studio.

I didn't bring any ocarinas in.

We'll get around to the ocarina eventually.

For this week, for a pause, I don't have anything really to anything loud, I've nothing to bang off my head.

This is quite a bare studio other than for recording equipment.

It's certainly very hot.

My body is being accosted by humidity here.

So let's have...

I've got a window open there now to let some cool air in.

Let's have a pause whereby a 2FM DJ enjoys a cooling breeze.

Oh, yes.

Cooling, cooling breeze.

5763.

All the traffic.

The traffic is crazy on the M50

There's the part of me that everyone sees.

I'm Howie Mandel, the comedian.

Apparently, I know what funny is.

Funny bought me a house, but I also know what isn't funny.

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Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly, must be 18 years or older to purchase play, or claim.

Hi, who here loves when their nails are perfectly done?

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You're all set for a nail glow up.

Let's get those nails looking fabulous, shall we?

As the breeze comes in and cools my chest.

Cooling breeze.

In Donnybrook, Dublin 4.

Cooling breezes.

Gardi, Gardi are looking for a cooling breeze.

RTE broadcaster Marty Whelan has been arrested for the assault of a cooling breeze.

The incident took place at 3.20 a.m.

It is understood understood that Mr.

Whelan assaulted the breeze with a blunt instrument.

Gardi, who were called to the scene, described the incident as horrific.

In his closing remarks, Judge Finton Kinsala told Marty Whelan that the violence of his actions undermined our shared meteorological experience.

A sentence is expected to be handed down to Mr.

Whelan later this week.

I open my window now to find myself haunted by a cooling breeze.

Cooling breeze.

There you go, there's your 2FM DJ experiencing a cooling breeze during a heat wave.

Pause.

Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

This podcast is my full-time job.

This is how I earn a living.

This podcast is how I was able to build this studio, how I was able to purchase this wonderful new PA that makes me sound like a a 2FM DJ.

And it doesn't really, because

I don't want to do that to my fucking voice.

It's stupid, but I just...

It's nice to know that I can.

So anyway, look, this is a fully independent podcast.

It's my full-time job.

This is how I earn a living.

Please support the podcast directly if it brings you mirth, merriment, distraction, entertainment.

If you're listening every week and you're enjoying the work that I do, please consider paying me for that work.

All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month.

That's it.

And if you can't afford it, if you don't have the money, don't worry about it.

Listen for free.

You can listen for free because the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free.

Everybody gets a podcast.

I get to earn a living.

Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

And also, advertisers can fuck off.

No advertiser gets to tell me what to speak about or change my content in any way.

That's what ruins art.

That's what ruins the thing that you love.

The thing that you enjoy, that you love, whatever the fuck it is, as soon as advertising comes in, it destroys it.

Because the art stops being about passion and creativity and playfulness and it becomes

being about it.

It has to be popular.

It has to hit targets.

It has to do well.

It has to go viral.

Fuck that.

That's how you end up with consistent mediocrity.

Upcoming gigs.

That gig I mentioned last week on Garnish Island in Cork that sold out in five minutes.

No, it was less than a hundred tickets, but it sold out in five minutes.

So, thank you to everyone who's coming along to that gig.

Then, I'm at Electric Picnic.

Whenever Electric Picnic's on August something, the end of the month.

I'm at Electric Picnic.

The Saturday, I think,

I'm doing a live podcast with Dara O'Brien about science.

Alright,

so

come to that if you don't want to be in a loud field full of people.

Come watch a wasp attack the cider on my lip, on the lip of my bag, which is something that's happened every single year that I've been gigging an electric picnic, and I've been gigging an electric picnic for 19 years, so there you go.

Get attacked by a wasp every year.

Tuesday, the 23rd of September, Vicar Street, Dublin.

Dublin there's very few tickets left for that gig.

Wonderful relaxing Tuesday night gig.

If you're thinking I'm not going to a gig on a Tuesday night this isn't like that this is like going to the theatre this is like going to the cinema you can go to one of my Tuesday night gigs in Vicar Street you don't even have to drink and then you're going to be you you can go to that gig you can be home in bed on time and you'll be up for work fresh as a fucking daisy all right don't think of it as a gig pretend it's the cinema or the theatre it's a live podcast dairy wonderful dairy I cannot wait to come to ye

dairy on the 27th Saturday the 27th in the millennium theatre right

come along to that very few tickets left for that now I'm trying to do a couple of smaller more intimate gigs um that being said

I had a small-y there up in fucking Sligo that's now sold out.

Alright, dog bless.

Thank you, the people of Sligo.

Now, back to my chat with the wonderful Deb's New Bald.

I know this week's podcast is very long, but it's a podcast.

You don't have to listen to it all in one go.

What I do, I love long podcasts.

I love a nice long podcast, but because what I do is I listen to it in bits throughout the week rather than go the whole shebang.

Alright?

Here's the second half of my chat with Deb's New Bald in York.

What's the crack?

Did y'all have a wonderful pint of a piss?

What what is the what is the local piss in York?

What's the local pint of piss?

Sam Smith?

You don't have one lager you can all agree upon, no?

That is astounding, lads.

That's amazing.

That's I'm very it's I always ask that wherever I go.

Like, I mean, it's it's a strange thing.

Some places you go somewhere and it's agreed upon.

This is the one local.

Like, if you go to Ireland, it's just Guinness,

as simple as that, you know what I mean?

That's mad.

Do you have those Sam Smith's pubs around here?

Yeah.

Those are the really, really strange ones where they bring the drink on horses and you can get kicked out if you speak about a television.

Does anyone go there for fun?

No?

Really?

Have you ever been in one?

Oh, yeah, I've been in one or two.

Tell me about that.

What the fuck is this?

I only learned about it a month ago.

I was like,

what the fuck?

They usually buy a nice building, don't they?

And then they make it look not that nice inside.

They don't want.

They don't want customers, is it?

They don't want.

Like, what?

How are they open?

There's no jukebox.

There's no dartboard.

Have you ever seen a dartboard in a.

Oh, have you seen a dartboard?

Oh, okay.

Sorry, I'll make it.

No technology.

No.

And is the horses thing through?

Do they bring the kegs on dre horses?

Only

Only in tadcaster.

Onion tadcaster, okay.

I mean, i it is it religious, is it Calvinist?

It sounds a little bit like yeah, it's a little it's a little uh

a little cultish in it.

Sounds a little cultish.

I mean, fair play to them as well, because

no offense, Sam Smiths, obviously.

But what I was no, fuck him, I didn't give a shit, I'm going back in an airplane in a few days.

Um but like

what but the other thing is because and this is what I was reading, because they stuck to that so much, there'd be no craft beer without them.

Because when the American craft beer movement started in the 70s, they were able to go to the beers that Sam Smith was making and going, oh, we'll just do this.

And Sam Smith were just like, no, we're just sticking with this thing and we've got horses.

Fuck off.

Something I was thinking about backstage before we took a break, Redden, you were explaining the process of how you're taking Shakespeare.

And

I don't want to say breaking the rules a bit, but the fluidity of what you're doing, changing it it the whole time, responding to the crowd,

it's very Irish.

It is

that's how you tell a story in Ireland.

Like when I had Claire on and we were speaking about storytelling, with Irish oral storytelling, there's no rules.

As soon as you decide this is the story and this is how it should be told, then stop.

It's you tell the story how you want to tell it, change it, it can be different.

Every time two people will tell the same story different, there is complete and utter fluidity and it's all about the moment and what feels right.

It's like jazz music.

It's like jazz music as opposed to classical.

It's this is about a vibe.

This is about improvisation.

Don't be bringing rules in here.

Is there like you have

there's Irish in a bit, aren't you?

Yeah, half of me.

Do you think some of it comes from that?

Like what type of Irishness did you grow up with?

Did you grow up with any stories or anything like that?

Yeah, no traditional stories, though, just really, really bloody good storytelling.

It's not a traditional thing.

It can literally just be a drunk uncle who's handy.

But it's not even.

When we say Irish storytelling,

the example I always give,

there's a beautiful video online.

And the video, it's on YouTube, and it's called English People Giving Directions versus Irish People Giving Directions.

You know it.

I do.

I've experienced it as well.

Yeah.

It's true, isn't it?

That's like

that's the storytelling you grew up with in Ireland.

You don't have an uncle who's handy at telling stories.

You have an uncle who you ask him how to get to the shop and you've just found out about his nephew.

You know what I mean?

Or he'll tell you, you know, a really elaborate and interesting sounding way.

It takes about five minutes and then he'll say, but I wouldn't go that way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like the fact that the video is it's it's English people on the street.

How do I get to the bank?

Straight that way, then take a left.

there's the bank.

And then they just meet this Irish farmer.

And it's like, How do I get to the market?

And your man goes, Well, Timmy Riley's house is up there, but if you go there, you've gone too far.

Do you know what I mean?

It's amazing.

This is that how she talks.

Yeah, she did.

If you go there, you've gone too far.

In a car, she'd go, instead of left or right, she'd go, Valerie, that leg, that leg.

And she'd hit my mum's leg, she wouldn't be able to say left or right.

I remember her telling me one like a story about walking home from from the Paulway shopping centre and

heartbreaking because she saw a one-legged pigeon hop in.

And so she she spent a lot of time looking for a lolly stick to make a little crutch for it.

The thing is I don't think she was making it up to amuse me.

I think that my nan did look for a lolly stick to help this little pigeon.

Where was your nan from in Ireland?

Casseray, Ross Common.

Fuck off.

We got one person.

Got one person.

That's where

that's interesting.

That's the home of Irish poultry.

Yeah.

So she's she's yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

um, and then granddad was from uh Wexford.

Well, Ballin Dynasty Wexford town.

Oh, another one.

Are they both here?

Nan and granddad?

Blind me.

How'd you manage that?

And there's the bromie in you as well.

I what was it like growing up in Birmingham?

Oh, well, we're talking backstage about canals.

You didn't, you couldn't go on the...

It was different when I grew up.

It's a lot nicer now, although it's got its troubles, hasn't it?

Its council has gone gone bankrupt, and there's been the bin strike and everything.

Have you heard about that?

There's been a there's been a strike among the um refuse collectors just because of over a pay dispute, and so yeah, it's been quite tough in Brum lately.

But when I was growing up, I lived in a place called Stetchford near an Alcan aluminium factory,

and um, you'd sometimes get told you had to close

your doors and your windows and stuff because you know there was a spillage from the factory or whatever.

And so, I do remember this smell, but I also grew up

East Birmingham, and so you're right on the edge of what used to be the old Forest of Arden.

So, I was in the suburbs and in a council house, and so the back garden was massive, it had loads of trees, there was a wreck ground nearby, there was an old disused bit of railway behind the Iron Horse Pub where we go Blackberry in.

And so, it was a real mix of

kind of that suburban edgeland

wildness that I didn't know was wild at the time.

It was just where you could go and play,

and then this kind of like a suburban street.

And I think Brummies are quite, you know, obviously there's a lot of huge Irish population in Birmingham.

But Brummies are quite voluble as well.

And we love a chat and we love to love to tell stories.

And the accent sort of trips along.

I love the accent.

Oh, I love you for saying that.

Not everybody says that.

Really?

Yeah.

Oh, Jesus, it's wonderful.

You sound like bubblegum.

What I adore,

what I adore about Birmingham, and what fascinates me about Birmingham,

the heavy metal.

I fucking love Black Sabbath.

Yes.

And I love Judas Priest.

I knew you would get on.

This is what I love.

This is what fascinates me about Black Sabbath in particular, because if you could credit anyone with inventing heavy metal, you'd go with Black Sabbath, right?

Yeah.

The thing with Black Sabbath is,

so when they started off,

they were just...

They were like a shit Led Zeppelin.

They weren't as technically good as Led Zeppelin, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

And they were doing this thing.

And I met a fella, I met a fella who'd been to early Black Sabbath gigs, like you're talking 150 people.

And the question I asked him was, What did you call it?

Because heavy metal didn't exist.

I said, What did you call it?

And he just said, It was shit prog rock.

It was shit prog rock.

That was it.

But

what fascinates me about Black Sabbath is

they they grew up, Ozzy and Tony Iomi grew up

after Birmingham had been banned bombed, right?

So it's post-World War II.

And they literally grew up with there are bombs somewhere and we don't know where they are and they might go off at any point.

So their childhood was disused like fucking places blown to bits, growing up in rubble, sirens going off because they've just found a Nazi bomb from 10 years ago here and the terror of that, right?

And then they developed this sound.

Now the other thing I love about Black Sabbath sound,

Tony Tony Iomi, the guitar player, he was working in a sheet metal plant.

Yeah.

And he chopped off the top of his fingers.

And obviously, that's not great if you're a guitar player to lose the top of your fingers.

Quite tricky.

But they didn't want to get rid of him.

So he replaced the top of his fingers with a bit of a washing up liquid pop.

But what that did was the only way for Tony Iomi to play the guitar, he had to tune everything down so that the strings became soft and wobbly.

And then he could only play bar chords and basically invented that doomy dark sound of heavy metal guitar because he chopped his fingers off in a factory.

But then, when Sabbath, with this strange new dark sound that no one knows what to call it, when they started to go to America,

their first audience, and they could never explain it, were traumatized Vietnam veterans.

Ozzy, yeah, they'd be playing, they're like from fucking Birmingham, all of a sudden they're in America and they're in these clubs, and the audience are, they said it was Vietnam vets, and then their friend is in front in a wheelchair.

Something about the trauma of war, something about the trauma of growing up in Birmingham with unexploded bombs, found its way into the sound of their music and worked as an auditory healing for lads who just had their legs blown off in Vietnam.

Wow, the power of that.

Oh my god, that's real fucking art.

And it might sound fucking silly, but

the space that you're in can shape sound and the impact that it has.

Like what one of my favorite examples is is

if you think of Gregorian chant, right?

So monks used to sing in monasteries and the monastery is just one large chamber, a bit like this.

And when they'd sing, it would all kind of be around the same level.

And they'd go up and down, but they're all singing kind of the same thing

then when Notre Dame Cathedral is built the same monks are brought in and they're singing in Notre Dame and what starts to happen over about 50 years

they begin to harmonize in accordance with the mathematics of how Notre Dame Cathedral is built

because sound is symmetrical vibrations of air.

So just the way the air is bouncing around the building, they start harmonizing in accordance with those mathematics.

And then you you end up with a totally new style of singing.

As mad as it sounds.

And another example then is

there's this band called Chios.

You don't know Chios, no?

They did late 80s, Josh Ham was in them, he was in Queens of the Stone Age.

But Chios invented a type of heavy metal called stoner metal.

So it's a slower, sludgier type of metal, almost nirvana-ish, but it's slower.

But how they ended up with this music was they grew up in the palm springs desert of california and palm springs is nothing it's just flat rock and then mountains in the distance and when josh ham and his mates were born and they were like 16 and they wanted to start a band it was so hot they would practice outside the garage and they wanted to play Black Sabbath and they wanted to play Zeppelin, but they couldn't.

Because the land was so hard and flat that if you made a loud noise with an amplifier or a drum kit, the fucking echo from the mountains was so loud that it would put you out of time.

So they slowed down Zeppelin and Sabbath to match the echo of the mountain.

Oh my god.

And then come up with this stone or sludge metal,

which I love because that's like 1989.

But that sounds like a story from Paleolithic times, you know what I mean?

That's far out, that is.

But it makes music theatre in a way.

It It does, doesn't it?

Because

the space is

playing the

space is what's dictating the performance, you know.

And in that story about the the the veterans watching Black Sabbath, there's there's fucking Greek epic happening there.

There's catharsis happening there.

Big time.

You know, and that's profound theatre.

That's one of the

the first reasons that theatre was invented, that live performance was invented.

How do you mean, as a type of therapy?

Well, they used to go and see all these huge you know, they go to the uh amph the amphitheatres in Greece and they go to see these incredibly extreme,

almost biblically rem not biblically, that's the wrong word, but removed.

The battles and the all the even story, you know, stories like Medea and Agamemnon, you know, with with infanticide and matricide and just awful.

And really they went in order to feel well, you used the phrase in your in your story, I think, pity and terror.

That's what catharsis is.

It's a it's an almost simultaneous feeling of pity and terror that's then released they went for a release because yeah catharsis for me is is

it's it's a safe way to explore very very difficult frightening emotions like

when i write

i get a catharsis i can i can write when you go to a therapist if you have a good fucking therapist and you're in that like that rapport and you're telling the therapist about things that you wouldn't tell anyone else that things that are you don't even want to hear your safe self say out loud but the therapist has created such a safe space that it's okay that's catharsis the release i mean i get it through

i get it through writing um

it's interesting that you say that so there was an element of catharsis with with the greeks yeah and that they play those those um those shows shows those plays in in these huge stone amphitheatres that were outdoors right so we've got daylight so we know we we're together we can't pretend just like the globe we can't pretend we're anywhere else.

So, we are together, thousands of us, and the stage would be usually back onto some amazing natural beauty, natural wonder, like this, like the sea or massive cliff tops, or whatever.

And they perform in these huge masks that kind of gave the actors a remove from the story they were telling.

And so, all of those elements

work together to allow us to enter into stories and situations that are so dark, so extreme, extreme, that

we can go there together in a safe way and almost see them

unwound for us, unspooled for us.

And it's, I mean, Shakespeare works with the epic, you know, even though we're watching a play about a king who's going insane

or losing his mind because of age or illness or however you want to interpret it, it doesn't matter that he's a king, he's a man who's afraid of getting old, is realizing his mortality, can't communicate with the people who love him anymore, and lashes out at the people who are closest to him.

But in the Greek theatre,

there's even more remove going on, so you can go to these

places.

And I was going to ask you about your mask.

Yes,

I'd really like to so so I mean there's a huge variety of different mask traditions in performance, ritual performance and also um just uh masks that are used to provoke performance and ideas.

But

it seems to me that the mask, and I've done a lot of mask work myself, that the mask has an effect both on the audience and the wearer, and there's an interesting synergy that happens.

And I wanted to ask you, when you put that mask on and you are with people,

what do you see,

and

how do you feel inside the mask?

How different is it to if you were just speaking to people face to face for you?

So I've been wearing the mask for near 20 years.

I've been doing it because it just felt comfortable from the start.

Like

the thing with the mask for me is that, so it is, it is, the meaning has drastically changed over the years.

The most important change that's happened for me is when I got diagnosed with autism a couple of years ago.

And

this mask was a huge part of my diagnosis because when I said to the psychologist,

Like he's like, what do you do for a living?

And I'm like, well, you know, I write books and I'm on TV and stuff and I wear a plastic bag in my my head.

And he's like, Oh, why'd you do that?

Is that?

And I'm like, Well, I wear the plastic bag so that I can be on TV.

And the next day, when I'm in Argos, no one knows who the fuck I am.

And he's like, Why don't you want people to know who you are?

I'm like, So I don't have to do small talk with strangers.

And then he goes, That's autism, sir.

Do you know what I mean?

It was a big tick on the box,

but

what it allows me is

like

I'm comfortable coming up and having a conversation with you up here in front of a lot of people, but I'd be quite nervous meeting someone in public with the mask off.

That's difficult because the thing is with being autistic is

I don't want to make eye contact with people.

I would prefer if for conversation my eyes are whatever the fuck it feels like I'm reading the inside of my thoughts.

That's what it feels like.

Eye contact is something that I have to do because it's it's appropriate, it's socially appropriate.

The other thing when I speak to people is I'm consistently monitoring my body language and my fucking facial expressions.

I don't have to monitor my facial expressions anymore.

I just have my eyes, and it means all I got to focus on is the tone of my voice.

So, it actually, this physical mask makes the act of conversation less emotionally draining for me as an autistic person.

Because now, all I'm worried about is my body language.

I could be making any type of fucking face under the ear.

It doesn't matter.

I can focus.

The mask allows me to focus on talking and thinking.

And if I didn't have it, I think I'd be a bit more awkward.

You know what I mean?

That's fascinating.

So, my sister was diagnosed late, late in her adult.

She's 40-something when she was diagnosed.

And she talks about masking as something that she

does to get through the day sometimes.

It's interesting our pretending to be normal.

Pretending to be not autistic.

That's what autistic people have to do.

It's we watch and learn what normal is and then deploy it in social situations.

But I'm sure, as your sister says it's fucking tough work when you do enough of it and so it takes a lot of processing power you know you you know and um

and I'm I I was interested in what you said she t talks very eloquently about that um but I'm thinking about her and I'm thinking about what you said when it takes the pressure off you and I'm just trying to translate that to to to more classical or um European mask work in theatre because the minute you you place a mask onto an actor, suddenly the experience that you find you have is that you you are you're slightly let off the hook because you don't because your face is covered, you're not really as responsible for what your body's doing.

So you become less self-conscious.

And then, do you do you do you find that you're reading people differently through those eye holes than if you didn't have the mask?

Can you

so

there would be a bit, right?

Because the thing is,

so

like emotions are are

reflected.

And

you're reading my face differently because you can't see a lot of it.

So naturally, anyone I speak to with the bag on,

they can't get a full read of my

there's no mirroring happening.

Like, I'll tell you a fascinating fucking study.

They did a study on...

people in California who were getting Botox, right?

So Botox, it relaxes the muscles muscles in your face.

That's how it works.

It relaxes muscles and then that gives the appearance of someone being a bit younger.

And they did a study that over time people who were getting Botox consistently were reporting certain mental health problems and psychologists were finding that they were

finding it difficult to empathize.

And one of the theories was

If a person smiles at you, if a person is if someone says to you, my cat died yesterday, without even thinking of it, you will mirror their facial expression.

We mirror all the time.

The people who were getting loads of Botox, the muscles weren't there and they'd stopped mirroring other people's emotions.

And then after a couple of years, because they weren't mirroring, it's like they weren't lifting the weights that practice emotions and they were starting to lose empathy because they weren't mirroring.

Yeah, you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, that's mad.

But it totally makes sense, doesn't doesn't it?

It completely makes sense because it's a it's like a feedback loop between us, isn't it?

And that's another reason why live performance is incredible, especially if the audience can see each other and you can see them, because that feedback loop is visual, it's energetic, there's something that we make in the space between us, in the whatever field that is that

we can enter together.

And in terms of mask, you find if you if you put a mask on an actor and it's an archetypal mask, right?

So it's like a hero mask or a crone mask or a fool mask, but you don't tell them what it is.

Oh, wow.

I swear they will start to play that mask because I think they're looking through the eye holes and the audience.

And I've been

in I've been in situations where this happens.

The audience start to slightly, very, very subtly, subtly, just adjust themselves to their interpretation of the mask.

And these are these classic theater masks that we think of, the big smile, the frown.

Yeah, well, there's the big smile and the frat frown, that's comedy and tragedy.

That's more of a kind of a symbol symbol kind of

I'm talking about um masks that uh are very very archetypal.

I mean if I showed them to you you'd be able to go, yeah, that looks like a bit like an old, kind of an old wizened wise person, okay.

Um or that looks like a very innocent child or whatever.

So you've got like the crone, the devil, the hero, the woman about to be a hero.

My favourite mask, I love that.

Woman who thinks she's attractive.

Loads of different archetypes, right?

But you can put it on an actor, then having not seen what that is, they'll start to play that mask.

Because they're reading how the audio.

Is that a training thing?

Yeah, it's used as a training thing.

It's used as a way of waking up ideas as well.

So you can actually put two masks together.

You could get a scene from your book.

You could find a little nugget from your book and put two performers and give them some text and get them to play it with the masks on.

Especially if it's half masks so they can speak.

And you can just, there's something about putting two masks together and just seeing how they interact.

Because the thing is, what we're tapping into all the time is every human's inherent genius for interpretation.

We're desperate to do it, aren't we?

We want to communicate.

Even if we might not want to make small talk, we might not be good at that.

We might not want to stand up on a stage, but in some way, we want to at least

allow a little bit of ourselves into the world and share that in some ways.

Absolutely, yeah.

So we're always trying to find ways to do that.

So when you put two masks on a stage, you don't even have to have words passing between them.

The audience will create a story.

They'll invent a story because you've got a crone and you've got

a hero.

And

I've seen archetypal masks, right?

And

someone's done something and I swear that the mask has smiled.

I'm projecting so much that I think the bloody mask has smiled and it hasn't.

Of course, it's a rigid mask.

But then what you can do is you can remove the mask.

and you can play a trigger line.

So

you can learn what the trigger line is for the mask and you can play a scene that way.

So, you could play if we were in a scene now and we had a script and we learned it and we were doing our lines and that

we could say, we could say, Okay, okay, blind boy, I'd like you to play this like the huntress.

And the huntress trigger line is, What are you looking at?

So, you play the scene, and it might be that you're proposing marriage to me in the scene, but you play it with the spirit of what are you looking at, totally changes the scene.

You know what I mean?

And if I play the crone, trigger line is, is it mine?

You know,

Yeah, it's fascinating.

And what is the crone?

Is the crone like a evil, bad?

It doesn't really.

It depends on the context.

The crone is, is it mine?

The crone is,

I'm doing it physically, and nobody will be able to hear if they're listening to this, but

it's hard to explain.

Is it golem?

Gollum?

Is it gollum?

It's more Mrs.

Overall if Mrs.

Overall was kleptomaniac.

You know what I mean?

Okay, okay.

It's more

it's someone who is trying to

gather as much as she can because she's in extremis.

She doesn't necessarily show it, but she needs to gather as much as she can to herself.

And she might do that in a desperate way, in an angry way, in a playful way.

Could do it in all sorts of ways, but it's this kind of

winding something into yourself is the crone.

But that's just my interpretation.

That's just my interpretation.

Are you into English myth, English folklore, any of that stuff?

Oh, yeah, yeah, look.

Tell us some of that, because what I wanted with this tour was to try and speak about English, to learn about English folk, English myth, because it's hard to find out about this stuff.

It's not written down as well as it was in Ireland.

And I've been trying to figure out what that is.

In Ireland, someone tried to take it away from us, and because of that, we went right, okay.

Whereas here,

you had people living in the country and all of a sudden they the Industrial Revolution

you're able to buy bread and eggs yeah and you just subtly forget the belief you had about the nettle yeah and I think also you know writing having it written down by people by collectors I think can kill it as well I mean it preserved it for us makes it one story yeah and I feel like yeah

telling English folk tale and English myth is is an act of restoring it like you know if King Lear's is based on an old folk tale,

yeah, there was a king and he had three daughters.

And he wanted to know how much they loved him, but he wanted everybody else to know how much they loved him too, because he was a man nearing the end of his life and he wasn't sure if he'd done right by himself.

So he held a great feast.

And he asked each of his daughters to explain how much they loved him.

And the first daughter got up and explained in great mellifluous tones just how much she'd adored her father and she'd performed very well and she sat down to applause.

Second daughter got up, outdid her first sister if anything, was even more beautiful in her text, pleased her father no end, sat down.

The third daughter stood up and she said, Father, and looked down at her food, because this was a great feast that he'd laid, I love you

like meat loves salt.

Dad didn't like this.

He didn't understand it.

It

didn't have enough beauty in the text.

It didn't have enough symbolism.

she wasn't drawing on poetic language.

And he was angry and let down and embarrassed in front of all these people that she'd not risen to the heights of obsequiousness that the other two daughters had.

So he banished her, he sent her out from the kingdom.

And she was the youngest, and she hadn't been raised to look after herself.

So there she was, completely at the mercy of an empty sky, you know, nothing over her head to take care of her.

She goes into the forest and she weeps and she finds an elm tree to huddle herself in and thinks, what will become of me now?

A huntsman comes along and he spots her, and he sees that she needs some help.

And her dress is all ragged now, so he doesn't recognise her as the royal person that she really is.

And she doesn't tell him.

He says, Come with me, I'll take you to my mother's house.

And he walks her to the other side of the forest, and sure enough, there's his mother's house, which is actually a palace.

This dude is not just a huntsman, he's a prince.

His mother's the queen.

She walks in, this young girl, and the mother, the queen, is canny as anything.

And she can see by the look on the young girl's face and her sons that something is brewing between them.

Their eyes are full of each other, but she says nothing, she sits back.

She also notices that the young girl has got a little bit of gentility to how she eats her dinner, but she says nothing, she just sits back.

And she lets her son take that young girl for walks day after day.

And days turn into weeks, and the two of them fall in love.

And the young girl

doesn't reveal who she is, she's too full of sorrow and shame from being banished.

But the wedding day is set, and the queen invites nobles from far and wide to the wedding of her son and the young girl she notices on the table in the buttery the list of the guests and she notices a name on it.

And so she goes to the kitchen and she asks the cook

when you make the meat, when you serve the meat, medieval banquet about 20 courses, course 23 is the meat.

When you serve the meat, you can do all the food however you like when you serve the meat.

Can you make it with no salt?

And the cook, you know, he's not particularly happy about this because he's quite proud of his cooking, but

she's a good egg.

He likes her.

There's something about the way she's asking him.

He knows it's important.

So sure enough, they make this huge banquet.

And she's veiled when she gets married.

And all of the guests sit themselves at the table.

And you can guess what happens.

The first, second, third, 19th, 20th course comes out.

The food is exquisite.

And then the meat comes out, and everyone starts to eat.

And first, there's a little muttering,

tastes a bit nothingy, you know, around the table.

But at the very far end of this table, there's a man and he has his head in his hands and he's weeping.

And the queen, who's Cannie?

He says, tell me, sire, because he's a king of a neighbouring kingdom, why do you weep?

And he says, I had a daughter and I asked her how she loved me and she said she loved me as meat loves salt and I didn't understand.

But now I do.

And if I could see her, I would ask her forgiveness on my bended knee.

And of course, the young woman, the bride, she takes her veil off, she goes to her father and she embraces him, folds him into her forgiveness, and says, You don't have to kneel, father.

I forgive you.

And that's a really, really old, old story from Geoffrey of Monmouth.

And it's probably older than that, ancient.

And that's one of the sources for the story of King Lear.

This this stuff is out there and it's it's folded into our so-called literature.

That's amazing.

The thing is though, right, Blind Boy, the other thing about Shakespeare is it's not literature.

I mean I know there'll be a lot of professors clasping their, you know, clasping their ties and typing

um and I don't mean I don't mean that in in a in a sort of incendiary way.

What I mean was these words were be were written to be spoken out loud, just like our oral culture.

They

They were written to be heard in a room called an auditorium, auditory.

The Elizabethans used to say we're going to go and hear a play.

It's like a live podcast.

Do you know what I mean?

And in the prologue of Henry V,

he says, let us upon your imaginary forces work.

Peace out our imperfections

with your thoughts, I think.

Peace out our imperfections with your thoughts.

When we mention horses, I can't remember the quote now.

Think when we mention horses that you see them printing their proud feet into the yielding earth.

I think that's the quote.

But he's basically saying, Look, we ain't got much set, we ain't got no props, but we've got your imaginations, and we can make something together.

So it's an oral thing.

It was written down out of first necessity, flogged the quartos, but then

maybe to make some money, maybe to commemorate after you died we've only got this stuff written down by chance it's our it's it went into ears straight into your heart straight into your body and that means when you if you want to if you want to get into Shakespeare if you feel like you can't get your ear in speak it aloud you might feel like a wally but just do it in a room by yourself and you can give and I've done this a group of six seven year olds

a speech and you can take a word from it like vexation.

They wouldn't know what vexation means but you can get them to explore, okay, what's the shape of vexation?

Vexation.

You kind of try and wake up their synesthesia.

Show me the shape of vexation and they might contaunt their bodies or they might stamp or they might put a kind of make an X with their hands.

And if you say vexation, what sounds in that word?

Okay, can you sculpt your partner to look like a statue called vexation?

By the time you've done all that, they can tell you what the word means.

You don't have to go to a dictionary.

It's part of our bodies.

Language comes from the body.

I could talk for about two hours on this stuff.

It's fucking amazing.

You're big into the folklore of hares.

I love a hair, yeah.

Tell me about that.

Well, I don't know what it is.

I really don't know what it is.

Hares are shapeshifters.

We have them in Irish mythology, we have them in English mythology.

In Irish mythology, hares, well, it was Gerald of Wales who said this, so we can't trust it, but he said that

hares would would run after, hares would run after pregnant women and steal the milk out of their boobs.

Oh no, no, no, women, no, witches, like women would shape-shift into hares, and that's what they would do.

Yeah, yeah, and there's a story about a woman who shapeshifts into a hare and turns all the milk of the cows black.

That's it.

There's one of them.

Yeah.

I kind of feel like the hare is a bit

of a friend of the crone, really.

The hare lives on its own in a form, right?

It's not a community-spirited creature necessarily, or at least its archetype isn't that.

And I know that a lot of folklore and mythology aims to bring us together.

I love the fact that there is also space for an archetype that is running

on its own, having to find its way, because we're all fundamentally both together and alone at the same time.

And we're both together and alone around a fire, listening to a story.

We're both together and alone here.

Every one of you has got a different image of a hair now in their heads, but it's all a hair.

It's not the same hair.

And so I love the fact that there is a space for this creature, and it's often a woman that shapeshifts into it.

Women who, you know,

controversial statement, but have been slightly sidelined in the last few hundred years.

There's an archetype which allows us to have agency

and to not be good always, to not be good.

And my favorite story about a hair comes from Aesop.

There's about three or four, but my favourite one is the hare who lives who lived in the form by herself and got tired living on her own.

And she came down to this farmyard where lots of other animals lived and she tried to live among them.

She wanted to be part of a community.

And she did her best.

She was an outsider, but she was no trouble.

So they accepted her.

And then one day the hare woke up

and she heard a sound.

And it was far off, no one else would have heard it.

But her sleek ears, they they took it in, they could they could could hear that the hounds were coming and she knew from instinct that they were coming for her

and she she always knew that they would come for her but she hoped that they'd leave it a little longer before they did but here they were so she knew she had to do something she wanted to hide so she went and asked one of her friends for help and and she went to the goat and she said to the goat

the hounds are coming they're coming for me they're not coming for you please can you take me up on your back because you can move faster than than i well you know this farm yard better than i and you can move over the obstacles a lot more easily than me.

Could you find me somewhere quickly to hide, take me, hide me there?

And the goat said, I'd love to help you.

I'd love to help you.

But, you know, my back is not strong.

It would probably, you'd probably injure me.

There's plenty of other people here, plenty of other friends that you could ask for help.

And she says, yeah, yeah, there's plenty of other friends.

No problem.

So she goes and she goes to the ram.

And she says to the ram, look, the dogs are coming, the hounds are coming, they're coming for me.

But you, you're huge.

You could stand between me and the hounds, and you could butt them out of the way.

And the ram said, I'd love to help you, I would.

But you have to know that hounds are much more likely to go for a sheep than they are a hare.

You can't ask me to put myself in harm's way.

But there's plenty of other friends here you can ask, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no problem.

So then she goes to the ox.

And she says to the ox, please, the hounds are coming.

And now she can hear them.

They're a little closer.

And the ox, his ears prick.

He knows that they're there too.

They're coming for me, though.

Please, you're so ferocious with

your horns.

You could just put your horns down and you could frighten them off.

You could scare them.

He says, I would love to help you.

Honestly, I would.

But there's a whole load of

female ox over there that need my attention.

But I'm sure there's people here.

You can ask this friends.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no problem.

Finally, she goes to the shy horse.

She thinks, oh, the shire horse, of course, why didn't I think she goes into the stable and there's the shy horse looking like a king?

And she looks up at the shy horse.

And now she can hear the hounds, and they're just in the trees near the farm yard.

Anytime soon, she'll be able to see this now.

It's coming through the trees.

So she holds herself as steady as she can, and she says, Please, the hounds are coming, they're coming for me.

But you are so majestic.

They would never dare,

they would never dare attack you.

Look at all, look at all the space you take up.

I could hide myself in the folds of your tail.

I could hide myself there.

Please, will you will you let me?

And the shy horse said

I have a master too.

Don't think I don't and he's waiting for me now, he's expecting me, I'm sorry, but I have to serve him.

And so this regal shy horse turns to do the bidding of his master, leaving the hare standing there, hearing the hounds now, and they're through the trees, and she can hear them, and she can smell them, and she knows that they can smell her.

And she looks down in desperation at the calf.

And the calf is there a day old.

And the calf looks at the hare, and the hare looks at the calf.

And the calf shakes its head.

Because the calf thinks, if bigger, and older and more regal animals than me

are not going to help this hare,

then I can't.

And the hare looks around her at this

farm, this place she's been living,

at these creatures who she thought were her friends.

And she feels something rise in her.

It's this feeling that comes up through her solar plexus, right in her chest.

And it's at first it feels like it's a sob,

but it's not a sob.

It's a voice.

And the voice says,

You have legs, girl.

Run.

And she runs.

and she's still running.

It's my favourite hair story.

Fuck me, that's great.

That comes from Aesop.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

I mean, what a do-day.

Whoever he, she was, whoever they were.

Whoever they were.

That's the.

I mean, they say that Aesop was one slave who had just left all these stories, but

I'd wonder, it does sound like

a lot of people.

Yeah, and if it's if it's an oral tradition and it's a way of communicating how to comport yourself in danger, you know, how to, you know, how to befriend someone who might not be your friend, you know, all this, all this stuff gets.

I can imagine that this sort of advice for life in those awful situations that slaves find themselves in.

You know, I can imagine that it's a collective thing.

I like the idea it's a collective thing.

Well, what I enjoy about the fables is

so my love of mythology mythology is

a lot of it is about biodiversity.

Like huge amounts of Irish mythology is about

don't fuck with pollinators, like b bees were very important, they were associated with Bridget, butterflies, it's it's very good information about it'll tell you about the time of year, what to expect, and

the the regenerative regenerative properties of the environment around you and why certain things shouldn't be exploited.

And I love that about mythology but the fables they feel like psychology they feel that because that's what it is you you learn there's so much wisdom about the human condition it

it tells you things about about resilience about understanding emotion about pain like

the the lion with the thorn in his paw that's is that a fable or is that I think that's a fable that is a fable yeah like that's just anger that's just if you've got a thorn in your fucking paw

and it doesn't have to be a thorn in your paw.

It can be insecurity.

It can be

you're not going to be not you w you you won't be happy and you won't be kind to people.

It's

you can't become an effective human being unless you try to accept the parts of yourself that you don't like.

Going to therapy, I was speaking about this when I was I did it, I don't like the phrase toxic masculinity because it pisses off the type of men that need to hear about it.

Do you you get what I mean?

So I use the term

an unhelpful view of masculinity.

And

like the word vulnerability,

like you have to be, and this isn't, first off,

I never heard any useful information never come to me in terms of gender.

What I mean is anything I learned from society, such as be a man, none of it is ever useful.

What's What's useful to me is be an adult.

What is an adult?

An adult to me is someone who has emotional literacy.

To be an adult is I fully understand what I'm feeling and I can observe my emotions and respond to them rather than react to them.

You know?

So if I feel anger, I'm going to challenge the anger and go, I'm feeling anger here, but really I'm angry because something is threatening, something is frightening.

So where's the fright coming from?

And you go there.

And that to me is, that's the toolbox of an adult.

Whereas when I was a teenager, I'm not going there.

I'm going straight for the anger and throwing a bit of a tantrum, you know?

And

if you look at who we call toxic masculinity, fucking Trump, Andrew Tate, Conor McGregor, whoever you want,

they're effectively, they're not behaving like adults.

None of the, this is not adult behavior.

This is tantrum throwing emotional reactivity, throwing your toys out of the pram.

They're not being adults.

But they're marketing their behavior as no, this is how you be a man.

You know what I mean?

And vulnerability.

The lion with that thorn in his paw, right?

And I'm trying to remember the fucking story.

There's a lion with a thorn in his paw, and he's stuck in a cage.

And no one wants to come near the lion because he's being such a prick.

And eventually one person says, have you asked the lion about why he's a prick?

Have you tried to investigate it?

And it it turns out the lion's actually pretty sound, it's just he has a thorn in his fucking paw, and the pain of this is causing him to lash out.

The lion needed to be vulnerable in order to find that.

The first act of vulnerability was allowing a person to help to listen.

The fella came in and said, What's on, what's going on, Mr.

Lion?

Well, I'm fuck you, you bastard.

And then eventually,

eventually eventually he said, well, you know what?

This is sore.

I'm glad you came here and listened.

And then

the lion takes it out himself.

Having identified it,

but that's vulnerability.

And

these proponents of masculinity, Jordan Peterson, Conor McGregor, all of this, they shit upon masculinity by saying that masculinity is men who cry.

And most people think, or sorry, not masculinity, vulnerability.

If you say vulnerability in the media, in a male male context it's oh men who are able to cry that's just one facet of it vulnerability is

the ability to confront the thorns one huge massive thorn that no one likes I'm insecure I'm an insecure person.

Sometimes I get jealous of other people.

Sometimes I see someone who has more than what I have and I feel like the anger comes in.

If I see someone and I don't know if they've got a better job than me, they have better possessions.

They have something, their career is in a better place than mine.

My initial reaction is, look at them, I bet they think they're great, the fucking prick.

But that's what it is.

Do you ever see someone like, or maybe they're dressed immaculately, or whatever?

Look at them, they think they're fucking great.

What a fucking arsehole.

Get a load of them.

Based on no evidence, that's the lion's roar.

But the thorn there is, I've no evidence that this person's a fucking prick who thinks they're great.

They've made me feel insecure.

That's my shit.

But that's vulnerability.

The vulnerability is, oh, I'm not angry at all.

I'm insecure.

I need to work on me.

I need to actually work on

me and that person over there actually have the exact same worth simply because we're human beings and no aspect of our behavior defines our worth.

But that's what vulnerability is to me.

Vulnerability is it's actually really fucking strong.

And I don't even it's

fuck gender, gender is not involved in it.

Adults are vulnerable.

Adults have the emotional toolbox and the emotional maturity to safely investigate really threatening parts of ourselves.

Yeah, and it's not just crying.

Crying is one facet of it.

It's what makes you feel insecure.

What makes you jealous of other people?

What are you threatened by?

What are you so threatened by that anger anger needs to step in as a secondary emotion to protect you from that?

Because when you see Andrew Tate behaving the way he does, or you see Trump behaving the way he does,

you're afraid of something.

You're afraid of something and instead of dealing with it, now we're all dealing with a tantrum.

Yeah, that's not masculinity.

That's someone behaving.

I don't want to talk shit about children.

And someone who's behaving in a way which is emotionally...

No, no, actually, I'm not talking shit about children.

It's completely appropriate for a child to throw a tantrum.

For a child to throw a tantrum, for a teenager to sulk, this is normal, healthy behavior for them, and it's not dysfunctional whatsoever.

It's a part of growing up.

But if we still hang on to this shit in adulthood, now it doesn't serve us anymore and it's dysfunctional.

And dysfunctional, immature behavior is framed as fucking masculinity.

Fuck that.

Do you know what I mean?

So,

but I just spoke about that there for about six minutes.

I could have just told you the story of the lion with the thorn in its paw for one minute.

Yeah.

And it does the job.

Yeah.

Do you know what I'm saying?

Yeah, it has to be a lion.

The fables, they're about their psychology, they're about the human condition.

We are just close to curfew, right?

I'm gonna tip pull up the house lights.

And 2000s Arn Biesinger, Usher, has kindly come along tonight to hand out the microphone and answer

for answering of questions.

Hello.

Oh, we've got users on the job already.

Okay.

What's the crack?

What's the question?

For me, me or Debs.

Whatever you want.

So I find it really interesting that you said

about

people finding catharsis in heavy metal music.

And you've gone through an autism diagnosis kind of later in life.

And I wondered if there are any kind of

characters in Shakespeare that you thought might have had neurodivergency and if people

had

if people found classes

in those plays,

you asking me that or blind boy, both of you.

Debs, you're fantastic, by the way.

Both are, yeah, you're so many are.

Thanks, thank you.

Fucking fantastic.

Oh, off the top of my head, it's hard.

It's really hard to I mean, you can think of so many of them, could be, I guess.

I mean, Leah, definitely, there's something going on with Leah, there's something happening to him, and whether it's it's neurodivergence or the onset of dementia or it's just

some kind of

breakdown.

But you know, like

when he's out on the heath,

it feels like a meltdown.

When you are so overloaded, so overstimulated, he's just at a scene just before where he says, Is there no one here who can tell me who I am?

I don't know who I am if I'm not the king, if you're not treating me the way I expect to be treated.

All the rules, all the rules are gone.

So who am I?

And then he has this enormous meltdown.

That's a huge thing happening.

It's a storm that's happening in his mind.

But it's difficult for me,

as far as I know, a neurotypical person, I don't actually know, but

I don't know how comfortable I feel trying to make those generalizations.

I'd love to respond to it and see what you think, Race.

So I can't comment on Shakespeare because I don't know enough about Shakespeare.

But

in sitcoms, and I'm guessing you could probably respond to this with Shakespeare stuff because it probably goes back further, right?

If you look at Seinfeld, Friends,

you've got in Friends, you've got Phoebe, in Seinfeld, you've got Kramer, in the Big Bang Theory, you've got Sheldon.

Every single sitcom that you look at,

there's one character who is deeply eccentric, the fool.

Yeah, and

as an autistic person,

I think that represents if each person in a sitcom is kind of an archetype,

you've got Ross and Monica are kind of straight, you know, same with Marge Simpson.

Marge Simpson is the audience almost.

Then you've got

kind of the comic relief that coming from Joey and Chandler.

Like Chandler is a little bit eccentric, but then you've got Phoebe, and Phoebe is just kooky, just on a different planet.

Same thing with Kramer and Seinfeld, on a different planet.

That's wonderful, and they're great characters, but the problem is

they are never taken seriously as human beings whatsoever.

They are never,

we love them when they come on screen.

We fucking love it.

We know fun is going to happen, but they're never offered any full humanity.

They never have relationships, complex emotions.

They never get sad.

When they do get sad, it's followed by a joke.

The sadness is reserved for Monica.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And

that's how it is to be a neurodivergent person.

That's what I...

So in my friends' group when I was growing up,

people love you.

because you're nuts.

People love you because you're eccentric.

You're there as comic relief.

When you go to a wedding, where are you sitting?

And this is something that I'm serious.

This is something that used to break my heart.

And what I mean by this is

I'm invited to a wedding and then it's like, oh, why am I not sitting up there with all my friends?

My friends group is here.

This is a friends group wedding.

Why am I not sitting up there

near the bride and groom?

Why am I back here?

Who are these people that I'm sitting with?

And then I look around at my my table and I'm like, this is really strange.

I don't know any of these fucking people at all.

I'm supposed to be over there with my friends.

And then the person beside me, oh, this person's a roaring alcoholic.

Right, okay.

And then I was at, seriously, I was at one fucking wedding.

Oh, this person's got a ferret.

Right, this person has brought a ferret with them.

That person, they're fucking nuts, they are.

And then I go, oh, I'm at the lunatic table.

And your friends don't plan it.

What happens is

the planning of a wedding is a very frightening thing.

And your friends are basically going, right, okay, who sits beside who?

Who sits beside who?

And then my name pops up.

And it's like, no,

I can't have him that close to Auntie Mara.

He's just going to talk about the Norman invasion all night.

And they're scanning through who they can't have me near because of what mad, eccentric shit I'm going to do, or ear, whose ear I'm gonna talk off.

And they have this group of misfits where they don't know, they're terrified of shame.

I've got relatives here, we can't have them there.

And then all of a sudden, everybody slowly gets put to this one table near the fucking emergency exit,

and it's the lunatic table.

And that happened to me enough times that I stopped going to weddings because I know it's hilarious.

I know it's fucking hilarious, but Christ, it hurts.

Pretty soul-crushing.

It fucking hurts.

It really hurts because I thought these people were my friends.

yeah you know what i mean and all of a sudden it's and and that's when you look at a sitcom that's what phoebe is that's what kramer is because the thing is you realize they don't actually take you seriously as a human being you're just a funny friend who comes in and says crazy mad hilarious facts and does bizarre things you're the eccentric and there's great value in that but you're not allowed to be a full entire human being they're not thinking about your feelings the thing is there

here's the problem:

they are not considering fully that you experience rejection because you're so insane.

Do you get me?

So it's okay to throw them at, whereas someone else, it's like, no, they have to sit here near all the friends because they'll be offended.

I can't get offended because I'm nuts.

Do you get what I'm saying?

But it's like, I do get offended.

I notice it.

So I just stopped going to weddings because it was so much hurt.

I stopped having friends, to be honest.

I don't really have friends.

It's not that I don't want friends.

It's a lot of autistic people, as you get older, you just start going, there's no fucking point.

I'm better off on my own.

It's too much fucking hassle.

Coupled with the fact that we're all right with it.

I don't get lonely, you know what I mean?

But

I can't be arsed with

forgetting birthdays, forgetting people's birthdays, not having that understanding.

I don't understand the concept of hanging out with someone.

Yeah.

All those social rules, unwritten, completely unspoken social rules.

Not a clue.

And I'm, I mean, your sister's the same crack as this.

You could be her talking.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's.

Any artistics in the audience?

You know the crack, don't you?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I just thought, just to just to say, I think the foot that the fool was a big thing in that, you know, in are they the fools?

Is that what that's what I wanted to ask you.

What archetype is Phoebe?

What archetype is Craig?

They're the fool.

And the fool appears in in several Shakespeare plays, and it's also a thing in the culture at the time.

The person who would speak truth to power, sometimes through riddles, sometimes through non-sequateurs, would say the unsayable to the king.

But they were revered and they were given a status at that time, the fool.

See, that's interesting.

Phoebe doesn't speak truth to power.

Well,

smelly cats.

What are they feeding you?

That is.

She does a bit, actually, because there's that back story where she stabbed a policeman and that's fairly fucking cool.

But like

it's that thing too with

neurodivergence autism.

It's not a fucking disease.

It's a type of human being.

And I think this is my theory is that there was once a society where we were very useful and then things changed.

And what the example I give, dyslexia is a type of neurodivergence.

Dyslexia is a neurodivergence.

And

if you think of English pubs, right?

English fucking pubs, pubs anywhere, why are they called the horse and hound, the king's head, the spotted duck?

They're called this because

they came about at a time when most people couldn't fucking read.

Reading is like all of us can read.

500 years ago, all of us couldn't read.

It was people who had the money to have an education.

So you had a society where people simply didn't fucking read.

So where's the pub?

It's the one with the painting of the spotted duck.

Thank you very much.

I'm gonna go there.

You could have had dyslexic working-class people going about their entire lives having no idea whatsoever that they're dyslexic because they live in a world where words don't exist.

Then you get this situation where the capacity to read is equated with intelligence, which is fucking bullshit.

And dyslexic people are called stupid and institutionalized to be considered and treated stupid.

If I existed a thousand years ago in Ireland, um I I'd probably be a druid or a bard or something because of my memory and my ability to tell stories and I wouldn't be called eccentric, I'd be considered magical and the pig would give or the king would give me a free pig.

You know what I mean?

If if artistic people would make fun like writing came about

and before writing, mythology had to be told by reading the landscape.

Like in Irish myth w we have the tawn.

The tawn is is this massive, massive, huge story written down.

It's thousands and thousands of pages.

And this exists before writing.

And I stood on the hill in Rath Crogan, Rath Crogan up in Ross Crammen,

where you can stand on this fucking hill and you can look at the mountains and the trees and tell the entire story of the tawn by just turning around.

And it takes a day to tell.

Someone had to be able to remember that.

And that person was autistic.

I fucking promise you.

You know what I'm getting at?

We have have gone over curfew.

I'm sorry, I can't take any more fucking questions.

But

that was a lovely question, and I think that answer was nice for the both of us.

Yeah, yeah.

Debs Newbold, thank you so much for a wonderful, incredible even.

That was astounding.

There you go now.

There you go.

Some clapping ensued after that.

I don't like playing the end of the podcast because the lever goes up, it goes a bit loud at the end when everyone starts clapping.

Thank you so much to my guest, Debs Newbold.

DebsNewbold Plays.com.

If you want to check her out or see if she's got any live gigs coming up, Debs Newbold Plays on Instagram, give her a follow.

Magnificent, interesting, talented, passionate person.

I love chatting to Debs.

Also, I want to give a shout out to...

This I'm very, very happy with my new studio.

I really love

the sound in here is astounding.

I've got a little custom-built studio.

You can't hear any of the noise outside.

Nobody can hear me.

It's acoustic paneled.

It really is perfect.

I'm still going to use my office mainly for writing.

But never again is a seagull

going to interfere with this podcast being recorded.

I want to give a shout out to the The lads who built this studio for myself and a couple of other artists.

Now before I say this I want to make it clear this isn't an advertisement.

I haven't received anything to give this shout out.

This studio was built by Munster Garden Rooms.

Tiny small independent Irish business that build garden pods, garden offices, acoustically insulated studios like fucking this one.

Most importantly, they're lovely sound people

who love what they do.

Really proud of their work down to the tiniest detail.

So I want to give them a shout out.

Munster Garden Rooms.

This is not an advertisement.

I'm not getting anything in return to tell ye.

I'm being sound to a small independent Irish business.

It's just a pair of lads doing excellent work.

So I'm trying to be sound to them.

And if you're considering getting yourself a little office pod or a garden pod or whatever and you live in the Munster area, consider giving them a shout.

That's all I have time for this week, you glorious cunts.

I'll catch you next week with

probably my Old Testament podcast, lads.

I have a hot take brewing that I've been researching, and I'm really looking forward to doing that episode, so hopefully that'll be next week.

In the meantime, rub a dog, gen your flick to a swan, whistle at a ladybird.

God bless.

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