Horror story #1: Drying

To dry is to forget your lines. I can remember dryng stone dead twice in The Business of Murder at the Grand Opera House, York: enough said.

Another review

Can't seem to find this review online, so here it is in its entirety, with thanks to Stewart Conn for letting me reproduce it here:

AUGUSTINE'S (VENUE 152) 41George IV Bridge ... 4-10, 12-17 Aug 08 7.25pm

Dear Conjunction Theatre Co. presents
MORE LIVES THAN ONE: Oscar Wilde & the Black Douglas
Written and performed by Leslie Clack : Directed by Patricia Kessler


In pools of light are a chaise-longue, a stool and a chair, a table bearing a large tome and on a plant-stand, an elegant vase of flowers. The varied social milieus these signify reveal themselves throughout the action. Similarly, in a series of transformation scenes as seamless as they are mesmerising, Leslie Clack encapsulates the personalities not only of Wilde but of those central to his downfall.

Dramatically conjured up are the malevolent Lord Queensberry, father of Wilde's beloved 'Bosie', and whom he had the folly to sue; and at his trial the implacable Edward Carson, a former friend at Trinity but now an adversarial defence counsel,

As a counterpoint to Wilde's tragic progress comes a crisp mosaic of witticisms and fictional vignettes. Dorian Gray reels back from his portrait. In the classic scene from The Importance Of Being Earnest an aghast Lady Bracknell utters the word, 'handbag'. It is a joy to experience the text's lucid gathering of momentum allied to the poise, insight, impeccable timing and sheer intelligence of Clack's performance. This finds a perfect match in the clarity and pacing of Patricia Kessler's production

As the threads unravel, the play becomes profoundly moving, not least in a letter Wilde's mother wrote after his prison term, begging him – at whatever price – not to leave the country; and a religious order's blunt rejection of his plea for sanctuary. Heightening the emotional impact are the total stillness accompanying The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and the tracing of Wilde's last days, to his death (or the last of his deaths...) in Paris.

The real triumph is that Clack's theatricality never aspires simply to dazzlement for its own sake. We come out indelibly reminded that the grounds on which Wilde (be he good or bad) was persecuted were not moral but basically – and brutally – political.

Stewart Conn
6th Aug 2008

Getting started

Why become an actor? Even as a child I was a bit of a performer, though only among my familiars. In both my mother’s and father’s families there were and are many very funny people, natural raconteurs, entertainers. As I lost my father very young, these uncles, aunts, grandparents were my role models. I was always a raconteur, a joke teller, but suppressed my desires to become an actor and went into teaching. Only at the age of 32 when living and teaching in France did I kick over the traces and join a theatre group. I won a Conservatoire award, gave up teaching and have never looked back (or is it forward?) since.

An audience of one - the sequel to the sequel

When I first played the Edinburgh fringe in 1978, the first night I played to an audience of one. He wrote to me afterwards to say how much the show had affected him and that he'd taken up acting and performed at Edinburgh himself.

In these days of google and instantaneous information, you forget how it used to be. I knew he was a solicitor in a small English town, but how to get ahold of him? I had a job for the BBC on Crimewatch, recreating interesting and gruesome crimes for the viewing public. We had police advisors on the show and one of them came from the same small English town. So in the pub after a long day looking shifty and suspicious, I asked him to bring in the phonebook the next day so I could look him up.

‘Who are you looking for?’, he asked.

‘It’s such a common name, I won’t even bother to tell you’, I said.

‘Go on, try me.’

I told him.

There was a silence. Bloody silly question, how many people can there be in the world with that name? Hundreds, thousands even.

‘The solicitor?’

‘Er, yes.’

‘He’s my son-in-law.’

A reviewer writes (in French)

Emily Eells also came to last year's production of More Lives than One and wrote a review of it in French. If you can't read French, she says that's a jolly good show and you should come and see it. Actually, she was very pleased about the French extracts, saying:

Le texte, rédigé en anglais, est ponctué de touches françaises, notamment lors d’une longue scène extraite de Salomé, jouée entièrement en français par Les Clack. Sa pièce va jusqu’à surenchérir sur la façon dont Wilde parsème son texte de mots français, car il emploie un anglicisme anachronique pour désigner le succès du jeune Wilde, qui est reçu ­ et adulé - à Paris comme 'un people'. Cet audacieux néologisme, qui consiste à mettre au singulier le mot collectif 'people’, est une autre façon d’illustrer le titre de la pièce, en disant que Wilde possédait plusieurs visages, et qu’il a vécu plus qu’une seule vie. Espérons que cette pièce aura ‘more lives than one’, et que le projet de la rejouer à Paris au printemps se concrétisera. A ne pas manquer.

An audience of one - the sequel

Two years after I last played the fringe, I received a letter, via my director in Paris. The letter said Dear Mr Clack, in 1978 I was the only spectator at the world premiere of your play Cuddles at the Edinburgh Festival. It is still the funniest play I have ever seen, and since I saw you I have taken up acting and this year performed at the Edinburgh Festival…

This was a great lesson for me. Often when audiences are small, you really don’t feel like going on. But you never know who’s out there and the effect you might have on them.

A reviewer writes

A review! Maria Kesia Greenwood came to an earlier run of the show and reviewed it for http://www.oscholars.com/, an "Electronic Journal for the Exchange of Information on Current Research, Publications and Productions Concerning Oscar Wilde and His Worlds." Goodness. She has some nice things to say :

When Les Clack gives us a scene from The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Bracknell comes over as far more sinister than Dame Edith Evans ever played her (in A. Asquith's film classic), a kind of sussurating serpent who assesses the man who wants to marry her daughter with a stupidity so crass that its cruelty is masked by laughter.

Here's that scene from the film:



Now of course, you need to come to the production in Edinburgh to see our version.