https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B48LAjXTFSy9Unh1NGRJbThrcFU/view?usp=sharing

“Stop me if you’ve heard this one. So an arch-duke, two presidents and a member of the Beatles walk into a bar…”

“This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.
Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will…
My rifle and I know that what counts in war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, nor the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit…
My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will…
Before God, I swear this creed. My rifle and I are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life.
So be it, until victory is America’s and there is no enemy, but peace!”

“That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody’s whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that being alive is a crock of shit. That reminds of a joke: Lincoln was shot by a two-bit actor exercising his right to bear arms.”

“Some families, especially in politics, are soaked in blood. Two brothers, both ambitious and populist, both murdered by radicalised mutants – one a Soviet defector, the other an Arab extremist. Same as it ever was.”

“People always ask if I’ve ever seen any of my victims. Look down there. Would you really feel any pity at all if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped moving, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax. It’s the only way to save money nowadays.”

“Do any of you people know who Charles Whitman was? None of you knows? Charles Whitman killed twelve people from a twenty-eight-storey observation tower at the University of Texas, from distances up to four hundred yards. Anybody know who Lee Harvey Oswald was? Ah, I see some of you know who he was. And do you know how far away he was? Two hundred and fifty feet! He was two hundred and fifty feet away and shooting at a moving target. Oswald got off three rounds with an Italian Carcano bolt action rifle in only six seconds, and scored two hits, including a head shot! Do any of you people know where these individuals learned how to shoot? The United States Marine Corps. These individuals showed what one motivated marine and his rifle can do!”

In a note he left behind after he was shot dead, Charles Whitman asked for an autopsy to be performed on him to determine if there was a physiological influence on his behaviour. They found a tumour the size of a pecan in his brain. Opinions still vary as to whether or not it was directly responsible for his mental health issues.

“Ask not what you can do for your country… ask what your country is doing to you.”

“I heard a new CIA joke recently: how can you be sure the CIA wasn’t involved in the Kennedy assassinations?”
“I don’t know – how can we be sure?”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

The archduke is a tricky one. He was killed by a 19 year old student radical who was armed by a secret society made up of Serbian military. He was tried in a kangaroo court, left to rot in prison and eventually he was re-buried as a hero for aiding the Slavs to throw off the shackles of Habsburg empire. Even assassins can be venerated as martyrs and saints. Even arms dealers have a patron saint in Catholicism.”

“Nobody really thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, so why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat. I talk about the suckers and the meat-puppets. It’s the same thing. They have their five year plans, and so have I. But I still do believe in God, old man. I believe in God and Mercy and all that. But the dead are happier dead. They don’t miss much here, poor devils. What do you believe in?”

“Oh, don’t be so gloomy. After all, it’s not that awful. Remember what the fellow said. In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

“Nothing is true, everything is permitted. Hassan I-Sabbah said that. Who says video games never taught anybody anything useful? The Romans knew it too, when they butchered Caesar, and the CIA and KGB, and Gavrilo Princip, and Whitman and Oswald and Booth and Sirhan Sirhan and yes, even that fat sonofabitch Chapman with his copy of Catcher in the Rye in one hand and a 38 special in the other. So did Valerie Sonaris and Sara Jane Moore and Lynette Fromme and John Hinkley – even those who try and fail understand that once you shoot burning hot metal into the present, the future splinters into fragments.”

We had an idea, to stage moments in history using technology all in order to show certain aspects of these moment that couldn’t be seen at the time. The lead example of this would be recreating Marylyn Monroe’s ‘Happy birthday Mr President’ performance (the moment of history) after showing a live feed of her backstage taking pills (the way in which technology could uncover things we haven’t seen before). Everyone jumped on board and went into writing up/ coming up with their own scenes/ ideas. In the end we had a list which contained; The Zodiac killer, Jack the ripper, Richard the third, WW2, 9/11, the moon landing, the JFK assassination and many more. At first we considered staging these as separate vignettes, yet we decided upon creating a plot that could act as a through line through so it might be a little more cohesive to follow. What we noticed was that many of these idea all contained the theme of conspiracy so this lead us to come up with the idea that this plot should be two (or more) people attempting to recreate the conspiracy’s in order to shed some new light on them. Really we wanted the show to be a discussion of conspiracy on a whole, using these examples to illustrate our points. What was a large debate that went on when moulding this idea was will we be playing fictional characters that we have made up or not. Personally I saw us playing versions of ourselves like in Gob Squad’s Revolution Now! Or even such as in Flickbook Theatre’s Three words. Therefore we can enter and tell the audience directly our ideas and thoughts/ making them aware that this is a show whilst also being able to get away with seemingly recreating what we want at our own will by stating something like; “well look at the Richard the third conspiracy…”. On the topic of Revolution Now! By Gob squad, I see this show following a similar style by being a show that explores the theme of conspiracy rather than attempting to uncover it. The way that they did with the theme of revolution. However one thing that I would like to avoid, something that Revolution Now! did, was laugh off actual debates of revolution. In one part of the show a member of the group took to the streets and interviewed members of the public (in order to hear ‘what the people want’). Mostly their participants were shy and making light of the topic matter. However one participant, a man in a black cab, did start speaking about (what he believed) to be the problems with the concept of revolution his ideas were dismissed and not mentioned again. Instead the group found another quite shy participant to act how he was told in order to fit into the ending they wanted, therefore completely undermining the basic idea of revolution all together. I want our show to be an exploration and investigation of the subject matter rather than an outright mission to make fun of the concept.

The inevitability of failure at the moment is something that is clouding my mind constantly with this module. Working together is hard when you only see 7 people each rehearsal. How are we expected to make something when each rehearsal idea is tossed around and shot down and new ones brought in simply because there isn’t a consistency of people who attend who can all shape one singular idea.
Everyone keeps saying ‘It will all work out in the end’ and honestly, I’m not sure it will.

The most recent direction we’re taking, and hopefully sticking to, is one that I came up with about a week ago. (I know, it’s too late for this…) To do with History and looking at it from a different angle. Marilyn’s backstage area, the gunman who shot JFK, the hidden speech from the moon landing…
A good idea, and something that if splitting off into smaller groups to put together scenes would make production quick and effortless with this all taking place so late in the game.
Bryony asked me to take over a rehearsal to go through ideas and run the tasks of the day, and honestly we got a lot of work done with the people who were present. We had outlined scenes we could do and thought about what kind of things technology wise, made a list and assigned roles and tasks to have done by the next rehearsal.
The next rehearsal the ideas developed further, we laid out exactly step by step each of these scenes should go. Queens coronation focusing on her breathing and shaking hands as we hear the audio through a radio, JFK’s assassin putting together a gun centre stage as car noises surrounded… What was wrong? It was too disjointed and meant nothing. A fair statement, there wasn’t anything this production meant other than ‘look, we can show history’ – so we developed a narrative. The idea of two or three people becoming ‘History artists’ as it were. Taking these moments and shaping them for the audience in silence, letting the recordings bring the story to life. Think ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ but with more tech. We thought ‘well, why are they presenting these moments of history?’ which led us onto Conspiracies. 9/11, Marilyn Monroe, the moon landing, Roswell. Moments of history that get questioned because of government intervention.

Then I had this idea.
The play is set inside an attic. Messy, cluttered, pizza boxes piled high, tv screens, cameras and laptops around. A man walks in, puts in a DVD of 9/11 footage and rewinds and replays the moment the first building collapses over and over again, searching, looking for something that he can’t see. Another man, asleep on a table remains motionless. The final man walks in, looks at the first man with the DVD, looks at the man sleeping, rolls his eyes then walks to the man with the DVD. They stare. the first man points fast at the screen as the second man looks confused. he rewinds, points again. The second man has no idea what he is talking about. The first man sighs, goes over to a cork-board and pins a picture of President Bush to it, along with the word ‘Liar’. He stands, staring. The second man walks over, he picks up a picture of Roswell, pins it to the board. The first man smiles. Slowly they fill the board, all these different conspiracies, until one man runs off and brings a pile of newspapers in, drops them on the table as the sleeping man shoots awake. He turns slowly, takes it in. Smiles. He grabs one of the cameras and a radio. He places the radio in the centre of the table and zooms the camera in on the picture of Bush.
9/11 news reports start through the radio and the small 9/11 section begins.

It’s an image that I think would look nice, and create a flowing narrative to sew all these moments together, however it was argued against saying that just the ordinary stories would be fine on their own. We shall see.
Either way a decision needs to be made.
The show is in a month and we have nothing.
I’m fed up of looping in circles.