Eamon Porktraddle is a mystery wrapped in enigma. He lives in a tumbling tin shed above the dunes beneath a crackling humming pylon. He likes to play on his old ukelele made from an old oil can. But he is troubled. Troubled by questions about Life and Death and Everything in Between. Somewhere in the fug of his brain he knows there is something he should do. Before it's too late...
Fifteen Years in the Making
More than fifteen years ago I started performing a series of poems that coalesced into a gloopy mess of words and ideas. Along the way, I gave the piece different titles and different character names as the underlying form and themes made themselves known to me. Most important, there were people who turned up and added to the mix by contributing various musical and performance ideas without any clue as to where we going on the journey. I’m very grateful to the audiences that sat there in various stunned silences. In 2018 I gathered a group of friends to try to make enough sense out of all this to perform it as multi-media, immersive performance for the Bournemouth Emerging Arts Festival. All those talented folk were brave enough to join in the fun without the slightest idea of what the end product would be. That’s mostly because I didn’t know myself. But still they came. And we managed to puzzle various audiences as well.
Since then I have been working with the voices of those performers to get the whole thing recorded as an audio piece. A couple of years ago I started a podcast, Tales From the Cliff Edge with the aim that this would eventually host Life and Death. Finally, after a lot of prevaricating and shilly shallying it was ready to go live. The versions of the words and acting are available in reverse order on my Blogsite (Tales from the Cliff Edge)With additional chat Here: and also on YouTube Here:
On the next page is a definitive presentation of script and words which will be slightly different from those other versions.
Will it make any sense to you? I have no idea but it is made with a huge amount of sweat, a certain number of tears and a lot of love so do give it ago and see if our work has amounted to more than a hill of beans.
All these People as well
Over those ten years I have been helped by dozens of performers and musician who have taken part in various iterations of the piece. I owe them all so much. I’d also like to thank those organisations that have hosted those performances and to Bournemouth Borough Council that funded the show at the Bournemouth Emerging Arts Festival (BEAF). There is also a page with some of the reviews an reactions we have had and somewhere buried here will be various videos and artwork from some of the earlier versions.
Timo Peach wrote about his involvement:
“Peter works in the echoes of Forkbeard Fantasy Theatre or Douglas Adams or Python – a delightful preposterity, a willfully intelligent silliness, that sets out to undermine the pompous follies of human loftiness in the face of the horrors of existential scale. Life and Death offers a sort of cheery nihilism that subverts our grand schemes for, well, a kind of reverence for life’s sheer unlikeliness. Something I’ve been discovering in my own way with The Shape of Things to Hum and Unsee The Future. But where I can’t help but be theatrically hopey-changey, Peter’s outlook is much less camply didactic, even as it’s even more absurd, inviting us to suspend disbelief in the finest traditions of high-concept but heartfelt sixties experimental theatre.”
Timo Peach’s full post
https://www.momotempo.co.uk/2018/06/life-and-death-and-everything-in-between/
Thanks Timo.
Eamon Porktraddle seeks answers to his questions about Life and Death and Everything else.