Revenge of the Video Star

On March 15, 1983, a gas pipeline in West Texas was pierced by a drill being used for planting trees. The explosion sent flames rising 600 feet into the air and killed five people living in a nearby trailer park. The tragedy survives in the memories of the inhabitants of West Odessa (population: 22,707), as an entry on a Wikipedia page (“List of pipeline accidents in the United States 1975 to 1999”) that lists 15 such incidents for 1983 alone – and, after a strange fashion, in a Fringe show.

Odessa, a one-man hour of character comedy by Joseph Morpurgo, spins a Lynchian whodunnit out of bits of archive footage. He pauses on a shot of the Texan blaze: surely the audience can see that mysterious figure in the smoke? A police officer provides his protagonist—the rookie cop tasked with investigating the blaze—while a smarmy salesman from an advert becomes a suspect.

Watching the show, it’s easy to imagine that Morpurgo started with the intention of poking fun at the conventions of the cop drama, a genre which gives him ample opportunity to show off his comic range (as well as brilliant one-liners, the show is rich with Booshian creations – an evil Santa Claus and the lyric-spitting personification of static). The easiest way to find raw material would be to pick and choose bits of goofy footage, scavenging oddities from here and there.

In fact, the clips all come from a single broadcast which he has condensed but otherwise presented as it was originally aired on TV. It might seem like a minor distinction, but it bugs Morpurgo (a bit) that people miss it. For him, it’s what defines the show, which was conceived from a rule: everything had to come from a single bit of footage. He didn’t spend long scouring the archive – holding out for a piece of footage that seemed too perfectly suited for comedy would have felt like cheating.

“The opening premise was to find a bit of footage and if I got a tingle in my gut, go with it. I had no idea that it would be set in America, that there would be this whodunnit aspect – it just came from finding that clip. I thought, ‘These characters are interesting, what if they were trying to solve this fire?’ I could have found a clip from East Anglian TV from the '60’s. It could have been something totally different.”

Morpurgo has been coming to the Fringe for seven years, first as an Oxford Imp and latterly as a cast member in Austentatious, and his training in improv—where “somebody gives you something arbitrary and the performance is about you pulling something from it”—gave him an appreciation of how a constraint can be liberating, channeling creativity in unexpected directions. But you could also say, without being completely ridiculous, that Odessa is a work of postmodern art.

Morpurgo’s eyes light up when I suggest that his approach has something in common with that of the Oulipo writers, the group of postmodernists (mostly French, obviously) who wrote using incredibly restrictive rules. Could you write a novel using a single vowel? What if you took a familiar story, a fairy tale that everybody knows, and replaced every noun with the word 23 places later in the dictionary? He starts talking rapidly about the significance of Georges Perec's decision to omit the letter “e” from his book A Void. An arbitrary decison – and yet “e” stands for the feminine in French literature, and Perec was obsessed by the death of his mother...

If you gather 25,000 performers in a city it’s hardly surprising that some of them will be working, without any knowledge of each other, on strange but oddly similar projects. It might be a statistical certainty, but it’s still a nice moment when you spot such a concordance.

The next day, I talk to poet Ross Sutherland about Standby For Tape Back-up, another show that plays with the possibilities of video. Standby... came about, or so the story goes, when Sutherland inherited a videotape from his grandfather. It contained a mishmash of his old favourites. Ghostbusters, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Jaws, The Crystal Maze. They’re jumbled up because Grandad’s habit was to wipe over the tape most evenings. Like Morpurgo, Sutherland uses the footage as the basis for a game. He plays the same sequences over and over, telling a long poem whose lines riff on what’s happening onscreen, twisting the footage in a new way with every loop. There's Will Smith again, sitting on his rotating throne, and every time the meaning's different. It’s an electrifying performance – both a moving tribute to his grandfather and one of the wittiest pieces of writing you’ll come across at the Fringe.

I ask Sutherland where the idea came from. The first thing out of his mouth: “I love the Oulipo writers.”

“It was about creating a form that was incredibly difficult to write. You had to find something to say that matches this two-second clip of video and at that point you can't write from the front of your brain – it doesn't matter what you want to say, it's not gonna fit. You have to sort of write more from the subconscious. You've created your form and now you're a mouse scurrying around trying to get out of the maze.”

Morpurgo spent around a year working on Odessa, returning to his office at weekends (he works as a music journalist) and teaching himself Final Cut so he could play around with the footage. For Sutherland, who began performing the Fresh Prince sequence a couple of years ago (“the proof of concept phase”) and kept adding to the project incrementally, the process was even more painstaking. He broke the footage into two-second chunks, watching fuzzy versions of the material on dodgy online streams and forcing himself, line by line, to come up with a lyric to match the visuals.

Most of the material he wrote never made into the final piece. The trick was to find bits of footage on the tape that were familiar enough to resonate easily with the audience. (He rejected Tutti Frutti, a 1987 drama with Robbie Coltrane, because it’s too obscure.)  His hope is that people watching will be able to pick up on the visual echoes and concordances almost subconsciously, without getting distracted.

“If you gave most people an hour with a camcorder they could probably give you a version of the opening credits of the Fresh Prince,” Sutherland says. Of course, what he means is: most people of a certain age. Both these performances are shot through with a nostalgic love of the look and sound of aged videotape  – its click and hiss, its strangely lurid colours.

Sutherland was born in 1979, which makes him almost a decade older than Morpurgo; they span a short-lived generation of people who came of age when analogue forms of data storage were being supplanted by cleaner, more easily manipulable but less romantic digits. Talking about the electronic music he loves, artists like Boards of Canada, Morpurgo goes misty-eyed, rhapsodising about “mildewy electronic textures, the feel of warped betamax”. And Sutherland, near the beginning of his performance, holds up the antiquated piece of technology he inherited from his grandfather. Raising an eyebrow, he tells a hackneyed joke for the benefit of the younger people in the audience: "This is a videotape. We used to have these."