- CROYDON GUARDIAN
February 25 2004
HAPPY TO BE … an actor
Bringing pulp heroes to life
Breaking into the theatre or film industry has never been harder.
SIOBHAN LISMORE speaks to one budding thespian to find out what it takes to cut it as an actor.
Pulp Fiction became a cult film the moment it hit the big screen.
Now in a daring move the film is to be transferred to the stage and 21-year-old Hamza Mohsin is keeping his fingers crossed that his performance in the play will be his lucky break.
Hamza, from Thornton Heath, has been dabbling with acting for some time, inspired by the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Robert De Niro.
As a young child he was encouraged to take part in stage productions at Ecclesbourne Junior School in Thornton Heath.
And as he grew up the more he enjoyed the buzz he got from performing in front of a crowd of people.
Hamza honed his skills treading the boards at Stanley Technical School in South Norwood. He recalls how he received his calling to be an actor after appearing in an adaptation of William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies.
“I was in Lord of the Flies as Jack and that experience made me realize I wanted to be an actor,” he says.
“I won the Sam Atkinson Award at Stanley Tech with another student and I was honoured to receive it. It made me see that my work was appreciated.
“Acting gives me a real buzz, when I’m doing well I feel a real connection with the audience, they’re eating out of my hands and it’s amazing.”
He continues: “There was this one time I was playing a really horrible character and I made the audience laugh at him, I improvised a poem and made it som funny they were cracking up. I loved it.”
Hamza went on to study drama at A-level in Nescott College, Epsom, where he developed his passion for theatre and film.
“I always loved watching films when I was younger. My parents realized I was genuinely interested in the acting and would let me watch anything, within reason. I love Robert De Niro, his performance in Raging Bull is amazing. Humphrey Bogart is also an inspiration,” he says.
“I just remember watching these films over and over again and it came to me that I should mesh my passion fro acting with the inspiration these actors have given me.”
But he admits that taking on the role of Jules Winnfield in the stage version of Pulp Fiction Live is the biggest challenge he has undertaken.
“It’s a scary role to live up to. I have to avoid imitating Samuel L. Jackson’s performance – I don’t want any comparisons drawn at all. I have made the character my own by thinking ‘what if this character grew up in Thornton Heath?’.” Says Hamza.
Hamza, who is studying English at Greenwich University, adds: “I like to keep my acting raw, I don’t want to become a prima donna.”
Hamza’s director Andre Michael Davey agrees that his passion and commitment immediately stand out when he performs.
He says: “Hamza’s energy is perfect for powerful roles.
“At first I wasn’t sure whether it was Jules or Marsellus he was going to play, but we thought he could handle the intensity of Jules’ character”
Pulp Fiction – Live! takes 21 scenes from the cult film, keeping the same dialogue but changing the locations of the story and the gender of a few of the characters.
Hamza has played a big part promoting the show and appeared on the Channel 4 show The Salon last week to get the stylists’ creative input into how to create his look for Jules
THE INDEPENDENT
THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW
Thursday 18 March 2004
Arts Preview
Warning: live and dangerous
THEATRE In Mandrepheus Androgon’s new play, Pulp Fiction meets The Simpsons before our eyes
“The challenge in translating Pulp Fiction into a live play is to set it in one location,” says the director Mandrepheus Androgon. He’s talking about his stage version of Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary’s cult 1994 film Pulp Fiction, which starred Uma Thurman and John Travolta, and had a script with more plot twists than gunshots.
Mandrepheus Androgon is the nom de plume of Andre Michael Davey, who wrote Pulp Fiction – Live! in 1997 for the Canadian company he co-founded Purple Octogon. “It pays homage to Tarantino’s storytelling,” he says of the production, which went to the Edmonton Fringe Festival – Canada’s answer to Endinburgh – in 2001.
For its London debut, Davey says, “I’d rather set it in England, and give the script a more natural feeling – and a natural flow to the words – than have the actors worry about the American accent.” He cast the play in London, recruiting the British actress Zoe Simon for the part of Mia, played in the film by Thurman.
The biggest change from the original screenplay is that drug addiction has been swapped for a raging addiction to The Simpsons – the characters get high by wearing headgear that wires them into an episode of The Simpsons. The dealer, Lance, played in the film by Eric Stoltz, deals out episodes such as “The Vegetarian Episode” (when Lisa becomes a vegetarian) as a hit for addicts.
“It plays on our dependence on both The Simpsons and modern technology,” Davey explains. “Mia ends up overdosing because she has a more powerful computer system and when she ‘fixes’ a particularly intense episode of The Simpsons, it causes her to go into convulsions. So we kept the scene with the needle and the adrenalin shot – which in the film brings her back from the edge of a drug overdose.”
Davey aims to match the film’s intensity by dispensing with a stage, so that the action takes place directly in front of the audience. It helps that Davey has acquired realistic toy weapons, and that the bloodpacks have just the right mix of treacle, liquid stain remover and food colouring – “It took a while to get it. At one point there was too much liquid stain remover; and the food colouring disappeared too fast.”
Some scenes left out of the original film, such as a fight involving Bruce Willis’s Butch, is included in this stage version. “The fight in the film is an incident that we only hear about over the radio in the back of a taxi,” Davey says. “I’ve always wondered why Tarantino didn’t use that wonderful opportunity for a fight in a boxing ring? We are using karate, t’ai chi and tai kwon do, compressed into a three-minute live-combat fight.”
Davey, a film buff who claims to have seen nigh on every feature film released since 1980, adds: “I’ve not only been entertained, but I have learnt my craft from it.” He has completed a screenplay about John Lennon, and is not eager to take Pulp Fiction on a tour around Britain, even if it is a hit. “With 21 actors and 21 scenes, this Pulp Fiction consumes me. I need to take a break from it and focus on the other creative projects buzzing around in my head.”
CHARLOTTE CRIPPS
HAM & HIGH
March 12 2004
NEWS
Pulp Fiction meets Camden Underworld
An ambitious stage version of the cult film comes to a nightclub near you, writes Jonathan Marciano
CAMDEN Town nightclub The Underworld is to host an ambitious stage vers9ion of Quentin Tarrantino’s cult film Pulp Fiction.
The venue of Camden High Street, which usually plays to a teen metal and punk crowd, will be turned into a theatre for the first time in history.
Tarrantino’s 1994 hit film is famous for its witty dialogue, graphic, blackly comic violence and drugs references as it follows the fortunes of a two gangland hitmen, a gangster’s moll, and a host of other lowlife characters. Pulp Fiction - Live, which opens on March 31 for three nights, is the first time the film has been staged in England. Producer and director of the production, Andre Michael Davey, said “The Underworld has exactly the right energy to support the show because it is not traditional theatre.”
Fans of the film can expect some departures from Tarrantino’s original, with the cast reflecting London ethnicity.
“We have made Marssellus Wallace (the gangster boss in the film) the don of London,” said Mr Davey. “It is really his club. We hope it will help the audience to believe the story more fully.” The director overcame the limitations of staging 21 interlocking scenes, incorporating dizzying shifts of time and location.
“It posed a challenge,” said Mr Davey. “But people will watch, say, the fight scene with Butch (played in the film by Bruce Willis), which has cut out of the film and can sit or stand and smoke and drink as if it is happening for real.
“The action happens all around you. When a man has his head blown off it happens in the cloakroom. The audience has to constantly turn their heads between scenes.” Unusual production twists include casting actresses to play Butch and the Wolf (played by Harvey Keitel in the film). The two charismatic hitmen played by John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson will have London accents. Classic scenes, notably the Jack Rabbit Slims Twist Contest dance-off, are revised: the music will come from Outcast rather than Chuck Berry. Mr Davey said: “The Dance moves are similarly bad.”
John Viner, promoter at The Underworld said: “It is a dark film set in a murky underworld and a basement in London suits the play perfectly.”
Camden New Journal
25 March 2004
PREVIEW
Pulp Fiction – Live!
The Underworld night-club in Camden Town may seem an unlikely venue for theatre but from Wednesday it will be playing host to a new stage version of Quentin Tarantino’s violent cult classic Pulp Fiction, writes Dan Cressey.
Never before shown in the UK the production sees the story relocated to London and performed by local actors.
Directed by Andre Michael Davey aka Mandrepheus Androgon it promises to be “live, violent and explicit”.
The Camden High Street venue – more used to holding packed weekend club nights – will be temporarily transformed into the hideout of Pulp Fiction’s top gangster Marcellus Wallace.
The movie’s graphic scenes – including the moment in the film when Uma Thurman has adrenalin injected directly into her heart – will be recreated with various special effects, including blood packs.
Although few scenes have been cut the dialogue has been given a regional twist and the cast will not be affecting American accents.
Mandrepheus is hoping to attract new theatre-goers, he said: “I think we can promise the audience everything they loved about the movie and more.”
The Underworld’s bar will also be open for those who find it all a bit too much.
THE LOCK
Issue 26 March/April 04
NEWSFRONT
PULP FICTION LIVE!
Don’t miss ‘Pulp Fiction – Live!’ – a theatrical recreation of the Quentin Tarantino celluloid cult classic that promises to be a strange and very entertaining evening.
Staged at The Underworld, actors perform alongside the audience. The action moves all over the large club leaving theatre-goers feeling they have entered the movie.
The play has been brought over from the States by producer/director Andre Michael Davey aka Mandrepheus Androgon where it played to rave reviews. One critic, Ron Foley MacDonald of the Daily News, said: “this play changes Pulp Fiction into a relentless theatrical experience that practically swallows its audience whole. The effect is electrifying.
“Mandrepheus Androgon brilliantly splits the action so that It occurs in and around the elevated spaces of the club. Nothing, however, prepares you for the explicitness of sex and violence (which, like in the film is both shocking and funny) when it occurs in the same space next to you. Fast pacing and imaginative staging comes completed with fake blood, ear splitting gunshot sound effects and lots of moaning and groaning during the sex scenes. This play is definitely not for the faint of heart. Of course, neither was the movie.”
INSPIRATION FOR INDEPENDENT TRAVELLERS
TNT MAGAZINE
United Kingdom
March 29 2004 Issue 1074
STAGE
CURTAIN CALL
PULP FICTION LIVE
Remember feeling like you had an adrenaline-filled hypodermic needle plunged into your own chest the first time you saw Pulp Fiction? A live performance of the Quentin Tarantino cult classic promises to recreate that sensation when it hits the Underworld club in Camden Town on March 31. “It doesn’t lose the edge at all,” says producer and director Andre Davey. “It’s an intense, explicit and violent night of theatre.”
A direct to stage translation of the 1994 film, the show has all the familiar elements – the obligatory witty dialogue about “Le Big Macs”, “foot massages” and “charmin’ motherfucker pigs”. The no-holds-barred drug references and the graphic violence (five litres of fake blood are spilled during each performance).
There are, however, some minor departures from the original screenplay. A fight scene with Butch (Bruce Willis in the film) which was cut from the big screen version has been reinstated, Travolta and Jackson’s hitmen will have London accents and Outkast, rather than Chuck Berry, provides the music for the Jack Rabbit Slims Twist contest.
The jigsaw that is the story of Pulp Fiction has been reshuffled a bit too – but, according to Davey, that’s the beauty of Tarantino’s work: “He taught us that there is no correct way or order to tell a story. You can mix things up a bit.”
Davey says Pulp Fiction fans will love the live treatment in the club setting, because the action plays out around the audience, hitting them from every angle. “A man has his head blown off in the cloakroom while the audience are standing at the bar. At the dance-off, it’s like [the audience] is actually there.”
Damian Pointon
THE STAGE
April 8, 2004
Reviews
Theatre
Pulp Fiction – Live!
Camden Underworld, London
March 31-April 3
Authors: Quentin Tarantino, Roger Avary
Director: Mandrepehus Androgon
Producer: Purple Octogon
A whiff of pretension surrounding the production – oozing through the publicity material – does not make Pulp Fiction – Live! an attractive proposition.
It has a hint of the misguided, earnest drama post-graduate about it. Certainly Mandrepheus Androgon lacks the more experienced practitioner’s understanding of pace – the dance scene and the scene in boxer Butch (Sam Burke) and her lover Fabienne’s (Ruth Mortimer) bedroom could have been trimmed. There are some outstandingly poor performances too. While some of the people in the minor parts are making their theatrical debut, the weak performance by Roberto Peter as lead role Vincent Vega is inexcusable and makes the opening scene – sparklingly written by Quentin Tarantino – drag.
Therein lies the production’s main problem. Pulp Fiction is a consummate piece of film-making that revived John Travolta’s career (he played Vega) and made stars of Ving Rhames and Samuel L. Jackson in the roles of Marsellus Wallace and Jules Winnfield. Steve Trister and Hamza Mohsin cannot be expected to emulate their performances but will be compared.
But both swap US accents for London, a wise move, and certainly Trister gives a strong performance. Zoe Simon, as Mia Wallace, adopts an American brogue and gives the production’s outstanding performance, closely followed by Burke as female kick-boxer Butch Coolidge.
Androgon’s decision to change some of the characters’s genders – Butch and gangster troubleshooter The Wolf, played menacingly by a rubber-clad Laura Cornelius – brings added depth and his inspired use of the promenade space makes it a unique theatrical experience.
Jeremy Austin