Or is it? Suddenly fake news is all the rage, and what exactly were the Russians up to in the American and French presidential elections? I feel a sudden fit of paranoia coming on. Just as I sat with Brian Aldiss through Illuminatus! so I sat with Prunella Gee through Cosmic Trigger, relishing what now seems to be a theatrical and cultural message in a bottle from another planet. Actors in Cosmic Trigger are summoned to the stage on their 23-minute call, the show ending – after suggesting that Bob Wilson be remembered alongside James Joyce and Aldous Huxley as one of the great exponents of realigned, or redefined, fiction – in a shower of $23 bills. The importance of the pentad was honoured in the Illuminatus! construction of five plays, each written in five segments designed to run for 23 minutes each. Peter Hall had rejected Campbell’s invitation to come and play God in the show for three minutes but he loved Illuminatus! and invited it, and Campbell’s company – which included Gee, Chris Langham, David Rappaport, Jim Broadbent and Bill Nighy – to open the National Theatre’s Cottesloe auditorium in March 1977 the recorded voice of a speaking computer was that of John Gielgud. There’s a wonderful moment in the new play when their fictional representation of the discordian anarchist Hagbard Celine (also played by Skinner) bursts on to the poop of his yellow submarine on a mock-up of the rickety stage at the Science Fiction theatre of Liverpool in Mathew Street, right next to the old Beatles haunt, the Cavern, where Illuminatus! premiered.Ĭosmic Trigger is in part an echo chamber of what Brian Aldiss, the sci-fi novelist and Campbell enthusiast, described as “a long strip-cartoon of every possible 20th-century phobia, something Bertrand Russell and Genghis Khan might have cooked up while sitting down to write Monty Python”. The assassination of JFK was the cosmic trigger for the notion, as far as the two Bobs were concerned, that the illuminati were responsible for every conspiracy theory going. Other words of wacky wisdom are provided by Bob Shea (Tom Baker) as he and the other Bob are inducted in the League of Dynamic Discord with its motto of “liberation through paranoia” and by Lee Ravitz as wild man Kerry Thornley who was linked to Lee Harvey Oswald by what one US prosecutor described in court as “the most fantastic chain of coincidences ever”.
#Prunella gee serial
“LSD can bring about psychotic behaviour in those who have not taken it,” is one of many striking lines in the play, this one uttered by Jethro Skinner as the Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, prime advocate of LSD and coiner of the catchphrase, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Shabby Tiger (ITV 1973, Prunella Gee, John Nolan) Published 6 years ago on ApPeriod drama serial Shabby Tiger took us back to the early 1930’s where Irish servant girl Anna Fitzgerald gets involved in Manchester bohemian life after falling for artist Nick Faunt.
Indeed, it turns out the shamans are sham. ‘LSD can bring about psychotic behaviour in those who have not taken it,’ … a scene from Cosmic Trigger.
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