The first Hoipolloi Podcast!

The Hoipolloi Podcast is fully up and running. And in our first proper podcast we are launching a new series called Stefanie Muellers Word of the Week!

Steffi is Hoipolloi’s Associate Director. A woman of many talents, she designs all of Hoipolloi’s productions, performs in most of them and helps Shon out with directing. Now, via our new Podcast and this Blog, she’s going to be showcasing another talent, reigning supreme as the Queen of Vocabulary.

Steffi is Swiss and speaks more languages than I care to acknowledge (embarrassed as I am that my appalling schoolboy French is as close as I’ve come to escaping my Anglophone comfort zone.) Perhaps this is why she’s so interested in curious-sounding or obscure English words, of which she has amassed a rather large collection. Some are fairly common words, which Steffi hadn’t heard before but which appealed to her immediately. Others fit less easily into one’s quotidian idiom.

The precise purpose of this assemblage of semantic sensations has never been entirely clear. Although in the Podcast, Steffi explains that there’s a fun game to be played, whereby you give someone a word and they have to guess or invent its definition. Eventually you try to work all these newly-created nonsenses into your everyday vocabulary. (Edward Lear would have been proud.)

Simon and I are super-excited about our new Podcast-making equipment and we’ll be working hard to bring you aural treats as often as possible. Simon will be boarding a plane in the next few hours as he travels to Australia to join Hugh Hughes. Keep your ears peeled for another Podcast, coming soon from Down Under!

Click here to download Hoipolloi Podcasts via iTunes.

Many thank to El Patojo for the photo!

John Hegley's Hoipolloi Limerick!

Our Artistic Director Shon Dale-Jones just made a small but perfectly formed contribution to John Hegley's Radio 4 documentary There Was a Young Man From Limerick.

It's a lovely little show, featuring a latin limerick allegedly written by Thomas Aquinas, Wendy Cope's limerick version of TS Eliot's The Wastelands, "serious" limericks and lots of discussion of Edward Lear, the much-loved nonsense poet who popularised the limerick and whose work inspired Hoipolloi's show My Uncle Arly.

You can click here to launch BBC iPlayer and listen to the show anytime for the next seven days.

John Hegley introduced Shon in a typically quirky fashion, with this "limerick":

....Shon Dale-Jones
Who write and directs and who hones
Works for the stage
Which inform and engage
And his company Hoipolloi have used some of Edward lear's limericks in the creation of a biographical drama.

We'd like to thank John Hegley and BBC Radio 4 for inviting Shon onto the show.

I hope you get chance to listen on iPlayer this week if you didn't catch it first time round!

There Was a Young Man From Limerick

Tomorrow, Hoipolloi's Artistic Director, Shon Dale-Jones, will be featured on a Radio 4 documentary about limericks. The show has been put together by John Hegley, the renowned performance poet, who has ammassed a legion of fans over the years (inluding Shon!) with his uniquely comic and quirky performances.

John Hegley is famous for his humourous rhymes and feelgood performances. Recurring motifs of his writing include dogs, his hometown Luton and glasses. In one recent show, he invited everyone in the audience who was wearing glasses to join him on stage for a "glasses dance", and he regularly rants against the "deserters" who opt for contact lenses!

Shon has admired John's work for years and was delighted to be invited onto the show. The two of them met up recently to record some musings on their mutual love of limericks.

The limerick, of course, was popularised in the 1860s by Edward Lear, whose nonsense verse inspired Hoipolloi's show My Uncle Arly. Arly is about to go back out on tour - click here for my recent Blog post with all the tour details.

There Was a Young Man From Limerick will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 11.30am on Tuesday 24 February. You'll be able to listen again on iPlayer for a week after the show is broadcast.

The Dong With the Luminous Nose flies to LA

Posted by David Ralfe (Marketing & Admin. Assistant, Hoipolloi)


The Dong With the Luminous Nose and The Pobble With No Toes will soon be flying to Los Angeles, as Hoipolloi revives its comic and colourful production My Uncle Arly: a show based on the nonsense poetry of Edward Lear.

First performed in 2002, My Uncle Arly has been one of Hoipolloi's most popular shows. It was nominated for a Total Theatre Award in 2003. It was also the first Hoipolloi show I ever saw, back when I was seventeen!

The tour has been organised in association with WebPlay, a company which allows primary school children in Britain and America to talk online, and discuss a play which will be performed in both of their countries. This year's project will link London with Los Angeles.

The first performances of My Uncle Arly will be at the Unicorn Theatre from 11 to 13 March. Then the company will be flying to Los Angeles to perform at UCLA from 27 to 29 March.

To get you in a silly mood, I'll leave you with a stanza from my favourite Edward Lear poem, The Dong With the Luminous Nose. (Click here to read the whole thing.)

Slowly it wanders,pauses,creeeps,
Anon it sparkles,flashes and leaps;
And ever as onward it gleaming goes
A light on the Bong-tree stems it throws.
And those who watch at that midnight hour
From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower,
Cry, as the wild light passes along,
'The Dong! the Dong!
'The wandering Dong through the forest goes!
'The Dong! the Dong!
'The Dong with a luminous Nose!'

Gorey details

Posted by David Ralfe (Marketing & Admin. Assistant, Hoipolloi)

Here at Hoipolloi Headquarters we’re putting the finishing touches to plans for The Doubtful Guest’s next UK tour. The company are extremely excited about getting back on the road, the show was a huge success when it toured for the first time earlier this year and we hope to see lots more of you in Plymouth, Southampton, Cambridge, Leeds and Cardiff. The full tour schedule will be posted here in the next few days.

The show is based on a book by Edward Gorey, an artist, illustrator and writer who is something of a cult figure in America, although still relatively unknown in the UK. Here are five things Hoipolloi pack in their suitcases to keep them in a Gorey mood when they’re out on tour...


1) Tim Burton DVDs:
Tim Burton, director of films like Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride, acknowledges Edward Gorey as a major influence on the melancholic, macabre aesthetic of his own work.

2) Fur coats:
Gorey attended every single performance of the New York City ballet between 1957 and 1982, where he was made notoriously conspicuous by the enormous fur coats he wore to the theatre. He draws lots of his characters wearing similarly decadent outfits.

3) Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats:
Gorey illustrated an edition of this book by T.S. Eliot (here's a picture) as well as works by Edward Lear, Samuel Beckett and Muriel Spark.

4) A Grammy-nominated concept album:
In 2003, London three-piece band The Tiger Lillies released an album called The Gorey End. Edward Gorey had enjoyed one of their songs so much that he sent them a box of his unpublished stories and invited The Tiger Lillies to write some songs around them. The album was nominated for a Grammy!

5) Health and Safety manual:
Gorey’s stories are full of dreadful accidents and unexpected deaths... In The Gashlycrumb Tinies we learn that “S is for Susan who perished of fits”, whilst “T is for Titus who flew into bits”.


Here’s hoping that The Doubtful Guest tour will be a little less accident prone than your average Edward Gorey story! Make sure you book a ticket, or you’ll end up like Neville who died of ennui.

Here's a video trailer for the show:




If you’d like to find out more about Edward Gorey, these websites are a great place to start:

Edward Gorey House
The Guardian's Obituary of Edward Gorey
The Gashlycrumb Tinies
Some more extracts from Edward Gorey stories

A Gorey Discovery...

Posted by Shon Dale-Jones (Artistic Director, Hoipolloi.)

When Hoipolloi toured My Uncle Arly to the USA in March 2005 I was interested to find out how popular Edward Lear was over there. I went into a children’s bookstore to look for one of his titles, but couldn’t find one, so I asked the shop attendant whether or not they stocked any Edward Lear.

She said, “Is he the guy Edward Gorey did some illustrations for? I think he is”, and walked towards one of the bookshelves in the corner of the shop. She handed me a collection of Edward Gorey’s illustrations – which included one for Edward Lear’s, "The Jumblies."

Before I knew it I had looked through the whole book and was asking the shop attendant for more Edward Gorey. She found five or six of his titles and I spent the next hour immersed in his work.

By the time I left the USA later that month I’d bought every title I could find in every bookstore I walked into. On the plane journey home I kept returning to The Doubtful Guest and got hooked on the world of this illustrated story.

Edward Gorey’s fantastical imagination and creation of unusual and biologically questionable creatures are perfect inspiration for the theatrical world of Hoipolloi.

We are approaching the tone of the illustrations, the world of the family and their house and the magical nature of the doubtful guest itself. The more we work on it the more we find. We are continually surprised how much there is to discover through this story.

We very much look forward to our continued work on this project. We are excited by what is emerging and feel privileged to be working with such powerful and fantastic source material.