‘Charlie Peace: His Amazing Life And Astounding Legend’ debuts at the Nottingham Playhouse on Friday 4^th October 2013 and runs until Saturday October 19^th.

Written by Michael Eaton MBE, all the projections used on the play’s sets have been designed by comics’ own Eddie Campbell – indeed Charlie Peace was originally conceived of between the two as a graphic novel!

You can find an interview with Michael Eaton on Charlie Peace and new images by Eddie Campbell at http://www.nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk/

Tickets from £7-50 to £27-50 are on sale now! Alternatively phone the Nottingham Playhouse Box Office on 0115 9419419, follow them on Twitter @SkyMirror and even enthuse with the hashtag #charliepeace

“The greatest celebrity villain of the Victorian age, Charlie Peace’s life became legend. He was a master of disguise, an accomplished musician and irresistibly attractive to women.

On the run, having murdered his lover’s husband, he holed up in the warrens of Nottingham’s Narrow Marsh. This modern musical melodrama asks the question why, now as then, are we terrified of crime but fascinated by criminals?”

 

 

I still want to see that graphic novel, please!

The Amazing Remarkable Mister Campbell

All of which gives me the perfect excuse to pitch you Eddie Campbell’s glorious graphic novels. Hurrah! Please click on any of the titles for the full review – and even to buy, if you fancy!

Alec: A Life-Size Omnibus boasts 640 pages of autobiography arranged into a sweeping tapestry of love, lust and drunken misdemeanours; ambitions, self-doubt and self-deprecation, observing human behaviour in all its foibles and cogitating on its wider implications. Published over many years as separate graphic novels, one of the more recent sections comes in the form a “letter” sent by Eddie Campbell as a successful artist to himself in his early twenties telling him how to get where he is today.

Once collated, I described it as “the single finest body of work in comics anywhere in the world to date” – which is a pretty good cover copy!

The Playwright, written by Darren White then drawn and painted by Eddie Campbell, is a comedic study in social inadequacy and sexual anxiety, depicting the imaginary sex life of a celibate man, libidinous beyond his middle-aged years.

The Lovely Horrible Stuff is money. It’s also more autobiography, because Eddie Campbell is useless with it.

The Fate Of The Artist, meanwhile, is a big bag of mischief for it is a multi-layered fiction disguised as autobiography, in which Eddie Campbell has gone missing. Clue: the artist is very much alive – you can tell by his set designs for Michael Eaton.

From Hell, written by Northampton’s Alan Moore, is the harrowing tale of a respected surgeon’s execution of a royal cover-up, fuelled by his Masonic obsession with carving a male sigil across the heart of Victorian London by slaughtering the women of the street. It is a bleak, unsanitised, dark and stark London which Campbell scratches indelibly on your mind.

The From Hell Companion is a wit-ridden exploration by Eddie Campbell of that graphic novel’s composition based on the original scripts of Alan Moore. Along the journey Eddie explains his approach to each segment while expounding on his wider theories about comics’ construction from individual pages’ layout to what is required and what should be avoided in any work’s climax and conclusion.

A Disease Of Language features Eddie’s two adaptations of Alan Moore’s performance pieces and an extensive interview with the man which is very, very funny.

The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard composed by Eddie and Dan Best is a romp in the vein of Voltaire’s Candide. Its protagonists constantly pray “May nothing occur…”, only to discover that everything that could possibly occur – and quite a lot that couldn’t – occurs.

Next year, I pray, will finally see Campbell’s modern (and ancient) mythology Bacchus reprinted as two volumes, each the size of the Alec Omnibus!

Eddie Campbell was born and bred in Scotland, moved down south and then further south still to Australia.

– Stephen

 

 

 

 

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