Out Of My Head

Come and join Alan Watts, hippie philosopher and pioneer of the counterculture, for his last night on Earth. Also, join Jeremy Stockwell for his 23,517th and beyond. 

In his Californian hilltop hideaway, Alan Watts contemplates his mortality and his life as a freewheeling guru and spiritual rogue. From his hospital bed, Jeremy Stockwell imagines what might have been if he had met his hero. What results is an intriguing, funny, sad, strange, and unexpected tale, a wild ride through an eccentric landscape of Love, Sex, Vodka, and Mortality.

Lifelong Watts enthusiast Jeremy Stockwell has written and now performs this original and curious show that explores freedom of thought and behaviour in a morally ambiguous world. Presented with the full support of the Alan Watts Estate, the play will appeal to both aficionados of Watts, and those yet to discover his enduring brand of philosophy.

The play previews as a work in progress at the Cockpit before enjoying a run of a fully-fledged production at The Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Monday 14th to Saturday 19th April - 7:30pm
Plus a matinee on Wednesday 16th - 3:00pm

Written and performed by Jeremy Stockwell
Directed by Terry Johnson

Original music and musical arrangements by Burnham & Smith

There is a Q&A after the show on Tuesday 15th April.

Alan Watts

Popular British philosopher and godfather of counterculture, Alan Watts (1915-1973) was a dynamic and prolific writer, speaker, broadcaster and early interpreter of Eastern thought. As a bright and precocious C of E schoolboy, he declared himself Buddhist and was invited to lecture at the Buddhist Lodge in London. The organisers were very surprised when a uniformed schoolboy turned up. But they took him to heart, and he became secretary of the organisation at the age of just sixteen. Watts was soon mixing with a wide range of influential thinkers and spiritual teachers of the day - including Christmas Humphries, Mitrinovic, and T.D. Suzuki. Eschewing university, he relocated to America in the late nineteen thirties to study for the priesthood and went on to become chaplain at North Western University, but he eventually quit the church in the early nineteen fifties and took up academic posts, including professor and then Dean of the Academy of Asian studies. He went on to publish a very successful range of books on comparative religious beliefs and philosophical ideas including Zen Buddhism, Vedanta, and the Tao. These include The Book on The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, The Wisdom of Insecurity, and Man, Woman, Nature. His choice to write in a non-academic easy to understand poetic prose style endeared him to his readers the world over. He embarked on a life-long series of lecture tours on subjects as wide-ranging as ecology, economy, politics, metaphysics, and the environment. TV and Radio success followed in the nineteen sixties and early seventies. Watts had three wives - not all at the same time -and seven children. In later years he split his time between his houseboat in Sausalito, California, and his hilltop hideaway cabin in an artistic community known as Druid Heights. As his popularity grew so did his reputation as a free-thinking, liberated trickster guru, part showman, part shaman, but a wholly unique and genuine individual whose positive and creative influence on the Beat and the Hippy movements continue to echo out into our world today. For more on Alan Watts, see www.alanwatts.org.
 

Jeremy Stockwell

Jeremy Stockwell is an actor, writer, coach and theatre maker. He recently played Ken Campbell in Terry Johnson’s KEN (Hampstead Theatre and Edinburg Festival), Spike Milligan in A Sockful of Custard (Pleasance, Edinburgh Fringe) with Chris Larner, and, in collaboration with Clown Tweedy, played Vladimir in Waiting for Godot and Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Everyman Theatre Productions and on tour. www.jeremystockwell.co.uk

Terry Johnson

Terry Johnson is a playwright and director. He is the recipient of a dozen major theatre awards including the Tony Award for Best Director of a Musical for La Cage Aux Folles.
In recent years he has had fourteen productions running in London’s West End; Mrs Henderson Presents, End Of The Rainbow, The Prisoner Of Second Avenue, The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice, La Cage Aux Folles, Rainman, Whipping It Up, One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest, Hitchcock Blonde, Entertaining Mr Sloane, The Graduate, Dead Funny, Hysteria, Elton John's Glasses and The Memory Of Water. He is a former Literary Associate at the Royal Court Theatre and is exceedingly proud that his play Hysteria was featured on their 50th Anniversary mug.

Some reviews for Jeremy Stockwell and Terry Johnson’s previous collaboration, KEN

One of the things that Johnson and Stockwell do best is surprise us with out-of-the-blue moments, and we wonder if they are real or whether they just made a mistake. Thecharm of this chiefly British play is that every show is unique due to its interactive nature and its bits of improvisation – the audience are going to share laughs and moments that won’t be repeated.

**** The Upcoming

This hints at hallucination as the man himself comes back to life in an extraordinary assumption by Jeremy Stockwell, a mime, mimic and clown who’s a dead ringer for Ken only because he chooses to be. When he drops into other characters, for instance a wickedly spot-on Trevor Nunn, his Campbell disappears from view. All the world’s a stage for Stockwell as he smashes through the audience and crashes his lines with gleeful abandon.

**** What’s on Stage

Jeremy Stockwell recreates the old bounder before our very eyes. There's the nasal twang, the lives-of-their-own eyebrows, the iron-clad self-confidence. And also the wit, the generosity, the embracing of risk. The man emerges from behind the obsessive desire to perform, to provoke, to proclaim. Of course, the two old hands are at their best when Stockwell fluffs a line and it all goes meta with ad libs, audience participation (not scary though) and an excursion off-piste that we could happily have watched all night.

**** Broadway W