Sunday 24 June 2012

Week Thirteen: Unlucky for some..?

Now there are those in this funny old business who believe firmly in never mentioning that Scottish play, or whistling backstage, or wearing green on a Wednesday or what have you, and those who think that all those funny foibles are just that.  Foibles. This week however, perhaps even the most skeptical viewpoints were challenged, as in both Bedroom Farce and Dry Rot things went awry.. and in Dry Rot's case,  not only in the thirteenth week but on the thirteenth show too..! I mentioned the Bedroom Farce upset last time,  but bear with me if I repeat myself a bit here.

For Bedroom Farcers, we experienced collapse of the sound effects speaker at a crucial point where telephones need to ring, allowing characters to speak to one another. As it's live theatre, it means we're standing very close to one another and could quite easily wander over to have that conversation or simply shout. But we're not in reality, we're playing through walls and over distances. So, what to do? Does the actor 'dialling' decide to make a ringing noise? Or maybe the person at the other end where the actual ringing should be coming from? What if they both decide to and the whole stage erupts in bad telephone impressions? Panic starts to set in. Thankfully it all worked out just fine, with much quick thinking by our Stage Manager Daisy & George Banks who  best placed  to frantically make something up while the problem was solved! He figured out that only his character could feasibly go off to find out the problem, whilst covering his absence with convincing noises and the odd improvised line that made it all pretty 'normal' to the audience. As for Jessica Ellis suddenly left onstage without her 'hubby', clutching a phone that wouldn't ring, well, that's showbiz! Thankfully she could see the funny side of it all and also is a real professional, going with whatever George shouted from the wings and keeping calm...  You can suddenly see where farces come from, especially ones like Noises Off and silly books like The Art of Coarse Acting. There are two kinds of actor when it comes to things like that too. Those who take themselves and this business far too seriously and who would never be seen dead reading a book like that. You have guessed I am not in that camp dear reader! Honestly if you don't laugh at these things that go on you will go bonkers crazy! So much is out of your control in live theatre, that it is best to trust it will all work out in the end!
The Dry Rot kerfuffle began early on in the play, when the beautiful front door of the Bull & Cow hotel, upstage and centre, failed to open.  Stuck fast.  A little crucial in a farce about lots of comings and goings, eh?  In a farce, doors have to open & close and trousers have to come down on cue. That's not too much to ask is it?  The splendid James Duke was onstage at the time, awaiting the arrival of Flash Harry played by the equally splendid Nicholas Goode, while the rollicking ( yes, and splendid)  Chris Hannon was busy being 'drunk' on the floor.  Nicholas dutifully tried to enter through the aforementioned door, failed, so knocked hard, only to have James shout, "It's locked!" Those immortal yet unscripted lines had us all backstage scuttling to the monitors to see what had happened. A ghastly silence ensued as realisation sank in all round. At this point, all the options open to an actor don't always appear as logically as they would in any other walk of life. The collision between a practical problem and the need to keep playing the fictional reality can result in interesting outcomes. The kitchen door was clearly not an option, nor the dining room door as both are interior.  The garden door was a possibility, but if your character never uses it, it can fail to register on the radar. So, instead, the best idea settled on by all parties behind the scenes was the nearest-  the secret panel,-which Flash is not supposed to have any idea of.  Cue much confusion as lines had to be made up to explain the anomaly.  Thankfully, Nick, James & Chris had great fun improvising cheeky little lines to one another ( and the bemused audience) to tie up loose ends as it became clear that the door was utterly jiggered and the show this time, couldn't go on. At this point, on comes the lovely Jo Jones, company stage manager, I hoped, to deliver the line, " Is there a joiner in the house?" but sadly not.  She announced a pause in proceedings to attempt a repair. Having stopped the show, the doughty stage crew did their best to rectify the matter but had in the end to dismantle the latch mechanism, leaving the door swinging gently in the breeze.  At least getting the door open did get a round of applause! Now it's bad not being able to get on stage in a farce, it's just as bad not being able to have the element of surprise provided by a solid object that opens on a hinge. Thankfully, the interval wasn't far away and in that time, new door latches were tracked down & the door back to its previous opening & closing glory. Following that, a few cheeky improvised lines from the boys and on we went back on track!

 So if there are any deities or spirits out there presiding over the world of show and all who sail in her, please let us get through the next few with just the usual scripted chaos and mayhem? Thanks.

Next week, we continue building the world of Roma & the Flanellettes, having been taught our choreography & our harmonies.. now just to find those characters and learn those lines..


Monday 18 June 2012

Week Twelve: A Brave New World..?

Week Eleven and a brave new dawn for some here in the shape of a new play specially commissioned by Richard Cameron for Theatre by the Lake  and also for the main house team, Great Expectations adapted by Neil Bartlett. For us in the new play which will be performed in the studio, we huddled round a table, pencils in hand in the upstairs bar area, while the physical-theatre-created-Dickens crew did dynamic stuff in the main rehearsal room with a movement director and everything.  Roma & the Flanelettes is a play about a challenging subject; the survivors of domestic abuse.  Don't let that put you off! Trust me.   Set in a small community, the very different characters we meet all have tremendous obstacles to overcome, while relief from these challenges comes for them ( & us) in the shape of Motown classics, performed by us as a Karaoke group raising money for good causes. A new play is an exciting prospect and we jumped in, taking our first few steps through the set and beginning to figure out how each of us might dress, sit, react to all the things going on around us etc. My character is an outsider to the Northern  village ( a Southerner no less ) and so my task is to explore that special position, as well as to try to get inside the life of a woman who stayed in a marriage for 15 years, despite her husband's cruelty.  We are incredibly lucky to be offered such a  great opportunity by Richard, as well as his presence in the rehearsal room for this first week, so we spent the round-table talks quizzing him about his creations, with Stefan ( director)  making vital links between us and him, seeing how all the questions & answers will guide us towards the best outcome.  All new plays are uncertain things by definition, but so exciting to be the first climing into something. Virgin turf. Heady & heavy stuff! A difficult subject that is already provoking strong feeling in us all as we try to get inside this world. Next week we'll have crucial input to help us flesh out back stories etc from key workers in this area;  we'll be meeting refuge staff & police liason officers who know this world well.  Meantime, we occasionally pass our colleagues from Bedroom Farce & Dry Rot in the corridor or Green Room and the different atmospheres of both worlds collide; us reeling from a tough scene dealing with Roma's story, them all fizzy and alive with having just been creating Dickens' world with only themselves and a few doors! I jest; they're all doing loads of wonderful things that luckily we will get to see early on for a change as they go into  their tech a week before us. I can't wait to watch my friends & colleagues perform! These strange varying combinations of plays and people you experience when doing a job like this are fantastic and unique to rep.
 And so to the strange combinations of the schedule! Just when we thought we were getting into the swing of switching shows, we realise that the schedule doesn't only change day by day but also week by week. As we rehearse play three, plays one & two take turns to be the Saturday night special, meaning another mental adjustment to the rhythm of shows. You now try to carry alternate weeks' programmes in your head.  Coming back to Bedroom Farce after two weeks of Dry Rot felt scary initially, but once up & running, we enjoyed the new-found feeling of 'play' in the show. Mentally checked off the list of worries, we move merrily back to Dry Rot, only to bump into Bedroom Farce  again on  Saturday night. The relief is that we all felt odd; also relieved that the audience I think are none the wiser as to our slight paranoia! It might be something the director could spot, having seen the play so many times and knowing us well as performers, but this strange phenomenon doesn't reach the paying audience.
Finally, just a big shout out to George Banks whose quick thinking got us through a fairly major technical glitch in Bedroom Farce on Saturday. As I sat in the dark 'bathroom' waiting to go on, I heard lines never written by Mr. Ayckbourn and much additional carpentry offstage courtesy of George.. turns out a vital speaker had failed, leaving us without a pretty important telephone sound effect.. Didn't happen in the good old days, when stage management did everything manually!! Live theatre. You can't beat it. You don't get these thrills watching Corrie.

Saturday 9 June 2012

Week Ten: Mixing it up

As the weeks whistle past ( Week ten!! Where's it all gone??),  we find ourselves swimming in a soup of plays; costumes of various sorts hanging about to remind us of play one, conversations & preparations about play three, perhaps a script from the first knocking about like a talisman, all while performing play two.   The lurking script is a bit like when you were doing exams at school, when you walked around with text books in your bag in some kind of faint hope that all the facts inside would leach through to your brain by osmosis.  So with the script; if it's  sitting there on my dressing table then  the part will be in my head. Honestly.  I should know better!  Well, we'll find  out on Monday whether it's still there when we do a Bedroom Farce run on the set before doing the show properly in front of an audience that night.  Can I remember Susannah?

 In the meantime, we still all share the same dressing room despite being in different plays and the lovely Maggie Tagney- a veteran of several seasons here at TbtL- has to prepare herself for her lead part in Colder Than Here, a very beautiful & moving story of a family coming to terms with terminal illness, while three of us, Jessica Ellis, Zoe Mills & myself all goof about in 'preparation' for Dry Rot. No we don't  really, but the combination could be that odd if things had been different. Instead we get along really well, as Maggie is to us 'our' Delia from Bedroom Farce and her other character is something that  ghost-like passes in & out of the dressing room.  As she enters and leaves getting into character, she picks up odd snatches of Dry Rot over the show relay and has a little chuckle before heading off to join the other cast members of Colder Than Here in more somber mood.  She also has to contend with me climbing into my Sergeant Fire costume, which must be a little off-putting.  The studio cast also have the unique privilege of having to be taken to a holding room before their show begins, as access to and from the Studio is the same way in as the audience. Like condemned felons they get lead off by Stage Management and tucked away ready for lights up.  Jess & I will be in that world when we get in with Roma & the Flanellettes in five weeks' time. It'll be great to be in such an intimate space. All of us in the Dry Rot cast watched the second dress of Colder Than Here on Thursday and it was fantastic, really moving stuff. Great to be invited in to a  closed performance like that!  It's just such a joy to be working in a theatre that has two such contrasting plays on in rep. Talk about from the sublime to the ridiculous! A  rollicking farce and a moving, powerful drama.. take your pick. In a little over a month's time, the full Summer 2012 smorgasbord will be ready & waiting for you to taste! That's if we manage to keep all our actors in one piece. So far in Dry Rot  just about everyone has head-butted someone else accidentally or been head-butted.  Let's not think about all the cuts & bruises and near-falling off the stage moments. All part of the consummate professionalism that oozes from every pore here in the cast. I do actually mean that! We work hard to reduce actual risk, but live theatre always produces minor bumps and bruises, they're inevitable.  I don't want you to go away thinking that we're crashing about  like a herd of near-sighted elephants. Not all of us anyway..!

Meantime, I can't quite believe we've come so far already. All around in my lush digs the trees & flowers are bursting forth, birds are nesting like crazy & those hills & fells need to be climbed! Lots of plans are being made in the company for all sorts of adventures when we have a little free time again & fingers are being crossed for some more sunshine..please! Personal goals are being set. We have  a trip to a petting zoo (don't ask), the seaside for obvious reasons, Ruskin's place,  a whisky distillery (purely scientific research), World  of Owls, etc etc.  Sadly Cars of the Stars in Keswick closed down last year and cleared off to Florida.. Hey ho! There's still the Pencil Museum.
Typically, weather-wise the last few days have been wet to say the least so the hills  have vanished beneath dense cloud; now I know why they talk of rain forest when they describe the vegetation in places here.. so glad I got my wellies! And waterproof trousers.. and waterproof jacket.. and central heating and fleece.. ( It's flaming June so why not?). The incestuous ospreys ( look it up! ) are busy raising their chick and I keep hoping an otter might pop its head up in the Greta at some point.  Maybe next week I'll get up a bit early & see what's out there before heading in to rehearse Roma... maybe.

Sunday 3 June 2012

Week Nine: What's next?

At this stage, it's a little tempting to think that the back of our task here has been broken, with two shows now up and running in front of live audiences & just the one left to get on its feet in the rehearsal room  (and learned! ). Tempting but not true. The interesting mental switch between the two running shows has to be achieved, performing the glorious romp of Dry Rot on a Saturday night for example, then adjusting your mind into the desperately funny but often bleakly comic Bedroom Farce world on the Monday. To add to that,  rehearsals of the third play will sandwich in between those two events, adding another set of character thoughts and attitudes to the mix circling around your skull. Particular challenges again thrown up for us all, because to add to that melange, some parts come to us more easily than others and so not only can the preparation for a part differ from actor to actor, but the individual's own preparations can be wildly different as attitudes & behaviours far from his or her own have to be explored and found before setting foot on stage. That can mean that someone who is perfectly chatty backstage in one production can become reclusive and morose in another. Instead of merrily nattering between scenes, they can be found glowering in a corner. Or in my case, marching up and down obsessively going over & over the ghastly events that happened to my character in Bedroom Farce before we meet her on stage. Sergeant Fire in Dry Rot is mostly the uniform doing the work. All part of the strange magic of creating a character.
The oddness of rep can be brought home to you while waiting to go on stage. Standing backstage during Dry Rot, I can see the walls of Bedroom Farce all tucked up out of harm's way behind giant curtains. In the dressing room, rather unnervingly, Susannah's wig from Bedroom Farce sits expectantly on her stand as I climb into Sergeant Fire's regalia,  leaving the 70's garments for their next outing in a week's time. Everyone is having a ball in Dry Rot, but the other character lovingly created weeks ago is very much a part of you and the costumes start to look rather sad, hanging aimlessly around. Occasionally, we might just have a word with our other characters, reassuring them that we'll be back. Have I mentioned the special kind of madness necessary in this business? All this while, we also hope that the words & moves are all very much in place and will spring back  with very little effort- just a refresher run on Monday afternoon before galloping into that other world again.

The two plays still waiting to have life breathed into them are very different, reflecting Ian & Stefan's shrewd scheduling, giving audiences lots of choice and offering new writers valuable opportunity to be performed. Dickens' Great Expectations adapted by Neil Bartlett will be in the main house while Roma & the Flannelettes will be performed for the first time in the studio space. I will be getting stuck in to that play and working with yet another permutation of the summer season company. I think there's  just one actor I don't get to work with over this season, although who knows what projects bubble up when we have a little time to ourselves? There is already talk of trying out writing projects by various members of the company, even a radio project; another reason why a rep company is such a good thing. It's a melting pot that can provoke all kinds of creative work between actors and trainee directors, anyone who has an idea.
So the week to come represents a little still water relatively speaking, with our days now to ourselves and Dry Rot to play with in the evenings.. what to do? Which hill to climb? Which much-neglected hobby to pursue? Of course, it's bound to rain...