St Michael and All Angels Church, Church Broughton, Staffs

I have never before performed in a Church.  To be honest, I've never wanted to.  My shows about the challenges of modern family life aren't all tea and toast and I've worried that occasional blasphemies or references to bodily functions might be inappropriate in places of worship.  However, last night I had no choice as the booking was made on my behalf.  In rehearsal I discovered that during the show I took the Lord's name in vain on three separate occasions and used other impolite expletives on three others. Indeed, there is a whole scene dedicated to the use of a family swearbox.  This worried me, and over the course of the week I have experimented with the substitution of other words.   I'll have to give an example, if you'll mind my language.  At one point I say as if to a 5 year old "For Christ's sake, Freddie, get that bloody thing off me." referring to a snail which has got stuck to my face.  I considered substitutions for Christ and bloody.  They needed to be rude words at least because that line is immediately followed by the imposition of a fine for swearing.  Running through my mental dictionary of swearwords I realised that every alternative would actually be worse.  You have to try it. Substitute Christ and bloody in the sentence for bodily functions/sexual acts and the sentence becomes far more offensive, viz.  "FFS Freddie, get that sh***y/p***ing thing off me."  So I stuck with Christ and bloody and braced myself for an enraged gasp from the audience.    Luckily it didn't come.


I always think it's a good idea to appear relaxed before a show when talking to the promoter.  It's a trick I learned as a barrister:  Never good to show the client that you are nervous.  So before the audience gathered I chatted to the Church Warden and he told me a story about the bats in the belfry which come out when the heating is on at night.  Bats!?!  I have inherited an irrational fear of bats from my father who claimed to have got one caught in his hair as a young man.  I really didn't fancy the idea of bats swooping and diving at me during my show (though one consolation would have been that any involuntary expletives would have been in character, I suppose).  Luck was with me once more, however, and the bats remained in the belfry throughout the performance. 


The Church had been equipped with a makeshift stage.  It was rather small, so I improvised  and incorporated the pulpit into the performance, making it double as a bedroom.  (I know!)  I walked up and down the steps a couple of times and felt that this new layout worked really well.  The organisers had been very concerned that I should not trip or graze my shins on the edges of the Church structure and furniture and reminded me more than once to be careful.  "Oh I'll be fine." I said airily, pumped full of adrenalin just before the show went up. After the Church Warden's introduction the houselights went down, the stage lights went up, my cue to enter was played over the sound system and I descended from my pulpit boudoir, caught my foot on the edge of the staging and stumbled into the limelight, narrowly avoiding a fall flat on my face.  Third time lucky?  No chance.  I was in a Church, after all, wherein superstition has no place. 

Tutbury - lost prop

So there I am in Tutbury, Staffs setting up the props for a performance of Double Booked.  Feel quite relaxed and looking forward to the show.  Suddenly realise a prop is missing.  I obviously left it behind at a venue in Sussex last week.  A copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larrsen.  It's an important prop.  The fact that it is written by a Scandinavian author whose gender and sexual orientation are hard to determine from his name, if you don't already know them, is a joke in the show.  Probably one of those "you need to be there" moments.  Panic!  All the shops will be shut.   Nevertheless I set off to the high street , confident that I'll find one that is open and selling the book.  Turns out that Tutbury doesn't have many shops, certainly none that are open at that time.  I stride into the likeliest option.
 "Do you sell books?"
 "Magazines?"
 "No, not magazines, real books."  (I'm getting a bit terse.)
 "Sorry, no, just magazines."
  I go into the second most likely.
 "Do you have any books?"
"No, just fish and chips here, love."
  I race back to the venue.  It is in a road with houses.  Time is running short.  A girl is outside one of the houses.  I run round.
  "Hello, do you live here?"
 "Well, sort of.   It's not my house but  ..."
  I interrupt.  "Sorry, I'm in a bit of a rush.  Don't explain.  But you live here, right?  So do you have any books."
 "Er, yiss?"   (At this point I detect a foreign accent.)
"Well, look, I'm just wondering if you happen to have any books by Stieg Larrsen.  You, know, the Millennium Trilogy?"
 "Yiss, I do actually, I'm in the middle of reading the third one.  I've got the second one upstairs."
 "Oh, thank god!  Can I borrow it?"
  "Yiss?  Mind if I ask why?"
It's a reasonable question in the circumstances.  I look at my watch.  Curtain up in 45 mins and we haven't done the sound check yet.  I gabble an explanation.
"Oh, that's great." says my foreign new best friend.
"It's not great."  I explain.  "It's an emergency.  Can you possibly lend it to me?  Where are you from by the way?"
"New Zealand.  Yiss sure, I'll go and git it."
She skips upstairs and returns with the book which I fall on avidly, kiss and hug her and dash back to the show.   It's not the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but its by the same author, and that'll do.
During the interval I explore my dressing room which doubles as a store room.  I open a cupboard.  Books ... hundreds of them, are in boxes are piled high.  There's Dan Brown, Maeve Binchy, Joanna Trollope. Somewhere, I know, there's a Girl with a Dragon Tattoo -  I don't have time to look for it now, but I know its there.    How weird is that?  The very thing I needed was almost certainly in the same building all the time.

Tutbury Castle is haunted, you know ... I wonder if the poltergeist had wandered into the village for the night?  I wonder if he'd nipped down to Sussex en route.  They can't find my book at the previous week's venue in Sussex.  If anyone in Tutbury is reading this ... go through those books in the cupboard, I bet The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo is there.

New season - line virus

It's September 2011.  I've had a break and am now looking into the future and wondering if it is possible to perform three different plays on separate nights within a week.  Actually, I am already learning that caution is required.

The first performance of the season was last Saturday.  "Family Matters" in Bulkington.  Last time I went there all my sound and lighting equipment was nicked from the back of the car during the show.  I'm convinced it wasn't Bulkington's fault.  Just a toerag passing through I'm sure. That's all water under the bridge now.  Bulkington conjures other thoughts in my mind now...  egg sandwiches.  The organiser, Fiona and her mum score very highly indeed on the refreshments front and I stepped on stage feeling very well fed and content.   The audience was a little small.  I was competing with a Beer Festival and it seems that Bulkington prefers beer of a Saturday night.  Nevertheless it was a nice night.   I would just ask one small thing of the lady who beat me to the punch line a few times, though.  Would you mind awfully waiting till I've said it too before you say it out loud?

Later in the week I reviewed a play at The Belgrade Theatre in Coventry.  It was the first time I'd been to a play there, and my first review.  The play looked interesting and I settled down to a thoroughly enjoyable evening.  Then something extraordinary happened.   One of the actors messed up a scene and then completely forgot his lines.  I mean, completely.  He didn't just wander around the stage waffling a bit until they came back to him in the magical way that lines sometimes do.  He told us what had happened, left the stage and didn't return for about 20 minutes.   Mystifying.  This was an actor with a pedigree.  He'd performed the same part for a whole run in 2010.  What on earth had happened?  I couldn't understand it.

I'm nowhere near in that actor's league but I'm usually pretty good on lines.  Or, I thought I was ... until Dorridge the following week, last night in fact, when I performed "Ten Days ..." for the umpteenth time.  I must have done sixty odd performances of this show over the years but suddenly, inexplicably, my brain was a gaping void.  It was the same feeling as you get when you go upstairs and can't remember what you went for.  Only this time there were 108 people in the audience.  Luckily for me, my words came magically back as I wandered around the stage waffling.  But now I know it.  Noone's safe.  Maybe this is a virus that I caught at The Belgrade.  Whatever it is, I hope that one bout of it guarantees lifelong immunity. This weekend I'm performing "Double Booked" and I'll do without the gaping void, if that's OK.

Round up of September 2010 - July 2011 season

I am a neglectful parent.  I admit it.  My baby, my blog wasn't fed between April and September 2011.

If I give an account of every performance I'll be here forever.  My baby will burst.  So I'm going to limit myself to one sentence or line describing each performance from April to the end of the summer season.

1. May 2011 - Brighton Fringe - New fringe, new play (10 Questions) , new friends, a new life for the future?  Maybe one day.

2.  May 2011 - Kirtlington - 10 Days - fourth visit to Kirtlington  Much fun trying on the lollipop man's uniform backstage.

3.  May 2011 -Dunchurch - 10 Days - Biggest, best audience ever.  I love you, Dunchurch.  Stay with me.

4.  May 2011 - Hallaton - 10 Days - Classy Leicestershire audience.  Top nibbles.  

5.  May 2011 and June 2011 - Stratford Fringe - 10 Qs and Double Booked:  Most hilarious venue ever.  Low point: Man coming to remove sound system 30 mins before show went up.  High point: Previous performance including a totally genuine proposal of marriage on stage.

6.  June 2011 - Rock - Double Booked - Rock being the apposite word.  Backdrop is a climbing wall.  Acoustic nightmare but you could all hear, couldn't you.  I said "YOU COULD ALL HEAR, COULDN'T YOU?"

7.  June 2011 - Tysoe - 10 Days.  Tysoe,  if I wasn't already promised to Dunchurch you could marry me.  Love you.

8.  June 2011 - Abberley - 10 Days.  Must confess I did arrive feeling a little tired, but the pure air way up high in Abberley lifted my spirits.

9.  June 2011 - Clipston - Double Booked.  Rather an interesting conversation after the show with a lady who called me Ruth.  Somehow I couldn't bring myself to tell her that Ruth's the character I play.  I'm Ginny.  Flattering, I suppose.

10.  June 2011 - Stratford upon Avon - KES - Double Booked.  Do not recommend hearing that your daughter has had a car-write-off crash for relaxation therapy just before you leave home to go to a venue.  Also, next time (if there is one) please could someone remind me about the 85 chimes at 8 pm on a Friday night from the clock right above the venue.

11.  July 2011 -Buxton Fringe - Double Booked.  Best review I've ever had.  Show nominated for Best Theatre Production.  Am now going to take a short holiday.

Brighton Fringe

Review of 10 Questions on Gscene
http://www.gscene.com/arts/index.shtml

Firings

I am intoxicated with power.  Over the past few weeks I have made swingeing cuts to the cast list of Family Matters.  "Hold on"  I hear you say.  "I thought it was a one woman show.  How does that work, then?"  You are right, of course.  It is a one-woman show.  But I am supported by a cast of a thousand props each of which is under constant scrutiny.  Two strikes and you're out is the rule and I regret to report that there have been casualties.

First - the condom.  The whole point of a condom is that it is supposed to make things safe.  It has no other raison d'etre.  The condom in Family Matters has behaved with such blatant and irresponsible care for the safety of the show it simply had to go.  It had a small role.  Maybe that was the problem.  Condoms are brought into this world knowing that they are the last frontier. So maybe being given a minor role was demeaning and the condom decided to make more of its onstage presence.  (Rather like the Nativity play innkeeper who, to Joseph's plea for a room for his travail and heavy laden wife replied "Yes, plenty of rooms, old chap.  Come on in!")  All the condom had to do in Family Matters was be produced from my pocket, be dangled in front of the audience until they laughed and then disappear into the side of the cutlery basket until it could be disposed of later on.    All of that it did.  However, when I came to lay the table I discovered that the condom had stuck itself to a knife.   One hand held the basket, the other hand held the knife.  Accordingly, vigorous shaking was the only way of detaching the condom.  Vigorous shaking is not the normal style of laying a table.  The condom did come off the knife e-ventually,  but from then on it was on its final warning.   The following night the condom fell out of my pocket as I walked onstage.  So, for twenty minutes, I performed the show with this "thing" on the floor near to me.  I ignored it.  But, then I felt something squidgy under my shoe .. and I knew that my next scripted movement was to lift my foot so that the audience could see the sole. What I didn't know was what the squidgy thing was .. and I couldn't look down to verify the whereabouts of the condom because where my eyes go, the audience's tend to follow.  I lifted my foot and prayed that the jonny wasn't attached.  It wasn't.  It was still lying on the floor.  But there has to be trust between the performer and her props and the trust had gone.  And so has the condom.

...followed by the fairy lights.  Stupid of me, I know, to use Christmas fairy lights in a play.  I can't actually think of any domestic piece of kit with a reputation for greater unreliability.  People make jokes about them over the advent sherry.   But the trouble is that the fairy lights usually get a laugh in Family Matters, so they have been worth persevering with, even though every - single - time we have used them, they have let us down.  We turn them on and nothing happens.  We jiggle the wires.  Still nothing. We pull out every bulb.  Nothing. Change the plug.  Zilch.  We ask around.  "Has anyone got a set of fairy lights we can borrow?"  Someone says she thinks she might have some in the loft.  Twenty minutes she returns covered in cobwebs, with her Xmas decoration box.  But in the meanwhile my original set has sprung into twinkly life, so we say "Don't worry.  We're fine now."   Last night, the fairy lights just died.  They got all hot, went phut and expired.  But I can't really do without them, because the laugh is worth keeping.  So tomorrow I'm going into town to buy some more.  That'll be easy.  It's mid April.      

Priors Marston

You may not know this, but I have a thing about Colin Firth.  It started when the television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice was broadcast a few years ago.  No, actually, it wasn't the swimming in the lake scene that got me going.  It was the look that passed between Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett as she played the piano in the drawing room one evening after dinner. A long, lingering look of tentative love.  I paused the programme and took a photograph.  It seemed the most natural thing to do, but everyone laughs when I tell them.

Last night I performed to an audience in a Warwickshire drawing room.  To my regret Colin Firth was not in the audience, not that I was expecting him to be there.  Anyway, he is mentioned in the script which, I reckon, is about as close to my screen idol as I'm ever going to get. 

I thoroughly enjoyed my parlour performance and noted the difference between that and the village hall venues I often visit.   

First there is the green room.  In village halls these vary considerably from kitchen cupboards, hallways, council chambers, toddler group rooms, schoolrooms, staffrooms to ladies loos.  I have learned not to be fussy.  Or I had until last night, when I was afforded a suite:  double bed, magazines, full length mirror,  bath, unguents, wet room, the works.

Then there's the theatre space itself.  You tend to know what you're going to get in a village hall.  Mostly they are the same:  empty spaces that work for birthdays, discos, brownies, yoga, slimmers world meetings and my show.  Last night I was in a  grand and comfortable converted barn with books, soft furnishings and a perfectly sized and fitted stage for a show about family life. 

I could get to like this.. and everyone has a stage in their home, don't they? 

But you have to be careful when performing in someone's home.  Things can happen:  the phone or doorbell can ring.  The cat can wander in.  The dog can bark.  Or, as last night, the dog can come in.  

We are enjoined never to perform with children or animals, and I wasn't planning to.  But during the first scene I heard the padding of paws on the stairs leading to the room and knew that for a moment or two I wasn't the main attraction.  I had no idea at all what was going to happen next.  I knew I could trust the owners to do all in their power to remove the dog, but I didn't know the dog that well. How obedient was she?  How interested in what was happening on stage?  Would the cocoa pops (a prop) prove an irresistible lure?  Auto-pilot kicked in as all these thoughts flooded my mind.  Happily the dog was as well-trained as I could have hoped and I regained my audience's attention as she returned to lie in front of the Aga. 

I'll do it again though ... a parlour performance. And I quite like the excitement of the unexpected .. disconcerting though it can be.  The last time I did it a hen came in through the window.  Not such a well trained hen, either.  But that's another story.