Nothing to Write About?

Quite a few people have thought that now the shows are all running along that I will have nothing to write about, which is an interesting viewpoint, especially when it comes from another actor! Nothing in live theatre ever really stays the same, it should never get samey, in that we all turn up and do our job still dragging behind us the day we've had. The warm-up is meant to dispel all that but we are all affected by things and some of those don't go away easily.  Of course no-one can ever do  scenes exactly as they did them yesterday (trying to do that is deadly, creating a very lopsided performance because the audience is never the same!).  Obviously the lines are the same ( they should be of course but let's not forget human error; no-one's perfect!),  the blocking and moves etc, but how you say them come out a little different every time- if you're doing it right- because you're hopefully in a state of 'finding' them for the first time.  It's a bit like when we did art at school with Mrs. Rogers.  She was a big fan of getting us to sit around a dispiriting pile of mouldering fruit, sad potted geraniums and assorted engine parts with pencil & paper in hand, our challenge to produce a colourful and life-like image of the still life in front of us.  Uninspiring the first time to say the least.  Once you realised that she would then set you further challenges using extracts of that same still life for the rest of the year, you began to really hate that sorry pile of detritus quite a lot.   So, how to remain inspired by a shriveled apple,  oily crankshaft or droopy geranium?  Pretend that you've never seen it before. Ever. This also allows the mind to really go to work with the eye and you find yourself noticing things about everyday objects that you've never noticed before.  So too with the notion of playing a part for the nth time. You play the game of, "I've never said this before or had this happen to me before" before you hit the stage and all being well, a freshness and liveliness comes across, making the audience sit forward and get involved.  Of course you might trip over as you come on stage or, as one of my fine colleagues did the other night, bash yourself in the face with the door that you are opening yourself (stagecraft!) and that can throw all your 'alive freshness' preparation out of the window. At that point you're just grateful that the brain and the mouth keep working sufficiently to get your line out! It's great to be working with actors who are alive to the things that can go wrong and who leave room for the audience to be a part of some of those things and share in the whole silliness of pretending to be in the 1950's or Dickens' London.  I tell you, you have to stay humble to be good in this game. You can eliminate all kinds of potential mistakes but at the end of the day, if you trip over your own feet when playing the king or president, you have to laugh!
Aside from all this theory is always the weirdness of the practice and how people in the audience will see things in a performance that you may never have intended or considered. That's another reason why I love this game; you really can't second-guess what an audience will think of something. We can get caught up in the macro-audience reaction of laughs; some actors get quite preoccupied with those- but a chance conversation in the cafe afterwards and you get all kinds of responses that remind you that there is always more than one point of view about the events witnessed. It's good to encounter people who are happy to tell you what they thought of your character or the play, and often they will not think that you have any feelings to be hurt or that they might be causing any offense... Here in a small community like Keswick everyone now is getting accosted in the supermarket or chemists by happy customers keen to pass on their enjoyment of the plays they've seen. Even some of my very experienced show-biz chums up from that-there London have really enjoyed the experience of seeing the same actors play different parts on consecutive nights in the same theatre. It is a rarity these days as I've said but it shouldn't be! Folk love it.
This week ahead holds a busier than usual turn-around for all as the theatre hosts a residential week at Higham Hall for theatre-lovers. We'll be doing more matinees than usual and the stage crew will be earning their keep, changing shows on the same day and then again for the next day, so that people can see as many plays in the shortest amount of time. Phew. A mini festival if you will. I don't know how they do it. I was recently visited by a friend who did the old-style weekly rep where it was described as 11 plays in 11 weeks... I need a lie down just thinking about that! That must surely be a consolation for the mighty Maggie Tagney who gets to play 9 shows this week to  our humble 7. It's the luck of the draw in this rep system! At least we're not missing the sun while we're indoors for all that time...