Thursday 5 November 2009

My Life As The Bowl

My first experience of the theatre came in 1979, aged 3, when I featured in the Rainbow Play Group's full-length adaptation of a series of nursey rhymes. I was cast as The Bowl, to Cathy McCoy's The Spoon, and it was my task to run away with her once The Cow had jumped over The Moon. I recall having been desperate to play The Moon, and so it was with bitter resentment that I portrayed some eloping crockery.

I didn't much know what to make of the show while we were rehearsing. Growing up in rural Yorkshire I'd had no cause to visit a theatre before, so the entire concept was alien to me: the stage, the curtains, a large room full of people including my parents. It was hard to imagine what it was all for, and yet still I played my role with panache and as the crowd roared I knew I'd found my calling.

It was some years later - at primary school - that I was next invited to act, in a somewhat confused adaptation of Winnie the Pooh which included a series of non-canon characters like Snow White. I was (along with the rest of the school) desperate to play Tigger, and I recall the night before the cast was announced standing naked in front of my father during bathtime and demonstrating that I was born to the role of Tigger by jumping up and drown frenetically until he pleaded with me to stop. My only anxiety was that the part came with a skin-tight costume, including orange tights decorated with black marker, and I wasn't certain I had the legs for it.

Alas, I was eventually cast as one of the Seven Dwarves and thus relegated to a stupid costume with a bobble hat, with my only job being to stomp around bellowing 'Hi-Ho!' while all of the other characters had fun. My one time friend Nicholas Cheetam was selected to play Tigger, a role he portrayed poorly, and his betrayal drove a wedge between us. We were never friends again .

Come Middle School (aged 10), I was selected to play the much-overlooked role of 'Newspaper Delivery Boy' in an all new adaptation of the Bible's Christ Story. Mrs Rees, the director, otherwise took authenticity seriously and insisted we all black-up with dark brown foundation so we'd look more middle eastern. My task was to hide at the back of the hall and then - halfway through the second scene - stride down the middle of the aisle bellowing "Read all about it! Read all about it! Census called in Bethlehem!" before handing newspapers out to the main characters on stage, thus seamlessly providing their motivation for Scene 3.

I don't recall much more about this production than that a tall blonde girl called Samantha was required to wear a miniskirt and gossip like a harlot, a task so suited to her that she adopted the role permanently in adulthood.

I became much more shy in my later years, and carefully avoided participating in any productions at secondary school. Pelinore Says and South Pacific thus passed me by, until in the sixth form (aged 17) Timothy Brabham and I were invited to write and direct the school pantomime. We'd never written a show before - indeed, had only written some pretty dreadful comedy sketches - so we had no real idea how to tackle the task. Things were not made easier by the furry-man-mountain that was Mr Dickinson, who handed us a vague concept which effectively comprised the weak play on words that is Sleepless Beauty, and we took it from there simply by dividing the scenes up and each writing completely different plots and characters for alternate scenes.

The plot and dialogue was extremely weak to start with, but then during rehearsals Mr Dickinson insisted on inserting his own scene towards the end in which he played a fat hairy priest quoting from the Bible ("Jacob answered his mother Rebekah, 'Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man and I am a smooth man."), which I vaguely suspect was a direct rip-off from Beyond the Fringe. The show was - ultimately - a great success, with one particularly heart-stopping scene in which the depressed jester was supposed to hang himself, and the teacher selected to play the role embraced it with such authenticity that he almost throttled himself to death with a rope hanging off the lighting rig. That got a terrific laugh.

I sat in the audience during the pantomime and had just one line to deliver during the entire performance, right at the end when Sleepless Beauty was due to marry her prince. The preist, shortly after some smooth-man/hairy-man bonus material, asked whether anyone in the audience had cause to object to the union. I was then required to bellow out, "I object. I object on the grounds that marriage is an outdated institution governed on lines which are both paternalistic and misogynistic!" (this was, you can see, comedy gold). Well, I was utterly terrified of doing any such thing, and sitting in the audience I didn't have the benefit of the adulation and adrenaline that fuelled the other performers. I thus found courage in a bottle of 'Rescue Remedy' which my mother had given me, which I sipped quietly through earlier scenes. Rescure Remedy claims to be a herbal solution to anxiety but really - in the quantities I consumed - offered its main support in the form of 70% proof industrial alcohol.

Later, while studying in Cambridge (aged 18), I entertained ideas of joining a comedy troupe such as Footlights, but the presence of such multi-skilled performers as David Mitchell and Robert Webb - combined with my own utter horror of performing - caused me to abandon this impulse. Finally, at the end of my first year, I spent a quiet weekend indoors writing a comedy play which was called, on the basis of three words chosen at random from the dictionary, Hooligan's Cows Dream.

I was quite pleased with the script, and in the second year Timothy Brabham and I formed the theatrical society JESSICA (Jolly Entertaining Show Staged In Cambridge Auditoria) in order to attract sufficient funding to put the show on at the Cambridge Play Room. This was a terrific decision as it was ultimately through this show that I made most of the university friends I now think most fondly of, most notably Olivia (who played Bob), Ted (Art Producer) and Darien (Director).

The plot concerned two people waiting in purgatory to hear whether they could enter Heaven, but who didn't realise they had already been judged and that their waiting was in fact Hell (the plot came to me while watching Satre's Huis Clos, which we sensibly flagged up in the programme in an attempt to wrong-foot the critics). It was a comedy of course, so Darien came up with the rather natty tagline of "A comedy about pain, suffering and death." He also shortened the title to Hooligan's Dream, and removed the worse excesses from the dialogue.

The show was a total hit, with most nights sold out and a substantial profit made. I was too self-conscious to watch the performance myself so I lurked in the cellar below the theatre like the Phantom of the Opera, listening to the audience laugh and clap and trying to guess which bits were so popular. When the first show concluded with cheering and applause I was so thrilled by the success that I ran out into the street whooping and raced all the way up to the Senate House, where a homeless man asked me for change and I was on such a high I gave him a full pound sterling. My mood soon fell on the Friday however when - on the way to a lecture - I picked up a copy of Varsity to read our reviews. The entire review was a direct and personal attack on me, which I considered rather unfair.

We only did one more show at Cambridge. Darien cobbled together some sketches he and some school pals had written, and we served the package as Twelve Moths (the name was chosen only after Ted had painted a poster of twelve moths). We persuaded Matt Benares to fund the entire venture on the basis of guaranteed return of 15% over one month. Of course, the show was an utter box office disaster and we lost it all.

"We didn't mean that sort of guaranteed return," we had to explain to Matt when he asked for his money. He was such a penny-pincher.

2 comments:

  1. I am almost sure that Pelinore Says was performed the year before we joined Prince Henry's, so we would not have been eligible to participate. Then again, this is the sort of "almost sure" that involves trying to remember the details of a thing I didn't care about in the late 1980s so I should really say "I don't have the slightest clue but..."

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  2. No, it was in our first or second year there. I recall because our math teacher co-wrote it and discussed it in class, and he was replaced after two years. Also, note htat I couldn't recall it if it was on before I was there.

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