Pope Benny, Bromsgrove and the bangers 

MIGHT you be in the market for something different in sociable shirts? There’s one now available in white and gold. It sounds like a combination of Spurs and Wolves, but it’s nothing to do with football fever. 

No, this is a rather special creation, designed to commemorate the imminent visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Britain. If you plan to be among the tens of thousands in Birmingham’s Cofton Park at Longbridge on September 19, you may get a glimpse of the Pope, but possibly not of the Popemobile. There are anxieties about the security that would be involved in seeing it safely from Birmingham Oratory, on the Hagley Road, to Cofton Park, scene of  many a mass strike meeting by car workers in the past.  

There is, however, every chance of swooping on a shirt beforehand. Indeed, as the newsletter of St Peter’s RC Church, Bromsgrove, helpfully points out, you can order one by calling 0844 8111 031 – and it urges you on your way with: “Be seen in the right gear. Order your Pope Benny shirt today.” Of all the parishes in the 3,000-square-mile diocese, which covers Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Staffordshire and Oxfordshire, St Peter’s is one of the closest to what will be the centrepiece of the Papal day. Clearly, it is not overawed by its distinction. 

BRIM-FULL OF THEATRE

Even without the Popemobile, we are heading for a day predestined to be brim-full of theatre. The Pope will celebrate Pontifical Mass, in the course of which the solemnity of the occasion will be augmented when he beatifies Cardinal John Henry Newman, an Oratory priest for nearly 40 years in the second half of the 19^th Century, who is about to take his first step towards sainthood. 

I hope no pilgrim who looks up from his prayers to point a camera at the Pontiff will find himself drummed out buttonless, because it will be a day of which many will hope to create a permanent record. 

In addition to Cofton Park and the Oratory, where he will see Cardinal Newman’s room, the Pope will also visit St Mary’s College, Oscott, the Birmingham archdiocesan centre for the training of priests. 

Meanwhile, back at Bromsgrove and nearly two weeks before the Papal visit, St Peter’s has something else up its shirtsleeve. The church has a celebration of its own on Wednesday, September 8, for its 150^th anniversary. This will find the Archbishop of Birmingham, the Most Rev Bernard Longley, celebrating its jubilee Mass – followed by a celebration buffet in the school hall.  

“But”, the newsletter warns, “don’t just come for the sausage rolls.” Sausage rolls and Pope Benny, too. An unlikely but admirable mix. 

It is good to see that the human touch still flourishes undaunted against some pretty impressive odds. All the world is indeed a stage.

John Slim

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Where there’s a Will, there’s a way out

AS it prepares for its 60^th anniversary season, Hall Green Little Theatre announces that “there is a whole lot of rebranding going on” – and the immediate casualty is none other than the Bard of Avon.

William Shakespeare – more informally known as Bill Wagga Dagga, I seem to remember – is caught in the act of a sweeping bow as he appears in the top left-hand corner of the theatre’s letter-heading.  

He’s been there for 60 years – but not any more. No more Will. Look  your fill. 

But it is not only those taxpayers on the receiving end of Hall Green’s correspondence who will find that Shakespeare has been replaced by hglt – none of your outmoded capital letters in its New Age thinking. No, he is about to disappear from membership cards, audience membership cards, diaries, theatre signage, badges, posters, flyers and crockery. And presumably from programmes as well. 

The new corporate look, designed by Hall Green member Edward Stokes, with the idea of presenting a young new look and in the hope of attracting new members for its diamond jubilee season, has no room for the son of  Stratford. As he might have put it, given half a chance, exit pursued by bear. If this saddens you, look away now. 

The season opens on September 24 with Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park in the main auditorium and promises to continue the “commercial” feel throughout, with Mother Goose, Blood Brothers,The Unexpected Guest, Dangerous Corner and Outside Edge lined up to show that Willy Russell,  Agatha Christie, J B Priestley and Richard Harris won’t be missing the party after the pantomime. 

The studio theatre, meanwhile, is not quite so clearly intent on offering an irresistible programme, despite its inclusion of Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van. 

The other productions are Four Nights in Knaresborough, through which Paul Webb recounts his modern language version – with plenty of profanity and slang – of the aftermath of the murder of Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170; Straight and Narrow, by Jimmie Chinn; The Long Road, by Shelagh Stephenson; and an unspecified youth theatre production. 

And they’ll all be launched, untrammelled by our Will. I can’t help feeling sorry for him – but I suppose he’s had a good run.

John Slim

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Waiting for the knock-out Punch?

SO that’s one in the eye for Mr Punch – and I bet some readily-offended jobsworth is all aglow with satisfaction.

A fluffy mop is replacing the traditional walloping stick – but even so, Judy is no longer going to suffer any kind of clouting. Indeed, her regrettably reformed husband is even being required to abandon the business of throwing away the baby. Imagine that!

All is calm, all is not-so-bright at Spinnaker Tower, Portsmouth, where officialdom fears that in our new age of walking on eggshells there are some people who are going to be offended by the sight of one puppet hitting another in the cause of pretend violence. Perhaps there are – but that is surely their problem. Isn’t it wonderful?

It is getting on for 600 years since the seeds of Punch & Judy were sown in Italy’s commedia dell’arte, with Punch originally known as Pulcinella and then Punchinello – and his long-suffering wife eventually bearing the somehow-unlikely label of Joan. But did you know that Mr Punch has a birthday? It is May 9 – the day in 1662 when he is believed to have taken his first bow in England. When diarist Samuel Pepys saw a show, he described it as “very pretty.” Why should it now be condemned as pretty unpalatable? 

In the early 18^th Century, Punch was wowing the crowds in Covent Garden – as a marionette. It was not until later in the century that he became a glove puppet and thus able to wield his stick with devastating freedom on his fellow-characters. It was in this period that he somehow knocked Joan into Judy – but the booth was still covered only in inexpensive material and it was not until the 1900s that the familiar red-and-white stripes began making their appearance at Britain’s seaside resorts.

Now, however, Mr Punch is being forced to face not only his old enemy, the long-established interfering police constable, but his upstart fellow officer, PC Political Correctness.

MOCK-MAYHEM

It’s quite remarkable. Are there really people stupid enough to take offence at ludicrous mock-mayhem on a 2ft-square arena – possibly afterwards going home and taking the latest television violence, real and fictional, without a blink? And if there are, are they so extraordinarily stupid that they will be unable to resist unveiling their idiocies to the world at large?

If this daftest of diseases spreads, Mr Punch’s famous war cry, “That’s the way to do it”, will acquire a ring that is horribly hollow. I am already aware of a distinct unease when I find that Daniel Liversidge, the Portsmouth puppeteer in the front line of the latest assault on sanity, is saying that Mr Punch is a rascal who still has weapons in his arsenal – “but they are more socially appropriate.”

Whatever next? Longstanding stalwarts, the Devil and Punch's mistress Pretty Polly, suffered general dismissal when an earlier wave of the aghast and the affronted decided that they were inappropriate.

How long will it be before Mr Punch himself is deemed ready for damning? It is his bad luck that it looks as if Brussels is now going to be able to empower foreign police to pitch camp on these shores to boost the British bobby, so it is entirely possible that Mr Punch could find himself being marched off by Estonia’s Old Bill as an unwanted immigrant – back to Italy, where he came from in the first place.

And what’s worse, we’ll take it with a Bravely British stiff upper lip and we won’t say a word.

John Slim

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Prompt service

I YIELD to no one in my admiration of that hardy band of souls who spend their working lives on the professional stage. All right, they bask in what is often deserved adulation in the wake of a job well done, but with their every appearance they risk the scorn of the unfeeling by forgetting their lines and not picking up the prompt.

So, whenever there’s an awestruck forelock to be touched, you will find me reaching for it – and even more so in respect of amateurs who do it for nothing. I shall never get to grips with this idea of needless exposure to potential humiliation in the hope of fleeting glory – but then, I’m all for the quiet life.

I could not cope with (a) risking needing a prompt, (b) getting one but not hearing it, or (c) not getting one while I contemplated throwing a fainting fit. And the passing years can only make matters worse. There’s a story about the late Sir John Gielgud emerging from behind a pillar in Othello and delivering a speech from Hamlet. Or maybe it was the other way round. He didn’t need prompting, of course – just pointing in the direction of the right play.

But as far as I have been able to judge, when people do need a prompt, they also need to have been told how to cope: how to fill the seeming eternity in which their brain has died and their mouth has dried, while not allowing the audience to suspect a thing. Perhaps NODA, the National Operatic & Dramatic Association, could find somebody to devote half a day in the course of a Summer School to defeating self-paralysis.

INSTANTANEOUS AMNESIA

This would necessarily incorporate not only the victims of instantaneous amnesia but anybody likely to be on stage with them – because these are moments when people need all the help they can get and their friends should be equipped to help them confidently, perhaps by asking an unscripted question that embodies a phrase for which they are grasping. In other words, it should not all be down to prompt corner if an intervention from the wings can be possibly avoided.

One time when a stage butler forgot a line to do with tea leaves, a seated actress rightly assumed some responsibility for dealing with the situation. She kept flicking her eyes between him and the teapot. Unfortunately, his reaction was to assume that his flies were undone.

The prompt, that is to say, does not have to come from the wings. I have seen a production set in a garden – with the prompt basking in her sun hat on the other side of the fence as the next-door neighbour, reading a script that was pretending to be a book. She was not needed, as it happened, but if she had been this would have been a clear case of making a virtue out of necessity.

There was one chilly summer’s night when an outdoor production of Bartholomew Fair was mounted on a half-moon of scaffolding, with braziers doing their best to warm the audience standing below. Sure enough, somebody up there dried. This was the moment I discovered that the prompt was standing immediately behind me, a good 20 feet from the action aloft. I leaped like a rocketing pheasant when the missing line was roared over my right shoulder to the citizen in need.

That was the loudest prompt I have ever heard – but there was one occasion when the prompt really should have been delivered fortissimo. This was during a production of one of the Farndale series of comedies, based on the incompetence of a Townswomen’s Guild’s drama section.

You know the sort of thing. A corpse will open one eye, the scenery will be upside-down, a telephone will be answered before it has rung – so a prompt that rang out loud and clear would have been entirely in keeping when one of the actresses suddenly lost the plot.

REVERENT TONE

Alas, it emerged in a hushed, almost reverent tone and the opportunity was missed, but this is a situation that any director contemplating something from the Farndale canon should prepare to meet head-on and profit from.

In another production, an actor alone on stage was standing in hapless silence. This time, we all heard his prompt. It was, ‘I can’t seem to remember.’ How true, I thought, how true!

There was the classic occasion when four people were onstage in sudden unsought silence. The prompt came three times to no effect, but at this point one of them responded, ‘We all know the line, darling, but who the bloody hell says it?’

I know of a bygone Shakespearian actor with his own special way of dealing with sudden onstage death. Knowing it was his turn to say something, but totally uncertain what, he would take a fellow-thespian by the arm and lead him gently to the wings, saying, ‘But soft, here comes the noble Duke. Couch we awhile and mark!’

As Shakespeare was pretty prolific in noble dukes, this was an unimpeachable ploy that slipped a cog only if the play of the moment was one of his Roman efforts.

The late A E Matthews, on the other hand, found occasion to circumvent the prompt altogether. The telephone rang on stage and he had to answer it. Unfortunately, the moment he picked it up, he dried – but enough of his brain remained sufficiently active for him to hold out the instrument to a fellow-actor and say, ‘It’s for you.’

As an example of self-preservation, that takes some beating. Clearly it should be mentioned in any half-day course.

John Slim

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Are you receiving me?

AT their worst, mishearings can cause momentary irritation. The person who has missed the message may feel embarrassed to admit – perhaps not for the first time – that a friend’s pearls of wisdom have passed him by.

And the failed communicator may fall to wondering whether an elocution lesson or two might improve his chances of being understood. Should he have paid more attention to how-now-brown-cowing and grazing-in-the-green-green-grass?

There is the classic story, still good for a chuckle, even now, of the urgent request that was passed, mouth-to-ear-mouth-to-ear, along the wartime trench: “Going to advance. Send reinforcements.” Eventually, at the far end of the line, a bemused soldier was told: “Going to a dance. Send three-and-fourpence.”

It couldn’t happen with decimalisation, so let’s hang onto it while we still can, because it’s a joy.

Mishearings can indeed do much to outweigh their embarrassment factor – but it’s odd, now I come to think of it, that in my lifetime thus far only one has whopped me so delightfully that its memory lives with me many years after I encountered it.

It happened almost as soon as I woke up. I turned on my side to look out of the window and found I was gazing on a glorious spring morning. A dazzle of sunshine, skies of the brightest blue. It was good-to-be-alive time.

There was just one slight drawback. A vigorous wind was howling. Trees were waving exuberantly. Clouds were whizzing by. It was time for a weather report. Without turning to face my still-recumbent wife, I delivered one.

“Nice day”, I said. “Bit rough.” 

SURPRSING RESULT

My effort as a one-man Met Office had a surprising result. My wife shot off the pillow, all dazed and disbelieving. “What” she exclaimed. “What did you say?”

“Nice day”, I said. “Bit rough.”

At this, she collapsed back onto the foam-filled, evincing what I could not help regarding as gratifying relief and therefore an implied compliment.

“Oh”, she said. “I thought you said, ‘I’m not staying. I’ve had enough’.”

All of which leads me to Arsehammers. You heard. It is a play that is scheduled to burst upon Birmingham’s amateur theatre scene – courtesy of an always-enterprising youth group.

I have admired Stage 2 for two decades but I am still guaranteed to be gobsmacked by every production. Its director, Liz Light, takes children, often disadvantaged, under her wing from the age of nine upwards, and she moulds them quite marvellously into confident, word-perfect performers who are clearly capable of handling anything she throws at them in productions that she expands with flamboyant insouciance so that they become highly-polished vehicles into which she crams 100 youngsters without ever making the stage look overcrowded.

RECORD AWASH

Most recently, they have given audiences at the Crescent Theatre their incredibly-populated versions of Under Milk Wood and A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and their record is awash with titles that you just don’t habitually associate with youth groups: Once a Catholic, The Lord of the Flies, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Equus, The Crucible, Picasso’s Women and Ionescu’s Rhinoceros. You name it, Stage 2 may well have had a crack at it.

Right now, its immediate enterprise is John Godber’s Shakers – but just over the horizon, in the New Year, is Arsehammers. It is a play written by Claire Dowie, who is Stage 2’s patron, and its title is possibly prone to cause parental consternation.

Imagine the scene: young Johnny has just come home after his first visit to Stage 2. Proudly, he announces that he is going to be in a play. Mum and Dad are delighted. “Oh, well done!” they cry. “What’s it called?”

 “Arsehammers.” Cue one of those pauses.

But it is indeed called Arsehammers, and Johnny’s parents can either get used to the idea or decide that he should perhaps reserve his burgeoning talents for James and the Giant Peach, which is on the Stage 2 schedule for January 5-8 – just a week before what sounds, even for Stage 2, like a bold step into the Great Unknown.

In fact, as far as these witterings are concerned, it is a step backwards – to mishearings, where they all started. Liz Light entirely understood why I had sought enlightenment from her about the title – but it turns out that it stems from the fact that a young boy mishears his parents saying Alzheimer’s in carefully-guarded whispers and he understandably thinks it must be something rude.

Liz told me: “In his mind he assumes it must be Arsehammers, which makes him giggle and then go off on a flight of fancy to imagine his grandfather as a superhero with magic powers. But we are doing three plays that term, so anyone or any parent who may have a concern about the use of the word can be in James and the Giant Peach or do the general drama workshop. And we do still have Stage 1 for the under 10's, so the vast majority of kids doing the productions are secondary school age.”

And clearly old enough to cope with an eye-watering title with nothing short of their customary confidence. As ever, in my efforts to keep up with Stage 2, I am fascinated.

John Slim

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Always look at the label

MANY years ago, Birmingham’s Alexandra Theatre was hosting a touring production of Daisy Pulls It Off, and it did its best to get the name of the show on its tickets. 

Think of a number 

IF you asked somebody to think of a number, and the reply was, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, it might take you a second or two to catch up with the plot.

*****

The special young ones just get on with it

NEVER act with children or animals. It is the dictum that is drilled into aspiring thespians from an early age – though possibly not an age as early as the ages that prompt a problem.  

I’m not referring to the angelic five-year-olds who are apt to turn up as fairly uninterested villagers in the local community hall pantomime, their thoughts clearly more on Mummy and Daddy in the audience, with whom they may even share an unselfconscious wave, than on their responsibilities to Prince Charming and Dandini. 

They are delightful, certainly, but as actors they are non-starters; no threat to the stuff-strutters downstage. 

No, I’m talking a few years further up the scale, when eight- and nine-year-olds are apt to catch everyone on the hop, not only because they retain the Ah! factor but because they clearly have real thespian potential. They are the ones who make you say not only Ah! but Good heavens!  They pin you to your seat because while you are saying Ah! they are actually acting – and acting incredibly well. 

THEATRE MEMORIES

This does not happen often – rarely enough, in fact, to ensure that any precocious perpetrator who does this will ping into your mind-store of theatre memories to be treasured and shared for some time to come. That’s what is happening for me with Francesca Johnston, unwitting shock-factor in Hall Green Youth Theatre’s production of Rockafella. 

This little lass was Mother. Mother with apron, mop cap, po-faced matter-of-factness, total control of all the sizeable number of lines that she backed with believably grown-up hands on hips – and a delivery that skewered you where you sat.  

She was remarkable. She really is the innocent potential threat to actors who are aiming at the stars. The audience loved her but I suspect she had no idea. She asked no questions. She was just getting on with the job – as, indeed, was young William Garrett, entrusted in the same show with doing a stand-up comic routine in policeman’s uniform, abetted by a helmet that loomed large over his eyes. Like the minute Francesca, he was faultless – and very funny.  

Kids are good at doing po-face – largely, I think, because they do it inadvertently. If humour is what they seek to deliver it is an accidental ingredient to be treasured.

John Slim

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Why do they keep the dire in directing?

YOU never know with theatre. Just when everything is rolling as smoothly as a hippopotamus on castors, it jumps up and bites you – because the living theatre is a thing of pitfalls and pratfalls. And that’s without counting inanimate objects that suddenly leap into life, like banisters that collapse or grand pianos that threaten to roll into the orchestra pit – things that nobody could have been expected to foresee. 

On the other hand, many things sit up and beg to be foreseen. That’s what a director is for, to look into the future as far as the first night and forestall all the obvious mishaps that lie in wait. I should make it clear before we go any further that I have never directed. I have never even been on stage since my unforgettable triumph as The Wind, aged six, in a little pale blue shantung frock with a crotch-high serrated hemline, when I had to rush onto the stage among the other mixed infants and go “Whooo!” to make the flowers grow. 

So directing is a closed book. I have no idea how soon the director should expect his casts to spot the hidden meanings in their script, or what is the significance of the first read-through. But when I go to the theatre, amateur or professional, I am nevertheless aware of what can be justly called The Blatant Gaffe. Pause for a moment to consider some of the uncalled-for contretemps that amateurs and professionals alike inflict upon themselves, alone and unaided. 

A professional who was playing the man in a wheelchair in The Man Who Came to Dinner over-indulged in the bar at the interval, left himself no time to answer the call of Nature and just about got back in his chair in time for the second half. 

MEDICAL ATTENTION

WHAT ABOUT PIANOS? 

And why can’t anything be done about pianos – even those that don’t try to roll offstage? I often see a piano that’s supposed to be being played but clearly isn’t – because nobody has had the sense to put its back to the audience and hide the alleged pianist’s fingers. I know that nobody actually wants to visit a theatre and stare at the back of a piano, but it can be largely hidden by a strategic settee, or its effect can be reduced by placing it at an angle.  

In dozens of sightings of My Fair Lady, I have yet to see evidence that Eliza has been instructed to throw Higgins’ slippers at him so that they whiz past his shoulders. Every production has unfailingly found Higgins lying in his teeth while his slippers lie at his feet and he says she threw them at his head.  

And does a director never give advice on procedure if the unexpected should happen? No actor should be expected to do something about a collapsing banister – but on the other hand, nine times out of ten, if something gets accidentally knocked off a table or a shelf, it is left on the floor until the curtains close as a merciful relief. I saw a show in which a small rug was accidentally scuffed, causing it to become badly wrinkled and possibly a bit of a hazard. All that happened then was that people walked round it or stepped over it but showed no sign of thinking that perhaps somebody ought to straighten it, the way they presumably have done at home.  

All praise, on the other hand, to the actress involved in one of those scene-on-a-trolley jobs with a two-walled set. She tried to leave but the door was stuck and it refused to respond to her repeated tugs. So, bless her, she stepped through one of the imaginary walls and took a floor-sweeping bow with one arm stretched up behind her, to the biggest applause of the night. Why am I certain that her director had neither envisaged the situation nor instructed her how to tackle it? 

Sadly, there are times when a director has actually tried to do a bit of directing, only to be thwarted by a member of the cast. I saw a musical western in which the director had decreed a freeze. Fine – except that a cowboy decided it was now time to adjust his hat, thus at once becoming the most prominent and the most stupid person on stage.

PANTOMIME TRAIL

John Slim 

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Let’s try to remember the writer

I WAS much stirred by a letter brimming with indignation about what its creator called “this damning phrase” that amateur companies are required to display on their programmes and advertising.

It’s the one about this amateur production being presented by permission of the named rightsholder – who, he says, adds to the final cost of the enterprise by demanding large percentages of the box-office takings.

If it’s any solace at all, it is through the rightsholder that the writers receive their money – and if it were not for the writers, there would be some awfully empty stages about the place. Not that writers receive a fat lot of recognition in any case.

Seeing the touring production of The Holly and the Ivy, I was fascinated to find that its programme, full of Christmas nostalgia, memories of 55-year-old weather records and profiles of the company, did not see fit to mention the author – Wynyard Browne – until page 15 of the 20 enclosed in its glossy cover. He was firmly put in his place, just after the biographies of the deputy stage manager, the assistant stage manager and the man who did the sound effects. As Mr Browne has been dead since 1964, they perhaps hoped he wouldn’t notice.

And then there has been all that nonsense that made Tony Hancock our best comedian of all time. It ignored the essential fact that he made his name, not as a comedian but as a comic actor – and that what he was doing was uttering the words written for him by Alan Galton and Ray Simpson.

I saw an amateur production of The Blood Donor, in which Gerry Lucas, of Birmingham’s Crescent Theatre, played the Hancock role every bit as well as Hancock did – because he, too, is a very good comic actor and acting is what actors do.

But they do it only because somebody writes their material for them in the first place before being largely overlooked – often by the people who strut their stuff, bask in the plaudits and forget to help to tidy up afterwards. It’s a strange old world.

John Slim

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Emreggubllew! (As Dylan didn’t say)

SEEMS I worried my website colleague Roger Clarke fairly somewhat in the wake of Stage 2’s recent production of Under Milk Wood – by causing him to think that I did not know that Llareggyb, the Welsh community that Dylan Thomas created as the centrepiece of the story, was as near as dammit bugger all backwards. 

Fortunately, I was able to reassure him that I was fully briefed on the state of impishness in the Valleys – though I did not realise that Llareggyb had originally been Llareggub until whatever was the equivalent of Elf ‘n’ Safety in days gone by registered anguish and consternation and persuaded the reluctant playwright to change it. 

Nor was I aware that right at the beginning, in the early 1950s, there were people who said it was a joke played on the BBC which first commissioned the radio play that was narrated by Richard Burton – but my mentor assures me that this is unlikely, as the Internet insists that Llareggub had already  appeared in a Thomas short story, The Burning Baby, more than a decade earlier.  

Thomas clearly revelled in the word play, which is why he came to use it again in Under Milk Wood, and apparently managed to sneak it through BBC scrutiny by making it Llareggyb, against his better judgment, when he submitted it in its radio play format in 1953. 

MODEST TRIBUTE

Subsequently, Terry Pratchett created his own modest tribute to Thomas in his Discworld novels by including his mythical country Llamedos which, is a thinly-disguised Wales and is as interesting backwards as Llareggub.  

Roger, I learn, is well-briefed on the subject because, as a student, he was guided through the script of Under Milk Wood by “some old dear from the drama department who was helping out” – and who was delighted that the original version was still there.  

He recalls her fondly: “She had been to Roedean, had worked in the West End with Olivier and could cuss, drink and smoke like a shipyard welder. Wonderful woman.” 

She sounds the ideal person to comment on a wonderful, poetic playwright.

John Slim

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Let’s give praise for Act 2½

I HAVE been grateful for a long time that whoever invented theatre also thought of having an interval.

It’s not that I sit there longing for it – although, as I’ve mentioned before, I do enjoy sitting, either before curtain-up or at half-time, and listening to the often far-from-muted conversation of the people behind me while I imagine them to be Plasticine chickens or dogs in the Wallace and Gromit mould. The sound, even without the pictures, can be rewardingly amusing.

No, I like the interval because it features prominently in the reply given by somebody who had been asked what part of the show he had liked most. Its sheer unexpectedness made tracks to my funny-bone and I have treasured it ever since.

The interval is a vital 15 minutes in the performance. It’s for having a drink and then giving it back to the theatre. It’s the time during which somebody in the party is bound to ask you what you think of it so far – unwittingly inviting somebody else to respond with “Rubbish!” in unfailing tribute to Morecambe and Wise.

REFLEX RESPONSE

It’s a sobering thought, but as it is 21 years since Ernie Wise died and an unbelievable 26 since Eric Morecambe had his fatal heart attack, it is quite likely that many of the people who even now say “Rubbish!”  as an automatic reflex response have no idea where it came from.

But I stray. I want to tell you about the evening with an interval so unusual that it turned out to be a special pleasure. As a matter of fact, it was the second interval – which is unusual in itself in these days of simply chopping a performance into two. And it was special because, although it must have lasted for a quarter of an hour, everyone in the audience stayed put: this was not an interval for an escape to the oasis for a g & t or a pint of b.

We remained in our seats at the request of director David Morris, now that we had seen two-thirds of his little group’s production of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off.  David, you see, is a proud evangelist of grassroots theatre, an umbrella title covering the thousands of stalwarts who put on their shows in church halls, village halls or scout huts, without benefit of anything approaching theatre facilities, and who make them work.

And here, in a church hall on the south-west fringe of Birmingham, David had crossed his fingers, his legs and possibly himself and gone hell-for-leather into Noises Off.

This is the farce about a touring professional company, unencumbered by talent. It shows us in the first act what its audience sees, and then in the second act takes us to share the chaos behind the scenes. In the third act the action reverts to the public face of its production.

GRASSROOTS THEATRE

In a theatre, the set simply spins on its axis, because the theatre has a revolve. In David’s church hall, as with grassroots theatre anywhere in the world, the set stays where it is until it is manhandled into its new position. Flats and windows that were stage right have to be turned round and carried stage left. Eight doors have to change sides, one by one, and be rehung.

Depending which act is next, the furniture, the phone and the pictures have either to be put in place or carted into the wings.

If your venue is largely facility-free, this is quite an undertaking – and that is what gave David Morris his idea. Instead of keeping the patrons just sitting there, or pushing them out for another drink, why didn’t he let them see the commitment that was making their entertainment possible?

So this is what his company – which a few years back was down to seven members, who were liable to become responsible for the lighting when they stepped off stage – set about doing in the second interval. While David stood downstage-left and gave a running commentary, his cast became stagehands and in about ten absorbing minutes his audience saw grassroots secrets revealed.

I am sure that every member of that audience, every night, was fascinated. For those whose theatre experience is customarily limited to seeing this unpretentious group twice a year and who possibly have no idea of what makes possible the entertainment with which they are presented and never think about it, it must have been an absolute eye-opener.

It was a great idea, this insertion of Act 2½ before Act 3. I commend it to grassroots directors everywhere.

Yes, by all means go and see Noises Off at its slickest and best and most expensive if it arrives at your favourite theatre. But when you’re there, take a look around you at all those happy customers who have no idea what they’re missing.

John Slim

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Keeping abreast of the brain cell

I AM sure he does, but there’s really no need for Donald Hunt OBE to feel bad about the moments of distraction that prevented him from bringing in the orchestra to herald the arrival of the prison staff in Great Witley Operatic Society’s splendid production of Die Fledermaus. (click here for review)

The gentlemen of the chorus stood bewildered in the wings while the ladies behind them unavailingly urged them onwards by poking them in the ribs while, for what must have seemed like an eternity, the orchestra stayed schtum.  

The human mind is a law unto itself. It leads you into absurd situations, or it just sits there and lets absurd situations develop around you, so that they become something that could be adapted for use in a farce or a comedy, no questions asked. 

Recently, when my senior son-in-law turned up for lunch, having collected his daughter, my senior grandchild, from the University of Birmingham, I was able to tell them of the trauma that my brain cell had visited upon me that very day, in my preparations for meeting my matutinal razor. 

BEGUILING BLUE GOO

I had in fact got a bit ahead of myself.  Shaving was to be the second item on the agenda, accomplished with the aid of a tallish tin can containing the beguiling blue goo with which I have to butter up my manly features in readiness for the arrival of the blade. But first I had to avail myself of the high-pressure pong-away – the press-and-squirt canister designed to deal with any armpit that plans to get a bit above itself. 

It was at this point that my brain cell had switched off. Left armpit at the ready, tin can in my right hand, I pressed the button and fired. 

I don’t know how often in a lifetime the average male is likely to fill an armpit with shaving foam, but this was my second such adventure. Moreover, it was undoubtedly an improvement on the first, which was some years ago. Its territorial ambition this time was quite remarkable.

 It not only filled my armpit, it globbed down the side of my ribcage. It also missed me completely – this must have been because when it made its first contact I jumped – and it put a yard-long blue stripe down the wall behind me, with another on the door of the airing cupboard. It made a blue canal on the bathmat on which I was standing and it scored a direct hit on the big toe of my left foot. 

IMPROBABLY PROUD

I still can’t understand how so much goo was able to burst into my bathroom so swiftly – but I have to confess that this was an occurrence rare enough for me to feel improbably proud. That’s why I called my wife to come and admire my achievement. That’s why she not only admired, she took photographs. That’s why, although, unlike Donald Hunt, I did not have the bad luck to switch off in public, I have not hesitated to come clean at the earliest possible moment.

It is also why, when time has taken its course, I am sure that Donald Hunt will dine out for years on the night he bemused the band. Most of us have no qualms about confessing to encountering the inexplicable.  

The only time I have had a major brain cell problem in public, however, was when I was sitting in a train at Euston, ready to be returned to Birmingham. I was in a single seat at a table against the window, waiting for the off, when, at the far end of the coach, there entered a couple whom I had known for years. They made their way along the aisle and they sat down facing me at the table opposite mine. 

I was surprised that they had not noticed me, so I repaired their oversight immediately. I leaned across the aisle, put one hand on their table, and said, “Hallo!” 

WRONG COUPLE

Well, not so much “Hallo!” as “Halloooooo!” and quite noisily, leaning encouragingly towards them across the gangway as I did so. As I say, I had known them for ages. It was what they would have expected. 

Unfortunately, they didn’t know me. Wrong couple. Double deceivers. Quite amazing. The woman said, “Er. . ?”  

I stumbled through what I hoped was an explanation before spending the entire journey staring fixedly out of my window. 

It’s called being a human being – like the man who has been a friend ever since we started grammar school together in September, 1941. A few years back, he regaled our dinner party with the day, before the arrival of dishwashers, when the difficulties of his domestic chores quite overcame him – the day he put the washing-up in the bowl, then carried it outside and tipped the whole lot into the dustbin. Think how he would be censured today, if he repeated the trick but chose the wrong bin. 

But now, he looks back with something akin to paradoxical pride, as I already do with my shaving foam extravaganza – and as I am sure that the briefly discomfited Donald Hunt will do in years to come.

John Slim

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To rain or not to rain . . .

IT has never been a role I have sought for myself, but I cannot help wondering whether one of the essentials in securing a job as a television presenter or reporter is the ability to demonstrate that you are a failed thespian.

And, particularly if you have designs on giving us the weather forecast, that you have that peculiar affliction, Left Elbow Bounce – something which,  unlike the arms and hands that almost inevitably spring into action when any other sort of presenter faces the camera, appears to be something entirely beyond the control of the sufferer.

But let’s look first at all those actors manqués. It matters not whether they are standing windswept on a barren moor or mountainside or sitting warm and cosy at a desk in a studio, as soon as they begin to speak, they start waving their arms about. And we are talking expansive gestures here – big, sweeping performances – as well as the smaller but equally stupid ones that involve only the hands, often in a veritable symmetry of syncopation.

BBC business editor Robert Peston even gets his face involved. With his head leaning to one side or the other, he brings alarming frowns into play behind his whirring hands. By jingo, he’s fierce – even when he is not addressing the camera but the newsreader who is sitting just the other side of the desk, a couple of feet in front of him.

At times, it is easy to imagine that he is conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the fourth trombone has not quite discovered the note he was looking for. And like all the others, our Robert becomes even more amusing with the sound turned off.

ACTIVE ARMS

But what has inspired this near-universal affliction that sweeps through television? What’s it all about? Has some under-employed jobsworth upstairs decided that viewers’ attention span is now so limited that it cannot cope with talking heads unless there are also active arms?

Were we to be allowed a peep beneath those impressive desks, would we find that they are hiding feet that are tapping away in time with all the activity above them?

It would be stretching the credulities too far, were we asked to accept that all this strange hyperactivity is a simple coincidence; something from which 90 per cent of television’s frontispieces just happen to be suffering. On the other hand, can it really be that all new recruits have to go on an induction course that tests them for satisfactory arm action? Do drama schools provide their students with tuition in mastering it, in case their dreams of stardom on stage fail to find fruition?

I don’t know – but I am certain that all these peculiar people know exactly what they are doing. This is deliberate distraction. They could not possibly be afflicted en masse with out-of-control limbs – unless, of course, hypnosis forms part of the bigger picture.

And that is where they differ from their mates from the Met Office. A remarkably high proportion of weather presenters, clearly involuntarily, have Left Elbow Bounce. They use their left arm when they point at their maps, then they bring it back to their side, where it arrives perfectly normally – but then bounces an indeterminate number of times, away from the waist and back again.

They can’t possibly be doing it on purpose. Nobody would deliberately offer to look so odd. So what causes it? For me, this is one of life’s great unanswered questions, like how big are a greenfly’s kidneys?

But they’re wonderful to watch. Just remember to turn off the sound.

John Slim

Old habitués die hard

AMATEUR thespians are an interesting lot. They love their hobby so much that they never want to abandon it. But they don’t love it enough to care that by going on too long they risk putting off the patrons who would otherwise be happy to continue supporting their shows.

So some of them are still on view when they can scarcely totter. Some wear weird wigs. Some are no longer built to move but nobody’s happened to mention it to them. Some have clearly become too big for the job. Physically, I mean – but mentally, too: a big head does not contemplate bowing out gracefully.

In an ideal world, anyone, whatever the role in whatever the show, would find a moment to wonder whether he or she is any longer a director’s dream. In an ideal world, the director would make it clear if the dream had ended.

My worry is not particularly about a chorus that seems to have come straight from Saga. Provided its members can look interested, hold a note and be hidden at the back when mobility becomes a problem, an aging theatre group has gone a long way to meeting its responsibilities to the paying public.

No, it’s the principals who give me pause. It is they who demonstrate far too often that the world that is a stage is a world that is far from ideal and that it will continue to be so as long as too many directors are content to stay schtum.

That’s why I’ve heard about a Marco and a Giuseppe who looked like Michelin men. It’s why I’ve seen a Curly who must have been hitting 50 but who was clearly primed on his first entrance to vault the gate in Aunt Eller’s picket fence. He positioned himself for lift-off but wisely thought better of it. Instead, he opened the gate and just about squeezed through.

SQUARE MEALS

This was a Curly full of calories; a cowboy who was a walking demonstration of how square meals make round people. He may have been a good-looking kinda guy 20 years ago, but Time the Great Wrecker had taken its course and Adonis was now a doughnut.

It’s these carry-on Curlies I worry about. They don’t know when to stop. They apparently lack both a mirror and a best friend – so the show, its supporters and the reputation of the group are doomed to suffer.

Similarly, the bright young ingénue who first captivated an audience 20 years ago should no longer be allowed to be a Laurey when she’s as old as the show that was launched in 1945 and a Laurey who’s distinctly sorry.

This does not need to happen, and as an under-instructed outsider I can’t see why theatre groups allow it to do so. It is surely not too much to hope that a meeting of the membership could agree that there should be an age limit of, say, 35 or preferably 30, on the younger principal roles.

For heaven’s sake, most shows have a smattering of older or character parts that need filling, and some plays are written entirely for that kind of cast.

YOUTHFUL GUEST

And if there’s a society shortage of young members, let’s be bold and import a youthful guest or two and at least put on a show that is both creditable and credible as well as being fair to the audience.

Some theatre groups are indeed short of youngsters, but most have at least some young members perfectly capable of carrying off a young role – yet time after time I see them in the chorus while the usual principals, the usual suspects, risk making themselves a laughing-stock and frequently succeed in doing so.

It’s odd, isn’t it? These self-obsessed citizens, these set-in-stone time-servers, don’t have the wit to see how they now portray themselves. There are lines in the script they can’t remember and lines in their faces we can’t forget. And all the while, they add momentum to the mockery to which they are exposing their beloved hobby.

They’re pitiful and it’s sad. And it’s ever sadder, because weak directors are allowing them to risk driving away not only the patrons but those frustrated younger members who could do the job a damn’ sight better.

Rabbie Burns – he who in one immortal verse managed to rhyme beast, breast and hastily – could not be faulted when he urged some great power to give us the wherewithal to see ourselves as others have the misfortune to do.

If some great power does not pull its socks up pretty quickly, it could be too late.

John Slim

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Making light work

 LET us give a little more thought to light.

With music and sound effects, lighting is a vital part of a stage production – part of the packaging which wraps and enhances the best efforts of the company. Properly used, it is the most atmospheric of tools. On an otherwise darkened stage, if there is just enough of it to enable the audience to see what is going on, without necessarily being able to distinguish the shadowy figure who is creeping about, it can send a pleasurable tingle down the spine in expectation of an as-yet-uncertain shock.

It can provide substitute dappled sunshine and shade to create a magic bower for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  It can conjure up the flames of Hell, as did one magnificent production of Dr Faustus that I saw.

Indeed, so powerful was the re-creation of this story of the man who sold his soul to the Devil that it caused one woman in the audience to scramble desperately across kneecaps to which she never been formally introduced, crying, ‘I’ve got to get out!’

And another woman sat rooted to her seat for several minutes after the final curtain, so real had the battle with evil become. When she eventually managed to make her way out of the auditorium, one last unexpected shock awaited her: there at the bar was Faustus – having a quiet drink with Mephistopheles.

With a strangled cry, she disappeared into the night. I never heard whether the theatre saw her again.

Properly controlled, lighting is a wonderful thing and it undoubtedly did much to create the ambience that so disturbed that unfortunate woman.

DAY-GLOW DISTRACTION

But if it breaks loose, it can be a bit of a joker. Ultra-violet lighting has a mind of its own. I saw a group of dancers capering in the u/v gloaming. One of them had a bra strap escaping from under her top. It positively gleamed – a tiny strip of brilliant white which became day-glow distraction and the most prominent thing on stage.

And another production featured a clutch of angels who had presumably never been put through a technical rehearsal. The effect of the lighting on them was to remove their diaphanous heavenly robes.

I saw a thriller involving a corpse in an alcove of the sitting room. Eventually, the curtain was closed on the scene of the crime – at which point, badly sited lighting behind it gave us an unfortunate shadow show of activity as the corpse got up and a stagehand did a bit of bustling about.

In the same production, somebody went out up-stage and failed to close the glass door behind him. And lo! an unaccountable figure appeared from behind the flat and closed it for him, brilliantly illuminated by the lighting team.

The moral must be that lighting is a tool to be treasured, but you do have to watch it – because if you don’t, the audience almost certainly will.

John Slim

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Sufferings in an awful audience

ONE of life’s little ironies is that so many drama students, the professionals of the future, don’t know how to behave when they are members of an audience. The result is that if you have the misfortune to be in that same audience, normally at a drama school production, you can’t help knowing that they are in there with you. 

They may not actually go as far as to shout out comments. They don’t usually throw apple cores or toffee papers. They don’t need to.  They register their intrusive presence by howling with mirth at serious moments, or because one of their fellow-students has been required to adopt, say, a Glaswegian accent for the purposes of the production.

 I have seen one young man convulsed by hearing unaccustomed tones emerging from a scripted conversation in the wings – just because he knew that this was not what the actresses concerned really sounded like. 

If perchance the production is a comedy, he and his like join in wholeheartedly, habitually from as near to the front of the auditorium as they have been able to get, with exaggerated laughter intended to show the rest of us that they understand the joke.           

But the real joke is a sad one: it’s the fact that they are not helping their fellow students on stage and they are a pain in the proverbial for patrons who want to be able to enjoy the performance that they have paid to see, not the one that’s in the stalls.  

AUDIENCE MEMBERS

It’s clear that although a drama school habitually turns out young people who will illuminate their profession, it hasn’t occurred to it to teach them to behave when they are audience members – so they get very excited by seeing their fellow-students on stage and appear totally incapable of curbing their enthusiasms to an acceptable level.           

I know nothing of the psyche of being a drama student, but it’s as if they are overtaken by the need to let their long-suffering friends on stage know that they are there, supporting them to the hilt and really enjoying their silly selves. And if their friends are as daft as they are, the presumption must be that when it’s the cheerleaders’ turn to star, their friends will respond in kind and ruin yet another theatre evening.           

This whole business of audiences bothers me. Audience participation is for pantomimes, not for Pinter, but it’s becoming more and more difficult to attend a performance anywhere without discovering that you are in the presence of people who have no idea of how to conduct themselves or of their obligations to other audience members.  

They don’t understand that the proscenium arch is not to be talked to like a television screen. And along with the talkers, we have the telephonists, the sweet-rustlers and those who clearly think a theatre is the ideal place to try to get rid of their bronchitis while they kick the seat in front, rest their head on their companion’s shoulder or lean forward in their raked seating and ensure that the person behind has a sharply restricted view of the stage.            

If the overture becomes inconsiderately loud, they raise their conversational pitch accordingly.  

Heaven help me, despite the theatre’s nightly recital of the litany of the mobile phone, they still fail to turn the damn’ thing off. I’ve even seen one member of the lesser intelligentsia answer it and embark on an animated conversation. 

And before any of these things happen, before the show has even started, you are up and down in your seat to make way for those who have come in by the wrong entrance despite the clear numbering above the door and the instructions on the ticket. 

UNDER-INFORMED

Who are these under-informed regrettables? What’s the matter with them?  And is there nothing that the rest of us can do to point out the error of their ways? 

All they need to know could be compressed into a half-hour talk, in which the instructor would be accompanied by strategically-placed audience members kicking seats, rustling sweets and having free-flowing conversations. 

It’s impracticable to suggest that the National Operatic & Dramatic Association (NODA) might incorporate a free mini-course in its annual Summer School – although some thought could perhaps be given to providing an advice sheet for the under-instructed that could be slipped into every theatre programme, in print large enough to be read in the half-light before curtain-up. 

It might even include a hint that while unstinted cries of Woo! Woo! Woo! may be a help in rounding up the occasional herd of cattle, they are just a little over the top as part of the applause when the cast is taking its bow. 

Perhaps next time one of Britain’s scores of little theatres is arranging an open day, it could include a session on the art of being an audience, possibly provided on whatever is the DVD equivalent of a non-stop video loop. I’m sure any local drama school would benefit from topping up the visitor numbers and listening – and by learning, allow non-student theatregoers to reap the increasingly-rare benefit of a distraction-free evening.

John Slim

The week they swore to

be **!!@** memorable 

I  WAS irritated on reading a report that a revival production of Michael Frayn’s splendid Noises Off had somehow managed to include one of the foulest four-letter words in the English language. I have no reason to doubt that it is true – but if it is, for heaven’s sake why?

This amusing behind-the-scenes look at a not-very-good effort to present an acceptable bit of theatre has managed very nicely, thank you, for years. It does not need to descend to the abysmal basics of communication with which it shocked its first audiences in the West End in the early 1980s.

It has no need of the witless terminology that is so often shovelled into plays these days. The shock effect achieved by Kenneth Tynan when he pinned the nation’s viewers by their ears in breaking the F barrier all those years ago is no longer achievable.

Today, every talent-free idiot is at it, either in writing plays or as an alternative comedian presenting an alternative to comedy.

Let’s dot an I or two. At least it will cause less upheaval than blacking them. Let’s talk about the irritation of this insistent idiocy.

CLEVER AND **!!@** BRAVE

I’m fed up with it. Nine times out of ten, if a character produces The Word, I spend the next few minutes wondering why. It’s a complete distraction. I ask myself whether there was any reason, other than that the author thought there was still something rather clever and brave about writing it. Was he expecting awestruck admiration for his dauntless daring? If so, he is many years out of date. If he is going to F about, the audience has the right to expect that there is a more compelling reason than a playwright’s self-delusion.

Which leads me straight to Glengarry Glen Ross.  You may not have heard of it. I hadn’t, either, until I found myself watching an amateur production in deepest Worcestershire. But now that I have heard of it, now that I’ve seen it – and it was quite some time ago – I am not going to forget it.

Paradoxically, it is because writer David Mamet must have broken world records for the number of filthy words in any one script – and because I thought both the play and the production were magnificent.

The words, you see, define the characters in this Chicago drama. Here are hard-bitten real estate salesmen who are deadly rivals in their dog-eat-dog profession. No word that comes their way has a hope of being minced. Right from the start, two characters are in high-decibel, nose-to-nose confrontation.

MAGNIFICENT **!!@** GUTTER-SPEAK

No theatrical ambience can ever have been defined so quickly, so effectively and so unmistakably. The words, that is to say, had a purpose. This was quite magnificent gutter-speak. It pinned a largely middle-aged audience in its seat, disbelief ringing loud in its ears.

But the interesting thing is, once the initial shock had been absorbed, it was obvious that the patrons had adjusted. They had never heard anything like it in their theatregoing lives, with more profanities than they could count in the first five minutes and heaven knows how many still to come – but the fact remains, they adjusted.

And they adjusted because this was dreadful language for a reason – not something added as a silly, smutty afterthought by a foolish perennial fourth-former in search of obsequious plaudits.

I salute the amateur group concerned for its bravery in taking the risks inherent in placing such highly-charged theatre before patrons whose susceptibilities had to be suspect – and for bashing it at them so brilliantly.

This was a week when bad language had a job to do – a real job, one that could be justified without benefit of subtitles or help from prompt corner. It was a week that deserves recounting in any future history of The Nonentities or of Kidderminster’s Rose Theatre. If only they could have seen it, it could have taught a profound lesson to all those scribbling irritants who would not know a good swear if it sat up and bit them.

John Slim

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Author! Author!

HAVE you ever asked WHY you put yourself through the business of appearing on stage, enduring the anxieties that precede the plaudits, giving your time, risking your reputation and putting up with the petulance of your fellow-performers?

It isn’t because, in your masochistic way, you enjoy it.

No, the real reason goes back much further than that: you do it because somebody made it POSSIBLE for you to do it – somebody whose existence probably never crosses your consciousness as you bask in your triumphant opening night.

There’s gratitude for you!

But it’s a fact. The authors – the writers whose witty lines enable YOU to get the laughs, the composers whose melodies let YOU have the audience howling for more – are without exception the most important factor in every single production, because without them there would be nothing.

Yet they are also, far too often, theatre’s forgotten people – the taken-for-granted team whose solitary endeavours apparently mean so little to those who absorb the adulation that they have made possible that every so often I can go to an amateur production whose programme does not tell me who wrote it.

For any thinking member of the audience, such a cavalier approach deserves every contemptuous inference implicit in the old concept of Amateur Dramatics.

COMPETENT PRACTITIONER

It is unlikely to happen if your name is Ayckbourn or Lloyd-Webber – only if you are a lesser-known but completely competent practitioner – unsung, but utterly worth your hire. A pro, utterly deserving of reward.

Unfortunately, playwrights are the people who tend to spring to mind only when it is time to try to lob something off their royalties – a tactic which is aimed almost exclusively at writers and rarely at the lighting chaps, the costume hire people or the musicians.

I think it’s boost-the author time. We are not embarking on a sustained crusade: just trying to point out that plays and musicals don’t happen by spontaneous combustion.

Next time you are strutting your stuff, please try to spare a thought for the fact that you are there by dint of somebody else’s time, inspiration, perspiration and furrowed brow.

Unless he or she has provided you with an opus like the one which was famously criticised for giving failures a bad name, that is the very least your forgotten benefactor deserves.

John Slim

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Driven to distraction

IT’S odd, how one thing leads to another. I had returned home a few years back, waxing lyrical over the best Jack Point, amateur or professional, I had ever seen, in what I also thought could possibly have been the best account of The Yeomen of the Guard to have come my way, when suddenly it struck me: why Gilbert and Sullivan?

That is to say, why not Sullivan and Gilbert? Was it because Gilbert exercised his ego and Sullivan was too much of a gentleman to stand in his way? Was it an alphabetical decision? Or was it to do with the sound of it? When two names are involved in a partnership, is it more mellifluous to put the shorter one first?

Well, yes, according to Rodgers and Hammerstein – which certainly sounds better than Hammerstein and Rodgers – and Abbott and Costello.  On the other hand, Lerner and Loewe support both the long-one-first and the alphabetical theory, and so, for that matter, do Morecambe and Wise.

For Flanagan and Allen, whose label benefited enormously from all those A sounds, it’s foot-in-both-camps time. They are anti-alphabet but in favour of long-one-first.

But what do you do when both names are single-syllable, with the same vowel sound? Comedians Hale and Pace went alphabetical – which is perhaps just as well, because the other way round they would have sounded uncomfortably like Paschendael, that horrific battleground of the First World War. Tate and Lyle, unencumbered by that sort of vowel consideration, gave the alphabet the elbow.

PRIORITY DECISIONS

So how are all these priority decisions arrived at? And would it matter if any of them had been reversed? Is it just a case of what we are accustomed to? We are happy with Gilbert and Sullivan, so could we have become used to Allen and Flanagan? Would we have warmed to Wise and Morecambe and to Loewe and Lerner – and if not, why not?

There’s probably an expert on labels, lurking in the undergrowth somewhere. I would be delighted to hear from him – or, indeed, from her.

To revert to the operetta that prompted me along this particular pointless path, and to give credit where credit is manifestly due, the production was by Aileen Haden, for Worcester Gilbert & Sullivan Society, and the remarkable Andrew Rawle was Jack Point – a tragic jester whose legs, arms, elbows, hands and fingers supported his face and voice in a quite superb performance.

His final appearance, for his desperate, antic dance, was in rags, which I had never seen done before but which brilliantly underscored his broken-hearted destruction.

But what I was really going to ask, before completely distracting myself, was this: how does any group, however brilliantly, confine itself, show after show, year after year, to G&S? It surely cannot be entirely due to the absence of royalties, however persuasive the treasurer may be on the subject. And can there really be sufficient aficionados in the area to enable such a one-track society to keep body and soul together?

STYLISED TO DEATH

Drawing support on a national basis, the original D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, formed in the late 1870s and tied for ever to tired routines, first at Gilbert’s insistence and subsequently, it seems, simply to maintain the tradition, managed to keep going until it finally stylised itself to death in 1985.

But irrespective of the support, what discipline is required by the company? Is there not a boredom threshold somewhere, waiting to be crossed with cat-like tread? Does no Gilbert & Sullivan society member, awaiting with scarcely-suppressed eagerness the arrival of his fourth Patience, Pirates or Mikado, murmur, albeit sotto voce, ‘Not again!’?

And surely Gilbert did not have the immortal arrogance to assume that his concept would manage to entrance the world for ever without the need to change a syllable or a gesture? Surely even he would have seen the wisdom of letting productions off the leash far sooner than was allowed by the original copyrights.

FOOTBALL TEAM

Happily, we now see liberties taken. There are, for example, a version of Patience about a football team and a Mikado set in a Japanese car factory, and Ko-Ko’s little list is mischievously adapted nearly every time we hear it, so we’re getting there.

I still rejoice in the inanity of the plots, but are they and all that wonderful music sufficient compensation for all those awful jokes, which surely cannot possibly have been funny, even in the 1890s?       Tell me!

And will no Mikado director ever insert a minuscule spot of excitement by sorting out which of Katisha’s elbows has a fascination that few can resist and choosing only one of them? She names them both at different times. Surely no one could have been blessed with a double delight half way to her armpits. Perhaps Gilbert himself was getting bored at a very early stage.           Good heavens, it was only 1885!

*

DOES anyone else find anything slightly weird in the thought that Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat has been wandering from theatre to theatre rather longer than the Israelites were in the wilderness?

Where will it all end? For the Israelites, it ended when Moses led them to one of the few places in the Middle East without any oil.

John Slim       

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IT was in despair, rather than with the anger in which she could so justifiably have indulged herself, that the secretary of a musical theatre company told a friend that after the last show, she, her husband and their daughter had between them spent ten hours cleaning up after the band.

Nothing to do with ice cream cartons or cigarette packets. No, this was a family giving precious time to the job of rubbing pencil marks off all those hired scores, which are supposed to be returned to rights holders in a condition that ensures they are fit to be used by the next theatre group that needs them.

When the musical director had been asked to sort them out, she had promptly gone all high-horse and hoity-toity and proclaimed that she was not paid to rub out.

Who says? She had been paid to take responsibility for the musicians, and if those musicians turned out to be a bunch of idle, unthinking, selfish oafs, they were still her responsibility. If she had failed to instil in them any sense of fair play and best practice, that was down to her. If she had failed, and she clearly had, why should somebody else have had to provide the dustcart that followed her Lord Mayor’s Show?

Was she more interested in collecting bucks than in being where one stopped? Not that that matters: from where I am sitting, it is obvious that the buck stopped right on her rostrum. 

Her attitude and that of the musicians were typical of the society into which Britain has turned – a society in which, increasingly often, it is me, me, me, with no thought for others unless there’s something in it that might provide instant payback in return for some slight sacrifice. Ask any MP.

I am writing, of course, with the distinct advantage of knowing nothing about the subject. I am proceeding in blessed ignorance of any self-serving and possibly stupid rules that may have been shaped by those whose job it is to know something about it. I don’t know whether the Musicians’ Union has rules of any kind relating to the returning of scores in a decent condition – but whether it has or not, they should not be necessary. All that is needed is that its members should have a civilized attitude to other people’s property. 

SELF-CENTRED OIKS         

And if they are incapable of being civilized, and if their musical director is incapable of helping them towards such a desirable and obvious goal, then it seems inarguably apparent that the musical director, who is paid to take responsibility, is the one who must step up to the mark – whether or not he has a bunch of self-centred oiks beneath his baton.

If the music industry does not recognise this, I am appalled. Why should longstanding and loyal members of a theatre group that annually forks out increasing sums, both to the musical director and the musicians, have found it necessary to take on a chore that was nothing to do with them because the band was unduly populated with miscreants who didn’t know any better and the musical director had shamelessly shirked her responsibilities?     

If the musicians won’t do it, the musical director is logically the next in line. It should be clear that if pigheaded obstinacy and selfishness – or, indeed, insupportable rules – are in the way, perhaps a touch of the ignorance that has inspired these witterings is just what’s needed.

In a way, I wish the story had never come my way. But it did – and now I shall never again be able to sit in the half-light and hear Luck Be a Lady, There is Nothing Like a Dame or Blow, Gabriel, Blow, without wondering how many of the musicians involved will prove at the end of the week to be just so many musical jerks.

John Slim

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Their exits and their entrances

NOTHING in a theatre is more heartfelt or spontaneous than the applause that greets a player who has responded superbly to an unexpected problem.

Two examples spring instantly to my mind. One involved an actress who entered a sitting room on stage, pulling the door closed behind her – and found that she still had the door knob in her hand as she carried on walking. She joined two other women who were already sitting on a settee, and being no fool she immediately gave her unexpected encumbrance to the actress next to her.

Actress No 2 studied it intently before passing it to Actress No. 3. She, too, left us in no doubt that she would recognise this particular piece of door furniture if ever she met it again, then gave it back to Actress No 2. By this time, Actress No 2 had seen all she wanted to see of it and gave it to Actress No 1 on the instant – whereupon, to a rousing cheer, Actress No 1 popped it into her handbag.

Then there was the young lady on a stage-within-a-stage – on one of those trolley affairs that can be wheeled into the wings on the instant. It had only two walls, one of which contained a door through which she was intended to take her leave. She pulled the door and nothing happened. She pushed it and it didn’t want to know.

Totally unfazed, she stepped through the fourth wall – the non-existent one that faces the audience on theatrical occasions, as if you didn’t know – and down onto the stage. There, she performed an exquisite profound bow, like some 16th-Century courtier greeting his Queen, with the knuckles of one hand almost touching the floor and her other arm held high in the air behind her back. And she took her leave to the biggest cheer of the night.

Audiences are always generous to players who keep going in the face of adversity and this one was no exception.

ROUSING RESPONSE

A similar rousing response greeted the baddy in Viva Mexico! – not when he left the stage by diving though a window, but when he subsequently appeared with a fractured arm in a sling and described himself as a one-armed bandit.

Both these are examples of confronting a crisis head-on – and I can think of another which coincidentally involved the same actor, this time as the young man in Anything Goes, standing downstage on deck and taking notes from his boss. His pencil snapped and the operative end flew into the orchestra pit. Only momentarily disconcerted, he shrugged his shoulders and threw his notebook in after it. He received the cheer he deserved.

A young lady, however, was completely unable to cover her embarrassment as I watched her being carried offstage, wearing a low-slung gipsy-style dress, over the shoulder of the hero of the hour. The dress slipped profoundly and we could only wish her luck as we waved her goodbye. Our Gracie would have understood.

But the most prolonged build-up to catastrophe I have ever seen came in Cabaret. Our expectations were raised when the actor playing the all-American hero of the piece failed to drink his glassful of raw egg – for the unimpeachable reason that he knew he would be sick if he did so.

He placed it on a convenient shelf – then managed to knock the glass onto the stage, where it shattered. The stage was a sudden morass of shards and egg yolk, on which the first dancer to arrive skidded and fell over before getting up with egg on her base.

Eventually, the time came for our hero to take his leave. One should not dwell upon a fellow-man’s misfortune. Suffice it therefore to say that he had reached for his overcoat and pushed his second arm down his sleeve lining; that he had Sally Bowles’ ticket in his overcoat pocket; and that the pocket was on the same side as his imprisoned arm. He was supposed to place the ticket on a convenient table before making his exit – and, give him his due, he did the best he could.

He turned sideways-on to the audience, so that his missing arm was upstage. Then he flapped the rogue sleeve in the general direction of the empty table-top and said, ‘There’s your ticket’, and took his leave, not for a moment believing that he’d had us fooled.

But he had done his best in the face of fate, and I salute him. I take my hat off, too, to all those other amateur thespians who have looked disaster in the eye and somehow managed to survive by sheer luck or native wit.

But I shall never, ever, understand what drives them repeatedly to chance their arm – even an arm that’s not stuck in a sleeve lining – when the unpredictable is for ever lurking in the wings.

John Slim

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Scene and unseen:

 hard work unheralded

ONE of theatre’s constant unkindnesses is to be observed in the cavalier way it so often treats its scenic designers these nights. These are the people the audience never sees – the ones who receive, if they’re lucky and someone has remembered to write it, just a line of acknowledgment in the programme, but whose skills can illuminate any production and bring joy to the heart. 

I am sure that the average theatregoer who settles into his seat and waits to be entertained has no idea of the hard work that has gone into the show – and certainly, as far as the set designer’s unsung contribution is concerned, there is little, if any, effort to enlighten him. 

The words and the action flow smoothly, so it’s obvious that somebody has sweated away at learning the lines. But what about what might be called all the backing bits – the finding or making of the props and the ingenuity that has gone not only into the set but into the model of the set that may well have preceded its construction? 

Very few audience members, I’m sure, give it a thought – and they are hardly encouraged to do so by the current vogue, far too prevalent, of having the set on display when they arrive, which means there is no collective gasp of pleasure in response to the opening of the curtains. The curtains are open already, so the audience sees the set in penny numbers, with half an eye, as it performs its one-at-a-time scramble past the kneecaps that are to be its neighbours for the next two hours. 

BAG OF TOFFEES

Then it takes its seat, finds its bag of toffees and resumes the conversation it was having in the car, while the impact of a possibly glorious set decreases by the minute and has been firmly consigned to a wallpaper role by the time the lights dim and the action commences. 

I have never been so aware of this as I was at a professional production of Neville’s Island, the joyous Tim Firth comedy about a group of businessmen marooned on an island during an Outward Bound-style course. The set was superb: trees, lichen, seriously impressive fake rocks – and so much water that the cast members made their first entrance swimming. 

But long before they did so, the set had been on show from the moment the theatre opened. It was on display in all its glory as the audience filed in. The customers had undoubtedly been individually impressed on arrival but had completely acclimatised to it up to half an hour before anything happened on stage. This was the in-vogue way in which Britain’s world of theatre had become prone to greet its patrons, and this theatre was well up with fashion. 

But it’s just not fair! The only time a set designer has a chance of being acknowledged is when the dimming of the lights heralds the opening of the curtains and the result of weeks of artistic endeavour and bloody hard work is allowed in a single magic moment to hit the patrons firmly between the eyes. That’s what prompts them into the concerted applause that all that creativity so richly deserves. 

MODEL SETS

All of which makes The Handbook of Set Design, by Colin Winslow (The Crowood Press, 192 pp, £19.95) a guaranteed eye-opener, attractively illustrated with black-and-white and colour photographs. 

There are pictures of model sets, painstakingly crafted before anybody began creating the real thing. One shows model banisters made from beads and wire and wrapped with thread. Another features tiny double doors decorated with rococo details produced with fine plaster from a syringe. 

The irony of all this is that set designers are understandably unimpressed when they feel that their patient skills have not been given a thought by members of the audience – but on the other hand they are often distinctly coy about revealing the secrets of their scaled-down artistry. 

I suspect that they can’t have it both ways – but I’m equally sure that if a few more directors ensured that their productions kept a visual surprise out of sight right up to the moment a performance begins, designers would at least receive the plaudits they so often deserve but which are habitually reserved only for the stuff-strutting members of the cast.

John Slim

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