Treading the boards: Part three

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When it came time for my interview I said I wanted to become a theatre professional. The master said from what he’d seen he thought I’d be pretty good at that, but pleaded with me to first go to university and get a degree (so I could pursue a different career) and then, if the urge was still strong, to go to drama school. As he said, theatre is a highly competitive and precarious business.

And so I went to Oxford where I joined an amateur theatre group. Eventually, I produced plays with them, but first I had to do some acting. What I want to focus on here is things going wrong, to give a sense of what it is like doing theatre — an insider perspective.

I’ll look at technical problems, inadvertent laughter, and coming in on cue.

Early on I played Elyot in Private Lives, a character who is trying to re-engage with his former partner, Amanda, who was played by a fine young actor named Claire. (I should have pointed out earlier that I follow the modern preference of using “actor” for both male and female, rather than using “actress” for the latter).

At one point, the two are standing on a hotel balcony and hear the hotel band playing a tune they used to love. They start singing along with it and that’s the point at which they begin to get together again.

Claire and I decided on a song, one we both knew, “Don’t you remember?” Come the first performance our stage manager put the wrong music track on (we were using an LP recording) and Claire and I were confronted with a tune neither of us had ever heard before and which, therefore, we couldn’t sing along to.

We gazed blankly at each other and then — I’m proud to record — I stretched out my hand and lifted hers and we danced to the tune—same dramatic effect as singing.

Next up, the experience of a performance grinding to a halt because the actors can’t stop laughing. We were doing a short play by George Bernard Shaw, Farfetched Fables, written right at the end of his life when, frankly, he was beginning to lose his wits.

Our producer wrote, as one does, to the publisher for permission to perform and to arrange to pay royalties (the performance fee), and received a nice letter back saying there had only been one production of the play before on BBC radio, which had broadcast all of Shaw’s plays in his centenary year.

At the end of the letter the publisher asked “Why in heaven’s name do you want to do it?” But our producer was a massive Shaw fan, so we went ahead, even though the play was clearly nuts. At one point my fellow actor, Clive, had to play a space alien, dressed in a flamboyant costume covered in feathers.

My character had to confront him and ask, “What kind of a creature are you?” to which he had to reply: “I am a Cocky Olly bird.” At every rehearsal, we tried to get through this nonsense, but both of us doubled up, roaring with laughter at the idiocy of the lines. Our producer saved the day, instructing us not to make eye contact as we spoke the lines, but to stare at each other’s ribcage. That worked.

-At this point, my readers are probably getting a bit tired of my recollections of theatre, so I plan to turn to a (very serious) book review and I’ll come back to theatre-land after that.

To be continued

Chris Dunton is a former Professor of English and Dean of Humanities at the National University of Lesotho.