Beware the Boiled Sweet Brigade

I’ve just been reading an old Shenton’s View blog post for The Stage, about audiences, and how integral they can be to a performance. He was looking at it from a fellow-audience-member point of view – clearly, in one evening, he suffered from the ‘cougher’ and from a couple of ‘talkers’ and ‘gigglers’. He found it so off-putting he requested to move seats during the interval.

Imagine then, what it’s like to be an actor with distractions like that from the audience. There is, for example, as well as the aforementioned offenders, the ‘boiled sweet brigade’. These are the folk of a certain age who will usually attend on a Tuesday or Wednesday night, or a matinee if there is one, they may have a rug to put over their knees while they enjoy the entertainment, and they will have brought a lovely bag of Werther’s Originals to suck on. There is little more off-putting during a quiet, emotion-ridden scene for an actor, than the sound of a boiled sweet being tentatively unwrapped. It takes forever and is never nearly as quiet as the opener assumes.

There are also the ‘whisperers’ – possibly worse even than ‘talkers’ although it’s a fine line. ‘Whisperers’, certain that they can’t be heard, may well share a running commentary alongside the action on stage, and fail to realise that when the house lights go down and the beginners take the stage, that it is time to shut up.

Audiences also feed off one another, although it’s unlikely they realise that they do. I’m always grateful when I’m in a play that isn’t billed as a comedy, but may have the occasional humorous line, to have a ‘laugher’ in the audience. This is someone who guffaws heartily at the slightest suggestion of a joke, and so confident and vocal is their amusement that the rest of the audience loosens up and is brave enough to laugh too.

In the recent production of Darker Shores that I ASM’d on, there was one particular performance where the audience, thanks to adverse weather, was less than expected and therefore somewhat scattered about the auditorium. There were no ‘laughers’ and due to the dispersal of the audience members, no one had the confidence to even chuckle. The actors literally had to battle against the silence that assaulted them at every turn and it was exhausting.

Then there is the opposite of that. I experienced, during my recent run of Skylight, a couple of audiences who were so involved I wondered if I’d wandered into a pantomime. At every performance I was gratified by the stillness and silence – boiled sweets were on hold, the ‘fidgeters’ were unmoving in their seats – they were truly engaged at every performance. Then on one occasion, when my character went to check her one-bar fire was working, I had two people call out “it is on!”. On another night, after my most ranting monologue, a woman in the audience half-whispered, half-shouted “Yes! Great!”. This is a phenomenon I’ve never encountered before but it amused me greatly! They, whoever they were, will go down in the annals of my most-favourite audiences of all time.

The show must go on

You know that saying, 'it never rains, but it pours'? You also know the one - 'a baptism of fire'? Well both these wise old adages are perfect for Jak's and my introduction to the world of backstage crew.

During final dress rehearsal for Darker Shores, the legs of a wooden doll (a prop) weirdly and randomly fell off and landed on the floor with a clatter backstage, during a quiet moment. Jak and I clapped our hands  to our mouths and looked at one another with wide eyes - 'oops!' we were both thinking. One week later, and we are both looking back fondly on the time when a doll's legs fell off - such a small and insignificant mishap. Oh how we laugh when we think of that crazy, crazy day.

This last week, during performances, we have had the lights brought up on set too soon, so we were still on stage doing a reset, a door on the set broke and wouldn't open at an important moment, and a large scenery truck decided to get stuck fast so we couldn't move it onto the stage. More troubling than the doll's legs, but still, we kept calm and carried on, because that is what you do.

Then last night, thanks to 'adverse weather conditions' as they are politely known, one of our leading men got stuck in traffic on his way to the theatre. "Did he arrive in time?" I hear you cry. No, dear reader, he did not. Eventually we decided to bring the curtain up anyway, slightly late, dressed a willing yet nervous director in the character's costume, handed him a script (which we hoped he would be able to see without his specs) and with a hearty amount of Blitz spirit and back slapping, shoved him onto the stage. He did very well, he has, after all, been directing the play for the last few months so knows it inside and out. But as I have mentioned before in other posts, there are magic tricks in this play, which he can't do, certainly not holding a script, so things were never going to go quite according to plan.

Eventually the missing actor arrived in a flurry of panic and snow, only to discover once half undressed, that he had no costume. So then commenced the most bizarre moment I've had for a many a year, as two grown men stripped to their pants in the dark of backstage and swapped clothes in a frantic high-speed manner. The actor resumed his rightful place on stage to applause from the audience, and the director was packed off for a stiff sherry in the bar. All's well that ends well, to coin another phrase.

The show has been cancelled tonight, due to those pesky adverse weather conditions, so I have a quiet evening planned of curry and Strictly - so much tamer than panicky men in pants. Hopefully all unwanted meteorological phenomenon will have cleared enough by tomorrow so the matinee can go ahead as planned.

The ghost of Christmas present

Well, I am now all up to speed on the backstage happenings of Darker Shores, which opens tomorrow night, and after a six-hour rehearsal yesterday I think we’re pretty much there. It’s final dress tonight, so Jak and I can iron out our final set-moving wrinkles.

Darker Shores is a Gothic ghost story set in the 1870s. Professor Stokes takes lodgings at the Sea House on a desolate stretch of the East Sussex coast, but the troubled history of the house comes to the fore with a series of disturbing and mysterious events. He enlists the help of an American spiritualist to try to find out what or who is haunting the house and whether it can ever be cleansed of the vengeful spirit.

Trickery is used to add to the mystery and spine-tingly drama, and the director, Duncan, got a professional magician in during the rehearsal process to teach the cast some cunning illusions. I can tell you no more as they were sworn to secrecy, and frankly, I wouldn’t want to ruin the fun anyway. Suffice to say – it’s all very clever and should keep the audience on their toes!

Jak is stage manager for the production and is therefore in charge of the backstage magic, and I am her trusty (I hope!) second in command – we have to move scenery, reset furniture and props during blackouts and, best fun of all, create a spooky atmosphere with the help of smoke machines. The trick with these is to puff enough smoke to set the scene, but not so much that you gas the cast, as Jak discovered briefly yesterday! There’s nothing quite so scary as a ghost with a hacking cough!

The writer, Michael Punter, came to rehearsal yesterday and seemed pleased with what everyone has achieved. I can take no credit for any of it as I literally only joined the team a week ago, but they’ve clearly all worked so hard and have produced a rather marvellous play that, I think, won’t fail to get the hairs on the back of people’s necks standing on end.

And Jak and I, both seasoned actors but neither of us ever having worked on the backstage technical side of things before, are loving it! We are utterly involved in the play, we get to help, in a small way, to make it what it is, but we don’t have to remember any lines! It’s truly wonderful – why didn’t we ever think of this before!

Production photos were only taken yesterday, so when I can get my hands on a couple I will post them up here so you can appreciate the ghoulishness and Duncan’s outstanding set.

(L to R) Mel, Mark, Fred and Matt get to grips with the seance scene in rehearsals

O frabjous day!...

‘Callooh! Callay!’ I chortle in my joy!

Skylight is done and my life is, for a short time at least, once again my own. I will very soon be back at the theatre as I’m an assistant stage-manager on the theatre’s upcoming Christmas production of Darker Shores, but for now at least I have a few days off.

I can forget the reams and reams of lines I’ve been holding in my head for the past forever – not as easy a task as you might imagine as they are still assaulting me in my near-sleep, near-waking moments and will do so for a week or so yet I should imagine – and I can sweep the unhappy last few months under the dusty rug of things best forgotten.

I am however, a glass-half-full sort of gal, so have thought long and hard on what I can take away from the experience that is useful, and my overall umbrella realisation is that I now know exactly what not to do when Jak and I direct Irma V next year. A bit of a negative positive to be sure, but a positive nonetheless.

Despite the unfortunate rehearsal process, the run itself was a great success, excluding one performance where I dried so faked a crying fit to cover it up, and another where my opposite number dried, couldn’t hear the prompt, and I rewrote David Hare for a while in order to help him back to the script – in fact, even those two performances with their minor disasters were still good. We had some terrific feedback from audience members, not the least of which was how we’d managed to learn all the lines in the first place, and on from that, how did I manage to cook whilst remembering lines? To both these questions my answer was, and still is – I have no freaking idea!

The added bonus to the play being over, finito, done, dusted and heartily kicked to the kerb, is that my face is no longer displayed giant-size on the poster boards outside the theatre. No-one needs their head that big – literally, metaphorically or photographically.

...and so, her sigh of relief could be heard far and wide, whirling amongst the trees and skyscrapers and issuing forth across oceans and streams, and her smile, which had for a time become a stranger, once again made its home on her face.