Author: mcphillamy

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Acting

June


There are three standout moments in any theatre gig: the offer, the first night, and… the last night.
The offer validates you as an actor.
The first night tests the work you’ve done in rehearsal.
And the last night…
In the days before a show closes you move from a temporary sense of permanence back to a semi-permanent sense of transition. The group of intimate strangers that assembled around this production and became a family for a while is going to dissolve. Some of us will meet again, maybe all but one or two will have a reunion dinner. But it’s unlikely that we’ll ever again see the whole company as it was when we did the show. In some circumstances this can be a positive of course. But mostly not. Mostly the parting of the ways is at least a little wistful, and often rather poignant. As is the familiar transition to uncertainty. Chances are all of us will work again, but not all of us know it for sure. 
There’s nothing I know of to stop the forward march of time, but the way time passes onstage and over the course of a run, is odd. There’s the repetition. Every performance repeats the words and the moves, it’s both as exactly similar as you can make it, but also as singular as your experience of the present moment  can be – at least it’s better when it is. 
This being in the moment thing is important, specially in comedy. Say you’re playing a scene with another actor and there’s a possible laugh coming up. For the laugh to hit, both of you has to be aware of the comic possibility in the text; the pace, rhythm, and timing of your scene partner; and what the audience collectively can respond to. 
Life of Riley, is a play about three couples, and our seven person cast (including the silent but telling cameo given by Rebecca Gold) was an expert group including, among others: Dana Green, Nisi Sturgis, Ray Chambers, and David Bishens – as varied a group of human shapes, types, and temperament as you could assemble – led by a skilled, deft, and graceful director in Rick Seer. I reckon directing is the most demanding job in theatre, but if you cast a play well and create a place that is fun to work in, where people can experiment freely,  a lot of your work is done.
I played opposite the splendid Henny Russell, as gifted a comedienne as I’ve ever met on a stage. And as consummate a technician with all the awareness mentioned above in spades. I was predisposed to like her for having the good taste to accept this gig, and then delighted as we began rehearsals, and it became clear that we fit well together as a comic partnership. Comic chemistry with a scene partner is fun like no other. The sound of several hundred people all laughing at once is just so great, and for a couple of vocational comic actors what could be better?
Usually a laugh breaks like a wave. You can see it coming, and if the timing is reasonable (and the script is funny – let’s not forget the playwright), then the laugh will arrive, swell, and fade. How the right silence is held for the comic idea to be heard, how the words of the punchline are delivered, how the actors listen (or don’t) to each other, how they focus the moment; all this is technique, which is why comedy demands the most technical accomplishment from its actors.
And there are different kinds of laugh. Titters, ripples, swells, explosions… and occasionally… the comic bullseye, a rolling laugh. A laugh which arrives and peaks, but goes on to another peak, and another, an endless laugh lasting for a long long time in stage time, say as much as 20 or 30 seconds. Henny and I scored a few of these. They don’t happen often. Some laughs are reliable, so built into the show that if they’re not there something is wrong. But the rolling laugh arrives only when everything is right in the scene and when the timing hits the sweet spot. 
And how did Ayckbourn, the quintessentially middle-class English playwright, play in Southern California? Mostly very well. The usual hazards (from the actors point of view) applied of course: oversize patrons with limbs spilling into the aisles where entrances were made, talkative patrons supplying live and loud running commentary on the show as it progressed, and of course those patrons who believe the theatre is the best place to take a refreshing after-dinner sleep sometimes complete with snoring. But mostly English marital dysfunction played well in these parts. And after all, all history tells us that issues in marriage do occur frequently in most times and places.
Ayckbourn specializes in bittersweet; shade with his light; a dark lining in the comic gesture of his plays. But the Checkovian darkness in this play was gently tempered with a subliminal message referenced but unspoken in the final graveside scene when the voice of an unseen vicar tells the story of the woman taken in adultery. The tag line of that fragment of the comedie humaine is: ‘who is without sin let him cast the first stone…’ living in times when public figures fall from grace with drumbeat regularity, because, of all things, sexual peccadillos, this value seems an excellent one to me. 
And that, combined with an exquisite set and costume design, an invigorating sound track, a cohesive group of theatre folk wrangling and delivering a fun show including a series of  comedy duets such as it was my great pleasure to play with Ms. Russell. All that goes to say that it doesn’t get any better than it got in Life of Riley at The Old Globe, in the vivid Jacaranda-blossom springtime 2011.
Categories
Acting

May

Life of Riley opens tomorrow May 5th, and plays till June 5th at The Old Globe in the middle of Balboa Park, San Diego, California. It is the US premiere of Sir Alan Ayckbourn’s 74th play. I am playing the role of ‘Colin’.
Balboa Park is a rectangular section of 1200 acres (down from its original 1400 when founded in 1868) just north of the downtown section of the city. It’s topography spans two canyons, and it’s flora includes Eucalypts, Pines, and flowers of acrylic intensity. It also houses a zoo with a long ariel ski lift for viewing, a bowling green, 15 museums, an enormous Morton Bay Fig tree 120 feet tall, and ‘the great globe itself’ which now sports three performance spaces. I’m housed at the The Park Manor Hotel on the park’s north west corner and it’s a lucky thing to stroll though a piece of paradise every day to go to work.
Our play treats on George Riley suddenly diagnosed as having only six months to live. And as our director, Rick Seer, dryly observed in his opening remarks: “Really, what could be funnier?” George never appears. He lives (and finally dies – I’m giving nothing away here) offstage, and the play is really about the effect the situation has on his close friends.
As Colin the character, Colin the actor gets to say one of the funniest lines ever written in the English language, viz:
‘I can’t say I’m very taken with this marmalade.’
Hysterical isn’t it?
We open on a fragment from a scene from Alan Ayckbourn’s first commercial success (not his first play, but his first big hit). Relatively Speaking was written in 1965 and produced in London’s West End in 1967. And Act 1 scene 2 of Relatively Speaking opens with Philip uttering the aforementioned marmalade line to his wife Sheila over breakfast.
Act 1 scene 1 of Life of Riley opens with my chap, Colin, running lines with his wife Kathryn prior to their first rehearsal of a local amateur production in which they are playing Philip and Sheila. The action of Life of Riley takes place between May and November of one year, and from first rehearsal of Relatively Speaking to the last of three performances is a mere 4 or 5 months. Sir Alan has sprinkled this part of the storyline with subversive humour to do with both amateur and professional backstage life. The fact that he is referencing one of his own plays written 45 years ago is a witty retrospective.
Ayckbournian text is a delight to play, and there are some scenes in the cannon of his work which  I think are actor-proof – the deck chairs scene in Round and Round the Garden for example when Ruth, driven to exhasperation exclaims: ‘How would it be Tom, if I took all my clothes off and rolled around naked on the grass my spectacles flashing messages of passion and desire at you? How would that be, Tom?’
Tom’s reply: ‘Good Lord … have to be carefull where you rolled on this grass.’ 
It works.
San Diego is full of Britons. A mile or so from where I’m writing this, there’s an establishment called The Shakespeare Pub. They sell popular British beers and things like Fish n’ Chips, and Sausage Rolls, and Digestive Biscuits. For a Brit far from home, it’s a tonic to go and get an armful of comfort food and proper tea. The establishment has been in business for some 11 years and does brisk trade, but the ocassion of the recent Royal Wedding was their busiest week-end to date. 
British exports have traditionally found lively markets in the States, not least in the large crop of costume dramas which retail the accent. But language and accent is always changing. The cut-glass vowels of the BBC circa 1940, gradually gave way to admit regional variations by the 1980s. And now even Royals use a mottled ‘t’ and the odd ‘estuarine’ vowel. Our vocal coach here at The Old Globe pointed out several corrupted vowels in my speech – the result of living America for more than a decade. 
Accent work has improved with global communications. These days we often see films where Brits or Aussies play American, and Americans play Brits. Kudos here to my fellow cast members doing the best accent work I’ve ever heard in this country. And as a British actor who once played American in the Great State of Kentucky, at The Humana Festival of New American Plays, I’m able to say such an undertaking can be a challenge.
The current season of plays here is loosley connected in themes of familial dysfunction. The smash hit Rafta Rafta about two families of Anglo-Indians living in the north of England and having marital trouble, closed last week. The mighty August: Osage County telling us how things can get out of hand in Oklahoma, opens next week. Even the Shakespeare Festival this season includes The Tempest – another family-gone-wrong story.
But middle class England on the verge of a divorce is ground that Ayckbourn has mapped and chronicled like no other. And this is where the marmalade line and subsequent scene is so brilliant, being a distillation of unexpressed, unheard, relationship-need-in-marriage passed through the filter of English nicety. But where this playwright has previously experimented with sleights of theatrical form such as variation plays like Sisterly Feelings and Intimate Exchanges, time plays like Communicating Doors, multi-space plays like A Small Family Business, stereo plays like House And Garden, to name but a few; here he contents himself with relatively mild theatrical eccentricities like; his title character never appearing, a setting which is multi-functional and overlapping, and variations on the marmalade line (the scene is played more than once), culminating in the equally hillarious and devastating:
‘If you ask me, we’d have been better off with jam!’
Categories
Acting

April


A delicious sampling of the uptown New York theatre scene. This week; in this order: Anything Goes, War Horse, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Any More, Lombardi, and Freud’s Last Session. With these daily viewings I know how a Tony voter must feel. I’m here to report that there’s no shortage of talent this season.
First I want to say something about Brian Bedford as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. On the force of love-letter reviews and consistently delighted audiences, the run of The Importance of Being Earnest has been extended to early July. I left the company (my choice to do so, just in case you were wondering) two weeks ago, and have been at large taking in shows. Brian has had a long, distinguished, and hugely successful career as a man of the theatre. He is a highly accomplished performer in all departments, although his great strength is comedy, and he has some x factor too.
X factor?
There’s a part of his talent which is not easy to imitate or understand. Back in 2001 I worked with Brian in a similar function to the one I’ve just performed in the Earnest company – see my last blog entry – when I understudied him as Sganarelle in The Moliere Comedies in Los Angeles. On the first night at The Mark Taper Forum there was one of those wonderful moments that can only happen in live theatre. A laugh that peaked, fell, rose to another peak, and another beyond that, and finally, after several crescendos erupted into a round of applause.
What happened was this: on the line ‘All this is true no doubt…’ a lady way back in the house spontaneously uttered a sympathetic groan of agreement. Brian was sufficiently in the moment (he always is as an actor) and sufficiently on the back foot (something a comic has to be even in frenetic moments) to respond to the sound, and work what had happened into a laugh that went for more than a minute (a very long time on stage). And all he did was look.
He looked out into the house to see where the sound had come from. Then he stood still and thought about it. Then he turned front and thought some more. Then he turned back to the lady. Each of these movements was simple and minimal, exquisitely timed and therefore punctuated with another wave of laughter. Finally he took two steps in the direction of the lady (she now helpless with mirth), and the house, as the saying goes, fell in.
It may not sound like much as described in a couple of fumbling paragraphs, but, and you’ll have to take my word for it, if you had been there you would have experienced a great comedic actor displaying the prime of his ability.
The reason I’ve tried to describe this moment in detail is this: the skill level in the theatrical community is high, which is as it should be, and not particularly surprising – given that people naturally get good at things they practise. Of course senior actors routinely bemoan the lack of linguistic technique, or the corrupted vowels in the generation coming up. And, of course, mistakes (particularly in casting) do occur, and also (of course) public perception is shaped by the organs of media – in this town, by the mighty New York Times – with sometimes, silly results. But on the whole, people are pretty good at what they do. So too with Brian Bedford. His ability to speak classical text and make even the most opaque of it clear to a contemporary audience… well he has a mastery in that department. Again, not surprising given his many decades of work… but the ability to ride a piece of the present moment  (that which the sages of all traditions tell us is the gateway to eternity), and to shape it, that, that is inimitable. It’s x-factor. 
Talking of which:
Sutton Foster in Anything Goes sheds light that is pure fun. For virtuosity in hoofing and singing this is one to see. I suspect that some parts of New York taste will compare her with the last Broadway production starring Patti LuPone whose virtuosity comes from a very different part of the forest. There’s a simplicity here, and a purity, also reflected in the design, which makes the evening a confection you just want to have.
War Horse transferred from The Royal National Theatre in London, now with an all American cast – well, they make a horse gallop on stage with puppetry. World War One seen through the eyes of a cavalry horse – amazing.
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore: fascinating. Tennessee Williams in his own last act struggling with mortality, the text moves from the transcendent to the vicious, from the quotidian to the rare. Kudos to The Roundabout (my late employers) for producing this little-known play.
Lombardi: a simple story, simply told – with a lot of heart. The finest ensemble acting I’ve ever seen on Broadway. Led by a star turn in Dan Lauria, and another one in Judith Light, the play is beautifully staged in the round, and the acting is superb and somehow allowed to breathe – a welcome feature in an environment where plays are frequently over-directed.
Freud’s Last Session: starring the splendid Mark Dold of my acquaintance (I was Court Composer to his Emperor in Amadeus) is a piece of thinking person’s theatre. A very verbal play treating on the hypothetical meeting between Freud in his last year of life and the young C.S. Lewis. Astoundingly successful. Originating at the Barrington Stage in Pittsfield Mass., has now played more than 10 months off-Broadway, with several regional productions in development.
But for now I’ve quit the maelstrom of theatrical New York and gone to San Diego, California to appear in the US premiere of Alan Ayckbourn’s 74th play, Life of Riley, at The Old Globe. The character I’m to play is called ‘Colin’ – a tweedy middle-aged Englishman.

Now who do we know like that?
Categories
Acting

December


Every once in a while there comes a cherry on life’s cup cake. My present job for example.
I’m covering the two butlers in The Importance of Being Earnest in New York, or to put it alliteratively; bystanding for a brace of butlers on Broadway.
It’s an unusual production and my workload in it is unusually (and most agreeably) light.
The celebrated Brian Bedford (Tony winner, five time Drama Desk winner) is playing Lady Bracknell. One assumes that Oscar Wilde was not consciously writing this role for drag, but it has become vogue for male actors to play it. Something about her stentorian dominance, given definitively by Dame Edith Evans in the 1952 film of the play, attracts a man’s idea of what such women are. Indeed, the role has been essayed by Dames Maggie and Judi, who stand alone at the  very peak of English speaking theatre, but neither of whom found an answer to Dame Edith’s reading of ‘In a handbag.’ Noted north American productions where men have played Lady Bracknell include: Edward Hibbert (Longwharf), Bill Hutt (Stratford, Ontario), and Ellis Rabb (Lyceum, Broadway). The production I am currently involved with also originated in Stratford, Ontario, where Brian Bedford has been a featured leading man for many years.
Brian is splendid, as is all the cast, more on that later – but the star of this production is Desmond Heeley for his transcendent sets and costumes. Broadway stages command the best design skills in the country and the biggest budgets. But step back a minute and consider the Broadway environment. It is driven (as is all theatrical production) by money, but on Broadway by much more money than in any other theatrical context in the world. The pressures on all involved are enormous, because a show which fails is just horribly expensive; that, and it should be noted, the baroque taste of the most influential New York theatre critics; and the fact that there is such absurd over-supply of actors, has evolved the Broadway style of performance, that hundred-and-ten-percent look-at-me commitment. An energy that flashes and dazzles, and perhaps satisfies or confounds the paying customer into believing that they actually got something of value for the astonishing price of their tickets. Likewise with design. Adjectives that usually apply are: flashy, stylish, unrelenting.
But this is different: The Importance requires two interiors and a garden. And Desmond Heeley’s design begins with a masterpiece of a front cloth which covers the whole proscenium arch. It is a stunning visual before the show begins. It is a painting of Britannia with the sun rising behind her and the letters V. R. (Victoria Regina) rising above, the rays of sunlight catching the lettering and making it shine like gold leaf. Above the front cloth there is a deep red (the usual colour of theatrical curtains) teaser (also crafted by Desmond Heeley) which supplies a fringe of tassels, curled in secret swirls, referencing the velvet plush of Victorian upholstery.
In Act One we’re in Algernon’s Apartment, the palette is based on a series of silver grays, the same tones echoed in the furniture and the dressing, but variations played with a master’s touch. Three paintings grace the walls, but where a lessor artist would have settled for a painting of the time, Desmond has painted his own. His figures are softique, even the frames at their edges seem to flirt with another dimension that looking at directly you can’t quite define, but when you see peripherally, hint of places where there is more style and meaning than we commonly know.
For the garden scene in act two, he gives us a profusion of roses, but an abundance, not a surplus. The quantities and the colour just so. In Act three we are in a morning room with a glass paneled conservatory upstage, and grounds beyond – but here’s the magic – the glass is painted on a scrim – he doesn’t bother with real glass and all its stage issues of reflection and glare, the result is one of heightened realism.
But the signal feature of each of the three settings is this: on first sight they are stunning – they draw applause as the front cloth rises – but as the playing of the scenes proceeds, the set fades from the spotlight. It’s the same with the costumes. They are bold for sure – Gwendolyn’s act one gown shimmering between light silver and white cream, and her curled jet black hat is a late-Victorian precursor to something by Aubrey Beardsley with his seductive lines or even Jean Cocteau with his gossamer ones.
The summary is this: the design supports the play, the story and the actors, rather than, as can be the case, competing with them. It’s an example of design virtuosity from a master of his craft, whose focus is first on the work, not on himself.
A similar purity of discipline is displayed in the acting. Under Brian’s precise (unusually precise) direction, the comedy moves forward with energy and intent. It is a truism of comic wisdom that one well placed big laugh is better than four or five small ones. The Importance is a challenge of good taste in this way because it’s possible to get a laugh on every line. Brian’s own performance is deliciously understated. Wisely he does not confront Dame Edith’s rendition, but makes memorable emphasis in other parts of the text – I won’t say which, in case you happen to see it – we play till March. He is, like his designer, a master of technique, so Lady Bracknell’s feminine treble flutes and pitches with the best stage dames, but he has certain characteristics as an actor which are beyond price on a stage. Chief among them is his depth of belief in the world which the character inhabits. It is this, much beyond his considerable vocal skills, or adeptness at navigating classical text, that gives him a direct line to the audience.
And where do I come in?
There are certain keys to understudy engagements: if you’re smart, you don’t cover a star. And you don’t cover Hamlet – although Jeremy Northam broke both these rules when he covered Daniel Day Lewis at The National in London, and it doesn’t seem to have hurt his career.
In this job I am required to be well acquainted with thirty four witty lines of dialogue in eight small but crucial entrances. 
So I come in to the theatre at a half hour before curtain, I climb the five flights to my well appointed dressing room, and for three agreeable hours I do my own work under the aegis of an immensely stylish production. 
I’ll call that a cherry.
Categories
Acting

November

October



Question: when is a play not a play?


Answer: when it’s Hamlet.


It’s always the Tuesday evening after the final Sunday performance that it hits you that it’s over. In the States, that is. In England and Australia other timetables apply.


In American regional theatre when Tuesday showtime comes, the company has dispersed and is many miles away from the stage where they lately were a performing unit. And that’s when the muscle memory kicks in. If you did a vocal warm up (as I did on this one), there’s no reason to do one today. The identity that you checked at the stage door on a daily basis for the past six weeks makes a pale attempt to repossess your psyche, while the identity that you crafted in the work is now as surplus to requirements as the costume you donned.


I’ve been at large in American regional theatre for over seven years now and I’d just like to put it on record that it’s a falsity to think or to say that theatre in this country is not subsidized. On the contrary, it is heavily subsidized by all who work in it. I find it moving that actors driven by vocational passion will travel far from home on the chance of a good production and live their dream for a few brief weeks, knowing that they’ll likely return to selling pizza when it’s over.


A return to Little Rock Arkansas, my second time there but my first ever in Hamlet. If anyone had told me back in college – yes, you will be in a production of Hamlet one day… in Little Rock… well I wouldn’t have thunk it.


And why is Hamlet not a play? Not an ordinary play at least?


Because it is so well known that some audiences could sing along with the text. In Little Rock we performed in more or less ideal conditions for a production of this play in the modern age. Fewer people around here have seen the play than in say New York where film star Jude Law recently played it. What does this mean? It means that the audience actually follows the story (it’s a good one), rather than evaluating the production/acting/design as they go.


Personally I’ve always found Hamlet to be a tough one. Long, confusing, hard to follow. I speak as one who knows the text well. As a young actor I listened to Sir John Gielgud (surely the greatest exponent of Shakespearean verse speaking) on more or less endless loop. I’ve seen a couple of dozen Hamlets, admired actors, but seldom if ever been moved by a production – Anton Lessor in Jonathan Miller’s was an exception.


George Hall, who ran the acting course at Central in London where I trained, said “On the first night of Hamlet, the questions were the same: “Will they get it? Will the fights work? And will the old fool playing the king remember his lines?”


Now that I am that old fool I know what he meant.


George was full of wise saws and modern instances, and in those days I thought he knew just about everything there was to know about acting – still think that, actually.


Of Robert Newton, he said: “His final consonants were a matter of chance, he had a body that was held together by tension, but when he came on as the button moulder in act four of Peer Gynt, he was coming from a place that most of us have never been to.’


We had an actor like that in Little Rock. His name is Harris Berlinsky and the world is a better place because he is in it. Harris played Polonius with easy grace. His portrayal of the character was accessible and fascinating, yet his backstage confusions were legendary. It was never certain which of the four entrances he would use to get on stage. Occasionally he made a guest entrance in a scene in which Polonius does not usually appear, wandering off about half way through. It was a great pleasure and a privilege to work with him.


A theatrical company away from home is a meeting of intimate strangers who become friends. Replicating behaviors together for the public view, binds you as a group. The character of such groups varies hugely. In the larger theatrical centres the group is vulnerable to the follies of status, ambition, and competition. But usually, regionally, those pressures are less. This particular collection of abstracts and brief chronicles was multi-national, multi ethnic, and multi talented. We included a sharpshooter, indie film makers, linguists (portuguese, japanese, mandarin, spanish), fabulous amateur bakers, corporate consultants, and sundry entrepreneurs.


Even to someone familiar with the play, hearing a performance from backstage is an experience full of small and new recognitions of text. “Ah that’s where that comes from.” So much of the text has passed into everyday usuage. To name but a few:


In my mind’s eye


The primrose path of dalliance


Brevity is the soul of wit


Caviar to the general


The lady doth protest too much


Assume a virtue if you have it not


A hit, a very palpable hit


For quotability Hamlet stands alone. From: “… neither a borrower nor a lender be…” through “… there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow…” to “… and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”


And what about titles derived?


The play’s the thing (Molnar & P. G. Wodehouse)


Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard)

Single Spies (Alan Bennet)


Summer’s Lease (John Mortimer)


And a casual search turned up this amazing anagram:


To be or not to be: that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…


becomes:


In one of the Bard’s best thought of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.


Or to quote another Shakespearean epilogue: “The King’s a beggar now the play is done…”