Category: Acting

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Acting

‘Tis the XXXXXX to be XXXXX

British actors Richard Lyntton and your author
British actors Richard Lyntton and your author

I’ve just done a very agreeable gig with fellow Brit, Richard Lyntton. Chatting aimiably, made me nostalgic …

At this time of year my thoughts naturally turn to a theatrical form which is immensely popular in my native England but doesn’t seem to work either in the land of my extended family, Australia, nor to have caught on in my adopted homeland, the USA. It’s a Victorian invention really, along with trifle and the commercialization of Christmas. Having said that, there are traditions in the form that can be traced to the medieval miracle plays, and to the later broad style of Commedia D’ell Arte. I refer, of course, to pantomime.

I once played a broker’s man by the name of ‘Snachit’, one of the double act, Snachit & Grabbit, first cousins to the law firm, Sue’em, Grabbit ‘n Runne also related to practicing attorneys at law, Woppit, Upham ‘n Gasp.

The Dame (female character) was played by the late, great John Moffatt (Male actor as tradition requires), who was also the author. A man of consummate technique, it was a privilege to watch him turn a line like:

John Moffatt as Hercule Poirot
John Moffatt as Hercule Poirot

Dame: (Horrified) Sell?! (Appalled) Our cow?! (Heartbroken on the verge of tears) Miranda??? … (Suddenly turning avaricious) How much d’you think we’d get for her?

Panto, as British readers will know, turns on a contra-sexual universe where it seems only the Fairy Queen and the the Demon King keep their given genders. Dames and Ugly Sisters are always played by men, Principal Boys (e.g.; Jack in Jack & the Beanstalk) always by dazzlingly attractive young women.

For non-British readers who may be confused, I recommend a year’s subscription to Private Eye, the British equivalent of the American, Onion newspaper. Private Eye explains much in British life that is puzzling.

But I digress.

I started out to tell you that this year Santa brought me the chance to play a telling cameo in a new (spin-off) TV series. The series has been announced but details are fairly hush hush. To such an extent that I never actually got to read the full script of the episode, and therefore had only the sketchiest idea of my character – who he was and what he had for breakfast – and before you ask, yes, I admit, sometimes it’s like that onstage too.

Ryan Eggold, Me, Famke Janssen, Richard Lyntton
Ryan Eggold, Me, Famke Janssen, Richard Lyntton

Fortunately the stars of the show were extremely generous and hospitable and were able to quickly clear up any confusion that I had, actually reversing my understanding of the character, the scene and the show in a few brisk sentences.

These details aside, I am able to report as follows:

I played, xxxxxxxx the man xxxxxxxxxxxx in the xxxxxxxx where xxxxxx and xxx come to  xxxxx  the xxx

The story xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx my character, xxxxxxxxx in a tryst with, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. Then, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx at the climax, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx just when xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx a helicopter xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and then, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx finally revealing xxxxxxxxxx

Great story, right? – Oh! I forgot to mention …

Just when xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx at which point xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx to the amazement of xxxxxxxxxx

Well I’m sorry if that’s spoilt the episode for you. Just pretend you never read this blog.

 

Me as xxxxxx in xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx
Me as xxxxxx in xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx

 

And as you see from this photo, my character looks pretty shifty.

But I don’t think it gives anything away, do you?

 

 

 

 

Merry Christmas and a xxxxxxxxxxxxx !

Categories
Acting

President McPhillamy

PLANT MORE TREES! DON'T BE A DRONGO! MCPHILLAMY THANKS YOU FOR NOT VOTING FOR HIM!
PLANT MORE TREES! DON’T BE A DRONGO!
MCPHILLAMY THANKS YOU FOR NOT VOTING FOR HIM!

Having played the odd monarch and occasional deep thinker, a natural next step might be … politics?

I want to thank the two or three people who might have considered voting for me if I had actually run for president – they know who they are and I thank them. In the end I am happy to say, not one single person ticked my box on the ballot. For the excellent reason that my name was not on it. However, to those few who might conceivably in some alternate universe, have voted for me, to them and to the hundreds of millions who actively did not vote for me, I am grateful.

As you may (or may not) remember, my campaign was predicated on a single policy:

 

Don’t be a drongo *
* (Drongo: Australian colloquialism meaning “Silly fellow”, “Idiot”, “Waste of space”)

Here are a few policy suggestions in lieu of an actual McPhillamy Presidency:
Personal:
1. Plant more trees.
2. Meditate now and then.
3. Never watch cable news. (If you are unsure how to kick the habit. The following one-step process will help. Step one: disconnect your television and throw it through the {open} window)

National: (USA specific)
1. Explain to the characters who run Big Oil, they could make just as much money with wind, wave and solar power, and they would get a lot of good karma for saving the planet instead of destroying it. Use some of dough in the Big Oil offshore savings accounts & some of the war chest billions to support those workers who would be out of a job.

2. Commission the design of a water-powered motor car. Repair all the bridges and roads nationwide, with the possible exception of Manhattan in New York City, where hazardous sidewalks, streets and avenues give an added theme-park excitement to a taxi ride.

3. Require all national leaders to demonstrate accomplishment in one or several of the following: yoga, calculus, ability to listen, yearly detox, t’ai chi, flower arranging, chess, non-violence, fluency in at least one foreign language, organic gardening, ability to name countries and capitals worldwide, courtesy, self-control, above high-school use of English, demonstrated refusal to accept a high degree of inequitable privilege (e.g.: waiving the government healthcare plan until all citizens are similarly insured), recycling, cycling, thorough acquaintance with “The Republic” by Plato (which explains to the letter how what has just happened, happened, and should therefore be no surprise to anyone with any developed political understanding and least of all to the “Liberal left-wing media”).

Personal/National/International:
Assist all efforts foreign and domestic to desist from poisoning the air, the earth, and the seas. Implement clean, green, lean technology at every level. Talk to Dolphins and to Whales, listen to the messages carried on the wind. Plant more trees.

I am Colin McPhillamy and I approved this message.

Categories
Acting Plays Theatre

Lots of Prime Ministers: One Queen.

Reading this post you’d be forgiven for thinking the play I’m working on is called, ‘Churchill’ … actually it’s called ‘The Audience’.

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Here is a diary excerpt:

October 4th 2016.

It’s the first day of rehearsal at The Maltz Theatre, Jupiter, Florida. We, the cast, arrived yesterday, Most of us from out of town. Just shy of three hours on the plane from New York. I was in a window seat with a young mother and a one-year-old baby in her arms next to me. The baby was as good as gold except he did persistently kick me in the ribs, presumably unintentionally. I pretended not to notice and when the mother apologized I pretended not to mind. I was returning to British mode (from expat mode). We British would rather suffer in dignified silence than inconvenience a stranger. I used the time to go over my lines as Sir Winston Churchill.

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One scene only. Where he encounters the young Queen Elizabeth II. The scene is the occasion of their first private audience together with she as monarch of the United kingdom and Dominions. It took place in 1954. Sir Winston was then 78 years old.

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For research I visited the Cabinet War Rooms in London, and I’ve watched in no particular order Robert Hardy, Albert Finney, Timothy Spall, Brendon Gleeson and Michael Gambon as Churchill. Oh, and the great man himself of course in all the available speeches.

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All very fine actors, none of them actually impersonate the great man, but all of them copy some of his vocal characteristics, the well known rhythms and cadences, Gambon uses the lightest touch. Finney is my favorite for character.

th-4On the morning of the first day of rehearsals we have the meet and greet. As ever, it is astonishing how many people a theatre employs. The Maltz is a theatre under speed. By which I mean they put up plays and musicals in two and a half weeks, run them for 17 performances and that’s it. Get in; get out. I like it.
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The Audience is a big play and by far the biggest challenge falls to Karen MacDonald who is playing the Queen and is onstage the entire show with some astonishingly quick costume changes as she moves from Elizabeth R in her 8os to her 20s to her 60s and back and forth in this non-linear telling of the story of Britain’s Prime Ministers and their constitutionally un-mandated, but constitutionally effective weekly meetings with the monarch.

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Photo by Alicia Donelan Karen MacDonald as Queen Elizabeth II

We read through the text and you can feel confidence in the room as everyone, without saying so, agrees that it’s a fine cast and that the play has indeed been well-cast and with a bit of luck we’ll have a fine production. Of course this is the first time we’ve heard each other read and at this point none of us can do more than sketch an indication of where our performances might arrive. But everybody approves of everybody, everybody hopes everybody will come up with more, and everybody understands that on day one everybody is both confident and insecure. We all know that many things can go wrong in a rehearsal period. It’s a bit of a miracle that anything ever gets produced anywhere. But it’s a good start and baring acts of God we should have an excellent production on our hands.

In the afternoon we begin to pick the play apart and an amusing discussion follows on the cultural, social and political differences between our two great nations. Lou Jacob is directing and he seems to know more about British Constitution than I do. Hardly surprising, because no-one can really claim to be an expert, least of all anyone from Britain. Why so? Because there isn’t one. A British Constitution that is. At least not one that anyone has written down.

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Photo by Alicia Donelan with Peter Simon Hilton, Colin McPhillamy, Henny Russell, Karen MacDonald, Rod McLachlan, Skye Allysa Friedman, Mark Dold, Paul DeBoy, Peter Galman

Oddly, well it seems odd given the themes of the play, tonight is the U.S. vice-presidential debate. Getting back to the digs from rehearsal I turn on the telly. One of the cable news anchors is interviewing a couple of talking heads, “Is he gonna go offense or defense tonight?” the anchor asks. Before the talking head can answer, the anchor asks two other questions, answers the first question, then answers it again with a contradiction and then opines that it shouldn’t be left too long before one of the candidates “throws the first punch”. Then, in a further melange of sporting metaphors he announces a commercial break and we cut to a picture perfect family having a barbecue amid gently rolling hills and a mellow voice-over artist is telling us to soothing, mildly optimistic music, that spingo-dingo-mingo is not right for everyone and that side effects can include halitosis, bankruptcy and allergy to popular culture. I deploy the only sanction I can and turn the telly off, taking note that five years ago I could still have played the Dad in the commercial, now I’m the right age for the foxy Grandpa. Time flies in entertainment. Still it’s fun to be back in Florida.

Assorted production pix & trailer here

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Photo by Alicia Donelan Mark Dold, Gabriel Zenone, Karen MacDonald

And then there was a hurricane …

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Photo by Peter Simon Hilton. Colin McPhillamy as Winston Churchill
Categories
Acting

Before…

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Shortly going to Florida to play Churchill at The Maltz Theate, Jupiter. Sun, sea and sand, aka:
“… fighting them on the beaches.”
Categories
Acting

A Nostalgic Transit

Approaching London, the nostalgia hit me. Gerard Manly Hopkins had it right when he said:

english-countryside-reads-suitcase-magazin

 

“… landscape, plotted and pieced-fold …” There are few straight lines in the English countryside when viewed from above.

 

Oh to be in England where that which elevates is still a lift, where a dispensing apothecary, as once was, is still a chemist, where a check is a bill, where people understand what tea can mean, where the nation (grappling with who knows what political astrology) still drives on the left. A place where (some) people still apologize to you if you bump into them.

“The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.” — Anon

“… is there honey still for tea?” — Rupert Brooke

“Is there warm beer still in Oxford?” — Colin McPhillamy

Inside-of-Heathrow-Terminal

They re-vamped Heathrow Airport while I was away. No pictures can do justice to the overhaul. The ergonomic management of large numbers on the move includes subterranean moving walkways that go for hundreds of yards and give on to spacious malls. Ticketing counters tastefully jostle ecologically sound food offerings and really good coffee — a thing quite beyond imagining in the London of my youth. The forecourt behind the bus station has jet fountains lightening the mood with negative ions. It almost rivals anything built in modern China, but it makes NYC airport, JFK, look like … well, JFK.

I find a re-assuring consistency in the British media. As in the USA, it is to satire that one turns for the facts, and that redoubtable organ of truth, Private Eye, is still going strong. The Eye, first cousin to The Onion, reports on the unchanging melange of graft, vested interest and feet-of-clay-at-the-top. Said organ reports a sturdy readership of 700,000. As Radio 5 anchor, Sally Gunnell put it (reported in the Eye), “It’s just a small majority who are getting away with it.”

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Meanwhile at the other end of what the more rabid news anchors in the States are pleased to call the lefty/mainstream/liberal media, The Guardian newspaper (aka The Grauniad, due to a famous misprinting of its title on a main page), features on page 15 of its main section, the return of voles to the Yorkshire Dales. Nice to see journalism imitating art, even if it now knocks eighty years since Evelyn Waugh writing in his novel, Scoop, personating his character, the poetic countryman turned war correspondent, Henry Root, wrote “… through the plashy fen passes the questing vole …”

But it is in tradition that England excels: “And that sweet City with her dreaming spires…”

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I’m here for the Faculty of Astrological Studies summer school, one thinks of Dr. John Dee, 16th century man of stars, consultant to Elizabeth the First.

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Did it drizzle persistently then as now? My wife was right, I should have brought an umbrella.

The signature weather of an English summer, affirms, “… this other eden, demi-paradise… this precious stone set in a silver sea…  this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”

No prizes for guessing who wrote that.