Category: Acting

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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
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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.”
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Acting

A Nostalgic Transit

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

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“… 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

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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.

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Acting

The Stage at the end of the Lane

Every theatrical venture is a triumph of the improbable over the impossible. None more so than a theatre in northern Maine where I’ve just had an intense few days.

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The Bagaduce Theatre lives in a large barn where swallows nest at the end of a long driveway on a peninsula where seals frolic in the swift flowing tidal inlets.

Here I am with an actress that I know well, Patricia Conolly of Broadway fame:

unnamed (5)It was like one of those European whirlwind tours — if it’s Thursday it must be Prague — The centre piece this season was an adaptation of The Tempest by Shakespeare, but also including segments from all your Bardic favorites! Other programs took in: Checkov, Durang, Shanley, Bennett, all the way up to and including a reading from that little-known British/Australian author C. McPhillamy.

I would have posted earlier so that you could have come to see a show if you were passing, but the days were full, hopping in and out of various costumes, brewing the excellent coffee available from the nearest town, Blue Hill, and grappling with the local mosquitoes which in that locale are special forces trained.

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Here are some of the company: Monique Fowler who is the driving force behind this splendid effort is center. She gives us a delicate Prospero aided by all the actors seen below and that redoubtable man of theatre craft John Vivian, who when not operating lights and sound, was everywhere, performing in one body the work of three men with behind the scenes support.

 

And this is the company at a lobster dinner given by the producers: The lobster flowed (there’s no other word for it), the wine flowed. We laughed, then there was singing. We all ate and drank more than would be advised by a doctor. I’ve said it before, in my line they pay you in fun.

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It was a theatre fest of the kind that reminds you why you joined.

 

Categories
Acting

The Bard and the Stars

IMG_9743‘Not so my lord, I am too much in the sun …’ Hamlet

‘The inconstant moon who is already sick and pale with grief…’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream

‘The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo…’ Love’s Labours Lost

‘O’er picturing that Venus wherein we see the fancy outwork nature…” Anthony and Cleopatra

‘Assume the port of Mars …’ Henry V

‘If Jupiter should from yond cloud speak divine things …’ Coriolanus

‘But thou, being, as thou sayest born under Saturn …” Much Ado About Nothing

I mention all this because this month I guest at http://www.bagaducetheatre.com where I get to do some Shakespeare up to and including the seven ages speech which, as above, references the seven planets of the ancient world.

And then on August 1st at 1pm eastern USA time, I’ll be talking live about these same planets and how they correspond with the tarot deck. Click here 

‘Course, if the Bard knew one thing it was how to put both sides of an argument so let’s not forget Edmund’s speech in King Lear:

‘This is the excellent foppery of the world that when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting-on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.’

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There’s no mention of Tarot in Shakespeare, but he does mention the names of all the cards of the Major Arcana except Hierophant and Temperance. Everything else is there … Fool (400 uses), Juggler (also magician), priestess appears only once in Pericles and so on through the rest of the 22.

So, to get my take on Shakespeare’s take, on how tarot and astro connect including a step by step demonstration of how this technical knowledge can add depth to your readings, and how quantum physics brings it all together, click here to register. It’s free.