Category: Acting

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Acting

October

There was a rush of preparation shopping in the supermarket next door. By the time I got there the eggs were gone and all the bread. Understandable, but who can explain a run on molasses? Only six jars left on the shelves. 

Likewise tomatoes – all gone. Fresh fish – down to a few sad Tilapia. Tins of corn – wiped out. 

But coffee – still plenty. Likewise tea and herbal tea, condiments of all kinds.

Molasses? We buy the strangest things under pressure.

How thin the line between First World convenience and the Stone Age. We filled the tub with water, and pots and pans too, not really believing that we’d have to use it. It was fun to live by candlelight for a night or two, but it was less fun to flush the loo with dwindling bathwater.

Back in the 1970s I lived on a commune for a few months in the North Yorkshire Dales. The property was a hunting lodge, built by Queen Victoria in the style of the Tyrol to make Prince Albert’s cousins feel at home. We lived in a house powered by a fuel stove, and ate soup made from fresh vegetables, grown in the kitchen garden. The house was on a high slope a mile from the nearest village, and in the winter it was cold – bitingly, penetratingly cold. The wind came off the heights whining continually. Wind was the only theme some days.

At that time there was a network of such places up and down Britain. The famous community at Findhorn still flourishes, and a few years later I would visit a community on Iona. Our place was  directly inspired by the work of J. G. Bennet, his compelling life story told in his book ‘Witness’. Bennet foresaw a sequence of urban collapse, privation, and social failure on a massive scale. He encouraged his followers to set up communes and communities to preserve craft knowledge. His vision was inspiring if perhaps a little off in the timing.

Because, what happened? The largest, most enduring commercial and technological expansion since written history began.

Ah … but that didn’t last long, and as soon as the Internet goes down, and the one-eyed monster in the corner or in plasma on the wall is silent, and when the water in the tub is all used up, and when a tin of molasses is changing hands at dollars on the penny … what happens then?

Be all that as it may, the biggest news in our lives, bigger for us even than the hurricane, is that Trish has become a grandmother. Baby Jeremy Daniel arrived fully formed and perfectly beautiful.  Emily and Jonathan adopted him as a newborn. No one could wish for better care.

And the story of the hurricane and the story of being new grand-parents converge, because here we are staying with the new baby and his new parents up in Westchester while the power is out in Lower Manhattan. With amazing good luck their house was untouched by falling trees, and they still have electricity.

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Acting

December

Once the readership of this blog soared into double figures I took a six month sabbatical. Now that I’m returning to it on the last day of 2011 and in the middle of a run of Charley’s Aunt at The Guthrie, I’ve finally managed to break a leg. Actually it was a torn hamstring, but as so few us are reading, you’ll forgive the license. In passing I’ll mention that the editor has told me to make this returned-to-version leaner and meaner at 500 words a pop.
Charley’s Aunt has to be in the forefront of silliest plays ever written, but it’s one of the funnest to perform. Mostly because that great theatre sound, the sound of several hundred people all laughing at once is a great tonic. I mean where else can you get that?
Not in congress! At post play discussions I sometimes say that farce (Charley’s Aunt) is a naturally popular form in England, because for years now we’ve run the whole country on farcical lines. Now I see that trend is catching on with our American cousins. And I say this with all respect due and now that I have become a British American.
It’s a big circle for me to be involved here. Charley’s Aunt was just about the first play I ever saw, it was certainly the first time I was taken backstage. I was about twelve, and Tom Courtenay was giving us his ‘Lord Fancourt-Babberly’ – the one, you’ll remember, who personates Charley’s hitherto unknown Aunt. 
I was utterly charmed by the experience, and it took me back when one of our audience here in Minneapolis told me that seeing our production had made him laugh so much that his stomach hurt – back when I was twelve I laughed so much my face hurt and my cheeks were stuck near my ears. Back then when we went behind the scenes I was introduced to an actor by the name of Wolfe Morris, he was playing Spettigue. Fifteen years later I was in a British production and played one of the lively undergrads, a character called Jack, notoriously tricky by the way because he is the ‘engine of the play’ (the author’s words, not mine), and is mostly the comic feed, the straight man. Now, forty years later, I’m playing the old fart, yes Spettigue. Time passes eh?
But let’s get back to politics.
Taking citizenship I thought I was privy to the finest of The United States ideals – how did that thing go? Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free … we were 150 strong in the room where we took the oath, 42 nationalities represented. And in the course of the ceremony, with the New World genius for self-congratulation, we gave ourselves six standing ovations.
Incidentally: 
Do you know the difference between American politics and British politics?

There is no difference, they are the same.

Except that in America you don’t have the two drink minimum.

Happy New Year!
Categories
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?