If Enid Blyton had written The Seafarer(reviews here) I’m pretty sure that is the title she would have come up with.
One time I was involved in a World War 1 play. The set was an abstract of sand bags and scaffolding and we were invited to play at the St. Magnus Festival on The Orkney Islands north of the northern tip of Scotland across the Pentland Firth, one of the most treacherous stretches of water in the navigable seas.
We drove a van up the length of Britain from London to Thurso all through the night, and at an early hour before the sun came up one of the company filled the gas tank with diesel, not petrol, and we came to a full stop on a lonely road just about dawn. The highway services came to our rescue but we lost 2 hours in the confusion.
We reached Thurso (as far north-east as you can go in Scotland) to see the ferry which we had booked to take our set and costumes steaming out of the harbour.
What was to be done?
Our entrepreneurial assistant director was off round the moorings and he cut a deal with a fisherman to take us and our sandbags and scaffolding across the Pentland Firth in an open boat. The fee was £50, and “all the beer I can drink”.
Fortunately word of this madness reached the harbour-master and he immediately put a stop to it, otherwise I would be writing this from the sea-bed. We were able to re-book our berths on the next ferry but logistics meant there was no room for our set. So we abandoned the aforementioned scaffolding and sandbags (which we had transported the length of the country), repacked our costumes into suitcases and, catching the next ferry, gave our performance in the Festival on time.
Every now and there’s a stand out gig in an actor’s progress (to say career would be too loose a use of that word). The Seafarer was such a one for me. Great role, great cast (yes, the five who go drinking, ah lads…), great company – the Irish Rep, a brilliant triumph, as all theatres are, of the improbable over the impossible. Huge thanks and kudos to Charlotte Moore and Ciaran O’ Reilly, co-founders, and to all who work there.
Mick Mellamphy as Ivan, Colin McPhillamy as Richard in
The Seafarer at The Irish Rep. Photo Carol Rosegg
Tangentially and speaking of the sea and of ferries… I’m delighted to say that in September I will join the company of The Ferryman, a London transfer to Broadway. In a later blog I will disclose details of the patentable Mick Mellamphy Magical Method which assisted me to this forthcoming gig.
Big thanks too, to Carol Brennan who writes pacey, spicy crime fiction, for letting me crash on the sofa bed in the funky East Village when the commute got out of hand!
Next stop far north-eastern Maine and the Bagaduce Theatre – as far north-east as you can go without hitting Canada and New Brunswick where my maternal great-grandmother was born and at a young age in her early adult life as an actress sailed to Australia under a seven year contract to J C Williamson, theatrical producer, but that’s another story.
My third post in as many weeks?!: I may be in danger of becoming a real blogger!
My second Irish play in 12 months: … and although I estimate the Irish to be a magical people … a real actor? I think it unlikely, after all … “the best in this kind are but shadows.”
The Seafarer
I come by Irish connection honestly. My maternal great-great-grandfather emigrated from Dublin to Sydney in 1860 and in 1816 others in my maternal line were transported to Australia for making pot’een (whiskey) without a license. A manufacture that I call a service, not a crime.
At the end of the year in the frozen wastes of north-eastern USA it is easy to forget that in Australasia the season and the weather is exactly opposite.
Unless…
You happen, like me, to have recorded a forthcoming Australian
novel. Two actually. One is called Signal Lossby Gary Discher, and is a pacey police thriller. It’s the second of Mr Discher’s books that I’ve read aloud for commercial use (he’s written a string of them) and I’m a fan. The story itself deals with the desperate effects of the drug trade, and when I was in Australia earlier this year I witnessed some of exactly that in the economically challenged areas of NSW.
The other book has not yet been published and I was going to keep quiet about the title until it comes out officially, but I notice that those cunning marketing strategists have made it available to pre-order via Amazon.
I will say though that this year was also memorable for me for a dental episode involving a cracked tooth, and if you had poked it with one of those spindly things that dentists use, I would have told you the name of the book immediately, had you asked me. Yes, that painful. And when there’s pain what do you want? Anesthesia, right?
After all: “There was never yet philosopher who could endure the toothache patiently.” Shakespeare Much Ado About Nothing
So talking of drugs, my troublesome tooth obliged me to visit no fewer than three dental offices in one morning. This was the sequence: examination, possible root canal, extraction. In the first office, the dentist did indeed prod with an instrument. To say I leaped from the chair is an understatement. It was more as if my body was momentarily abducted by aliens and I was hurled at interstellar speed across the consulting room. I am not exaggerating.
Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man
With the root canal specialist there was whatever the present equivalent of novocaine is, and damn good stuff it was too. “That is good stuff.” I said to the friendly specialist, and I would have paid large amounts in cash money for a ready supply. Deciding the tooth could not be saved, I was referred to the third practitioner, a dental surgeon, who when I recounted through a thickly numbed mouth the level of pain and the level of comfort afforded by the right dope, kindly jabbed me with a further shot prior to performing the extraction.
And talking of medicine, and its close sibling, medical insurance, well I won’t bother you with the byzantine details, but… well actually… you do need a bit of back story to appreciate the full astonishing, mind-numbing absurdity of the situation.
And here let me say the story is involved so if you want to stop reading and make a cup of tea and then resume, fine. Or perhaps just stop reading altogether, and the next time we run into each other you can just make sympathetic noises and I’ll assume that you’ve read this sad account.
Still with me? Ok. Here’s the summary:
As you may know in the USA — of course if you are an American citizen or Green Card holder then you do indeed know, and if you are reading from some other part of the world, the UK for example, all I can say is: revere the NHS… and try not to let the characters presently in charge to finish what Mrs. Thatcher started in her attack on all social services — hospitals, schools, libraries, the railways, the BBC and so on…
Long story short. If you are an American actor and union member and you complete an average of 20 weeks of full employment in an 18 month period you can get very good medical insurance for the extremely reasonable (and to my mind) appropriate price of $100 per quarter. For the past 15 years, I have been fortunate enough to maintain this important average and (ironically, can you hear me laughing?) in that time never went to the doctor.
Then, at the end of last year my score of weeks-worked slipped below the qualifying requirement. OK. So I did what millions of Americans did and signed up for what is known as Obamacare. And here you enter the paradigm of the shy-and-retiring-second-hand-car-dealer. Which is to say there is no shortage of “affordable” insurance policies available which are actually expensive and meaningless, if you did have a serious medical emergency while “covered” under one of these discount schemes, you would very likely find yourself unable to the meet the “deductible” and they would come for your car, computer, television, furniture, 401k, clothing, underclothing, and house or apartment and you would have to sleep in your car — oh no, they already took that.
So I prepared to purchase the lower end of a policy which actually did seem to give actual coverage at a cost of, wait for it, $500 a month. Yes, that’s right. From $400 a year to $6,000 a year. Loss of income = exponential increase of premium was the net result. So just as I was poised to pay the first installment, I received an email from my union (the actors’ union) telling me that I was in fact eligible for another six months of coverage at the friendly union rate. I instantly paid the said union rate, 200 bucks for six months, and felt that (temporarily at least) I was winning in the game of life.
Cut to: six months later and the elegant, utilitarian health insurance offered by the union did actually expire, so I bit the proverbial bullet fully prepared to pay the (to my naturalized-citizen mind) exorbitant 500 bucks each and every month, until such time as I either: regained sufficient employment or won the lottery.
Picture my surprise when the website turned down my money.
This was to do with the complexities of “open enrollment” and various other internecine details that arose in the original Obama negotiations with the insurance companies and their proxies, the Republican Party. As we don’t have the space of a book to explain it here, I refer you to Michael Moore’s summation: “The insurance industry wasn’t content with a piece of it, they wanted all of it.”
After various circular conversations with insurance professionals and government officials, each of whom seemed to be just a few sandwiches short of the full picnic, the upshot was this:
Because I didn’t pay for something I never had (when I first applied for Obamacare and shunned it in favor of the union policy), I was not eligible to purchase it now.
Clever, right? I’d say right up there with Catch 22.
So there I was uninsured. This is not a condition you want to find yourself in, in the free world. I was passing the Actors’ Equity Association offices the following morning, and realizing the absurd and appalling state of risk I was living in (House, car, electrical appliances etc…) I went in and asked if there was a remedy?
“Sure,” said the union advisor, “You can’t be excluded from the policy just because you don’t have the weeks, so you can pay retail for the very same union insurance you had for $400 a year when you were in work.”
“How much would it cost?”
“$935 dollars a month.” This was said with an entirely straight face.
“I’ll take it.” I said instantly, glad to be able to come in out of the cold of the perilously uninsured condition into the warmth of at least being able to go on living in a well built dwelling should I step under a bus.
And there you have it. $400 a year, if in sufficient work; the precise same policy (and very good it is too) for something north of $11,000 a year, if you fall from favor with the gods of employment. Oh, and how a mere $500 per month now seemed a bargain, (which I could not access, remember?) Free market capitalism mixed with medicine, a compote of sophisticated financial oppression at its finest. Trawl the Internet and it will tell you the stats are that more than 60% of personal bankruptcies here in the Land of the Free are due to medical expenses. Seems plausible to me.
As Tilney photo Erika Rolfsrud
Deep personal thanks to Bonnie Monte at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival for inviting me to play Tilney in the recent sumptuous production of Shakespeare in Loveover there. Unknowingly, although profound thanks are still due, she saved my medical bacon.
Which is just as well, because I went to the doctor for a check up (most men don’t go, the statistics say, until they are 60). Well I just turned 60, so here I am right on the national average. There’s nothing seriously wrong, just a few harbingers of the issues to come as we move inexorably forward towards the final exit. The doctor was an extremely agreeable chap with whom I exchanged medical jokes. I told him that had I known it was going to be this much fun I’d have come to see him years ago.
In George Orwell’s book, Down and Out in Paris and London, Boris says:
“It’s fatal to look pale, it makes people want to kick you.”
This whole sorry episode could be viewed as a pale tale, and hey! It’s not sooo bad to have First World problems of this kind, actually all of the above is just one manifestation (there were plenty of others, believe me) of what we actor/astrologers know as the Saturn Return. I’ve just had my second one — we all get one about every thirty years or so.
If you are interested in my astrological perspective on the coming year, take a look here, but wait until the 2nd of January 2018 when the post will be live.
Oh, and if you thought medical insurance was fun and games, try getting dental coverage.
Shakespeare in Love is a charming tale of a young man and a young woman’s fancy in the context of the language-theatrical explosion that was London in the 1590s.
In some respects the script reads like a trivia compilation:
“And for ten points, which sonnet is referenced in the opening scene? For a bonus quail’s egg, who are the offstage Elizabethan celebrity authors mentioned in the De-Lessops-at-home scene?”
The splendid Whitney Maris Brown. She plays Viola
A frivolous confection, a charming love-letter to the Bard and all who sailed with him. Fights, sex, poetry. In short: something for everyone. This production, fielding 21 actors (who, in regional theatre can do that, these days?) — kudos to Bonnie Monte, an artistic director with the drive, enthusiasm and resources to field this show — opens at The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, October 11th and plays thru mid November.
Shakespeare has been on my mind lately as I’m re-reading ‘Shakespeare and the Stars’, an excellent volume of muscular scholarship which reveals the depth and breadth of commonplace astrological understanding in the Elizabethan world-view. As someone with a life-long interest in the mantic art, and as an actor in my fourth decade of work, having appeared in about a dozen productions of Shakespeare’s plays, it is kind of humbling, but I have to admit I have missed this insight, or if I noticed it dimly, I simply did not get the implications.
As with so many things, it’s obvious once you have it pointed out for you. For example The Tempest deals with the 12-year cycle of Jupiter, the many Martial references in the history plays juxtapose with the Venus/Mercury verse of Love’s Labor’s Lost, the insistence on The Moon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, including the almost drug-induced highly Neptunian speech “The lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact…” — notwithstanding that was written approximately 260 years before the blue gas giant was discovered. Romeo and Juliet has a Geminian flavor, right from “Two households, both alike in dignity…” onwards, and once you have the key, The Duke’s speech in Act 3 of Measure for Measure; “… reason thus with life … a breath thou art, servile to all the skyey influences that dost this habitation where thou keepst, hourly afflict...”, fairly hits you between the astrological eyebrows.
Of course it is possible to interpret Shakespeare as a Catholic, a Protestant, a humanist, a monarchist, a democrat, an anarchist. As the man says, “The devil himself can cite scripture for his purpose.” Now I know he was also an astrologer.
Simon Callow as Sir Edmund Tilney. BBC Archives
Meanwhile I play Sir Edmund Tilney, my costume cannot be revealed before we open otherwise I’d have posted a picture. Meanwhile, Simon Callow looks quite a bit like me, don’t you agree? Tilney was the Master of the Revels, in the employ of the Lord Chamberlain, a chap who seemed to find pleasure in closing theatres. (This is dramatic license. The historical Tilney was a great supporter of theatre and especially of Shakespeare). In the play he is an early prototype of the more censorious characters who later inhabited the Lord Chamberlain’s offices and redacted all kinds of literature right up to and including, Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the early 1960s, until Pluto entered Virgo and finally disrupted that kind of thing.
Ah, the Elizabethan age when women onstage were played by boys and men wore beards. When the eating of fish three times weekly was mandated in law. When a farthing (a quarter of a penny) could buy a pot of ale, and when illiterate people could compute in base duodecimal (twelve pennies to a shilling), and planted their vegetables by phases of the Moon.
One time I was involved in a World War 1 play. The set was an abstract of sand bags and scaffolding and we were invited to play at the St. Magnus Festival on The Orkney Islands north of the northern tip of Scotland across the Pentland Firth, one of the most treacherous stretches of water in the navigable seas.
You happen, like me, to have recorded a forthcoming Australian
marketing strategists have made it available to pre-order via Amazon.
