The Translator And The Actor At Cross-Purposes

I don't know how to write about this. If I'd intended to blog about the process of M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. I should have started months ago, at the beginning. Now I need to think - and by think I mean write- about last night, but I can't start there, or nothing will make any sense. I'll have to start at the beginning after all, and see if I can follow my thoughts to where I stand.

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The beginning came courtesy of Phoebe, an old friend in Athens who is a journalist but used to be an actor. She reported for the BBC World Service on Greek theatre's response to the economic crisis, discussing several plays that sounded intriguing. Selfish motives foremost in my mind, I asked if any of them might be suitable for translation and performance in English. She replied that the best thing she'd seen in Athens last year was not notably political, but, come to think of it, it might suit me perfectly. It was Μ.Α.Ι.Ρ.Ο.Y.Λ.Α a one woman show written by Lena Kitsopoulou and performed, to great acclaim, by Maria Protopappa.  I asked another good friend, Maro, who also has a deep knowledge of theatre and excellent taste, though different aesthetic preferences from Phoebe. She too, said the show was very powerful, though she warned me it was full of wordplay and references to Greek culture, that it would be almost impossible to translate.

I had to read it. I contacted Lena, whom I didn't know, with some trepidation, but she was warm and friendly, cheerfully sending me a copy of the performance script. I loved it. It surged off the page with a reckless, flamboyant energy; fascinating, exasperating, as alive as any text I've ever seen. I wrote to her again, being perfectly frank about my near total lack of resources;  nevertheless we agreed easily on the terms by which I could use her work. It's not necessary to like a playwright whose work you're dying to perform, but I like Lena very much. Even if M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. never gets off the ground in English, I'll have had the pleasure of getting to know her a bit.

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I'm not going to say I didn't struggle with the translation, because I did to some extent, particularly with a section in the middle that's made up almost entirely of punning acronyms. For this section, I sought, and received help from a mixed group of Greek friends and family, who got me unstuck and on the right track more than once. I also had a wonderful time doing it, and found it much easier than I anticipated. I've worked as a translator on and off, it's a natural occupation for someone brought up bilingual, but I'd translated marketing bumf, academic texts, a coffee table book, never a work of art. I loved translating M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A., it was the most fun I've ever had at my desk. If you're reading this and you know anyone who might need a literary translator - Greek to English- please put us in touch. This isn't really a joke; I could use the work.

I won't talk about the content except in general terms. It's a rip-roaring rollercoaster of a stream of consciousness monologue, whose clever, self-aware protagonist tries to conceal her own truths under a slew of great universals and outrageous jokes, some deft, some clunky, and ends up revealing more than she thinks. It's a lovely play. It's also a play that requires a great performance; something with depth, comic timing, a huge emotional range, nuance, layers. Nothing less could carry it, could even begin to approach the power of the words on the page.
 
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It's also a play that strikes very close to home for me. Like me, the protagonist is an actor in early middle age. Like me she is single, language-obsessed, unhappy - unlike me she is childless. There are so many mistakes to make in the performing of it; melodrama beckons, and glib reliance on the wit of the text, so does a cathartic self-indulgent wallow. Now, I didn't come back to acting, my first love, in my 30's because I was scared of a big, juicy, complex part. And I didn't spend two months translating M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. to balk at playing her. But neither was I unconscious of the scale of the difficulty, of how very much dedicated character work it was going to take to do it properly, nor stupid enough to try it on my own.

I was going to need a director. Not only a very good one, but one who cared about new writing enough to take on this odd and entirely unknown text from another culture,  and would be willing to entrust the acting to me, an odd and entirely unknown actor from another culture. Fortunately, I knew an excellent director, whom I trusted aesthetically and as a person, and she'd seen me do a short solo piece I was quite proud of. It would serve as an audition. She is Louie Ingham, Associate Artist at The Duke's Theatre in Lancaster, where I live, and recently director of one of the most moving things I'd seen there. I sent her the script. She loved it, we agreed to apply for funding, to try to make it happen. I was thrilled, thrilled and impatient to start. Also slightly incredulous, needing the reassurance of a starting date to believe it was real. But Louie's schedule was packed. The earliest we could start development was mid - May. Rehearsals were unlikely to begin before autumn.

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There I was, with a freshly translated play I was itching to start work on, and no director for weeks or months yet. And there came an invitation to a scratch night, issued by undergraduates at my old university. This, I thought to myself, was a great opportunity to try out  a short extract from the script. Undirected of course. I wouldn't attempt to play the character, just speak the words in a way that made sense to me, to see if my translation actually worked in English, spoken aloud. Even just learning it would help me understand how the words felt in my body, in my mouth. It would allow me to further polish the translation, to make sure it was a dramatic text, not just a literary one. I would have no ego riding on the performance because I would have put very little into it. Just learned the lines, played a bit with word stresses, come up with a bit of business. There was no point in trying to do character work, no point in going into any depth without Louie's guidance and support. It was just text, not acting.

The first indication that I might be deluded came as I re-read the script, looking for a good bit to do, an extract that had a shape to it, that gave some idea of what the play was like, without requiring any of the depths I couldn't yet supply. I chose a couple of bits, read them out a few times, started learning the one that sounded best. And stopped. I couldn't learn it. It was too far along. I'd have to start at the beginning, that's where actors start learning monologues, at the beginning. Fortunately the first two pages were pretty self-contained, almost an overture. I started learning them.  I did redraft as I learned, finding the places that didn't flow out loud, and that was good. I learned it more easily than I've ever learned any text, probably because I'd already broken it down into thoughts in order to translate it, or maybe just because I'd worked on the English words for so long that I already knew them a bit.

                     

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Which brings me to last night, to that scratch night, where I learned that it's one thing to say you don't care about your performance as such, just about speaking the words in English to an audience, and another thing to actually not care about your performance, as such. Don't get me wrong; I held the audience, they laughed in the right places, even got a little bit tense in the right places - a little bit.  The text certainly worked, some decisions about it that had troubled me had clearly succeeded, and my core skills in speaking text didn't fail me. But, it was empty when it should have been full, a husk instead of a ripe fruit. In Mairoula's terminology - the title is both a name and an acronym- a watermelon that was a bit unripe, not very juicy, a bit bleah.

And I hated it. I hated not giving my baby - Lena's baby - the care it deserved. It hurt. It hurt during the performance, and it still hurts. A few years ago, in the depths of an ugly depression, I spent a lot of time being emotionally distant from my young son. I'm better now, and I feel like shit about those times. It's not the same thing of course, but the flavour of that guilt is like the taste in my mind right now, the taste of having betrayed a precious, tender creature in my trust. I betrayed M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A.; not grossly, not irrevocably, but I betrayed it. And it haunts me. I've spent all day writing this just to get to these two paragraphs where I can say: How stupid of me to think I could  not care about the performance, even for the sake of the translation. I may be both translator and actor here, and who knows what else, but I can't be both at the same time. And I know it was a scratch, and presented as a work in progress, and it's not the end of the world. I know. But all the same, I'm ashamed of myself. In my enthusiasm, I volunteered to do that little extract at another couple of events. I'm cancelling those. I'll go through the rest of the text reading aloud, making changes like the ones I made in the first two pages, and that's that. The rest can wait, and I can stand waiting much better than I can stand letting the material down again.

The Forest: Review

The space is darkened, fathomlessly large, a haze hangs in the air. Nested in traverse seating, a narrow strip of stage shines smooth and metallic, a dozen slim tree trunks rising up from it.

"Spooky," says my seven year-old, eyes aglow. It's clearly intended as praise.

Spooky it is, and beautifully so. One of the joys of living near the Nuffield Theatre is seeing it transformed, by show after show; it's a vast space, and remarkably flexible. I've seen it in every arrangement imaginable, but never like this. Even before the show begins, there's something magical about it.

Three dancers walk out of the darkness and come to stand by one of the short sides of the stage.
There's more animation in their faces than you usually see in dancers, and they don't avoid our eyes. They don't seek them out, either. Something in the way they stand by the stage tells you the forest extends beyond it, though this isn't illustrated in any way.

The music is evocative, ornamented with birdsong, adding to the sense of space. Swiftly but unhurriedly, the man and two women step onto the stage, pick up the conkers lying there, step off. Again, they step forward, radiating curiosity, wonderment. For these opening seconds it's easy to read the piece as a story: Three friends walk into a beautiful woodland; perhaps they're children-certainly there's something childlike in their curiosity, their delight.

I couldn't tell you at what point the stroll became dance, so smoothly did they segue into it, a dance that was playful, concrete, informed entirely by the dancers' response to the environment and each other. They chased each other, hid, their slim bodies concealed more by stillness than any cover the even slimmer tree-trunks could afford. There are moments of abstraction; red elastic they stretch among the tree-trunks, step on, get tangled up in - or the golden spheres they discover and set to rolling in perfect, improbable parabolas across the golden floor. My analytical mind, not entirely detachable from the experience, makes connections to fairytale forests, treasures, and quests.

I glance at the boy sitting next to me. He is completely absorbed, an eager, delighted expression on his face. The dancers seem to be having as good a time as we are, sparking off each other and the shapes and textures of the space. Tangled in red elastic, they huff in mild irritation; hiding and seeking among the trees, they call each other's names. In one of my favourite moments, the male dancer is hiding in plain sight by passing himself off as a tree. One of the women is seeking him "Robin", she calls, climbing partway up a tree-trunk, and then another, "Robin". "Robin," she climbs up Robin's body, gazing over his head and into the forest, "Robin!".

Occasionally, something drops down from above, a leaf, a constellation of suspended lights, and play turns to discovery of this new element in the environment, and again to play. The lights dim, and we know it's night. Robin curls up to sleep. He snuffles and shifts on the floor and then he's an animal; grumbling and lumbering this way and that. Petra and Marianna restrain him, gently, soothe him back to sleep. There are faint flashes of danger in these moments, something primal is glancingly evoked, but before even a hint of real anxiety can develop, the wild creature resolves again into comfortable friend.

Not long after, it's over, ending in a coup de théâtre that made me laugh with delight.

My son tells me he loved it, that it was wonderful. I agree. I remind him that he hadn't wanted to see it because he couldn't tell what it was going to be about. "So," I ask, "what was it about?"

"It was about these kids that went into the forest and started playing about and dancing around there."

It was. And even though I never set foot on stage, I was a kid in that forest too, playing and dancing about.

Taking the boy to The Forest

Forest

Me: We're going to see a show.

He: What's it about?

Me: Well, I'm not sure. I guess it's about forests. It's for kids. Take a look at this video:



He: I'm not going to like that.

Me: I thought it looked pretty cool.

He: I don't like it that they don't tell you what's going on. And it looks like there's no talking in it.

Me: I don't think there is any talking.

He: It's just dancing. I don't like stories with no story in them.

Me: Well, I don't think it's a story, exactly.

He: When there's no talking, and you can't tell what's happened, you spend all your time trying to figure it out. It's confusing.

Me: I'm sorry you don't like the idea, but I really want to see this, and you've come to other shows with me that you didn't think you were going to like, and you loved them.

He: I know you're going to make me go with you. I bet I'm going to be really bored.

I understand what he means. As recently as 5 years ago, I too, would have balked at seeing a show with no story, no speech, where meaning was conveyed through movement and sound. My mind still struggles to form meaning, to link up elements of any performance I see into a narrative. I'm still more at ease with story, would probably choose a narrative work over an abstract or impressionistic one, all other things being equal. And yet...I've now experienced performances that moved me deeply, or made me laugh out loud, that were not stories. I've learned, a little, to force my verbal to brain to shut up long enough to experience a kind of beauty that words can only hinder. Everything I've heard about The Forest suggests to me it may hold that kind of experience. So, off we go, this afternoon, one protesting 7-year old and I. Into The Forest. We'll leave a trail of breadcrumbs for you, if you want to follow.

The Worst Mistake

The worst mistake is to play the character….

That’s what Philippe Gaulier said when I asked him about the different ways that performers block themselves from clowning. Well, what he actually said was “the best”, but we all think he meant “the worst.” The stuff of performance is very hard to transmit in words anyway, let alone when the speaker and hearer don’t share a native language. When I write about what I think he said, there’s a lot of guesswork.

Not all actors can be clowns, I guess he said. Some are happy to play a ridiculous character, but they can’t bear to be ridiculous. To clown you have to find a part of yourself underneath the social persona- or maybe the conscious mind- that other people find funny. You have to enjoy having this hidden part of your self laughed at. Then you can build on it, refine it, magnify it. But you can’t fake it; the worst mistake is to play the character.

I saw people do what he told them, in the little, excruciating and valuable time we each had alone under his forensic gaze and everyone’s judgment, and snap into focus on the stage. I did it myself. Goaded to anger and told to be angry, I let loose a stream of Greek invective. He had others speak in their native language too-is an older physical identity tied to native language? I knew I was funny then, when everybody laughed as I cursed Gaulier and them with real anger. “You are not boring,” he said “but this charming character you play is very boring. Anger is good for your clown.” But you can’t spend all your time on stage in a towering rage, right? Wrath is so monolithic, so ponderous, and clowns are anything but ponderous; they’re all about the pleasure of the game. How can you use anger to find the game?

We devised a show when I was an undergraduate in which I played an almost-suave and vaguely sinister androgynous compère in a bowler hat. Whenever the hat fell off or was removed, I’d fly into a rage or howl in despair. It worked, it was funny. It worked in another way too. It gave me something to do with all the anger I’d accumulated over a then six-year relationship with an angry, controlling man. When that relationship ended, and I started studying clown, I was determined not to go there. Anger was too easy to get a laugh out of; too uncomfortable psychologically after so many years of being defined by it, one way or another.

And I tried, I really tried, to find something else, in workshop after workshop. But I learned something watching others, and it must be true of me, too. The red nose is a magnifying glass; it can only show what’s there. Censoring anger, all I found I could show was sadness, and shame. Clowns are shameless, of course. They live too much in the present for regrets, and the closest they get to acknowledging error is a rueful sort of “better luck next time” attitude to their mistakes. And despite the ‘crying clown’ cliché, they’re never mournful. A clown can howl with a toddler’s unrestrained sobs, but is easily distracted from them and never, ever goes around feeling sorry for herself. In workshop after workshop, I failed to get a laugh.

Group games and pair-work on complicity aside, clown exercises are just various ways of framing the injunction: Get out there and be funny for us-and don’t pretend. Many clown teachers use unkindness as a technique. I know there’s a whole philosophy about it, but I haven’t read up on it, I can only tell you my experience. In that experience, that cruelty mostly consists of telling you you’re not funny, brutally and often. The teacher’s words are only an expression of the audience’s restless silence, a magnifying glass, just like the nose. Brutal words were not new to me, I endured them, braced myself to endure them in every exercise, and with every exercise, I got less funny. There’s nothing funny about stoically enduring abuse. Maybe what that means is that my stoicism, and other attempts to be anything but angry is “ playing the character”. It’s not funny because it’s not the truth; the truth is I’m angry.

All of the people who teach clowning in this way tell you that it’s a technique, that they don’t enjoy being cruel to students. Many of these teachers will also tell you that the cruelest of all is Philippe Gaulier. I don’t buy it. Philippe is relentless in his critique, inspiring the audience to join him in extreme condemnations of your failure to be funny. He clearly enjoys the game of being extravagantly unkind, enjoys getting to kick all the sacred cows of social convention too, but I don’t think he was enjoying our suffering. I’ve met at least one clown teacher who clearly did.

There’s something childlike about a clown’s ignorant and unselfconscious enthusiasm for everything. That’s where I’m trying to get; to the joy of the game. I don’t know how I can get there through anger. I can’t pretend to be angry, that’s playing the character again, a boring angry character instead of my boring charming one. But how can you wear your real anger as a pair of clown shoes, how do you teach it new tricks? I don’t get it intellectually, and I don’t get it in my actor’s body. It just doesn’t make sense; but it seems there’s no denying it:

I am ridiculous when I am angry.

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I’ve been very angry about a lot of things in the last few years. I’ve felt angry as a woman, as a citizen, as a human being, as a participant in online discussions, as an actor. Studying theatre at university, in my thirties, I became enraged by the assumption that only deliberate formal experimentation was artistically valid. A lot of people who work in or teach experimental theatre seem to look down on plays and acting, treating both narrative and pretense with contempt. I’m told this works both ways (both forms of prejudice are silly) but as someone who tried to learn to be an actor through courses beguiled by different modes of performance, it’s my own experience that makes me angry. I love narrative, I love pretending (and watching others pretend) and I got very short schrift for saying so. I find this infuriating both aesthetically and personally. Most of the time, I manage to keep a lid on that fury.

Recently, I was invited to be part of a discussion group about theatre convened by someone I have great respect for, full of people I like and admire, people I am humbled to be counted among. I was never asked to hang out with the cool kids when I was a teenager, but if I had been, I think it would have felt a little like this.

This week, in one of my first posts to that group, I unloaded all my suppressed fury on one member, whose only crime had been to dislike some texts I was working with and tell me so. You know how when some people post online they attach all the bitterness they’ve ever had around the subject, and lob it at anyone who disagrees with them? My ex did something similar in his frequent abusive episodes, he bundled up years of anger generated elsewhere, and threw it at me. Well, that’s what I did in this discussion group. It wasn’t as bad as what the ex used to do, or as the kind of stuff you get when you admit to being a feminist online, but it was in the same territory. I got invited to the cool kids' clubhouse, where I got drunk, punched one of them, and threw up on the floor. So much for keeping a lid on it.

I’m writing this to apologize, but also to understand. I can’t pretend to not be angry. When I do, when I play that character, what Gaulier called my “charming character” I am boring, it seems. I try to keep a lid on it, then it explodes like a faulty pressure cooker, making a mess and hurting people. How do you take all that steam and turn it into an engine instead, to take you and others to different places? How do you turn your anger into clown shoes and take it for a walk?

I don’t know, but after a week’s worth of Gaulier’s clown workshops I know there's only one place I can start:

I am ridiculous when I am angry.

Finishing The Seam

Image by beanphoto

Working on Lancaster Theatre Uncut has been an absolute joy, even as we lurched from one crisis to another. We didn’t have much with which to make it happen. Besides the play texts, all we had was ourselves, what little time and other resources we could steal from our lives, whatever space we could borrow. Maybe that’s the essence, what theatre’s always made of; people, space, time. In our case the last two were in very short supply, but people made up the difference. So very many people stepped in to make Saturday’s event. From Hannah Price and her team down in London, the writers who donated their work, the people here in Lancaster who gave their time, their effort, their skills. For each person listed in our programme as part of the production, there were anywhere from two to a dozen of their friends and family members without whom the event would have been lesser, or not have happened at all. And that’s without going into the thanks page.

Time was what we had the least of. We held auditions a month ago, with extracts from the seven plays then available. In any ordinary rehearsal process of course, a month is plenty of time. Only we weren’t rehearsing every day. We were lucky to spend two hours together a week on any given play. Of course people put in time on their own, got others to stand in for rehearsals, and by considerable effort, it held together. Still, there were losses. The worst was that our schedule didn’t allow us to incorporate the eighth play, David Greig’s Fragile, into our event. This is a pity for all sorts of reasons. One of our first and most crucial recruits to the cause, Daragh Carville, was eager to direct it, sight unseen. I’ve understood from various reviews, and from Kieran Hurley, who performed it in Glasgow, that it’s not only excellent, but occupies a formal territory I’m personally fascinated by. But we were short of time and short of actors. We couldn’t do it, that was clear. I haven’t been able to bring myself to read it and find out what we’ve missed.

It’s been a case of mucking in all along, never more so than on the Saturday itself. We had access to the Storey’s auditorium from 1 PM. The plan had been to quickly tech through the transitions between plays and the few light and sound cues, then go for a full dress rehearsal. This plan didn’t survive contact with reality. It was 1:20 before we were all assembled, un-stacking the modular stage, setting it up at one end of the auditorium, and unfolding the chairs. We were blessed that Emma Geraghty, a Lancaster University undergraduate who was already acting in two of the plays turned out to know her way around a lighting desk. Even with LitFest director Andy Darby, and Emma, and fellow undergraduate actor Leo, and Adrian, partner to one of our directors, all helping out with tech; even with all the rest of us doing what we could, it was after 2 by the time we were ready to start. There was no way to cram in a tech and a dress, we’d be lucky to finish a full tech run in time. I don’t know what we would have done without all the other directors and some of the actors thinking of all the things I’d forgotten to think about. I don’t know what we’d have done without Angela, smoothing the way and doing everything else. As it was, we finished teching just 40 minutes before we opened the house doors.

Some of the plays had had less than 5 hours rehearsal with a full cast. The reasons varied: Housekeeping, Lucy Kirkwood’s absurdist 3-hander had lost its protagonist. Twice. The final replacement had taken on the part only a week before, and we’d been so certain that he couldn’t learn the lines in time that we’d put it in the programme. He proved us wrong. That whole company, the least theatrically experienced of all of us, did director Tim Austin and the rest of us proud. Everybody did. I’m going to write the kind of thing here that gets theatre people mocked for being “luvvies”. I don’t care. Love was what these shows were made of, that and a shoestring. Knowing you can rely on people, to do what’s needed and more…well, it inspires love. But if trust was a product of our working together, it was also a requirement. After all the desperate scrambling for performers and recruiting of amateurs, we had to can someone in the last week. It was so late in the process that she’s in our publicity photo. Crazy as it sounds, it was an entirely pragmatic decision; better no-one at all than someone you can’t rely on. Come to think of it, the fact that she managed to show up to the photo shoot but failed to attend rehearsals speaks for itself. Director Keely Hawkins came up with an ingenious solution involving stylization and a pair of dictaphones, and in the end we had a better show for it.

I’m not in a position to give you a review, I’m much too close. I can tell you that it went remarkably well, with none of the disasters I was dreading, and that the audience was enthusiastic. I can tell you that it worked, as a production and as a call for political action. The audience was palpably fired up. Back in February, we were all pretty clear about why were doing this; why we were protesting, and why in the form of theatre. By Saturday night, it had all become about the how. We had our hands so full with the how of putting these plays together that we almost forgot what they were, and why we were doing it. To put it another way, making Lancaster Theatre Uncut inspired so much love that we misplaced the anger which sparked it. And then the house lights dimmed, and we started. When we spoke to audience, in the plays themselves and afterwards, in the bar, we remembered, because they reminded us.

Adam Gregory, who was in that audience, wrote that it was “like a rallying call for a minor revolution” and of course he’s right, that was the whole point. But there’s something else in his post that will stay with me from that night. I looked out into the house, and saw strangers and nodding acquaintances, teachers and parents from my son’s school, shopkeepers, neighbours, friends, people I knew from work- some of these categories are overlapping. I felt, for the first time since I moved from the large, hot, dry and bustling southern European city in which I was born to this small, damp, quiet town in the north of England, that I was at home. As much as our anger, it was our love we were asserting, our sense of this place and the people we share it with. Against the fraud of the Big Mac Society we set the reality of this small community and many others like it. Theirs is made of greed and lies, ours of love and people; that’s why we’re going to win.

This piece was commissioned by exeunt magazine

The continuing adventures of Lancaster Theatre Uncut

This time last week, everything seemed to be coming together for the Lancaster group of Theatre Uncut volunteers. We had a great venue in a central location, a good friend and ally in LitFest, a network of supporters lending us everything from clown costumes to hospital beds and volunteering to ferry bits of set for us, usher on the night of the 19^th, help publicize the event. We’d acquired an excellent and cheaply printable poster from The Secret Surface just for the asking, and Angela was back from a family wedding and able to apply her considerable administrative skills to my slapdash if energetic attempts to manage the event. We’d lost three directors and two actors to paying work and the demands of postgraduate study, but we’d managed to replace them by asking almost everyone we knew and howling our (make that my) despair on social networks.

One actor we found by such a convoluted, 21^st century set of connections that I can’t resist telling you about it. My friend Emma is the bar manager at Manchester’s greenroom. She saw my facebook post announcing that we needed a young man to play Bill in Lucy Kirkwood’s Housekeeping. Because, of course, it had to be one of the parts in the Theatre Uncut plays whose age and sex were specified that we suddenly had to recast. Within 20 minutes, Emma had given me an email address. If you know greenroom, you know that most of the people whose work can be seen there describe themselves as performers or theatremakers, not actors, so even this first step in the sequence was reasonably unlikely. I wrote to the guy, who replied that he’d love to do it, but he was broke and living in Manchester. He couldn’t afford the train fare, and knowing the purpose and circumstances of the show, didn’t want to ask us for expenses. Quite right, too, we couldn’t have paid them. He suggested, though, that we contact his agent, who by chance is based in Lancaster, for an alternative. It felt very strange writing to an agent to offer his clients unpaid work, but to my surprise, that too, worked out, and a couple of days later I finished making arrangements to have the venue especially opened for a Housekeeping rehearsal on Sunday afternoon, and went to read my son a bedtime story. I returned from my nightly exercise in vocal characterization and 1-on-1 performance to an email from Tim, who’s directing Housekeeping. Our newly recast Bill had found a paying gig for that weekend and left us.

I’d already done despair earlier in the week, so I went for swivel-eyed optimism instead. That, and accosting friends and badgering them to play the part. Tim and I decided that it no longer mattered that whoever played Bill be as young as the script required, or as male. Anyone who could read the lines and speak them audibly would be welcome, and I was on the verge of breaking out the spirit gum and the false mustaches and playing him myself, when Anthony turned up. A cartoonist and illustrator by trade, he’s acted in shorts for the DIY film-makers group in town, which is how we heard about him. Cunningly, I offered him the part without mentioning that it was the lead, and he accepted. The email I received on sending him the script began “Yikes!”, but to his great credit, he’s made no attempt to back out. He’s also never acted on stage before, nor had to learn anything like this many lines, so though Sunday’s rehearsal went very well, we think it’s likely he’ll go on if not quite script in hand, then with one easily available.

Some of the other plays have had their ups and downs, though none have been quite so close to being cancelled. I’ve not had much to do with Things That Make No Sense, but I gather it’s been going smoothly ever since we had to replace the director and one of the cast. I sat in on one rehearsal for A Bigger Banner, and especially enjoyed watching director Jayne Davis come up with low-tech staging solutions for the time-travel effect that its central device. I’d only come by to bring them a dress from 1950, borrowed from the Vintage Shop, and ended up staying for two hours to enjoy the fun. The dress was a perfect fit, and matched the gloves Jayne had brought, and Keely loves it and looks so good in it that’s she’s buying it after the show, for the princely sum of 8 pounds.

I’ve had more to do with Whiff Whaff. The director, playwright Daragh Carville, has never directed before, and asked me to sit in on rehearsals, I think because he felt he needed help. He doesn’t, but I haven’t told him so because I’m enjoying observing the process too much. The play is satirical, and the characters could easily be played for cheap laughs, but he’s bringing out the subtleties in the text, turning them before my eyes from monsters into people whose monstrous opinions, fiercely as they are held, have cost them dear. Myself, I’m directing all the monologues. Open Heart Surgery is a spare, affecting parable. Nickie , who’s performing it, is a physics student with a lot more political conviction than acting experience, but she has the good sense not to overplay it and a beautifully expressive face; it should cut straight home. I’m also directing HI VIS, easily my favourite of the texts. Back in the distant reaches of February, when I first started trying to get people involved in this, I received an email from actor Christine Mackie, saying she’d like to join us. I probably shouldn’t admit to this, but that email nixed anyone else’s chance of getting cast in HI VIS. I’d seen her in Sabbat, here at The Duke’s Theatre, and I knew she’d do it justice, and more. It’s a wonderful text, rich, complex, and heartbreaking; working on it with Chris is sheer delight. As for the Anders Lustgarten piece, which I’m performing, it’s a barnstorming rabble-rouser of a polemic, not a character monologue. There’s a glorious, compelling rhythm to delivering it, a heady pleasure, and as I walk around town, I have to stop myself addressing it at passers-by. It flows well and is easy to learn, so I’m only a little worried that, thanks to my hectic schedule, I’m still six paragraphs short of knowing the whole thing.

So all’s well with Lancaster Theatre Uncut again. Except for the inquiry we received on Friday from the police, asking what sort of protest this was exactly, and how many people we were expecting to attend. The director of LitFest and I think it’s a misunderstanding, and he was ringing them today to explain that it’s a performance, not a protest, and that a risk assessment’s been carried out. It’s the end of the working day, and he hasn’t called to say we’ve been shut down, so that’s probably okay too.

This piece was commissioned by exeunt magazine

Making it happen: Lancaster Theatre Uncut

When I heard that seven new plays had been written in protest against cuts to the public services, to be performed at Southwark Playhouse, I thought it was a wonderful idea. Then I learned that the plays were also donated by their writers for performance on the 19th March all around the UK; it became obvious that we should do them here, in Lancaster. There are a surprising number of theatre folk here, students from both our universities included, so it wasn’t implausible that we’d be able to cast 7 plays. More to the point, it’s already obvious that Lancaster, like many places in the North, is going to suffer a lot from the cuts. There’s anger here, and anxiety, surely someone would want to channel that into a theatrical protest.

Someone other than me, obviously, though maybe there might be a part in one of the plays suitable for a foreign woman, and of course I’d help in any other way I could. I don’t vote in national elections, what right do I have to start something like this? Besides, I’ve never been especially organized, I don’t have a producer’s tact or persistence. Someone should do it, though; that’s what I kept saying, and people kept agreeing. Before I knew it, I had called auditions.

The youth theatre where I work let us use their space for auditions without charge. A playwright friend emailed all the theatre people he knew to tell them about it. Another friend who teaches at Lancaster University told students and friends about it. I imitated the Theatre Uncut logo by taking a picture of a pair of scissors on a red placemat, and used it to put posters up around town, asking people to come audition. I talked to the largest of the local anti-cuts groups, started to get emails from actors. We set up a facebook group. LitFest very kindly gave us the use of the performance space at The Storey Institute for the evening of the 19th.

Unlocking the youth theatre for auditions, an optimistic number of script extracts in hand, I had no idea how many people were going to show up. I don’t even mean actors. I was in love with a monologue by Clara Brennan but knew I couldn’t act it, was desperate to direct it. Another monologue, more political polemic than work of fiction, I reckoned I could perform without a director. That left 5 plays without directors, and only a handful of promises to consider directing to go around.

In the end, the auditions went better than I could have hoped for. A student director eagerly snapped up one play. I persuaded 3 actors, one of whom was also a dramaturg, and the playwright to try their hands at directing, despite demurrals. Exactly the right number of people showed up to fill each part. Before splitting off into little groups to work on the texts we stood in a circle, talking about why we were there. Many were worried about their jobs, some about their children’s education, or their own. Many were indignant at the simple injustice of paying for a disaster they never caused while those who had caused it reaped ever-greater rewards. Many were theatre folk of some skill and experience, some were theatre students, others had never done any theatre before. The atmosphere was passionate, welcoming, everybody seemed so willing to give what time they had, to rub along together in the best way we could find, to make it happen. We left with every play cast, first rehearsals agreed on, even some set and costume needs accounted for.

Of course it was never going to be that easy. It’s one thing to want to do something like this, to believe in it, another thing to actually find the time. Work, parenting, education, health, all take priority. As they should, of course, but still it was a blow when people started measuring their eagerness against the reality of their time. One, then another, then two more had to withdraw or limit their participation. Proof, as if we needed it, of the limits of volunteerism; the implausibility of “The Big Society”. So the begging emails went out again, the facebook postings, the tweets. It was touch and go for a while, but as I write this, we’ve just recast the last part. We’re a good mix, I think. About half of us are theatre professionals, the rest amateurs and students. Rehearsals have started, in people’s houses, in a shop after closing time, at our venue, in a community centre. I’ve sat in on some of them, and they’re going excitingly well. I’ve ended up directing two very different plays, both of which I love. I’ve even managed to set up an eventbrite page; we’re not charging an entry fee, but we need to know how many people are coming. I’m beginning to believe there’ll be a lot. I’m also starting to think that I’ve spent too much time organizing and not enough learning the 4 page monologue I volunteered to perform….

This piece was commissioned by exeunt magazine