When I left university, my best friend and I decided we would try the acting malarkey together. One of the first things we went for – and both got - was an unpaid Sunday night at the London Palladium job. In fact, I believe we had to pay £30 for the privilege of being in the show and wearing the horrendous show t-shirt. Hmmm. Something wasn’t quite right; I thought this was my job. And that meant getting paid. But we all have to start somewhere, and I was happy to have an opportunity to be on such a wonderful, enormous stage and to do some singing and to work with professionals. Or so I thought. The rehearsals were mind-numbing to say the least, with the organisers mostly calling all 130 or so performers to the whole day’s rehearsal, and then obviously not using half of them for the whole day. It didn’t fill me with confidence. In fact, it was tedious in the extreme.
The main piece that I was involved in was a famous trio from the musical Sweet Charity, and this seemed to involve a lot of extra rehearsal, most of which seem to consist of being yelled at for ‘carrying plates’; in other words, don’t walk about the stage with your palms out. Fair enough – I’m not sure it needed an extra three hours a week just for that, but what did I know? I was only starting out. But the rehearsals were really endless and having spent the first month working on only the very first line of the song, I was beginning to worry.
The particular rehearsal that sticks in my mind was in Guildford, in an old church hall with a very high beamed ceiling. For various reasons, the other two girls in my trio were both running very late, so it was me and the director and her son-in-law, who was sent out to get coffee. Whilst he was out, she began to ask me about my stage experience. Summoning up as much of a professional stance as I could, I began to tell her of my various triumphs, when, suddenly, we both heard a squeak. I must say, it sounded like an animal of some sort. The director looked around from her seat at the table and the squeak sounded again:
“Oh my God!” she screeched. “There’s a bird, a poor little bird, and he’s stuck in the roof”.
“Hmmm…it does sound like it,” I replied.
We listened intently. Nothing. And so we decided to continue with my non-plate carrying development work.
“No,” she yelled, leaning on the table, “That’s not how it should be done!”
SQUEAK!
There it was again.
“The bird…the bird!” She was becoming apoplectic in her concern.
SQUEAK! SQUEAK! SQUEAK!
And then it dawned on me. It wasn’t a bird at all. The stupid bat was making the squeaking noise. It was coming from her table. Every time she leaned on it, the squeak would be heard:
“Right,” she announced, “you’ll have to get a ladder and climb into the roof and get the bird out.”
And apparently there was no another option. As I stated before, the ceiling was pretty high – I’d say a good 20-30 feet up. There was no way in hell I was scaling some flimsy step-ladder to go and see if there was a non-existent baby bird in the roof. The thought of mountaineering a feeble step ladder to go and see what rodents, bats and birds actually were in the roof – I’m sure they would have been plenty – was not an option. There was nothing else for it; I would have to tell her that she was making the squeaking noise. I began to speak:
“Actually…I...think it might be coming from…erm…your table.”
“What?” she snapped.
“Yes,” I stammered, “I think you’re making the noise when you push on the table”.
“Don’t be so stupid,” she replied.
That told me.
It was at this opportune moment that the son-in-law with coffee returned, along with my fellow performers. Stupid Bat started her protestations to him of how there was a baby bird trapped in the roof, and he had to go and find a ladder. So off he went, whilst we took what was left of the rehearsal to practice non-plate carrying. I left the rehearsal at 9pm to see the son-in-law returning with a ladder and a grumpy-looking caretaker. I must confess I walked past silently, smirking. Shame on me.
Thursday 17 July 2008
Wednesday 9 July 2008
First night...
So, here it is. After years of having no idea how the internet works, I have finally succumbed to a blog. We all know we live in an age of celebrity. We all know we live in an age where children don't want to grow up to be a train driver, a teacher or even an astronaut - they want to be famous. We all watch the X Factor, Pop Idol, searches for soap stars, musical stars and dance stars. We see the winners. We don't really think about what happens to those who don't win.
Well, I'm afraid they do exist - and here I am - one of theatreland's losers. In all my glory. Now, let's see how in God's name that happened...
As a child, I didn’t want to be an actress. I wanted to be a farmer. I thought being a farmer would be very romantic, and rural, and I would have a chance to be with lots of lovely animals. Being an actress only came in third place, after farming and writing. But that was ok – it was third choice for Tom Cruise too – after wanting to be a priest and a wrestler. Over the past twelve years of being in the theatrical industry, I have managed to accumulate an alarming number of humiliating moments, during auditions and performances. So, there has to have been some point to me remaining an out of work performer, and that has been so that I could memoir my degradation in this little blog, with the fine assistance of some of my colleagues and anecdotes from some of the true greats of our industry. Now, back to being a farmer…
I fully understood that being a farmer required a lot of early mornings and was probably extremely hard work, but I felt that that I would be able to cope. Who could baulk at a bit of mucking out and dawn risings if they had a chance to look out over stables, fields and a courtyard? It was all set.
But then I came to the real problem: farms have to have a pond – any self-respecting farm would always have a pond. It is part of farm life to have a pond of a fair size, with ducks, a pair of geese and maybe a swan would fly in on occasion. If that was all that dwelt in a pond, I would have been fine. But there are other things lurking in ponds - undesirables - a pond meant frogs. Since I can remember, these small, some might say cute (these people are wrong) amphibians had been the bane of my life. I was terrified of them and still am – although I do try to behave slightly more rationally these days; I have made an exception for Kermit and certainly would not condone any sort of frog-massacre. They seem to lie in wait for me and then leap out when I am least expecting it. I will give you plenty of perfect examples of this later on, but suffice to say, that my phobia of all amphibians was going to mean that farming and me had to finish our relationship. The option of having a farm without a pond was unthinkable to an eight year old. I had to move on – that was all there was to it.
Option two – writing – was promoted to my career of choice. My father was a writer – it was in the blood. Perfect. So I began to write my children’s book series Arctic Antics – stories about a seal, a polar bear, a penguin and I think an arctic fox, trying to thwart their arch enemy – the killer whale - written and illustrated by me. However, I was losing credibility, as my father pointed out that seals and killer whales didn’t tend to live in Buckinghamshire woodland. It was a devastating blow. I carried on writing in my teens – mostly angst-ridden, rancid poetry about unrequited love and the like. No, this writing malarkey was going to have to stop. It was far too lonely a profession. I would surely top myself before my genius was recognised. And the Vincent Van Gogh of the writing world I was not.
So, there it was. The writing was out, and the phobia had destroyed my farming career. That meant that there was only one option. An option that did not involve being terrorised by leaping creatures or led to an early death; the option that I would try to deter any poor drama student from doing, saying if there is anything that you would rather do than perform in the theatre, then do it, and save yourself the hassle. But they didn’t have to combat a phobia of amphibians, did they? They didn’t have a father that knew where arctic creatures lived. The things I would rather do, I had already discovered, I couldn’t do. There were no other options left for me. I’d have to become an actress. Oh dear.
Well, I'm afraid they do exist - and here I am - one of theatreland's losers. In all my glory. Now, let's see how in God's name that happened...
As a child, I didn’t want to be an actress. I wanted to be a farmer. I thought being a farmer would be very romantic, and rural, and I would have a chance to be with lots of lovely animals. Being an actress only came in third place, after farming and writing. But that was ok – it was third choice for Tom Cruise too – after wanting to be a priest and a wrestler. Over the past twelve years of being in the theatrical industry, I have managed to accumulate an alarming number of humiliating moments, during auditions and performances. So, there has to have been some point to me remaining an out of work performer, and that has been so that I could memoir my degradation in this little blog, with the fine assistance of some of my colleagues and anecdotes from some of the true greats of our industry. Now, back to being a farmer…
I fully understood that being a farmer required a lot of early mornings and was probably extremely hard work, but I felt that that I would be able to cope. Who could baulk at a bit of mucking out and dawn risings if they had a chance to look out over stables, fields and a courtyard? It was all set.
But then I came to the real problem: farms have to have a pond – any self-respecting farm would always have a pond. It is part of farm life to have a pond of a fair size, with ducks, a pair of geese and maybe a swan would fly in on occasion. If that was all that dwelt in a pond, I would have been fine. But there are other things lurking in ponds - undesirables - a pond meant frogs. Since I can remember, these small, some might say cute (these people are wrong) amphibians had been the bane of my life. I was terrified of them and still am – although I do try to behave slightly more rationally these days; I have made an exception for Kermit and certainly would not condone any sort of frog-massacre. They seem to lie in wait for me and then leap out when I am least expecting it. I will give you plenty of perfect examples of this later on, but suffice to say, that my phobia of all amphibians was going to mean that farming and me had to finish our relationship. The option of having a farm without a pond was unthinkable to an eight year old. I had to move on – that was all there was to it.
Option two – writing – was promoted to my career of choice. My father was a writer – it was in the blood. Perfect. So I began to write my children’s book series Arctic Antics – stories about a seal, a polar bear, a penguin and I think an arctic fox, trying to thwart their arch enemy – the killer whale - written and illustrated by me. However, I was losing credibility, as my father pointed out that seals and killer whales didn’t tend to live in Buckinghamshire woodland. It was a devastating blow. I carried on writing in my teens – mostly angst-ridden, rancid poetry about unrequited love and the like. No, this writing malarkey was going to have to stop. It was far too lonely a profession. I would surely top myself before my genius was recognised. And the Vincent Van Gogh of the writing world I was not.
So, there it was. The writing was out, and the phobia had destroyed my farming career. That meant that there was only one option. An option that did not involve being terrorised by leaping creatures or led to an early death; the option that I would try to deter any poor drama student from doing, saying if there is anything that you would rather do than perform in the theatre, then do it, and save yourself the hassle. But they didn’t have to combat a phobia of amphibians, did they? They didn’t have a father that knew where arctic creatures lived. The things I would rather do, I had already discovered, I couldn’t do. There were no other options left for me. I’d have to become an actress. Oh dear.
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