Watching from the Back

Cross reference to the on-screen page if you like and you'll find I'm working on Calixto Bieito's Carmen at the London Coliseum right now.   It's something of a dream to find myself here.

Long ago when the world was new and I was doing my first paid theatre job, assisting on a youth theatre production, there was a TV series called "The House."  A Fly-On-The-Wall documentary about the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.  I watched it hungrily and even let some unrealistic ideas slip into our own production - mostly to do with things that turned out not to be physically possible.

Now, less than a century later, I find myself working just next door at the home of English National Opera.  A similar repertory company in a similar theatre - there's no denying the Coliseum is a smaller building and I can barely imagine where they keep everything - because it generates the same kind of extraordinary productions and it is some venue to lose yourself in. Labyrinthine corridors lead up tiny spiral stairways and through unlikely gaps in the architecture to turn you out unexpectedly in the back of the ladies toilets on the balcony front-of-house.  I frequently worry that I'll never find my way back to my dressing room.

Yes. real cars.  Mercedes!  And there are several more.

I was watching the stage being laid out for a rehearsal yesterday - the crew often stay overnight to do the changeovers but this day they were working while I was awake (and sober) and I sat and watched them for a bit. Terry Pratchett wrote once that opera only happens because an astonishing number of things unexpectedly fail to go wrong.  But it's more astonishing just how many  people it takes to drive a stage like this, all seasoned craftspeople at the top of their trades, from welders to electricians to carpenters to painters, the stage is a huge factory floor and probably houses more potentially lethal heavy machinery than many would care to know about.

There may be sets for as many as four different shows waiting in the wings

To make sure so much fails to go wrong, the crew have every activity timed to the half second throughout the day so that that ramshackle pile of steel truss and cloth and furniture wedged into the corner, and over there and up there and under that, has miraculously formed itself into the Duchess' Castle, or the Pirate's Ship by the time the artistes come in to start constructing the bit that the critics tend to write about.


(There's a crap job for you:  To look at the work of perhaps hundreds of incredibly skilled people, each of whom have poured their heart and soul into losing sleep to make sure that every tiniest detail is the best they can make it and it's your task to tell the world why the finished product wasn't quite good enough)

In an opera house there exists somewhere amongst it's staff, the skill set to achieve anything that is physically possible - and several things that apparently are not.

It's a breathtaking thing to watch the unrealistic ambitions of it's directors forming, like clouds, into the acclaimed shows that only run for a few weeks before slipping off to tour the world with different casts in myriad languages and I have to say it's an awesome place to call work.

More Development Issues

Simkins Lee Theatre in Oxford features a showcase of Mark Ralph Bowman's Play "With You Always" in May. 

The title is a quote from the bible, believe it or not.  Probably the only one I could claim to know and then only because it's in Jesus Christ Superstar.

Delving into the hideous complexity of international development funding, and exploring it's impact on the lives of six individuals on both sides of the Aid divide, the play is a sharp witted, emotionally challenging piece.

Oh, and I'm in it again, playing Christopher. Catch it if you can!

https://www.facebook.com/WithYouAlways2015

Give me Dr Jazz

I am playing Jelly Roll Morton, arguably the originator of Jazz Music, at the Theatre by the Lake in Keswick in May.  The show is a fictionalisation of verbatim recordings made by Morton in 1938, written by the late John Petherbridge. It brings together Morton and Radio presenter Robert Ripley (Played by Robert Blackwood) who is best remembered for his "Believe It Or Not" franchise.

In real life, Ripley introduced the world to W. C. Handy on his programme, crediting him with the invention of jazz.  Morton, furious, kicked up a fuss about it, wrote a 4000 word open letter to Ripley and made enough of a nuisance of himself that renowned musicologist, Alan Lomax invited him to do a series of recorded interviews for the Library of Congress which was compiling material for a record of American Music History.

These are a fascinating listen and a goldmine of personal memories of period of history that has taken on mythological stature.

Of course, there is no question that Jelly Roll was present at the birth of jazz and he was a very skilled musician, composer and entrepreneur. Nearly a century and a quarter has passed since and many have written more incisively  (and accurately) about it than I can.

It's interesting to be playing a real person.  The responsibility is different. I once played Elijah McCoy
who invented the self lubricating steam engine but that's a different story.  In my comfort zone of fiction, one can ruthlessly invent and fabricate around a script.

It's a different prospect when you are recreating a person from living memory, particularly one who has been recorded so ubiquitously.  Yet the performance must be more than an impersonation.  We also have the job of placing these real people in their fictional setting, creating drama and pursuing character arcs and doing all the things that an actor must do to please an audience.

 This may be one of my most challenging roles yet and I'm a little nervous. But as Woody Allen suggests, "That's why have rehearsal."

The Song of The Oasis

Actually, there's rather a lot in the pipeline, theatrically.  First of all, I've been writing.  The Song of The Oasis is a binary play that I'm in the process of developing.  Two One act plays about a mysterious house in Southern Africa, the stories are about one Mr Morton. A widower who finds himself running away from all he knows and wandering across the globe before he rediscovers himself.  He experiences his epiphany in the wilderness and subsequently sets up a new home and life.  However all things change as they do and when his unique existence is stumbled upon by a visitor some ninety years later in the other play, it seems that all has not been Orange Blossom in the Africa House and it is Morton's responsibility to deliver a cautionary message to those aiming to exploit the rich resources of the area.

Part of the show has been given a rehearsed reading by Actors and Writers London, a new-writing development group based in West London where it was well received. And there's a lot of interest elsewhere, so, keep an eye out.  It's on it's way.