Printer to Script to Plays to Television

Following the example of my daughter, who has to print out pages and pages of University material this year, we bought a Brother printer which prints at speed - but only uses black ink, no colour.  (But there is a cash back promise comes with it.)

No problem, we thought: we hardly ever use colour.  Of course the first two things I print out both have colour in them...  We haven't got rid of the printer that does do colour; if really necessary we can just hook up that printer and go for it.

One of the items I was printing was the script for Grimhilda! - the prompt needs a copy.  It was printed in record time.  Stageworks, the company that's producing the musical, has a wonderful lady called Jan who'll be doing the prompting.  She prompted for The Mousetrap, and very occasionally got herself accidentally seen by some members of the audience (if they were paying attention to what went on backstage) when the downstage door was opened just a little too far by one of the cast.  Or when, as one night, it opened by itself...

Jan also prompted for The Christmas Carol, which we did a couple of years ago.  Prompting is not a job I'd like to do.  It seems simple reading along in the script as the play progresses and hoping nobody will dry.  That's the easy part; it's when an actor skips a section and another actor has to follow, and the poor prompt isn't sure whether they'll catch up with what they've missed, or forget about it entirely.  That's what happened to me once, in The Magician's Nephew.  The young fellow playing Digby skipped a page or so of dialogue, and, because I was in the wrong place for the line he spoke, I went completely blank in a way I've never done before.   The prompt was on the opposite side of the stage, and was prompting like billyo, but for some reason I couldn't pick up what he was saying - there was what seemed to me to be an eternal pause before we managed to find our own way back to native soil.

I always admire actors who do weekly television series, especially those who get long speeches that they've got to have memorised within a couple of days and be able to say with the utmost conviction.  I'm a slow learner, comparatively, and like to feel my way into lines so that by the time I'm on stage with them I feel utterly confident.

Which reminds me, for some reason, of last week's Doc Martin episode, and the uncongenial Doc's remarks to the funeral director's son who was taking supplements of various kinds in order to make himself stronger and bigger (and more attractive to the ladies).  He was also having cod liver oil (which made him unattractive to the ladies - one of them telling him to stay 'over there, your breath stinks.')   He was also tanning himself, and the cellar in which he was doing this was not only full of muscle-building supplements, but tanning supplies.  Doc Martin stormed in there, barely managing to avoid hitting his head on the very low beams, and verbally set the place alight, giving the funeral director himself an earful for letting his son go through all this nonsense - and bringing on him some obscure medical problem in the process.

People on these medical dramas/comedies never have plain ordinary illnesses.  You wonder where the writers dig up all the peculiar problems that beset the characters.   I understand that variety is the spice of life on television, but some of the illnesses are just plain ridiculous - though not to the characters, obviously!

Reflective

My nephew and his wife recently uploaded some photos of their UK coast-to-coast bicycle ride; they did the trip about a month ago. And it rained a good deal of the time.

One of photos intrigued us and with a bit of Google flitting hither and yon we finally discovered what the building was. In their original photo, they'd shown the building side on with other buildings reflected in it. The photo below is a more 'official' photo, one that appears on a site called Construction Photography.


The building is in Newcastle-on-Tyne, and is the SAGE Music Centre, a shell-shaped form encompassing three large music chambers with seating for over 2000 spectators.

Spectacular, eh? You can get a different perspective on it at this site, where there's a slide show of various angles. I particularly like number one in the series, with this extremely modern building overlooking a variety of old houses and their upstanding chimney pots.

Playing

Last year I took a small but important role in a full-length play for the first time in four decades. This year I landed myself a bigger part, that of Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew, the second of C S Lewis’ Narnia stories to be dramatised by our church.

It’s no surprise that we use the word ‘play’ for things associated with at least two of the arts: theatre and music. Being Uncle Andrew was like having the opportunity as a sixty-year-old to return to childhood, and to remember again how much fun it is to play – in what might be called a ‘controlled environment.’ Uncle Andrew’s a spoilt child, self-centred; a two-year old in adult’s clothing. I could put on his garb without suffering any consequences for his bad behaviour.
I loved performing for the audiences (physically exhausting, yet also energising), but I enjoyed the rehearsals even more. They were a return to that time of your life when you laugh without restraint.

At the rehearsals there wasn’t the pressure to get everything right. Certainly we did lots of serious hard work, making sure things went smoothly, fitting in with each other. But I don’t think I’ve laughed so much in ages as I did during the rehearsals themselves - and even more during the tea breaks. For some reason Lewis’ nonsense line, ‘Womfle pomy shompf’ (uttered by Uncle Andrew when his top hat is pushed down over his head) brought us all near to hysteria. (Though it never raised an out-loud laugh during the performances.)

There were the ‘deplorable’ words – or lack of them - and the attempts of the actress playing Jadis to find something explosive but incomprehensible that would do for a ‘spell’ to bring Aunt Letitia to her knees. And the same actress’ refusal to admit that in spite of her character saying she could see through walls and into the minds of men, she was not only singularly unsuccessful at this at any time, but remarkably dense about what the inept humans were up to.

Nor could she take her task seriously when she had to grasp Uncle Andrew’s chin, twisting it this way and that while she inspected his face for signs of a ‘real’ magician. Equally, as Uncle Andrew, I wasted long minutes of one rehearsal because I couldn’t burst in on Aunt Letitia and inquire ‘what on earth’ she was doing with the mattress, without collapsing in a heap. Those actors’ moments of madness you see at the end of movies don’t only happen to movie stars.

The boy playing Digory delighted in holding the fake guinea-pig (named Russell by the cast) like he was a wet sock, or giving him a goal kick into the stalls. Russell suffered much during the show, getting a nightly short sharp shift from Polly, who had to make sure he ‘vanished’ off the stage.

Digory also had a couple of ‘deplorable’ words. In one scene, the word ‘wondering’ always came out as ‘I should think a person would go on wandering all his life…’ It was rather like the mispronunciation of the TV3 sports newsreader (Clint Brown) who always calls the Warriors, the 'Worriers.' (And well he might!) Digory was equally unable to get his tongue around the line, ‘In an asylum, do you mean?’ Only the producer’s desire to keep to Lewis’ original text as far as possible kept her from substituting, ‘In a madhouse…’