Actors, lines, stillness

We went to the Regional performances of the Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival last night. And had forgotten how hard the seats are in the Otago Boys High School Auditorium, in spite of having spent Sunday after Sunday there for several years during services with Dunedin City Baptist, before it moved into its own home in Concord.  We've been to one of these regionals before, (as well as the National finals when they've been held in Dunedin) and enjoyed it. Last night seemed much more of a mixed bag than previously.

The first item of the evening, and one of the best, gave us Act 3 scene 1 from Henry IV, Part I. This was a fine fighting-talk piece with Hotspur pitting himself against the Mortimer family. It included music, and dialogue and singing in Welsh. A major achievement. I'd wondered if this was scripted, but I see from a copy of the play that all Shakespeare offers is: The lady speaks/sings in Welsh. So whatever she was saying was written for the performance. The only thing that undercut the value of the performance was that the young man playing Glendower made the mistake of assuming that because someone is old he has to be seen to be acting like someone who's nearly 100. Still he did better than the young man playing Lear in another scene. He was virtually bent over double, tottering along on his walking stick. Unlike most of the old people in the audience!

There were two King Lear pieces, both covering some of the same ground: the argument about how big a retinue Lear could bring with him when he stayed with his daughters. For some reason known only to the director (not a student - several of the pieces were student-directed) the first of these was done as a 'Mexican Day of the Dead' scene, presented in 'flashbacks' and thoroughly confusing the structure of the play. To anyone unfamiliar with the play it made no sense whatsoever; to anyone familiar with the play it took considerable effort to understand why on earth Mexico or the Day of the Dead had anything to do with it. Tacking an idea onto Shakespeare doesn't work unless the thing is integral to the text.

The other Lear, as I say, had a young man playing a Lear with considerable physical disabilities. It took several bits of scenes and ran them together. Again the result was confusion for the audience, I felt.

Probably the top performance of the evening was a small piece of Macbeth, with the speeches expanded out to fifteen minutes, even though in the play they'd probably only take about five. This involved three 'familiars' sinuously winding around a raised area in the middle of the stage, on which Hecate stood. (According to the programme she was also Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, but I don't know where that was worked in; maybe she spoke some of their lines.) In contrast to these unpleasantly evil creatures there were three old biddies in relatively modern dress who spoke no lines at all, but provided a variety of chirps and buzzes and short sounds as they picnicked at the front of the stage. These were often very funny, and had the style of what they were doing down pat. Towards the end of the scene the three 'familiars' turned out to be the three biddies' pets (like cats) and that was disturbing. Hecate meanwhile had turned around (and proved to be a talented young girl we know) and all of them kept repeating Fair is foul and foul is fair. It was very well done, though it left a very nasty taste in the mouth - as was probably intended. The witches in Macbeth are nothing if they're not vile.

In one of the five minute pieces Mark Antony discovered his wife was dead. For some reason this was played for laughs, and the young man playing Enobarbus managed to speak all his lines in a totally incomprehensible manner. Quite an achievement!  Taieri College did the play scene from Midsummer Night's Dream, emphasizing the crudity of the humour, and getting some laughs, but overall seeming to be more knockabout than funny. That was disappointing given that Taieri has quite a reputation for good work.

In another five minute job, from Two Gentlemen of Verona, two girls did an excellent job of the scene where Julia is encouraged by her maid to read Proteus' love letter and keeps putting it off. This was a delight, as was (a female) Petruchio wooing a decidedly modern Katharina. The girl playing Petruchio also directed it, and did much better than many of the student directors. (One of the girls in the Gentleman piece may have directed it too, but the programme for some reason claimed they were presenting a scene from The Merchant of Venice, which was a little confusing.)

We had two versions of Romeo and Juliet. In the first only the Nurse and Juliet appeared, stranded on the entire width and depth of the stage, with three chairs forming a spaced-out triangle. This was student-directed too, and had some good points, but the Juliet raged her way through much of the dialogue (it's the scene where the Nurse tells her Romeo is banished and Tybalt is dead) and her words couldn't be heard. Still she brought huge energy to the role, unlike the stillness that you often see in Juliet. The Nurse however floated around the stage with a distinct lack of energy; it was hard to tell whether she cared about Tybalt or Romeo or Juliet. Or anything! An odd way to play the role. It was as if Juliet and the Nurse had swapped characters.

The other R&J was very curious, not helped by having the curtain come across when it was only two-thirds of the way through! The Juliet was played by a solid, tall boy doing a falsetto. When the audience realised he was meant to be Juliet there was a surge of embarrassed laughter. A strange piece of casting. Romeo was a little fellow, as was Tybalt, and they were left shouting at each other across the distance of the stage, for no good reason. These three were supposed to be flashback characters. The 'real' Romeo and Juliet were in the tomb scene with her lying still and him bewailing her being dead, and then each killing themselves in due course. These two were good, but the other three seemed at odds with them in age and everything else, pretty much. There was supposed to be another Tybalt, according to the programme, but he never eventuated. !!

The other piece was from Twelfth Night, and played out the scene where Olivia first meets Viola disguised as a young man. Olivia was in what appeared to be her short nightie. Malvolio was dressed in ordinary modern clothes, and showed no embarrassment at being in what must have been Olivia's bedroom. Maria spent most of her time dusting imaginary furniture and saying nothing, and the girl playing Viola spoke her lines with a strange weightedness, as though there was no rhythm or bounce to them. I couldn't tell whether she had a naturally gruff voice or whether she was trying to be a boy being a girl.

As in so many of the student productions (and even some of those directed by teachers) there was a great deal of unnecessary movement in this piece, much wandering around the stage by the two leads, without any great purpose. (In one of the King Lear pieces, two 'soldiers' marched across the stage and back again four times, for no apparent reason.) Other actors would shuffle about on the spot, as though they couldn't just stand still. Movement needs to have a reason on stage, otherwise it's nothing. And sometimes it's just annoying. Merely shifting people around without purpose achieves nothing. Sometimes the student directors got it right and did a good job. Other times it looked as though they had no idea what to do with the actors - and no one told them, it seems, that actors can stand still on a stage, say their lines effectively, and the audience will be enthralled.

In the most recent play I did, Verdict, I had less than ten minutes on stage. My entrance required me to show that I was an arrogant blusterer: initially I took control of the centre and forced the main character to stay at one side. And then it was a matter of each of us shifting from one position to another as we played out the scene, the two characters assessing each other, constantly changing the balance of power, even when both of us were sitting. Even small movements, such as a turn of the head, or my crossing my legs as I sat, or a refusal to shake hands, were slotted in for maximum effect. The third person in the scene, who had no lines except at the beginning and the end, stayed in one place all the time, only her face showing her reactions, or occasionally a slight shifting of her body.

I don't note this to say that we are better actors than these young people, but just to point out how movement is part and parcel of character and of what's going on in the scene. I'm reminded how in J B Priestly's play, When We Are Married, I played a photographer who became increasingly drunk as the play went on. In my first scene I was allowed to wander around the room inspecting things on the mantelpiece or a table and so on, even though other characters were speaking. It showed that as a character I had an underlying restlessness, probably because I was ready for my next drink. By the time the last scene came, I was able to literally burst through the door into the room where most of the other actors were assembled, and take over the scene as I lolled across the stage, drunk.

A more disciplined approach to movement gives the actors a much better sense of why they're on the stage, why they're saying what they're saying.

Next week and then after

Concert's now only a week away - less in fact, since it's on Saturday - and the artists all seem pretty much up with the play. I'm getting to the point where I don't feel I can do any more with the piano pieces I play; if I don't get some things right now, I probably never will, but I'll need to keep practicing anyway. That's the problem with writing music that has passages in it that are just a bit beyond your own capability!

As for after the concert, well, I've got another play coming up, one that was to have gone on late last year, but didn't make it for various reasons: some health issues, as far as I recall. This one's A Christmas Carol, and I'm playing a couple of parts (as are some of the other actors): Marley's Ghost, and Mr Fezziwig (or is it Fizziweg? can never remember). The cast includes people from both When We Are Married and The Diary of Anne Frank, so it's kind of being amongst family.

What after that? I'd like to get on and finish the Children's Opera I started writing way back in the 70s, and which I've added some more to over the last few years. What's been holding me up was a lack of libretto. I did a kind of synopsis about a year ago, and things have stalled again since then. So I really need to sort this out.

I'd like to see if the three movements for brass band can get a play through. I've talked this over with a couple of the players from the St Kilda Band. It's up to me at this stage to go further with this, and I just need to get myself into gear, print out a full score, the parts and go from there.

And something else - something that I've already started on: while I was going through all the problems related to my prostate op late last year and early this year, I wrote a number of posts on another blog, WorkReport.net. Sometime after most of the hassle was over, I got an email from someone who was going through something similar, saying that the posts had helped him get some perspective on things. So I'm planning on turning the posts into an e-book, with some additional comments. I'm not sure how I go about putting an e-book out there, but we'll be working on it. (The link on WorkReport is a typical sample of the posts that were being written about this time. )

Stage struck

When I was a young man, I had two very close friends, both of whom left New Zealand for the bright lights of London - with intentions to go on the stage. Neither of them went on the stage; one of them eventually came back home after having an interestingly varied career in the usual sort of jobs NZers do when they go on the Big OE. The other got a lot closer to show business, at one time being part of the film promotion team for MGM. Which meant he got to see all the movies that were worth seeing, often before they went to the English public. I saw Last Tango in Paris in a tiny little private cinema as a result of this (not that I was greatly impressed with it), and also Pinocchio before it came out on a re-release. (Those were the days when you couldn't just go down to your local video store and hire a movie you liked - you had to wait until either the distribution company decided it was time to give it another go (which could be years after its original release) or until you caught it at some niche cinema where they managed to ferret out movies that weren't readily available.) I'm not sure if I saw Pinocchio as a child, but even as an adult it was a revelation in that small cinema; animation like you couldn't believe possible.

This same friend stayed in the UK until he died (much too young); he lived on the fringe of the show business world, flatting with a fellow Dunedinite who'd been big time in amateur theatre here and wound up on a daytime soap there. This actor had a tiny part in A Clockwork Orange, as a policeman. I think he's visible for all of a minute and a half.

I was reminded of this by reading an article in the Guardian today about young actors at the Royal Scottish Academy of Drama and Music in Glasgow, people who are still hopeful of getting in the business even in these tough times. Not that it's ever been easy to be an actor: two-thirds of them may be out of work at any one time, and reality TV certainly hasn't helped.

The curious thing is that when I joined my two friends in London, I hadn't had any plans to go on stage, but I certainly got a lot closer to it than either of them did. I went over to study as a repetiteur at the London Opera Centre, and wasn't only involved in the productions the Centre put on in-house (and the one that was presented at the Sadlers Wells Theatre), but also had free access to opera rehearsals at Covent Garden, which became almost as familiar to us as the Centre. I even played for auditions at the English Opera's theatre once. On the stage (a rather scary moment, actually). And on another occasion I played for a young singer in a competition, Abigail Ryan, at the Wigmore (pictured on right) - and she won. And went off to Germany to study as a result.

Well, that'll do for name-dropping, for the moment. Our mini-dramas at church have finished their 'run' - there were five in all, and I made it into four of them. (The second was on at the same time as When We Are Married.) Last Sunday's featured the four blokes who've appeared in the previous plays, and they were celebrating the loss of the All Blacks at home. One of them, who's become increasingly angry over the last couple of episodes, tries to explain his anger amidst the banter. It was a good little piece, and should have got a number of laughs, but the audience was surprisingly subdued, and it became hard work for the actors to keep up the momentum. Never mind, it made its point, I think. It had a second 'half' as it were: a return to the four soliloquies we'd started the series off with; this time the four actors (three of the guys and one of the two women who'd appeared in the plays) went in reverse order to the first play, and their speeches showed the progress they'd made. Different levels for each, but progress nevertheless.

Easy Virtue - the play

Last night I mentioned going to see Easy Virtue, the movie. I thought it would be interesting to see what the original play was like, so got it out of the library today. Crikey. The first and most interesting thing is that the movie is far better than the play. The departures from the original are so considerable that only things that are similar to Coward's play are the following:

• A butler called Furber, who is a real person in the movie; in the play he has no existence except buttling.
• A strikingly good-looking woman who's married the heir in a very uptight family. However she isn't American in the play - and she's some years older than John; they go on about it all the time.
• An extremely repressed mother, who doesn't, however, have any concerns about the family property, though she's so uptight about life in general from the moment the curtain rises that she would act as an appetite suppressant to anyone silly enough to try and eat in front of her (actually, that's not dissimilar to the movie!).
• A father who's remote, but who likes his new daughter-in-law. He's not only remote in the play, he's utterly boring, and would probably have been played by an aging matinee idol who had relied in the past on his charms rather than his acting skills to sway the public.
  
• Two daughters, one serious and one scatty. Except in the play the serious one is a bit of a religious nut, and the scatty one is exceptionally catty with it.
  
• John, who's naive and callow. At least in the film he also has some charm.
  
• The neighbouring girl who would have married John if the outsider hadn't come in. She's much the same as in the film: wiser and warmer than the cold-hearted family.
  

The story is roughly similar: callow youth brings home gorgeous, slightly older woman, to the horror of the family. Woman has something in her past, and at the end has to leave for the sake of her sanity, even though she actually does love the boy.

But there the similarities end. Notice that I didn't say anything about the humour in the play; in fact, there's almost none. The funniest lines come in the author's introductions to his characters; their speech is seldom more than a little amusing - there's no laugh-out-loud humour here. Mrs Whittaker (the Kristin Scott Thomas character) is described thus: The stern repression of any sex emotions all her life has brought her to middle age with a faulty digestion which doesn't so much sour her temper as spread it. She views the world with the jaundiced eyes of a woman who subconsciously realises she has missed something, which means in point of fact that she has missed everything.

And what actress would be excited by this description of Marion, the older sister?: She is largely made and pasty, with big lymphatic eyes. Hilda, the younger sister, 'possesses all the vivacity of a deficient sense of humour.'

Which means that most of the humour and wit and nifty one-liners in the film are the film's scriptwriters, not Coward's. In fact, there's almost nothing of Coward in the movie, as far as lines go, at all. Furthermore, Coward doesn't provide us with the hay fever, the Picasso painting, the vicious chihuahua who gets squashed to death by being sat on, the motorcycle amidst the Hunt, the tango at the end with the father (nor the running away with him), the butler who's a bigamist, the can-can at the local cultural evening, the boyfriend with the broken leg, the other girl's wealthy father who's not only buying up the land but also has his eye (goodness knows why) on Mrs Whittaker senior. And the father has never been to war, been sullied by it, nor wandered about France living in brothels.

In other words, most unusually, the film is infinitely superior in almost every way. It would take a cast of considerable skill to make anything of the play as it stands; the movie even manages to remove the sense of datedness.

On top of this, Coward asks the impossible of the average modern producer: he asks for nine characters for the first two acts (plus adding in, during the second act, a young man of no importance who will appear unimportantly in the third, and an elderly bloke who appears for about a minute and is never seen again) and then in the third brings on another eight characters, plus several unnamed extras. These people have come to the ball that's taking place in the next room, and wander in and out randomly during the scene making inane remarks, or, to a degree, building up a bit of tension when the heroine doesn't appear on cue. So that's some dozen actors who do nothing for two acts and then do very little in the third.

I thought When We Are Married was a bit oddly constructed in terms of its usage of some actors: Dyson the reporter appears in the first and second acts for about three minutes apiece and then disappears; Rev Mercer comes on late in the second act for two minutes, is hussled off and then gets another couple of minutes towards the end of the last act; Lottie turns up very late in the second act but at least gets some stage room; the niece gets five minutes early in the first act, another half minute a bit later on, and then a couple more minutes at the beginning of the third act. She's totally forgotten otherwise. Even the young man who sets everything in motion in the first act, where he's a major player, is dumped almost completely after that (he gets a couple of minutes at the beginning of the third act too). My character, Ormonroyd, appears with Dyson early in the first act, and then vanishes for well over an hour before he becomes a major character later in the piece. I suppose in the thirties actors were a lot cheaper, and they could be tossed on and off like this without consideration!

Of course, with the Coward, it makes a big difference, after two acts of constant talk (and very little action - another difference between the play and the film) to have lots of people bobbing in and out, and women and men in pretty dresses and evening wear. It gives the last act some additional lift (and it certainly needs it).

Well, there you go. A relatively straight play turned into a successful comic movie: wonders will never cease.

Old Stagers

Before When We Are Married began, the ODT published a piece called Old stagers still playing up after 75 years. It discusses the Dunedin Repertory Society in the light of their 75th Anniversary. (The Anniversary was the reason When We Are Married was being staged - again. It's always been a popular and successful play with the company, and proved to be so again.)

The article has a few errors in it: for one thing, as far as I can remember, I've never performed for the Repertory Society before, although the article includes my name amongst a bunch of people who have. And the photograph that accompanies it claims to show a Repertory production, but apparently it isn't. (Don't ask me what the production actually is; there's some debate about it. )

Natalie Ellis, who was interviewed for the article told the cast there were some other miscrepancies, but didn't expand on them further.

Anyway, it took up a full page in the ODT, and that's always good for publicity!

The play ends...

The play is over. I'm sorry, and I'm glad. It's always sad to see the end of such an enterprise: the friends you make, the entity that's a combination of the script and the actors and all the other facets, and the enjoyment of performing (when you burn fat more than you realise!). But it's also a relief to have some space again. (And the last essay for the Varsity course is now done and sent off as well.)

When We Are Married is an interesting play. It's not as famous as some of Priestly's other works, such as An Inspector Calls (at least as far as I'm aware), but it's obviously a popular choice for amateur and professional groups alike. (The St Peter's Church Players' amateur version on You Tube [see below], which shows the last ten minutes or so of the play, seems however rather turgidly done for a comedy.)



The characters in the play are superbly drawn, with lots of detail - especially the three husbands. There's plenty of room for them to swing from total self-importance to virtual defeat and back again. The wives are different again; Clara's sudden descent from aggressive bossiness may be a bit sudden, but it gives the audience huge satisfaction: every single night they clapped with delight at her downfall. Annie is the quiet one, but her long conversation with her husband Albert in the third act is a supreme example of how to undermine pomposity. And there's a wonderful buildup to her response after he asks, How long has been feeling like this, and she says, Twenty-five years, (which just happens to be how long they've been married).

Maria is different again: in this production she was played with considerable authority and warmth. I think you could also play the part differently, as someone who is less confident and finally realises she's going to have to fight for her man. And that's another great facet of the script: each part can be interpreted differently to the way we played the parts (as the St Peter's Players testify!)

A short review

The review for the play was very good, but I don't think it's online. I'll check on the weekend when I've got more time. Meantime, here's a bit of trumpet blowing. A friend of ours in Auckland got an email from a friend of hers who'd been to the play here in Dunedin. The latter wrote [slightly edited]:

Just a few lines from me, [we] went to a comedy drama play last night called "When We Were Married" and Mike Crowl played a "tiddly"photographer. He was hilarious. The play was by J. B. Priestly set about 1908. I'm sure you would have loved this play - it was a really good laugh.

I knew Mike was musical and had produced operas etc., but didn't know he could act. The part suited him to a "T" (not that he's a drunk in real life!!) but he played the part magnificently complete with red nose!

I've never actually produced an opera that I can remember, though I've done some musical direction in that line (not for a complete, full-scale opera, though).

The camera upstages me

Well, the play's had four performances, and is going well over all. A few of the usual slip-ups with lines and things, but in every case someone's pulled us out of a potential hole. Including me, last night, when I got everyone into a hole and then had to haul us out again - which was a bit chaotic for a moment, but, being a character who spends most of the time being drunk, the incoherence of my somewhat made-up speech was reasonably appropriate!
I've been upstaged three times, however, by the antique camera that accompanies me in three of the scenes. It behaved itself on Saturday night, but on Monday one of its legs came loose and I had to try and (drunkenly) fix it. No easy feat when I'm not wearing my glasses to see with (!) and it makes it difficult to keep the lines running smoothly. On the same night, at the end of the play, it managed to get itself stuck on the audience side of the curtain at the end of the play, which terrified us all because it only needed to have been hit by the curtain opening again and it would have toppled into the front row, with breakages, no doubt.
On Tuesday, the flap on the large end flopped down, and do you think I could figure out how to get it up in place again? In the end I decided just to leave it, since drunks can get away with more than undrunk characters can!
The props lady thinks I haven't been nice to it, and it's reacting. So last night I spoke loving words to it at intervals between scenes, and told it how great an actor it was and so on. And it behaved.

The play begins

I'm writing this as a way of both getting warmed up for my next (and final) essay for the Research Methods paper I'm doing, and to also note that the play had its first night last night, and went very well. A few missed lines, a few moments when nobody spoke (but somebody should have) - including me - but overall a success. The audience delighted in it. It seems like a very wordy play (I guess that's hardly unusual) but the words have a lot of subtlety and heaps of humour. In fact, I think the cast continues to find it funny, which is always a plus. I certainly do.

There's a 'window' in the set, so that those backstage can actually stand there (without being seen by the audience) and watch at least part of the stage. It's interesting to see how the various actors have developed their characters; no one is just being there saying the lines: there's lots of detail and lots to keep the audiences eyes interested, as well as their ears.

We had an after-show 'do' last night. The South Dunedin Rotary Club had been the bulk of the audience, and were using it as some kind of fundraiser (to do with polio in third world countries). So all the actors trouped upstairs to the socializing area (which is where we did most of our rehearsing, in fact) and met up with the various bodies who make up the Rotarians.

What was interesting is that the two groups barely mixed. Here we have on one hand a bunch of people who can cope with performing on stage in front of a crowd of strangers, and yet when they come face to face with the same people, they mostly become introverts. I thought it was just me, but several of the cast were like that - or else they honed in on somebody they already knew and spent most of their time with them. And on the other hand, we have a bunch of people who are socially adept, and yet who kept their distance from the actors. Surely actors are 'okay' people these days? Or is it that they just didn't know what to say? Intriguing.

On another issue entirely...

There are always new jobs turning up (or maybe old jobs with new titles). I'd never heard of the job that requires medical coding, but apparently it's a job just like any other. The are medical coding training courses available. According to one site: Medical Coding and Billing Specialist are employed by hospitals, clinics, physicians' offices, health maintenance organizations (HMOs), mental health care facilities, insurance companies, consulting firms, health data organizations and information system vendors. As an Insurance Coding & Billing Specialist, you play an integral role in your employer's office. You help make it possible for your employer to collect monetary reimbursements from patient insurance providers. Medical insurance billing/coding and its related occupations are among the fastest growing opportunities in the healthcare industry.
Maybe the reason we don't hear so much about it here in NZ is because we don't, in general, have medical insurance. Or rather, there are medical insurers, but they're not the way the medical system is run, basically. Anyway, if you want to become a medical coding trainee, you can do it online - a kind of distance course, like my Research Methods.

Swingle Singers

Several years ago the Swingle Singers appeared at one of Dunedin's Festivals of the Arts. My wife and I paid what seemed a very large amount of money to go and hear them, as the SS sound had been something I'd loved as a youth, when I first started collecting records.
I was a bit disappointed with the concert, even though the group (not the original group of course, which had long since gone its way) was utterly professional and polished and superb in their singing. I was disappointed because they didn't sing any of the famous Bach pieces that had made the group famous.
I was reminded of this because my wife bought me for my birthday last week a turntable that connects to the computer. Old records that haven't been heard in years can be put on it, with all their hisses and scratches, and turned into digital files. The turntable on its own is fine, but the advantage of being able to 'preserve' the sounds is a great addition.
A friend of ours has one that she got a few months back, and try as we might we couldn't get it to record onto her computer. To her frustration and ours. However, this time round, with some adjustments for 'this' and sortings out of 'that' we managed to record two tracks without disaster. (So we'll go down to our friend's place when I've finished with the play and see if we can finally get things humming at her end too.)
The Audacity program that we're using is a bit temperamental, but otherwise things are humming along fine.
The J B Priestly play is in its final week of rehearsal, and while most of the lines are in place, we all got a bit knocked by being on stage on Sunday afternoon, and having to contend not only with different furniture to that which we'd been rehearsing with, but also a different - and seemingly smaller - space. We'll get used to it (and the real door which we now have to open and close) but Saturday wasn't one of our great achievements.
Which reminds me of a couple of times back in 2007 when I wrote on this blog about mesothelioma. At the time I had no idea what it was, and had to go investigating. But when the word turned up in front of me again just now in a different context, I had no idea that I'd ever met it before (!) So much for all the learning that the brain enjoys that I talked about in one of those posts. Learning is fine; remembering is a task.
Incidentally, I don't think I've mentioned that one of the actors in this play (he plays Rev Mercer, the character I started out playing) was in a J B Priestly play that I had connections with back when I was probably only about 16. That play was An Inspector Calls and I think this actor played the father. I didn't have much to do with the production of the play; think I was mostly there because my best friend was involved in some way. But it was one of my first tastes of real drama, and I saw every performance. The actor and I were discussing the other day how few of the cast from that play were still alive: at least two of the women died quite young, and the Inspector himself may also be dead. The guy who played the young man has now had a stroke, and isn't well. The changes that 45 or so years bring!