Exit The King

Death: really, what could be funnier? This seems to have been Eugene Ionesco's starting point. 

Whether the play really is all that funny, as always with comedy, can only be known in the moment with a living breathing audience...I’ll get back to you.

Meanwhile, my advice to people who read this blog, and even to those who don’t, is: get yourself down the Gym—pronto. Why? Because you never know when you’ll find yourself playing King Berenger the First. I will go further, you never know when, whatever protestations to the contrary the director makes, you'll find yourself hired as a stunt double for Geoffrey Rush. 

Geoffrey Rush who gave a riveting, award-winning performance on Broadway in Exit The King, is, as we all know, an extraordinarily fine actor with the physical facility of an elastic band. One assumes that with an international film career he can comfortably afford any necessary physio.

Personal physique aside. I have a strong fondness for South Florida. The place has been good to me. This is my eighth show in these parts over the past ten years, and always in the winter months when the daytime temperature hovers agreeably in the 50s, 60s, or even 70s with mellow breezes, and flawless blue skies. 

One amazing feature of the locale is the Kennel Club with its Damon Runyon characters disposed around its thirty or so card tables, any one of whom can give you a fine post-hand analysis in poker dialect:

“With sixteen cards to hit to make my straight and the nut flush draw—hey! I’m not going anywhere.”

“Right! But I gotta push in that situation.”

And the guy who took the long chances that paid off when his off-suited 9-7 hit two pairs on the Turn, and filled up on the River, makes a note to watch out for the guy whose A-4 Spades he annihilated and from whom he lifted an easy hundred bucks. In the Mano-a-Mano etiquette of the card room, the two players grimace as comrades. There is silent agreement on the unfairness of life and the futility of existence.

About the ocean: when the rip tides are low, and when there are no Bluebottle Jellyfish around, it’s pleasant to float in a sea the temperature of a warm bath. 

Florida is a touchstone though, for the effects of a changing climate. A hurricane that hit locally the city of Miami a brief six or seven years ago, now might cover the whole state. The new migration of many thousands of sharks off the Florida coast is reported on the TV news, and some of the condo buildings built on the shores have a bad case of sandy gingivitis. 

Talking of decline, decay and death and how amusing it can be—Not. Theatre is dying too, like it always has been. Four established theater companies in these parts have closed within the last two years. Florida Stage, Promethean, Mosaic, and The Caldwell. Sure, there are plenty of new young theater companies springing up, but few of them have much funding. 

In that context, producing a play about death, whose author was one of the masters of the absurd, a man who was obsessed and scared and struggling, a play which challenges its actors and its audience, is deeply life-affirming.

.

Planet Television

I auditioned for a commercial recently and was asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement as to the advertising copy and the product. Er...excuse me? I didn't get the job.

But I did do a small gig for a forthcoming TV series last month. And just in case, I’m not going to say which one. The role was, as we say in the trade, a “Telling Cameo”. It was that of a British bio-hazard technician, and I had a two-week beard growth when I did the casting.

I got the hoped-for call from my agent's assistant, Letitia Sideways. This is the call that exposes you as an actor. Inevitably you think to yourself, “They want me...?!” And it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling.

“And they asked if you would mind shaving?” said Letitia.

“No problem.”

So, they didn’t like the beard, huh? I purchased a razor and some shaving cream. I filled the sink with warm water, and as I lifted the razor, some instinct made me put it down and call my agent again just to check. “They do want me to shave, right?”

“No!” she said, mildly surprised. “They don’t want you to shave.”

“They don’t want me to shave?”

“Right.”

“They want me not to shave?”

“Exactly! Don’t shave.”

“On no account am I to shave?”

“That’s what I said.” said Letitia, pleased to get the point across.

So I didn’t shave.

A similar episode had happened once, some twenty years past. This was when I was a young father and sleep was at a premium. I went to an audition for a commercial for cough medicine, and having been too tired to shave for a month or more, was beginning to look like a character from a 19th century Russian novel. And having been confident that they had not liked the look at the audition, had returned home and shaved the whole thing off, only for the phone to go half an hour later with the news that I was the lucky actor that had been selected.

“Great!” I said, “I’ve just shaved off the beard.”

“Oh.” said my agent. “Oh dear.”

“They wanted it? The beard?”

“They loved it. They said specially.”

“How long before the shoot?”

“A month.”

So I didn’t shave for the next month, and I did the commercial for cough medicine. Nobody was coy about disclosure back then.

Anyway, this time just past with the TV gig, having had experience with how a beard can get you work (or lose it), I stayed my barber’s hand. And just as well.

In due course I arrived on set and donned the bio-hazard suit, along with the character. I played a British bio-hazard guy, bearded as required. 

If you happen to see it, look out for the pivotal scene where a menacing shape emerges from a quarantined ship wrapped in plastic, and takes a few steps along a quayside to report the findings to the brace of lead actors figuring out the latest screen quandary. The bio-hazard suit this enigmatic figure wears includes a helmet with a visor. It’s betraying no secrets of the trade to say that the visor was held open by the cunning use of ‘Gaffer’s tape’. 

My face is visible between the upper nostril, and the lower eyebrow. 

That’s how you’ll know it’s me.

Marti Caine

Back in England I was on tour one time with Marti Caine, one of the most popular comics of her generation. Alas, now telling gags at the great microphone in the sky. She was tall and slim, gawky and funny. When she spoke it was a gentle northern drawl, smokey velvet.

Her humor was mildly self-deprecating, but behind it was the steel will that folk mostly conceal when they’ve risen entirely by their own efforts, and then seized that precious moment when preparation meets television exposure to millions, and leads on to fortune. 

In Marti’s case it meant a blue Rolls Royce.

She was beautifully generous both on stage and off. Once I saw her hand over about a couple of thousand quids' worth of scarcely worn designer clothing to a single mother with a teenage daughter, who was in our cast. She did it gracefully, insisting they were doing her a favor by freeing up closet space.

I was a twenty-something actor who’d stumbled into a commercial tour of one of Alan Ayckbourn’s funniest plays, ‘Season’s Greetings’ - that’s the one about a family reunion at Christmas where everything goes horribly, horribly wrong.

The late, great Bill Frazer was in the cast too. A magically funny veteran, built like a Walrus, he could bark a line, and it was like a direct command to the audience - “Laugh! Laugh some more ... now give me a round of applause.”

The show toured up and down the length of England, and Marti let me ride in the Roller with her. She told me stories about the "Workies" - the Working Mens’ Clubs where she’d learnt her craft... "Once I told a joke that offended a table at the front. It was pint pots down, folded arms, and I saw the disapproval ripple across the hall. Someone called out, ‘Right lass, I think we’ve had enough.’ But I stayed out there and I told every joke I knew. To complete silence."

“How did that feel?” I asked.

“I felt skinned” she said.

We were coming down the M1 motorway, heading back to London for the week-end after the Saturday night show in Hull. Somewhere after midnight, somewhere between Sheffield and Coventry, we went into a service station. The place was bleakly lit, empty except for a lone night attendant behind the counter, ready to dispense over-crispy bacon and rubberized eggs that had sat too long under warming lamps.

“Now I’ll let you into a secret,” Marti said, as we went in. “I am Queen of the Universe, and I come from the planet Television. Sometimes they recognize me. If they do, there’s only one thing to do. Look them straight in the eye, and say, ‘Do you sell knicker elastic?’”

Sure enough, as we collected some chemical beverage, laughingly called coffee, the lone guy sputtered, “It’s ... it is, isn’t it ... you are ...?”

Marti turned to me, “You see?” her face the picture of what it’s like to be Queen of the Universe, and have to deal with this recognition from time to time. 

“Do you sell knicker elastic?” said the Queen of the Universe.

It seemed to do the trick. The guy stuttered and spluttered, then he saw the funny side of the question and began laughing. The laughing grew and took hold of him, it shook his frame. Finally he managed to say, “...Er ... no.”

The Queen followed it up. “Would you consider selling it in the future?” she asked mildly.

The guy was a mess.

December

It’s three weeks to 12.21.12 or to put it the way we used to say it back in the UK; 21.12.12. If the The Mayan Calendar really does mean some super-transformational event like the planet going pole dancing, or if there’s a humungous magnetic shift, then all our small concerns will fade away.

Meanwhile, I’m unemployed. 

Unemployment has struck in the same month as the school where I trained has been elevated. Henceforth it is to be called:

The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama

The inclusion of the world Royal in the title is significant. Even though our graduates include: Olivier, Dench, Pinter, all the Redgraves, and many other distinguished names, the only British theatre school known in the USA was RADA. Maybe that all changes now.

It’s always been a peculiar irony how well the British aristocracy and royalty plays in America - and I cite here the naughtiness that is Downton Abbey - really, to pass off a soap opera in period as a quality costume drama is a marketing masterpiece, worth watching for that alone. But doesn’t it prove the enduring appeal to The American Republic with its theoretical social mobility, of a simpler world where everyone knew their place and dressed accordingly?

Or is the charm really all based on cream teas, and cricket, and good tailoring?

Years ago Simon Callow wrote a book called Being An Actor which did a certain amount for his career, and in which he announced himself as spokesman for the working conditions of the actors of his generation. The book inspired a hugely successfully parody called I, An Actor! authored by Nicholas Crane (nom de plume of Nigel Planer) and published a few years later, the parody extending as far as a televised master-class in how to be a TV weather anchorperson. 

Again, when Anthony Sher gave us Year of the King, in which he recorded his views, experiences, and insights while preparing for and playing Richard 111, an actor of my acquaintance intended to write a parody called Year of the Spear, about his experiences playing the guy who stands at the back.

Callow’s book defines the usual starting condition for the actor as unemployment. And it’s true. Employment is intermittently continuous in the same way that one who believes in re-incarnation might define life as an out-of-death experience. All actors experience a lull from time to time, even if they’ve been fortunate enough to work a lot - which I have - although this time, the gears really do seem to have stopped.

So, to while away the time, I’ve written a book of my own. 

It’s a slim volume called: An Actor Walks into China, and it should be available in February of 2013. So for that among other reasons, I am hoping that we’ll get beyond 12.21.12. 

October

There was a rush of preparation shopping in the supermarket next door. By the time I got there the eggs were gone and all the bread. Understandable, but who can explain a run on molasses? Only six jars left on the shelves. 

Likewise tomatoes - all gone. Fresh fish - down to a few sad Tilapia. Tins of corn - wiped out. 

But coffee - still plenty. Likewise tea and herbal tea, condiments of all kinds.

Molasses? We buy the strangest things under pressure.

How thin the line between First World convenience and the Stone Age. We filled the tub with water, and pots and pans too, not really believing that we’d have to use it. It was fun to live by candlelight for a night or two, but it was less fun to flush the loo with dwindling bathwater.

Back in the 1970s I lived on a commune for a few months in the North Yorkshire Dales. The property was a hunting lodge, built by Queen Victoria in the style of the Tyrol to make Prince Albert’s cousins feel at home. We lived in a house powered by a fuel stove, and ate soup made from fresh vegetables, grown in the kitchen garden. The house was on a high slope a mile from the nearest village, and in the winter it was cold - bitingly, penetratingly cold. The wind came off the heights whining continually. Wind was the only theme some days.

At that time there was a network of such places up and down Britain. The famous community at Findhorn still flourishes, and a few years later I would visit a community on Iona. Our place was  directly inspired by the work of J. G. Bennet, his compelling life story told in his book ‘Witness’. Bennet foresaw a sequence of urban collapse, privation, and social failure on a massive scale. He encouraged his followers to set up communes and communities to preserve craft knowledge. His vision was inspiring if perhaps a little off in the timing.

Because, what happened? The largest, most enduring commercial and technological expansion since written history began.

Ah ... but that didn’t last long, and as soon as the Internet goes down, and the one-eyed monster in the corner or in plasma on the wall is silent, and when the water in the tub is all used up, and when a tin of molasses is changing hands at dollars on the penny ... what happens then?

Be all that as it may, the biggest news in our lives, bigger for us even than the hurricane, is that Trish has become a grandmother. Baby Jeremy Daniel arrived fully formed and perfectly beautiful.  Emily and Jonathan adopted him as a newborn. No one could wish for better care.

And the story of the hurricane and the story of being new grand-parents converge, because here we are staying with the new baby and his new parents up in Westchester while the power is out in Lower Manhattan. With amazing good luck their house was untouched by falling trees, and they still have electricity.

December

Once the readership of this blog soared into double figures I took a six month sabbatical. Now that I’m returning to it on the last day of 2011 and in the middle of a run of Charley’s Aunt at The Guthrie, I’ve finally managed to break a leg. Actually it was a torn hamstring, but as so few us are reading, you’ll forgive the license. In passing I’ll mention that the editor has told me to make this returned-to-version leaner and meaner at 500 words a pop.

Charley’s Aunt has to be in the forefront of silliest plays ever written, but it’s one of the funnest to perform. Mostly because that great theatre sound, the sound of several hundred people all laughing at once is a great tonic. I mean where else can you get that?

Not in congress! At post play discussions I sometimes say that farce (Charley’s Aunt) is a naturally popular form in England, because for years now we’ve run the whole country on farcical lines. Now I see that trend is catching on with our American cousins. And I say this with all respect due and now that I have become a British American.

It’s a big circle for me to be involved here. Charley’s Aunt was just about the first play I ever saw, it was certainly the first time I was taken backstage. I was about twelve, and Tom Courtenay was giving us his ‘Lord Fancourt-Babberly’ - the one, you’ll remember, who personates Charley’s hitherto unknown Aunt. 

I was utterly charmed by the experience, and it took me back when one of our audience here in Minneapolis told me that seeing our production had made him laugh so much that his stomach hurt - back when I was twelve I laughed so much my face hurt and my cheeks were stuck near my ears. Back then when we went behind the scenes I was introduced to an actor by the name of Wolfe Morris, he was playing Spettigue. Fifteen years later I was in a British production and played one of the lively undergrads, a character called Jack, notoriously tricky by the way because he is the ‘engine of the play’ (the author’s words, not mine), and is mostly the comic feed, the straight man. Now, forty years later, I’m playing the old fart, yes Spettigue. Time passes eh?

But let’s get back to politics.

Taking citizenship I thought I was privy to the finest of The United States ideals - how did that thing go? Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free ... we were 150 strong in the room where we took the oath, 42 nationalities represented. And in the course of the ceremony, with the New World genius for self-congratulation, we gave ourselves six standing ovations.

Incidentally: 

Do you know the difference between American politics and British politics?

There is no difference, they are the same.

Except that in America you don’t have the two drink minimum.

Happy New Year!

June

There are three standout moments in any theatre gig: the offer, the first night, and... the last night.

The offer validates you as an actor.

The first night tests the work you’ve done in rehearsal.

And the last night...

In the days before a show closes you move from a temporary sense of permanence back to a semi-permanent sense of transition. The group of intimate strangers that assembled around this production and became a family for a while is going to dissolve. Some of us will meet again, maybe all but one or two will have a reunion dinner. But it’s unlikely that we’ll ever again see the whole company as it was when we did the show. In some circumstances this can be a positive of course. But mostly not. Mostly the parting of the ways is at least a little wistful, and often rather poignant. As is the familiar transition to uncertainty. Chances are all of us will work again, but not all of us know it for sure. 

There’s nothing I know of to stop the forward march of time, but the way time passes onstage and over the course of a run, is odd. There’s the repetition. Every performance repeats the words and the moves, it’s both as exactly similar as you can make it, but also as singular as your experience of the present moment  can be - at least it’s better when it is. 

This being in the moment thing is important, specially in comedy. Say you’re playing a scene with another actor and there’s a possible laugh coming up. For the laugh to hit, both of you has to be aware of the comic possibility in the text; the pace, rhythm, and timing of your scene partner; and what the audience collectively can respond to. 

Life of Riley, is a play about three couples, and our seven person cast (including the silent but telling cameo given by Rebecca Gold) was an expert group including, among others: Dana Green, Nisi Sturgis, Ray Chambers, and David Bishens - as varied a group of human shapes, types, and temperament as you could assemble - led by a skilled, deft, and graceful director in Rick Seer. I reckon directing is the most demanding job in theatre, but if you cast a play well and create a place that is fun to work in, where people can experiment freely,  a lot of your work is done.

I played opposite the splendid Henny Russell, as gifted a comedienne as I’ve ever met on a stage. And as consummate a technician with all the awareness mentioned above in spades. I was predisposed to like her for having the good taste to accept this gig, and then delighted as we began rehearsals, and it became clear that we fit well together as a comic partnership. Comic chemistry with a scene partner is fun like no other. The sound of several hundred people all laughing at once is just so great, and for a couple of vocational comic actors what could be better?

Usually a laugh breaks like a wave. You can see it coming, and if the timing is reasonable (and the script is funny - let’s not forget the playwright), then the laugh will arrive, swell, and fade. How the right silence is held for the comic idea to be heard, how the words of the punchline are delivered, how the actors listen (or don’t) to each other, how they focus the moment; all this is technique, which is why comedy demands the most technical accomplishment from its actors.

And there are different kinds of laugh. Titters, ripples, swells, explosions... and occasionally... the comic bullseye, a rolling laugh. A laugh which arrives and peaks, but goes on to another peak, and another, an endless laugh lasting for a long long time in stage time, say as much as 20 or 30 seconds. Henny and I scored a few of these. They don’t happen often. Some laughs are reliable, so built into the show that if they’re not there something is wrong. But the rolling laugh arrives only when everything is right in the scene and when the timing hits the sweet spot. 

And how did Ayckbourn, the quintessentially middle-class English playwright, play in Southern California? Mostly very well. The usual hazards (from the actors point of view) applied of course: oversize patrons with limbs spilling into the aisles where entrances were made, talkative patrons supplying live and loud running commentary on the show as it progressed, and of course those patrons who believe the theatre is the best place to take a refreshing after-dinner sleep sometimes complete with snoring. But mostly English marital dysfunction played well in these parts. And after all, all history tells us that issues in marriage do occur frequently in most times and places.

Ayckbourn specializes in bittersweet; shade with his light; a dark lining in the comic gesture of his plays. But the Checkovian darkness in this play was gently tempered with a subliminal message referenced but unspoken in the final graveside scene when the voice of an unseen vicar tells the story of the woman taken in adultery. The tag line of that fragment of the comedie humaine is: ‘who is without sin let him cast the first stone...’ living in times when public figures fall from grace with drumbeat regularity, because, of all things, sexual peccadillos, this value seems an excellent one to me. 

And that, combined with an exquisite set and costume design, an invigorating sound track, a cohesive group of theatre folk wrangling and delivering a fun show including a series of  comedy duets such as it was my great pleasure to play with Ms. Russell. All that goes to say that it doesn’t get any better than it got in Life of Riley at The Old Globe, in the vivid Jacaranda-blossom springtime 2011.