The End Of The West End

I realise the subject of this blog is ridiculously inevitable. If you have seen any of my tweets today then you will realise what has been winding me up. You'll know that a certain news story has got my goat, sheep and cow and has caused me to endlessly rant about it via social networking. Or, if for some reason you haven't noticed or you don't happen to follow me on Twitter (fools) then I'm sorry to break the bad news to you that you have missed a day of me whining about Chris Moyles being cast in the stadium tour of Jesus Christ Superstar. If you were unaware of this news, I'm sorry. Sit yourself down, give yourself a few minutes to recover, BACS me £1000 and then read on...

Checking the news first thing in the morning is never a good idea. Rarely do we wake up to the news that the government are giving away free money/ice cream/kittens so it's generally a bad way to start your day. However, it's normally news about famine or war but today's news was far worse. Today's news made me question humanity AND my career. The news that probably one of the most idiotic and annoying people to clumsily grace our planet has been cast in an acting and musical theatre role is tragic. It makes our industry into even more of a mockery than when I spent a whole summer playing the part of a camp man. It's that bad, people.

The casting of celebrities into plays is sadly not a new thing anymore. As soon as someone realised that you could put someone off the telly on to a stage and people would pay ridiculous amonts of money to see it, the West End has been ruined. Take yourself down the West End, push a few tourists out of the way and have a look. Every bloody poster is plasterded with the inane grinning face of someone from that little electrical box that we desperately stare at every evening in the hope that it might one day produce something good. And it's because of this that it's almost impossible to get a job in theatre now. These so-called stars have now taken the jobs of the top actors meaning that they now get the supporting roles. The supporting actors have now been pushed into the supernumerary parts and now the rest of us have been pushed into waitressing.

But what's even more upsetting is that Chris Moyles isn't even an actor. He's not a singer. He's not a performer. He's a buffoon that has somehow elbowed his way into an already oversubscribed industry. And like with everything else in the world of acting, the behaviour we have to put up with wouldn't be tolerated in any other industry. Would they give Holly Willoughby the role of a GP just so it would encourage more men to go to the doctors? No, of course they wouldn't. I mean, I'm sure that's mainly because who would give up a job of spending every morning with Philip Schofield but you understand what point I'm getting at. But at least the other stars of the West End are performers. They've kind of earned their dues and although they have annoyingly fast-tracked their way into a job that we have all worked very hard to not get, at least they pretty much know what they're doing. But what does has Chris Moyles done to get the job that I know a trillion actors would love the chance to play? Bombard radio waves with his incessant chatterings? Make terrible game shows that should never have seen the light of day? Appear on a celebrity version of Supermarket Sweep (thanks Wikipedia.) What started out as an interesting sounding show that would be starring the incredible and exceptionally talented Tim Minchin has now become the worst sounding project since Rock of Ages...

This now also means that a strand of the acting industry that was already pretty tough to get into has become even harder. Once you just had to be the son or daughter or best friend of the director. But now you have to somehow get famous first by making a complete fool of yourself on television in any show of your choice and then wait for the West End castings to come flooding in. As a career plan, it wasn't one I particularly had in mind. I had one in mind that contains a fairy knocking at my door before the month is out and handing me the role of a lifetime (and a million pounds) on a silver platter. Thanks Andrew Lloyd Webber. Thanks very much.

I saw someone post on Twitter today that at least this casting would help bring more people to the show and that it would mean ticket sales would be high. This means that instead of quality casting, directors have instead decided to create freakshows to ensure that not every musical ends the way of Streets of Dreams which has had to be postponed until the end of the year while they desperately work out how to make it any good. So, this week not only have we had to deal with the news that acting jobs are going to the director's friends and family but they are now also going to hateful celebrities. That's the way it's going folks. Soon Downton Abbey will contain a cast made up of Made in Chelsea stars, Jeremy Clarkson and the editor's sleazy second uncle. When the ancient Greeks invented acting, I'm pretty sure they never imagined this...

Wardrobe Malfunctions

Our brains will often turn against us. It's something you can understand. My mind puts up with a lot on a daily basis. I have filled it to the brim with pointless 90s Britpop trivia and 80s song lyrics. And then, on top of that, I'm constantly asking it where the next packet of crisps will be coming from and if it can drag out another amusing audition anecdote. So, I can't complain when it goes on strike. Those wonderful times on stage or in front of a camera where it just decides to have a little snooze. The times in an audition where it does a bit of cross-wiring and it feeds the wrong word to your mouth. That glorious moment when you're faced with someone whose face you recognise but their name is as familiar to you as quantum chromodynamics (nope, I've never heard of it either.) Those special little happenings are all when your brain is getting its own back on you. Just like you falling asleep during your friend's slideshow of their two years backpacking round Belgium, your brain needs to be a rude, charmless beast too sometimes.

But what excuse do clothes have? What stresses do they have to deal with? Ocassionally we might try and squeeze into them when we've clearly grown out of them. And sometimes we might tip a whole glass of red wine down them when we should really be heading home. But that's about it. Clothes at least get a rest. They get to curl up on the floor or hang sleepily once the day is over. Even pyjamas, the nightshift workers of the clothing world, get to laze around in bed all day.

So why do clothes feel the need to fight back sometimes? My first wardrobe calamity occurred during my second year of drama school. It was our first ever public performance as our flounces around a stage before that point weren't deemed worthy for the unsuspecting eyes of people who existed outside the drama school cocoon. We were all as highly strung as a guitar on Mount Everest and everyone wanted to make sure that it all went right. We were performing a musical and as I possessed the weakest singing voice in my year, I was given the only character who didn't have one sung line. This meant that I spent much of the first act backstage while everyone else got to prance around on stage setting up the story. The introduction to my character was right before the interval (presumably to give people a chance to escape after seeing me hamming it up) and I was wearing a dress almost entirely made up of strings of pearls. The scene I entered was one of four men sat around a poker table and all I had to do was walk around the table while making some dry remark about whether women were allowed to play. However, I only got as far as stepping on stage when a strand of pearls from my dress managed to intertwine themselves with one of the chairs meaning that I was stuck in a bungee run that was about as fun as Blackpool in January. Sadly I didn't realise what had happened until I suddenly unable to walk any further and then had to spend the rest of my scene desperately trying to untangle three feet of pearls behind my back. Exit pursued by a thousand pearls spinning across the stage.

Another awful moment was during a play I was in when I was in my first year out of drama school. The play was about the Iraq war and one of my characters was a young Iraqi girl who had been raped. I'd just been on stage where we discover that she has been brutally attacked and her mother desperately tries to come to terms with her daughter dying in front of her. For some reason, it had been decided that it would be best to drag me off stage. I can only presume that this made me look like a sack of potatoes in a pretty skirt but I was young and inexperienced and unaware it was ok to question these directorial decisions. However, I'd clearly not tied said pretty skirt tight enough one evening as, while being dragged off, I feel it coming undone very quickly. To add to this, whoever was in charge of the blackout (we were on such a low budget that we only had two lighting states: church hall lights or off and it was up to whoever wasn't on stage to do them) failed to flick the switch. So, our poor audience was subjected to the sight of my most childish knickers (they have elephants on) under very unforgiving striplights. It's a miracle no one asked for a full refund that night.