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.

Noises Off

Today I should be blogging about the audition that I just got back from. In the tradition of my blog, that would be the most likely thing for me to come back and report on. But, that will have to wait until tomorrow because, in a first for 2012, I went to the theatre last night. Oh yes, Miss L, because her wonderful friend got her a free ticket, ventured out of the house and pretended to be all cultural like.

I went to see Lovesong at the Lyric Hammersmith and on the whole, I'd recommend it to anyone that fancies an evening out in West London. It's written by Abi Morgan who, if you don't know by name, you definitely know her by her work. She's written a rather small film that's currently out known as The Iron Lady. You might have heard of it. She also wrote Shame which is out at the moment and Birdsong which is on BBC1 very soon. So yeah, she's doing alright at the moment. And the writing in Lovesong is bloody good. There are some gorgeously moving moments and all four characters are beautifully and delicately written. Despite the depressing nature of the story, I laughed far more than I cried and I came away feeling more uplifted than I expected to. There are some movement style pieces inbetween scenes which I personally found unecessary. I'm sure if I'd been in the midst of my GCSE Drama then I'd have loved them and would have found some meaning behind them but my cynical 28 year old brain just found them to be a bit tiresome. I do wonder if directors have become scared of just putting on a straightforward play. I admit that there are some incredible pieces out there where movement adds a wonderful new quality to the performance but when the writing is as tight as it was in Lovesong, all it did was detract from the performances.

But enough of my thoughts on the play. Basically I enjoyed it and I reckon your money would be well spent in going to see it. What I really wanted to blog about today was how exasperating theatre audiences are. I admit that my friend and I committed the first cardinal sin of theatregoing and because we were too busy chatting in the foyer, only entered the auditorium a minute or so before the show was meant to be begin. We checked our tickets and found that our seats were conveniently located slapbang in the middle of the row. After shuffling by angry people who were far more organised than us, we settled down and the lights came down as we were still in the midst of the wine glass/coat/bag dance. Within seconds of the show starting we realised that we were sat in front of possibly the most awful row of theatregoers. They bafflingly laughed at random lines (who knew the term 'peach tree' was funny?) and I swear they were munching their way through ASDA's entire stock of crisps. Bag after bag was opened as they guffawed at seemingly normal lines. They then became confused by some of the tricksy staging used to conceal the actors on stage. It was a shock when it was first used but within a nanosecond, it was plainly obvious what they'd done. Well, at least it was to everyone else in the room. Row M were so mesmerised by this that they then spent the next five minutes loudly whispering to each other to try and convince themselves that there wasn't some sort of evil witchcraft taking place on stage. Just as they finally managed to understand elementary staging, one of the characters makes a shocking revelation. Cue a gasp worthy of the pantomimes, followed by a whispering Mexican wave of 'Bitch!' as though we'd suddenly transported ourselves to the Jeremy Kyle show. Needless to say they remained audible throughout the whole play and any suspension of disbelief was utterly ruined.

I'm always amazed at how rude audiences are. I know that there are sometimes things that can happen on stage which can make you react in a way you didn't expect. I dare anyone to see The Woman in Black and not scream several times. Or for anyone who saw Oxford Stage Company (now Headlong) and their performance of Rookery Nook, you'll know that it was impossible not to remain laughing throughout. And if you see Translunar Paradise and don't find yourself sobbing by the end then you have a heart of steel. I don't mind those kinds of reactions. In fact, I think they're incredible. They show just how immersive theatre can be and I think it's amazing that you can completely forget about all the bills you have to pay and the work you need to get done for just a few hours and instead just allow yourself to be moved by what you see on stage. It's the other noise that really winds me up. Regular blog readers will know that I have a huge weakness for crisps but even I can go without them for a few hours. And unless you're actually dying (in which case, I wonder whether you should be seeking medical attention rather than watching Richard II) do you really need to cough in every pause?

But at least if you're in a big auditorium, those sounds can be lost slightly. I was once in a play in a very tiny space where a man yawned so loudly that everyone on stage actually stopped to look at him. Clearly he hated the play so much that he then continued to yawn in a similar fashion throughout, becoming more and more dramatic with each mouth opening. It got the point where everyone five minutes we'd have a five second sigh, followed by a ten second wail of a yawn which was accompanied my much arm stretching and was then finished off with a loud, contented second sigh. In the second half, he decided that his yawning wasn't enough and so proceeded to take out his mobile phone inbetween each yawn to see just how much he could put us off. Of course, we were all suitably distracted by this wailing, flashing buffoon and it ended up being the worst performance of the run. But I should be adept at dealing with such nuisances. In my first ever TiE show, where we took an 80s reworking of Much Ado About Nothing, to south London schools, I was welcomed on to the stage in spectacular fashion. Most actors get respectful silence but not me. Instead, while wearing a bright pink boob-tube and a frighteningly short polka dot skirt, my entrance had the soundtrack of 300 schoolchildren all shouting 'urghhhhhh' at the top of their voices. I'm pretty sure Dame Judi Dench never has to deal with such things.

So that was my first theatrical experience of 2012. Maybe I'm best off staying at home where I only have to deal with upstairs and the heaviest footsteps in the world and the weird man next door who shouts obscenties every few minutes. Hmmmm. Best get booking myself up for the year ahead...

Ain't Nothing But A Number

I think we all had a good chuckle at this news story over the last couple of days. Could someone really be so protective over their date of birth and could they really claim that it could jeopardise the possibility of them getting work in the future?

The debate over ageism within the acting industry is an age-old one and I think women in particular feel victimised. It's easy to feel that as you get older, all the younger actresses, looking gorgeous, youthful and eager, are coming in and snatching the jobs away. But surely they can only take the jobs that are applicable to them? The problem lies with the writers and producers and directors who insist on only writing parts for those under 25 and then maybe adding in an older man for good measure. I'm only just out of the 'young' age bracket and I get a little annoyed so I'm sure my frustration is only set to increase with age as I feel the little pool of parts I can apply for get smaller and smaller.

I can possibly understand why this woman might be annoyed as in the acting world, your actual age really has very little relevance to the roles you play. As long as you look like you can play the part then really that's all that matters. Who cares if you're 50? If you can still realistically play a 30 year old the the date on your birth certificate is utterly irrelevant. And I've never been in the casting seat but I'm pretty sure a casting director would look at the actor's headshot first and make their decision from that whether they think they could possibly play the part they're casting for. I'm fairly certain they don't get their calculator out and start working out whether or not their date of birth means that they could possibly play a 25 year old shop assistant. Thankfully, with the exception of one casting site, we're allowed to keep ourselves open to all roles and use our initiative as to whether we feel we can legitimiately play a role.

However, this doesn't mean that we always end up playing the ages that we should be and I've often found myself potraying characters in a completely different generation to mine. Most memorable was for a play I was in a few years ago. A child, despite having no lines, was a major part of the final scene and three young boys from local schools had been brought in to play the part during our three week run. However, because they were unable to attend our rehearsals which primarily took part in the coldest room in the whole of London during the day, I found myself, as the youngest looking member of the cast, standing in for this part. This was all fine until it was decided that on press night, it would be far better for me to play the role as the director was worried that the boys would get stage fright on such an important evening. It was ignored that kids are far more professional at these types of things and will just generally get on with it while the adults are all stressing about whether their hair looks alright and if they've done enough background work on their character. The show turned out to be amazing and by the end of the three weeks, we had a play that was getting amazing reviews and was selling out every night. But this press night was terrible. On two separate occassions, two actors found themselves in the unenviable position of being victim to wardrobe malfunctions and were on stage with their trousers round their ankles. Cues were missed, there were three separate moments of corpsing, I had to play the whole of my biggest scene facing upstage as the actor I was on with seemed to completely forget everything he'd ever known and we discovered that the giant piece of material at the back of the stage that was meant to mask us was almost entirely see-through. Then add to this, during a very naturalistic play, at the most critical and emotional point moment of the last 2 hours, a 26 year old woman wearing a skirt because her trousers had been picked up by another actor by accident, comes on pretending to be an 8 year old boy. It's safe to say that the magic of theatre was well and truly destroyed that night.

Today I've found just one part that I can actually apply for due to either being too old or too young. If you need me, I'll be the one underneath that pile of age-defying moisturiser...