Something wicked this way comes…
Thursday 25th February
Somehow, inexplicably, we have just over one week left of Dunsinane. And I’m pretty sure this is the longest run any of the soldier chorus has ever done, so it’s quite a marvel that we’ve found it to fly by. In fact, I think we’ll all be so gutted when it comes to an end that we may just have to hold fort in the Hampstead Theatre’s rehearsal room (our dressing room) until we feel rehabilitated back to the real world. Otherwise we’ll end up wearing medieval costumes to Tesco and trying to speak Gaelic at the Post Office and we all know how that story ends…
What’s seemed to really help keep each night fresh and exciting has in fact a lot do with the backstage banter. As in any show, there are lots of little rituals that accompany each performance, from very conventional ones like the warm-up and the fight-call to more quirky additions of our own like playing hip-hop music as we get into costume and finding ridiculous names for the two female members of the cast who have to dress up as male soldiers for the first scene. But it’s probably ‘story-time’ that takes the biscuit for my favourite backstage activity.
For the past couple of weeks just before the 2nd half, whilst the five of us who play Scottish prisoners are tied together by a rope attached to our feet and shackles around our hands, Catherine (our Assistant Stage Manager) tells us some horrific story or other to get us in “the mood”. This ‘mood’ that I talk of is the ‘mood’ of 5 boys who have been captured by the English army on suspicion that they might be the Queen’s son, having burnt all the other men in town: fathers, brothers etc before their very eyes. So spine-tinglingly abhorrent anecdotes about stage fights going wrong, childhood accidents and real ghost stories are all in fact very appropriate for this part of the play. But it’s just the sheer pleasure that Catherine gets from telling these gruesome accounts that is probably what makes them so dark. And there always seems to be some very obvious moral tacked hurriedly on to the end of them like: “and that’s why you’re meant to wear hard-hats”, says Catherine with a beaming smile…
I’m not quite sure how this ritual began, but I think it was just the fact of having us all in her power, quite literally, that she thought she’d inflict on us tales of the highest morbidity: “Are you sitting comfortably?….” – most certainly not! This week has marked a change in the proceedings however, as Catherine felt she wasn’t getting her own fair share of guts and gore and so it’s been our turn to tell the stories. Highlights have included Martin’s parable of “The dead dog on the tube” and Jeremy’s explanation of how he came to be called “Testiclops” (you can try and figure that one out on your own). And I think I may have succeeded in bringing the bloodiest story of them all but it’s still early days and I’m pretty sure it’s not a bloggable anecdote in any case!
So when you come and see the show, and you witness the shocked/terrified/appalled faces of the Scottish hostages at the start of the 2nd half – yes we’ll be “in the mood” of traumatised boys who have just watched their fathers burn alive, but also, we’ll still be reeling from Catherine’s delightful addition to Dunsinane of ‘story-time’.
Until next time!
Tom
