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John
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Alter ego:
Unverse
Born: Yes. All right, in the 1950's Spouse:Polly. Age undisclosed. Kids: Alice (18), Christopher - aka CJ (16), Felicity (14) Work: You care? I work for ICL. Not the actor then?
Not that actor. Location: Woodley, Reading, UK
Alta Vista
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Goodman Drivel:Thursday, September 06, 2001Alice is back from Nepal, with Nepali tummy bug. Felicity back to school, starting GCSE course. Thursday, July 19, 2001We've had an email from Alice, newly arrived in Nepal:
Tomorrow, Felicity flies to Canada to see Daphne & co. Day after CJ, Pol & John fly to Los Angeles to see all sort of nice things. Felicity passed her audition and made it into the Berkshire Youth Choir - Youth Choir of the Year. Saturday, June 02, 2001GCSE BiteSize is our most visited site at the moment. CJ and Alice are both in revision mode and like 16 and 18 year-olds all over the country are fed up to the back teeth with it all. Felicity is putting in her last appearance in Bugsy Malone as I write: "Oscar, Oscar I'm back!" With Alice co-directing and Polly on props, what could possibly go wrong? Friday, March 09, 2001After all that flooding in the UK, a lot of water has passed under the bridge. Polly has been in hospital having bits cut out - an oophorectomy if you insist on detail. She's still off work and will be for another month. Alice has offers from universities: Manchester, Bristol, Goldsmiths, East Anglia. She's passed her driving test so look both ways at junctions for a gold Fiesta (slightly dented). CJ has, we are informed, completed his GCSE course work and is now in revision mode. He and Alice are off to Tossa del Mar for a drama trip at Easter, so not much revision then. They call it the "Barcelona trip" and not the "Tossa trip" for some reason. Felicity is still singing in the Berkshire Girls Choir, is participating in a schools magistrates court competition as an advocate and will be appearing in Woodley Theatre's production of Bugsy Malone, which Alice is co-directing. I too will be seen under Woodley's proscenium arch in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. Get your tickets now. Parts of the house are being knocked about in preparation for the installation of Polly's dream kitchen. Apparently you have to have a nightmare before you can have a dream. Tuesday, November 21, 2000Just in case you were curious, Chris got a new Squier Stagemaster electric guitar and Marshall ValveState 2000 amplifier (with emergency funds) and a Yamaha PSR280 keyboard (with his ill-gotten gains from The Mill at Sonning). I got a Fuji MX1700, 1.5 megapixel, 3x optical zoom, digital camera. So we're both in gadget heaven. Tuesday, October 31, 2000Sand Castles now washed away by the tide of time and I am not in rehearsal for any play at all. No, really. No, I don't miss it. No, I'm fine thank you! Today Chris broke his best guitar in two and is inconsolable. It's a male thing, this attachment to the outputs of technology, I grieve for him. ICL are now offering me a gift in return for 21 years uncomplaining and unswerving service. I am torn between getting an SLR with lots of automatic gizmos and a zoom lens (perhaps a Canon EOS 300, or a Pentax MZ-7) or a new digital camera with a minimum 1.3 megapixels. I know an SLR would take much better pictures but I'd use it less and I'd need more patience to see the results. Guitars and cameras are just things. Things are great. Sunday, October 08, 2000Quite a while since an update here. My web endeavours of late have been in building a new site for Woodley theatre at www.woodleytheatre.co.uk. I'm in rehearsal for the part of Doug in Sand Castles, also at Woodley. Of course, if you go to the above mentioned site you can find out something about the play, which is shaping up to be really rather funny. Buy tickets! All 3 kids are in rehearsal for the school's production of HMS Pinafore, whilst Polly is rehearsing Pirates of Penzance for Woodley Light Operatic. The Pirates of Penzance cast list also has 2 of the stars of Sand Castles, so it's all very incestuous. However, all of these dramas fade into insignificance compared to Polly's project to transform our kitchen, at a cost that will be only slightly less than what we paid for our first house. When work is complete, I'll be selling toickets to view it from this web site. It currently looks just about feasible - if highly challenging - to get it done by Christmas. We'll keep you posted. A Twelfth Night DiaryWednesday, August 09, 2000And now it’s over. A successful last night, a successful last night party extended by some with a late night visit to Angela’s front room which was crowded even before somebody got out Twister. Some of us were tearful, some of us were drunk - not me this time! Chris Westgate announced to wild acclaim that Susan, our excellent Viola, was pregnant. So that’s why she was sick for those rehearsals. I’ve put off posting this final entry to the Twelfth Night diary to allow some time for reflection. It has certainly taken me several days to come down from an emotional high and I found myself in very weird and childish state by Monday. Hours of sleep have increased and I may be normal now. Just a passing phase. About three and half thousand people came and had a great time; some, no doubt, to their own surprise. The reviews were good and Terry’s decision to produce it in the round was vindicated. There was a lot of very good acting and I was proud to have been a part of such distinguished company. I’ve heard people say that they have never seen a better production, even on the professional stage. A couple of people have asked me why we didn’t portray Feste as sad, as has been the norm for the last forty or fifty years. One answer is that it made the play more of an entertainment. Shakespeare did, after all, intend it as a comedy. My answer is, “Because he wasn’t”. Finally, the “get out”. At 11 or so on Sunday morning a number of variously hung over people turned up at the Abbey for one last time to pack away the costumes, dismantle the stage, the fencing, the lighting and clear the site of fag ends. For another year, the Abbey returns to being an empty ruin in a half-forgotten corner of Reading, covering the bones of King Henry I. Some of us plan our next play, others a holiday. Meanwhile, William Shakepeare lives on – and rocks. Saturday, August 05, 2000This is a very hasty entry - tonight being the last night, or the last chance to get it right. Last night was a good night, followed by curry for cast and crew. My trousers are holding up nicely, thank you Sandra, despite the huge pressure. Good luck to us all! Friday, August 04, 2000Last night was the eighth night of Twelfth Night - with of course the tenth night being the last night. We have, so far, avoided being rained off, despite the showery weather of the last couple of days. It seems to be going well with good audience response and word of mouth. I'm told we even got a favourable review in the Chronic - but I won't be looking at it until after the last performance. I decided a while back that reviews - good or bad - were bad for my acting. I think we are still improving and some have said we'd stand up well as professional production. Certainly the audience have been teaching us where the laughs are. Anybody who has been watching for photos to appear here will be rewarded soon. Also I'll post Adrian's traditional cartoon of the show here, subject to his permission and me remembering to retrieve it from the Abbey Gatehouse. My cold is affecting my voice and I've got through the last couple of nights with overlapping doses of Day Nurse and chain sucking on the unfortunately named, but effective, Nigroids - "for clarity of voice". If Nigroid addiction starts to affect other cast members, that'll be my fault. Anyway, the songs have been even shakier than usual. Last night, just as Orsino said "I prithee sing" a plane flew over, drowning out the sound of Su's guitar introduction. When, a couple of lines into the song, I could hear her, it was obvious that the key she was playing in and the key I was yodelling in were painfully far apart. Quickly concluding that I couldn't reliably switch key in mid-tune, I stopped. I asked the Duke's permission to begin again, mumbling something about "extraneous noise in the atmosphere". We resumed with something slightly less insulting to music. Afterwards, Derek, our musical director, and others congratulated me and said I'd done the right thing. All I've been able to think about is how un-Shakespearean my ad-lib was. I've checked and, sure enough, "atmosphere" was not coined until 1677. Slightly more to my surprise, even "extraneous" does not appear in the language until nearly 40 years after Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night. Here is a writer who uses a vocabulary several times bigger than my own and in one short sentence I manage to come up with two words he never knew. Still, Feste is fond of making up new words, so perhaps it was in character. If you really want to know how clever Shakespeare was, try acting him. For instance, Feste has a line, "She will keep no fool sir, till she be married, and fools are as like husbands as pilchards are to herrings: the husband's the bigger". To my modern instincts this is long-winded and I've been putting in a beat after pointing the word "married" and trying to catch a laugh there. But Will was right, the laugh, if it's to be had at all, only comes after "bigger". Actually, it is just possible that this and other Feste lines were not written by Shakespeare at all, but improvised by Robert Armin, the clown for whom Shakespeare created the role. Armin wrote a history of clowning and at least one play of his own. He was known for his great gifts of mimicry and improvisation. I've spent a deal of time thinking about how to recreate the feel of this for a twenty-first century audience. If you are listening out there, Robert, send me a sign (or an email) to let me know how I'm doing. It might be busy in eternity, so if you don't have time to review my whole performance, just tell me how close I'm getting to what you might have done with Feste's last speech: "Some are born great ... and thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges." Tuesday, August 01, 2000Half way through the run. Thursday felt a little disappointing following a great first night, but Friday was better. Saturday began with a heavy downpour as we arrived at the Abbey Gates to change. We gazed out of the windows at water bouncing off the street, telling each other, "It'll be over before 7:45". It was, but it made the ground so soggy and muddy that the women could not wear their long dresses rented from the RSC. Instead, Barbara made a run up to Progress Theatre and raided the wardrobe for alternatives. Amanda (Olivia) actually ended up going on in the black dress in which she'd arrived. This was not the least of our troubles. Burglars had breached the security of the site, scaled Jon Churchill's impressive lighting rig and stolen the video camera and speakers. This meant that stage management and lighting had no view of the stage on their monitors and there was no sound effects or music. The culprits had also attempted to break into the locked container holding the bar stock and our props. This attempt failed, but damaged the lock so that we couldn't get in either. We had to start the show with no props and a couple of items of furniture that Terry had hastily fetched from his house. A damp cold audience eventually took their seats and watched a first half that failed, unsurprisingly, to sparkle. We whinged a bit about their lack of responsiveness but we probably got what we deserved. By the interval a locksmith had been found and we at least got the props and furniture back. The audience were able to get a drink and the second half lifted - but then it usually does. Sunday off. I woke up with a cold and managed to get sunburned by falling asleep on the beach at Hengistbury Point. CJ Felicity and I enjoyed our first swim in the sea of the new millennium. We rounded off the day with a fish supper at Harry Ramsden's in Bournemouth. On Monday evening we return to the Abbey. We now have new speakers and a video camera. Everyone is more relaxed and we put in our best performance yet to a very enthusiastic audience, including the Mayor of Reading and other civic dignitaries. My cold has me struggling for the notes in Feste's songs - Orsino says he contemplated not tipping me for Come Away Death. But, apart from coughing and spluttering half way through a line, everything else goes well. I actually feel like an "allowed fool" for the first time on stage. Lots of little things that actors have been working on come good - for instance, Mike and I have tried to get more energy into the start of Act 5, Scene 1, and we are rewarded with much more audience reaction. Later in the scene, when Orsino turns to Cesario (whose identity as Viola is now revealed), he gets a big laugh for uttering the one word "Boy" - a sure sign that we have carried the audience successfully through the preceding 3 hours. The mayor tells Terry it's the best show he's ever seen. We carry our euphoria to the pub and onwards past midnight, when Mike turns 40. Happy Birthday Master Fabian. Thursday, July 27, 2000Some are saying it was the best first night they'd been involved in. The audience was packed and attentive, laughing and applauding individual scenes. It was comfortably warm without being hot. I sneaked a couple of glances when I wasn't speaking and I could see people smiling almost as if they knew what was going on. I have little idea of how people were reacting when I was speaking because I was using all of my concentration on not screwing up. I think it may have been the first time I have got through all of the lines and songs without fluffing or drying, although I got pretty breathless. I recall only one occasion where I had to pause to ride out a laugh, following "...it shines everywhere" delivered, at Chris Westgate's suggestion, from up my arse. Nice one Chris. Oh, and they liked the throwaway, "...after fourteen year's purchase." Nice one, Will. As far as I could tell the whole show proceeded without cock-up. Ted, our excellent Malvolio, declared the letter scene to be a disaster. He made it sound as if he'd turned it into a random selection of Shakespeare quotes linked with some vaguely Elizabethan extemporisation, covered only by the clowning of the conspirators behind the box tree. I couldn't tell and the audience clearly loved it, applauding him as he exited. His subsequent reappearance in yellow stockings possibly got the biggest laugh of the night - the combination of his insanely incongruous grin and the outrageous costume gets me every time. I love this scene and follow it on the SM's tiny monitor. Amanda (Olivia) and Angela (Maria) are also very good in it. Whilst getting into costume at the Abbey Gatehouse I drive everyone up the wall with siren sounds and vocal warm-ups - "Nnnnnnnggg". Everyone is so tolerant that nobody complains. I feel a bit fraudulent: I'm not a singer, just an amateur actor trying to play a singer. There's a welcome chance to run through the songs with Su, Rachel and Sally, but we're the last to leave for the backstage tent. Arriving there, we find Tony nursing a bandaged thumb, which is not the finishing touch on his costume. Apparently his fight rehearsal with Ian (Sebastian) did not pass without accident and his thumb and Ian's dagger made unintentional contact. Tony is shaking a little and I suspect in shock, but there's no lasting effect as he subsequently puts in a belter of a performance as Sir Toby Belch. The audience respond warmly to all his scenes, especially the ones with Sir Andrew Aguecheek. It's gratifying to hear them get a double laugh on the "...one that adores me / I was adored once too" dialogue. Amanda tells me that the fight scene between Sir Toby and Sebastian went especially well. "First night nerves" is an interesting phenomenon. Some go off into corners because they need space and quiet. Others pore over the script. I never look at the script for my lines, only to see how close to my next entrance I am. I prefer to run my lines, preferably with a dialogue partner if they're available and then by myself. For Feste, I find I like to run the moves along with the lines, which means I need quite a bit of space. The lawn of a psychiatric hospital would be appropriate. I read (in Peter Barkworth's The Complete About Acting) that the best way to use time prior to an entrance is to imagine what the character would actually be doing. So, before coming on to drone at Orsino, Feste has probably been down in the kitchens, bumming a free meal with jokes and bawdy songs and flirting with the wenches. Sounds like good advice for later in the run. Sir Toby: Does not our life consist of the four elements? Practical considerations are now focused on refreshment as a series of questionnaires pass around backstage: - Interval drink? Tea/Coffee; - Cast meal? Chinese/Indian; - After show drink? Cooking Lager This last question is crucial. A slightly late curtain up means we have only about 15 minutes to change and sprint to the Rat & Parrot before closing time. I only bowl over 2 members of the audience in my haste to get clear of the backstage area. Through my profuse apologies they mumble kind comments about the show. Celebrity buys forgiveness. David, one of the stage crew, is waiting for us in the pub with a baffled look and an impossibly large and complicated drinks order. Phew! Weather forecast for tonight and tomorrow is not promising: "There is a risk of locally large rainfall totals in heavy showers through today and Friday". Let summer bear it out Wednesday, July 26, 2000Tonight's the night of the Twelfth Night first night. It's sold out, so every one of those 350 plastic seats will have a bum on it. The two dress rehearsals have sorted out most of our problems and there is a general air of optimism as Terry treats us to a plastic glass of wine in the refreshment marquee. He gave a reassuringly traditional director's address following the final dress rehearsal, saying that Helen (stage manager) is now in charge and that what we now need is an audience. Personally, I would like an audience that is very easily amused. Nothing that Feste does seems funny any more and everyone must be sick of it by now: "Now you see, sir, how your fooling grows old and people dislike it." I'm also trying to make my contribution to upping the pace but I'm singing the songs too slowly. Hopefully the presence of strangers will spur me on to get them over with quickly. Adrian (Sea Captain) and I agree that it's hard to get a sense of how the dress rehearsals have gone now that we can't sit in the audience to watch the scenes we're not in. There are some scenes in particular that I've enjoyed watching as they've been built and I'll be sorry to miss them in live performance:
Monday, July 24, 2000Weakened by the weekend. Time split between wrestling with CJ and his GCSE coursework, the WOMAD festival, tabour labour (alt. sp. tabor labor) and "the tech". Alice managed to squeeze a driving lesson out of me on Sunday morning - which is always good for adrenaline rush. We both survived unscathed, as did the car. We've not had a lot of luck with cars recently. Alice is showing more progress with her driving than I'm showing with my drumming. After hours of practice I can sometimes get through a whole song whilst beating time on the tabor, but only if I don't try anything remotely complicated - or try it on stage. So far, everybody who has picked up the drum has shown more facility with it than I, especially Angela (Maria) who loves drums and owns a number. Visits to WOMAD on Saturday and Sunday are relaxing, inspiring and serendipitous. On Saturday night, CJ and I run into Tony, Helen and Mike from the Twelfth Night cast. We all watch Youssou N'Dour who was absolutely tremendous and his ensemble included some dazzling drumming skills. I do not spend enough time listening to music. Returned on Sunday with Polly, who was more interested in the traders than the music. We found a pair of red leather Moroccan slippers, which Polly suggested might look good as Feste's footwear. Sunday evening, arrived at the Abbey Gatehouse at 4:00 pm. for the technical rehearsal, which does not finish until gone 11:00 pm. Feste's costume is now more or less complete, save for shirt buttons and Sandra's desire to fiddle further with my trousers. Costumiers generally agree that the Moroccan shoes look great with it. Which actor said great performances start with the shoes? The costume department have done everybody proud with actors looking resplendent, or in my case, resplendently foolish. Technical rehearsals were not invented to punish actors; it just feels that way. Entrances and exits are run and re-run whilst lighting and sound and props and scene changes are sorted out. As soon the actors get up steam it's "cut it there" and move on to the next cue. Terry lets a couple of scenes, including the prison scene run. Ted (Malvolio) and I are improving on the mechanics of this, but it is now clear that the business of getting in and out the cloak and beard looks like a dog's breakfast. I prevail on a reluctant stage management to let me take the beard home so I can practice in front of a mirror. Jove knows when, though. The cast are dismayed to hear that press will be at the first dress rehearsal tonight. It will be hard to convey the atmosphere of this production with no audience present. Hey, ho. Friday, July 21, 2000Six days to go. At last night's semi-dress rehearsal it seemed that each exit was accompanied by the painful sound of actors kicking themselves. A few of us are suffering from line uncertainty. I started OK but then dried in 3 successive scenes, in one case struggling to remember a line I did not in fact have. There ought to be name for that "I'm-sure-I-say-something-else-before-I-say-that" feeling. There's lots of techniques for learning lines, but of course we're all past that now. So it's down to concentration. We're amateurs with day jobs and households to run and it's not always easy to psych up for a performance or rehearsal when you've rushed there from the office, perhaps feeding a family on the way. "To be said an honest man and a good housekeeper goes as fairly as to say a careful man and a great scholar". Also some concentration is now going on other aspects of the performance: moves and business, tone of voice, intention, etc. Some of us are struggling with unfamiliar props and swords and we're still getting the feel of the performance space, which still does not have seats or lights. In the final scene, nothing is revealed because we're in hideous darkness. Nobody can see our wonderful reactions - shame. I reckon we're close to where we need to be but there's still plenty left to do. Malvolio's prison is now finished and looks pretty good. All fours sides of it are identical, which makes it as easy as pie for me to get totally lost as I prat around it, delivering lines into different windows. I'll need to develop a better technique for working out where I am in this scene. Global positioning satellite terminal concealed under my cloak perhaps? Panic about moves is causing me to lose lines and the annoying voice of Sir Topaz. It's incredible that people will pay to watch this. Following the director's request that we provide our own substitute props if the real thing hasn't materialised, I typed up the text of Malvolio's letter to Olivia. Out of boredom I slipped an obscenity into the middle of it. When Mike Franklin, as Fabian, snatched it out of my hand he actually started to read it instead of quoting from memory. But he went a bit strange around the middle of the letter. He now wants to keep the letter to show to his many fans. He hasn't yet stated what he wants to do to me. Terry has added "Projection" to his list of "P's" - one of the problems with acting in the round is that there is always some part of the audience behind you. They need to hear it too. Especially the ones in the expensive seats. Apparently ticket sales are going well, with first 4 nights sold out already and over 75% sold for the run. We'd better be worth it. We're not required again until Sunday so it's self-study time. Wednesday, July 19, 2000Last night was our first Twelfth Night rehearsal in the Abbey Ruins. Several actors become disoriented: we're doing it "in the round", on an octagonal stage. North, South, East and West are different from in Terry's garden, where there is a local anomaly in the earth's magnetic field. Acoustics are different too. Was that an echo, echo, echo? Evelyn and Rosa's fight choreography is played out so that other actors get see where their entrances are. Sir Andrew and Viola's duel promises to be deliciously comic when finally polished. Careful with that sword - you could have someone's eye out! I get to play out my own little farce in between scenes. Barbara and the costume team want me to try on cloaks, gaskins/breeches and jester's caps whilst material is tucked and pinned around my apparently deformed body. I race between them and the stage pulling on trousers and shoes, running back for my drum, arriving just too late for each entrance, out of breath, out of character and with no idea of my first line. At each exit the women siren me over so that they can caress my knees and tickle under my chin and I can screw up the next entrance. I love Am Dram. Barbara, Sandra, and Hester have each laboured lovingly over different parts of my costume, which, like everything else, is going to be delivered according to best "Just in Time" manufacturing principles. Lets hope love's labour is not lost. Terry also becomes alliterative as darkness overwhelms the rehearsal and lectures us about pace, pick-up and positioning. This second half is quarter of an hour too s l o w. Terry clearly agrees with Harold Bloom (I noticed a copy of "Invention of the Human" in Terry's drawing room) that the play needs to be performed at speed, but rarely is. Privately, Terry has a word with me afterwards. He has obviously picked up on my discomfort with the tabour, which I banged out of time until I forgot the words to "When that I Was". His analysis of where I am with the part is so close to mine that I wonder if he has read yesterday's log entry. Perhaps I'll be better on a run. Monday, July 17, 2000And here was I thinking that this web site was a closely guarded secret when, beshrew me, if Sir Andrew Aguecheek (aka Robert Baker-Glenn) doesn't tell me he's stumbled across it. Looks like it's 2 months since I last made a posting. Must have been busy doing something. CJ furthers the family association with the theatre by starting a week's work experience with the Hexagon in Reading. Meanwhile, Twelfth Night looms, with only 9 days, and 6 rehearsals, to go. I know my lines perfectly, in the bathroom - why can't we put the show on there? I am worried about singing at the same time as banging a drum, I am worried about breathing at the right times to get through the songs, I am worried about singing the right notes, I am worried about remembering what verse of "When That I Was" I'm on, I'm worried about forgetting the words to the songs and I'm worried about singing. I'm worried that Feste may be a collection of silly voices and comic mannerisms (that may not even be comic) rather than a personality and I'm not sure I've started acting yet. The biggest laugh I got at last night's rehearsal was when the wretched drum banged me. Can't do that every night, it's too painful. Speaking of pain I'm seeing the doctor about my strained calf muscle that's now giving me the limp I should have had at the Richard III audition. And poor Amanda's painful throat is currently yielding the quietest Olivia on record. I am worried about the weather, since we're in the open air and the rain it raineth every day. Did I say I was worried about the singing? Wednesday, May 17, 2000I am gone, sir, |
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