TREADING THE BOARDS and other Arts

 (The Business of Theatre and writing)

Why do I do it?

What is it that makes people like me want to be amateur actors, writers or singers?  The motivation to do it may vary from one individual to another.  I think that for most of us, it starts very early in life when we watch TV, or see a film or a play and we think, “I could do that”.  We see it as something that we love doing, and we have some natural ability at it.  I think my first experience of getting something I wrote published was when I was fired up about some issues and wrote to the local newspaper and I was so pleased to see my letter in print. It gave me as sense of achievement.  I then saw some issues in the church of Scotland and I wrote to the Church of Scotland Magazine “Life and work” , and once again, there was my letter, in the magazine, but this time it was not just being read in my town and surrounding villages.  I felt that it was quite an achievement to be read all over Scotland.  These days, I write each month in the village newsletter on behalf of the church.  This is a very different experience as it has an intimacy that a national magazine or local newspaper does not have.  It marks me out in the village both as an individual and as a member of the church..  I also think it has some responsibility as what I write potentially could impact a person’s life.  That is what I am aiming at.

I wrote a booklet about my testimony for friends and family. I distributed it to them, and for some it came as a surprise as it contained things they were not aware of.  I hope to produce it again in another form someday. 

Many years ago, I worked in Amsterdam at a Christian Youth Hostel in the red light district of Amsterdam.  Some years later they asked for articles for a book they were writing about it.  I saw this as another chance to do some writing, so I wrote something for it, sent it to them and it was accepted. The book is called, “Experiencing Gods Shelter”.  I sometimes look at it and relive the experiences I had then.  It is interesting reading my own work when some time has elapsed.  It gives me a sense of perspective.  It is a feeling of, “I have done more than I think I have”. As you can see, I now write blogs.  I think my motivation for doing these things is a love of God my saviour and the feeling that I have something to say that is important.

The Performing Arts

I cannot remember what my first performance was, but it had to be either at School or Church.

As a child I attended Commercial School Dunfermline Which at that time was located down Commercial School lane just off East Port.  The school was in two buildings.  The infants and what we called the big school.  The big school has long been demolished and the Infants building is now the Tower House.

There was a hall in the big school that we called the Gym, however although Gym lessons took place there, it was also used as dining room.  There were however other times when it was transformed into a theatre and each class would perform a play that they had written.  We would use whatever we could to suspend two curtains; one on either side to create the wings and the space in between was the stage.  I was slightly jealous of one of the other classes who did a sketch on Doctor who as I am a fan and I would love to have done that.

I do remember however that in that very same room, our class had watched a schools programme on smugglers and the revenue officers. Our teacher encouraged us to write a play about it.  I played one of the smugglers.  We did a great deal of improvising.  Cardboard boxes were used for walls that could be easily demolished to allow the children playing the revenue officers to come in and arrest the smugglers.  I think it was things like this that gave me a taste for the theatre.

Church also gave me a taste of theatre as the adults in the church had a drama group that did scots comedies.  As a child I longed to be in it, and decided that when I was old enough, that was what I would do, but in the meantime, I had to content myself with what Sunday school had to offer.  Each year, we would put on a concert and Miss O would train us in singing while one of the other Sunday school teachers had the job of playing the piano.  The church hall had a small stage that was really just a platform and we would stand on it looking like a choir.  It was decided one year that we would do a Black and White Minstrel show.  This was popular television show at the time where men and the Mitchel minstrels would blacken their faces.  It is not considered politically correct now, but this was not considered at the time.  I was looking forward to getting my face blacked up and singing, but alas, we never got our faces blackened up.  We were however expected to have white shirts with black lase boy ties.  I omitted to tell my mother what we were to be wearing as I thought that as I was wearing a white shirt that week, then that would do.  I was very upset when I found that she was going to wash it and I would be wearing another shirt that was not white. I burst into tears and went stomping off saying that I was not going to be the odd one out.  Mothers are good at resolving problems like that, so the white shirt was washed and dried and ready for the stage.   The concert took place and I enjoyed performing. I never needed any persuading to go on the stage.

In the 1960s, families could take a two week holiday and go to resorts on a scale unknown before.  There was what was called “The Trades Fortnight” when factories all over the country would close for two weeks and the workers and their families would got to holiday resorts such as Scarborough, St Anne’s, Bournemouth, Blackpool or Llandudno. My family went to all of these places over the years and it one of them I met a man who taught me how to do a card trick.  It consisted of three jacks and the ace of clubs and inserting them into various parts of the pack and somehow they all came together in the same place in the pack as one by one he revealed the cards to me. I loved the trick and performed it for other guests.

I thought that I would build on my newly found knowledge of magic tricks, so I bought a book called, “Clayton Rawson’s Colour Book of Magic and Simple Tricks”.  It contained a variety of tricks, some of which could be done using household goods.  There was an escapology trick that I performed once for the Sunday school. It required the use of string, but as I had none, I used wool.  This was not a good idea as to do the trick well, one had to be slick with timing and I was not, even though technically the trick worked.

On another occasion, it was decided to tell the story of Isaac and Rebecca.  I thought that it could be done as a puppet show.  I created simple cardboard puppets on sticks with mouth pieces that could be operated with string and wrote the script.  This gave me some experience of being a voice artist.  To me it was a more formal way of playing as children often use various voices for role playing in the school playground.

A Grown Up Role

The church my family attended was very liberal and could not survive.  At first I was not aware of the financial difficulty they were in.  By this time, I was 16, and old enough to join the drama group. I did this, and we performed a Scots Comedy called “Croanie Oh Mine”. I have no idea who wrote this play and I have tried in vain in recent years to get a copy of it.  I played Alec Lawson who was a young doctor and the love interest of the story. These plays often had a love story embedded in them.  I think this was the first adult role that I played. It gave me more experience of performing and I loved it.  I was starting to take performing more seriously as this was a full length play and I had not done anything like that before.  I had seen a number of these plays and I realised that I had a modest skill that most people do not have.  I had spotted this when I went to see one of the plays and a certain man who was a friend of my family was in it.  He played a policeman, but I noticed that on stage, he walked the way he always walked and stood with his hands behind his back as he always did.  He also spoke in his natural manner. In other words he could not act.  The only thing that told me that he was meant to be a policeman was the uniform, but he had no personal authority as that character on the stage and I could see in my mind how I would do it vastly differently.   One needs to put aside one’s own personality and step into the character one is playing.  It is a challenging and very fulfilling thing to do even in small parts.

Sketches

It still fell to the teenagers to provide entertainment for the adults once a year.  To this end, I wrote some sketches which the Teens group performed.  These were probably terrible scripts and certainly not well rehearsed, but when you are young, you are honing your craft. I have written most of my life and looking back, writing those scripts was a bit of practice at it.  The only thing I can clearly remember is that I wrote a sketch about a doctor’s surgery that was very close to farce.

The School Opera

I went to Queen Anne Secondary High School in the late 60s and early 70s.  In senior years one had the opportunity to be in the school opera.  These were in fact operettas that the school performed bi annually.  I expect they were expensive. They were certainly time consuming.  The scenery was created by the art department, the singing was coached by the music department with the head of that department being the conductor and the stage direction was done by the English department because they taught drama.

One year the production was, “The Vagabond King”.  Auditions were held for the principal roles. I attended the auditions, but did not do as well as I hoped.  I got a part that had one line.  However I put all my acting talent into that one line.  As a boy who loved art.  The costumes were lovely and the vagabonds did have swords made of metal, not wood and the archers did have bows.  I learned that it is possible to deceive an audience into believing that the cast is bigger than it really is.  During one of the solos, the lights were brought down with most of the cast on the stage.  In the gloom some of us would crawl off the stage to go back to the dressing room to change costumes and become different characters.  When the lights came back up there were still enough of the cast on the stage to make the audience believe that all of us were still on the stage.

I think all of the hours we spent on singing were good for confidence building.  The head of the music department was so enthusiastic that he communicated that enthusiasm to us.  He put me in the bases and told us that all music is built on the bases.  I think that what he meant was that the bases give the songs some depth of sound.  Another teacher told me I had a good speaking voice.  I realised that was true, but I really wanted to be a fantastic singer.  Unfortunately I am not, I am just an OK singer who at times gets away with being able hold a tune. If I were on the X factor I would be lucky to get to the second round.

At the Ballroom

I had joined the school opera but by doing so, I had not realised that I had become part of the school choir.  The cast of the opera were asked to perform at the Kinema Ballroom Dunfermline.  I can tell you exactly where I was on the 25^th of October in the evening, 1972.  I was on stage at the ballroom singing with the school choir.  I remember the date because it was in the morning of that same day that my grandfather died.  I never told the school as I had decided to go ahead with the performance.  I suppose it was my way of coping with death.  The performance itself was a good experience for me in a venue that I was not familiar with.  It was very different to a theatre. It had a more intimate atmosphere as the stage was smaller.

CAN YOU ACT?

The opera was always performed in the local theatre, the Carnegie Hall, but much of the rehearsal time was in the boy’s gym at school.  Looking back, it must have been a mammoth task for the teacher who was directing it to transfer it from the gym to the Carnegie Hall stage as he was working in one space, but imagining it as another.  He must have thought about the size of the stage and imagined it on the gym floor.

Nobody said what I am about to say here, but most of the principals were very good indeed, they could sing and act, but I can think of two who could not act. Neither of them moved well.  I think the director realised that, but had to do the best with what he had.  The auditions had been decided by a team of teachers who judged and I suspect that most of them were looking for good singers, but omitted to take into consideration that one had to act as well.  The auditions were purely singing, but no acting. One boy was a good singer, but it seemed like he could not act and sing at the same time because every time he had to sing, he stood bolt upright with his hands by his side, put his head back and sang.  Some years later another boy recalled this and said, “It was like watching a valve open up”.  I think the coaching that I could see the director was putting in to get him to move in what seemed like being more natural did improve things, but he was by no means a natural actor.  I said that I did not consider the friend of my family to be a good actor either. These two incidents made me aware that when casting, you need to bring to the stage the people who look right and have all the skills to do the job, not just one skill.

THE JOY OF LIVE THEATRE

In some plays and operas, there is a point where it is necessary to do a big scene change of move a lot of props.  There is therefore a short scene put in that is part of the story, but enables practical things to be done that should not be seen by the audience.  There is such a scene in the vagabond King.  A large piece of scenery was built to represent a City wall and it had to go near the front of the stage so that scene hands were setting up for the next scene could work behind it out of the view of the audience.  I was one of the characters on stage in front of it.  It was not only the full length of the stage; it was also very high to convey that the wall was big.  One night, during a performance, someone accidentally bumped it, and it wobbled very badly.  For a moment, I thought that it would fall on us and over the orchestra pit. However one of the boys playing one of the principal characters stood with his back up against it with his arms spread out to steady it.  Fortunately this worked and he looked out into the audience and said, “Well I always knew I would bring the house down someday” The audience laughed.  Perhaps the front two rows were laughing with relieve that it did not come down on top of them.

PERCY

For a number of years during the summer, my church had summer missions led by Scripture Union.  These missions would be for five consecutive days and there would be a sketch each day.  All of the sketches were to illustrate various aspects of biblical truth, and all of them were about the same character.  For one of the, I played a parrot.  YES YOU ARE READING THIS CORRECTLY, A PARROT.  The parrot was called Percy.  They could not have done any better than Hi De Hi, only there were no yellow coats.  The costume for this had to be constructed from what we already had such as a cardboard beak; I wore a Jersey and tights.  Someone had donated several pairs of tights, each pair being a different colour. It was decided in the planning process that I would wear different tights each day and there would be a quiz for the children. One of the questions would be, “What colour were Percy’s legs today”?  You can see that I struggled for my art.  This was of course amusing and I had to learn the script. None of it was ad libbed.  There was some rehearsal so that we all knew what we were doing, but not a large amount as there were many other activities to plan for the missions.

The Local Amateur Theatre

A few years later, I left Dunfermline and moved to my current location.  I worked with a lady who told me that she and her husband had a season ticket for performances at the local amateur theatre.  There was also a postman who delivered our office mail every morning who was a member of the theatre and he told me about it.  I decided to go with the lady and her husband to see a performance.  I cannot remember what the name of the play was that we saw, but it was a farce.  I was enchanted by it.  It was much better than I seriously expected.  I thought that the whole approach the company had was very professional. 

I felt that I wanted to get to know these people and the only way I could do that was by joining the company.  I did this and I attended one of their readings.  I was asked to play a couple of parts in the forthcoming production of “Canterbury Tales”.  There was a sub title of “Chaucer made modern”.  I did it and toward the end of the run, I was asked if I would be interested in a part in another play. It was “Fly Me to the Moon”, by John Godper.  I played the part of Dougie, a Glasgow truck driver who seems to be a hard man, but he hates his life. He really wants to be a nightclub singer.  I had to sing the title song while shouting into another man’s face.  It was a lot of fun and there was a good audience reaction

I then played the gardener in “Tons of Money”.  At the end of the first act of this play there is a sound effect to simulate an explosion.  No one had told the audience or the stewards about this, and I was on the stage during this scene.  When the sound effect came on, one of the downstairs stewards heard it and all the screaming and thought that there had been a terrible disaster.  For the rest of the week before curtain up the audience were warned that there would be loud sound effect at the end of act one.

I PLAYED MYSELF

The theatre had a Christmas Party at which we brought our own food and drink and put on Sketches, or read poems.  I saw this as an opportunity to present my Christian testimony in a fashion that I had not done before.  I wrote a sketch telling the story of how I became a Christian and I played all the characters.  This of course meant that one of the characters I had to play was myself.  I used different voices and a pair of glasses to denote different characters.  Over year later, to my delight, one man told me that he had found if powerful.  I expect that none of them had seen anything like it.  It was a new experience for me.  I will not say that I wrote a masterpiece of a script, because I kept it simple.  During the sketch, I referred to my school days and “The Vagabond King”. I sang the song, “Sons of Toil and Danger” from that Operetta and in my imagination I was back there in Dunfermline’s Carnegie Hall again.  In those days, I could not have foreseen how influential my school experience would be on me. It gave me a love for the theatre, and it trained me in how to sing.

PROPS AND BEING PART OF A TEAM

The theatre is very highly dependent on team work.  Everyone from the cast to the back stage crew to the gallery and stewards are vital for any production to go on.  Getting the props in an amateur production can be something of a challenge.  Particularly if the play is set in the past and the required props are no longer common place.  Perhaps the most unusual thing that our company had to get for one play was a space ship.  We ended up with something more simple than that.  Costs have to be kept down so it is best to get props from other members of the company, though at times, some props may have to be hired.  I once hired a stick telephone like the ones you see in films made in or set in the 1930s.  You would be surprised at how many things you can remember from childhood that are no longer as readily available as they once were.  I directed a play that required a pram.  Prams are no longer the sort of thing we put babies in.  They were big and heavy and have been overtaken by the present day much lighter baby buggies. 

We needed an old fashioned writing desk for on play.  It was “Gaslight”.  Writing desks are not common and when you see one, some of them are rather large and grand.  I was off the opinion that we needed a small dark stain one as it would not take up too much room and I thought it should be dark in keeping with the dark nature of the play, especially when the lights went down for parts of it.  I went to a certain second hand furniture store and to my surprise; there in the middle of the shop was a writing desk that fitted that description.   We do not have a lot of storage in the theatre and so I hoped that I could strike a deal with the shop to enable us to buy it, and sell it back to them at a lower price so that in effect, we hired it.  I managed to do this successfully.

Doing props at least makes me part of the team.  I have also done a lot of stewarding.  Apart from being a practical job, there are legal responsibilities for all the stewards.  In the event of a fire the stewards are necessary.  I once stewarded for a play that required a smoke effect. I had seen the play and I was stewarding the following night when the fire alarm went off.  Having seen the play the previous night, I realised that there was a strong possibility that the smoke had been a bit much and had set the alarm off.  It automatically alerts the fire service so even if I was right, the building had to be evacuated.  I was right, the fire brigade came and did an inspection and the show was allowed to continue.

On another occasion I was stage manager.  During the interval, one of the cast got stuck in a lift.  I seriously thought that we would not be able to go on with the second act because of this.  One of the other cast members went on the stage and said, “Is there a lift engineer in the house?”  The audience laughed.  I thought that as they play was a comedy the audience probably thought that this was part of the performance, so I went on the stage and said, “We are being serious, we really do need a lift engineer”. They did not laugh this time, they knew I meant it.  Another member of our company was on the premises and he has engineering training due to his job.  He was able to get the lift going, and open it to let the cast member out and the second act went on.

A Song and Dance

We did Pride a Prejudice one Christmas. That was a lot of fun as I love dressing up in really good clothes.  These magnificent colourful costumes were hired.  Those of you who are familiar with the novel and TV series will know that the story involves dancing.  Most of us were taught some dancing for this and I am grateful for the compulsory dancing lessons I had at school in preparation for the school dance.  I am not a good dancer, but it does mean that I have a rough idea of what to do when required to dance.  I recognised most of the steps of the dances we did for this production.  I had never danced on the stage before and one has to make it look elegant even if one is at best only an average dancer.  We were dancing in a very small space.

For the second play I appeared in I sang the title song.  I had the training for singing from the school opera all those years before, so voice projection and breathing for it was not a problem as I had been taught from the age of 12.

THE STEAMIE

One Christmas, it was decided to perform the steamie.  I directed it. One of the problems one has with the armature theatre is that people may decide to change their minds.  I found that when I thought I had a full cast, one girl dropped out and then someone else dropped out.  I asked various people to replace them but they were all busy.  We came very close to being forced to cancel, however one member of the cast was able to recruit a very good actress and I got a couple of others.  Thus the first two weeks of rehearsal were very difficult.

I made some decisions about the sinks which looked real but were in fact plastic tubs and the taps were rigged with a hose pipe so that they really worked.  It was suggested that we get dollys.  I had never heard of such a thing, but I was shown a photo of one and they were like plungers for doing you’re washing in the 1950s.  I agreed to it.

There is some optional singing in the play and I decided to make it simple.  However, I realised that I well into rehearsals that I had made some assumptions.  I had assumed that due to the fact that I had gone to a school that put emphasis on the arts and I had been in the school opera and also had three years of compulsory singing lessons that everybody else would have this experience. I was wrong.  I therefore got three people in to help with this and I watched these ladies learn to sing and breath properly. A skill I had learned when I was 12 years old and as a man, I felt frustrated that I could not personally help them.  I can sing, but teaching it is another skill I was so glad that the people who came in to help were women. They were better than I could ever have been.

I thought that ladies did the Scottish accents well.  Although the play was written in the 1980s, it is set in the 1950s.  I think we all recognise the characters as being people we once knew.  They may be our parents, relatives or neighbours.  The characters are working class women with pride in their cleanliness..  I love the play as it moves me and it is also funny.

I had difficulty finding a producer and a prompt. Someone stepped in to produce it, and I prompted it.  There is a skill in prompting. You have to read the script in detail every night and you need to be familiar with the performances so that you know when someone has dried and is not just pausing.  You also need to know when to let something go as prompting could interrupt the story.  I had to learn not to prompt too quickly.  A moments silence on a stage seems sooooo much longer than it really is.

Most plays require some props.  It may be furnishings, but it may be small things that the cast have to handle.  In an amateur

READING IN SHREWSBURY

There was a period when we did readings.  In fact my own association started with the theatre at such an event.  It potentially can introduce us to plays we are not familiar with.  For a new person, it certainly introduces you to members of the company.

Recently I participated in reading portions of Shakespeare in a town centre.  All the portions were about marriage. This was an interesting experience.  Very different to Edinburgh where the festival is a big event and performances in the street get a crowd.  This was fun, but it did not result in a crowd gathering round us.  There were interested passers-by.  I expect they viewed it like music.  One does not have to watch a musician to hear what he or she is doing.  One watches a musician to have a deeper and longer experience of the music.

It was lovely to meet relatives of people I already know and to find out that their relatives also tread the boards.  Who knows what it could lead to? I may read portions of plays in the street again.

WHAT DO WE BRING TO A PERFORMANCE?

I think that actors whether they be armature or professional, bring something of their lifes experience to the performance.  I played Mr Martini in “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and I was aware that having visited people in mental health institutions, I had some idea of how they behaved and I mimicked it.  Even if one has no direct experience of being the character one is playing, one still has experience of life that one brings to the stage to portray the character.  I for example have no experience of driving trucks for a living. However in “Fly me to the moon” I did feel that I bought to the character my experience of being a Scot and how Scottish society shapes ones character.  Also in the jobs I have done in supermarkets and in my present job, one meets truck drivers, and has a glimpse into what their working lives are like.

I played a king in Canterbury tales. I have never been a king, but I have read about kings in the bible and seen what their lives were like and I think I brought that to the performance in a slightly over the top kind of way.

For some plays that are set in the past but within my lifetime, I bring to it the memories of living through that period.  Some may say that I am bit of pain in that respect, as I can remember details that are not important to the story.  I am currently l doing props for a play and one of them is a cornflakes packet. The play is set in the late 1980s and I know that the present day Cornflakes packet is different as they no longer have the strap line, “The Best To You Each Morning” and some audience members may pick up on that if it is not there.  It is the song that went with it in the TV adverts that has fixed that line in my memory.

A lot of thought goes into any performance.  We had a workshop that was run by a professional actor. One of the exercises he encouraged us to do was go on the stage with portions of a script, but he did not tell us what the play was, nor the situation, nor the sex of the character.  This made us pay attention to detail and to try to get inside the character perhaps more than we would normally do at a first reading. 

One of the plays we looked at during the workshop was “Romeo and Juliet”.  I read Romeo and I found myself opposite a woman I know quite well of my own age.  The performance lacked the excitement and energy of youth so sometimes bringing to a performance experience can be a liability.  Sometimes what it needs is energy

IN SUMMARY

In summary, I love the armature theatre. It is an added dimension to my life and has enabled me to meet, befriend and love people whom I would not otherwise have met.  It has also enabled me to express my love for the theatre.  You dear reader may also have some of your own theatre stories to tell