Just a Stage of Life

Dick’s
Toolbox cont.
..real winner. I wandered into this musical genre through Stephen May, who learnt
guitar from Gary Young. Stephen thought that as Mike is musically brilliant,
some talent might have devolved to me – a supposition that would have pleased
neither a geneticist nor a behavioural scientist. Mr May, apart from being a
fine painter, now has his own band, whilst I have a guitar that sits unplayed
beside the piano.
Dancing has more or less eluded me owing to a lack of coordination coupled with
the delusional belief, suffered by all baby boomers, that I move like a youthful
Mick Jagger. He still does, and none of my generation ever did.
As the years move on and I see old people with the frequency that Haley Joel
Osment saw dead people in ‘The Sixth Sense’, I can say that there
are few more terrifying sights than a large room full of alcoholically disabled
aged parents attempting to dance. You see them, waists cinched with technology
descended from the space shuttle, hair parted left, right and centre, nostril
hair ecstatic, buttocks like hippopotami in heat, flooping dangerously around
like balloons in a strong wind (usually of their own making). This is still
a necessary purgatory that children must endure for reaching their majority
or getting married.
It is unlikely that I will ever write a book, much as I would like to, given
the difficulty these few lines cause me every month. Also everybody is a writer
but few people seem even vaguely literate these days. Not even authors.
My first experience of acting was a signal failure because I wasn’t there
when I forgot my lines. I was persuaded to be a messenger in Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar, which was directed by the crime writer Ngaio Marsh. The first
intimation that it was not going to be entirely smooth running was the director
thinking I was a girl – I had rather long hair and was dressed more in
the style of The Pretty Things than Butch Cassidy – which acted as an
aphrodisiac to the gay members of the cast, a disturbing number of whom were
lawyers. I realised that I had my back to the wall.
In Act Five I had four lines to recite, which should, even now, be burnt into
my memory
“Prepare you Generals;
The enemy comes on in gallant show
Their bloody sign of battle is hung out,
And something to be done immediately”.
It was a bit of a struggle, but eventually I learnt this critical part, only
to be brought low with the flu and have my place taken by someone who hadn’t
had two months to remember twenty-four words. Consequently the messenger emerged
at the stop of the stage, stuttered, “Prepare you Generals….”
and then froze, mute and stricken in the spotlight. Everybody thought it was
me, after all my name was in the program, but it was a friend who has remained
anonymous to this day. Let us call him Warren Sellers.
My acting career was in tatters, where it would have remained forever, until
many years later I was gently inveigled into set painting, and then into a number
of speaking and singing parts in the Warrandyte Follies, an annual revue held
in the local Mechanic’s Institute. An audience of friends, relatives and
the local fire brigade had a good time no matter what we did on stage. Fortunately
local dramatic societies have an amazing number of talented people to call upon,
so they were generally competent at worst and hilarious at best.
It was all just fun until the drama society became serious and decided to perform
Peter Weiss’s play ‘Marat/Sade — or The Persecution and Assassination
of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under
the Direction of Monsieur de Sade Marat Sade’, one of the great plays
of the 1960s.
I knew the play from Peter Brook’s film with the Royal Shakespeare Company,
which had a star-studded cast including Patrick Magee as de Sade, Glenda Jackson
as Charlotte Corday and Ian Richardson as the inmate playing Marat. An artefact
of the Theatre of Cruelty it is a not for the faint hearted and I thought a
great challenge – perhaps even courageous.
The play is set in the asylum of Charenton on the eve of Bastille Day. The Marquis
de Sade has created a drama to show how Jean-Paul Marat was killed in his bathtub
by Charlotte Corday fifteen years previously. The Marquis and the inmate-players
portray the revolutionary times and re-enact the murder made most famous by
David’s neo-classic painting. The director of the asylum, Coulmier, has
brought his family to watch, but it turns out to be intensely political and
things get out of hand as revolutionary fervour infects the patients. In the
abstract it represents the battle between individualism and socialism, with
the attempts of the socialists for universal brotherhood coming to nothing,
bringing chaos, fighting and repression.
I thought it a great idea as long as I didn’t get the part of Duperret,
who might be best described as an aristocratic sex maniac, although in fact
he was a Girondist, a reactionary upper class conservative patriot that used
Corday to strike at Marat. In the film he was played by John Steiner a tall,
blond, thin British character actor who later played deviant villains in Italian
movies. He is now apparently a Real Estate agent in Beverley Hills. At this
point readers may guess what part they had in mind for me, which struck me as
being at odds with the naturally nice guy that I am, unused to prancing around
with theatrically enhanced trousers.
Given either the size of the Institute, or our uncertainty as to whether anybody
would turn up, we put the audience on the stage and the cast in the body of
the hall, separating one from the other with steel mesh. And we ran riot in
a disciplined way – having work-shopped the production for a couple of
months; it should never have worked, but it was actually brilliant.
What I learnt from being in the play was this: you have no idea what you seem
to be to other people. Even though I was playing a person of intrinsic ghastliness,
I was still affronted by the audience reacting to me as if I was just that –
couldn’t they see that I was a nice guy just acting? Mothers taking their
children to the other side of the street the next day was going too far, however.
I also learnt that even thought the script stipulates that you put your hand
up someone’s dress, it is always emotionally problematical if it is your
friend’s wife.
My acting ability was impugned rather succinctly by my daughter when she said
that just because you like doing something doesn’t mean you are any good
at it. But the theatre is so much fun, and there is nothing that equals the
adrenalin rush of going on stage knowing that, as an absolute bare minimum,
you have only to remember your lines and not fall over the props. The rest is
all up-side; low level bungy jumping every night. You might like to try it –
it can become addictive.