Monday 29 November 2010

O frabjous day!...

‘Callooh! Callay!’ I chortle in my joy!

Skylight is done and my life is, for a short time at least, once again my own. I will very soon be back at the theatre as I’m an assistant stage-manager on the theatre’s upcoming Christmas production of Darker Shores, but for now at least I have a few days off.

I can forget the reams and reams of lines I’ve been holding in my head for the past forever – not as easy a task as you might imagine as they are still assaulting me in my near-sleep, near-waking moments and will do so for a week or so yet I should imagine – and I can sweep the unhappy last few months under the dusty rug of things best forgotten.

I am however, a glass-half-full sort of gal, so have thought long and hard on what I can take away from the experience that is useful, and my overall umbrella realisation is that I now know exactly what not to do when Jak and I direct Irma V next year. A bit of a negative positive to be sure, but a positive nonetheless.

Despite the unfortunate rehearsal process, the run itself was a great success, excluding one performance where I dried so faked a crying fit to cover it up, and another where my opposite number dried, couldn’t hear the prompt, and I rewrote David Hare for a while in order to help him back to the script – in fact, even those two performances with their minor disasters were still good. We had some terrific feedback from audience members, not the least of which was how we’d managed to learn all the lines in the first place, and on from that, how did I manage to cook whilst remembering lines? To both these questions my answer was, and still is – I have no freaking idea!

The added bonus to the play being over, finito, done, dusted and heartily kicked to the kerb, is that my face is no longer displayed giant-size on the poster boards outside the theatre. No-one needs their head that big – literally, metaphorically or photographically.

...and so, her sigh of relief could be heard far and wide, whirling amongst the trees and skyscrapers and issuing forth across oceans and streams, and her smile, which had for a time become a stranger, once again made its home on her face.

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