Way out West (incorporating Way up North)

An everyday story of tin mining folk

Following encouragement from the Nottingham correspondent, I thought I might present the true and awful history of an early show, it is experiences like this one that have made me the scarred and cynical travesty of a human being that I am now. Worse even than 'Ghetto' (see below), this was a truly life-changing experience.

I can't remember how I came to be asked to design the show, it would be a contact through another show or some such. Whatever the reason, I got a phone call from a complete stranger asking if I'd be interested in working on a new project, to be produced through a mixed rehearsal process of improvisation and poetry devised through the rehearsal process. These days, if you were to make this offer to me I would be inclined to treat it like an unsolicited offer to buy double-glazing, but perhaps with less sympathy.

Anyway, in my naivety, I expressed an interest, and after a meeting with the very sincere director, and the brooding, sullen and very, very sincere poet, I still said yes.

The piece was partly based on a poem called 'Blood on St Johns Eve' and partly on the biography of a bolivian political activist called Domitilla Barios de Chungara (you can possibly tell how this is seared into my brain twenty years on!), and dealt with the political and sexual oppression in that country in the preceding decades. So far, so bad, but things were about to take a downward spiral, it turned out that the director and the poet (did I mention that they were both very sincere?) were both heavy duty Christians and they cast as performers an existing theatre company; a christian TIE (Theatre in Education) company in fact. The four girls (I use the term advisedly), were just out of college, and being of a like persuasion, were keen to spread the word of the lord to anybody who was prepared to listen. The first job offered to recent acting graduates is often TIE, it offers few rewards and fewer pleasures, but in those days it was a fast track to an equity card, a situation mercilessly exploited by the cynical fascists who run TIE companies.

As I was keen, and naive, I did go to rehearsals, and whilst the whole procedure was a bit mysterious, there was evidence of progress. This was a touring show, I wasn't going to tour with it, so I had only to produce a design for the first venue and the production week, and my duties thereafter were simply to produce a lighting plan for each venue. The venue for the production week was a campus theatre in Bedford, and not very well equipped, either with sentient beings or with lights. Somehow I produced a design, and we advanced into the production week.

Generally I find the production week the most exciting part of a show, it is when your abstract ideas are translated into something more concrete, and you get a chance to see the images that have been floating around in your mind in a three dimensional space.

Up to this point I have avoided mentioning the set designer, he was very nice (but not especially sincere), in fact he lived in his own weird floaty world of pretty shiny things and swagged fabric. It was hard to have a conversation with him because his attention would wander off after a very short time. Soon enough I realised that I was pretty much on my own as far as my design was concerned.

The first version of the set consisted of a sort of tepee made out of bamboo and white linen, with a trail of artificial red roses like a trickle of blood running down it. This was set at the back of a circular stage, delineated by stones, and filled with a four inch thick layer of peat. As I said earlier, the subject of the play was political, sexual and religious oppression, and although stylised, the violence depicted was by implication graphic and brutal. The scene in which the heroine aborts her 8 month old foetus after being beaten with rifle butts for example, involved a lot of stylised movements and red balloons filled with red-dyed water being burst over the unfortunate performer (this was in february). The director had decided that the unfortunate foetus should be represented by a raw chicken, and I in my capacity as the only person with both feet attached to the ground was despatched to purchase one.

As a frugal north-briton I went for the cheapest option, which was a frozen chicken from Sainsbury, this, unfortunately, was still frozen when, in the lighting session, we came to its big moment. Also, it was up at the back of the hall in the lighting box with me, rather than on the props table, so, when the call went out for the chicken I rather foolishly lobbed it from the back of the hall down onto the stage; the sight of a still wrapped, semi-hard chicken flying through the air and landing with a soggy squelch in the even soggier peat, set the tone for the rest of that rehearsal session. Even worse, the revelation of the aborted feotus was laden with significance, and had many significant cues associated with its appearance, unfortunately each one of these cues reduced me to hysterical laughter for several minutes as the chicken was manipulated by the hapless performers. How we got to the end, if in fact we ever did, remains a mystery to me.

By the opening night the peat was resembling a marsh, the performers were slipping and falling constantly, and even in february, with the encouragement of the stage lights perhaps, things were starting to grow.
It had become like 'Come Mudwrestling' except that the participants were not busty beauties, but rather skinny and bewildered young women. Each time they appeared on stage you could see the question; 'what am I doing here?' telegraphed across their faces.

The chicken was cut after the opening night, and replaced with a bunch of grapes. The show toured for seven months (SEVEN MONTHS!) including a three week stint at the Edinburgh Festival, where we performed in a church with a carpetted floor and our peat circle was banned. After the show was over, the girls unanimously and simutaneously gave up the stage, and married their respective very nice and sincere boyfriends, getting down to the serious business of making babies at the earliest possible opportunity. As far as I am aware, none of them has ever appeared on a stage again. I was approached by the director with a view to working on another show, but for some reason I was doing my hair that year. More theatrical horror stories to come...

posted by Lampy @ 2/08/2006 02:43:00 pm