Notes from the Stage Manager's Box (3 page)

By a combination of press gang techniques and a few pints down the pub we soon had a cast of players from the staff. Few if any had any acting experience and the only play I could think of was She Stoops to Conquer
in which I had acted at school
.
All it required was to use one or two scenes to fit a forty minute slot on stage.

I had seri
ous misgivings about our ability
to
fit in
any rehearsal time
within the
social
needs of the cast,
let alone a
direct a group of barely willing volunteers
who would be
un
able to remember lines and deliver them
without
ever having been near a stage in their lives.

My fears were soon dispelled. As so happens in the Bank three members of staff and
as it happened
who were also
members of
the
cast
,
were moved to oth
er branches within the
space of a
month.
I wrote to the One Act Play organiser to say that regretfully the Clerkenwell Strollers would have to withdraw owing to an unusual round of staff moves. My apology was graciously received and accepted by one Trevor Gash.

A couple of months later I received notice that I too was on my bike a
gain – to Lombard Street Office which was
in the middle of the City and in the minds of many of the general public, Head Office. Head Office was actually in Lothbury but
Lombard Street
was generally accepted as being the pulse of the banking industry.

Almost a year later in 1979 the next Festival of One Act Plays was announced. I was suitably uninterested but unaware of the small world I had joined. Lombard Street Office is now no more but it was a very imposing building with its own parking area and undergroun
d car park, marbled frontage with
huge plate glass windows
. The
actual Office was on two floors; the ground floor was for general banking and the first floor the management suite.
The upper floors housed Regio
nal Offices and at the very top
on the ei
ghth floor was the staff dining room
. This in itself was a
n
unusual experience for someone
like myself
used to plastic coffee cups and cheese rolls eaten
when time allowed at my
desk.

The manager of
a
City Office is of a grade as high as a Regional Manager and the Deputy and Assistant Managers superior to an ordinary Area Manager. Each of them had their own clerk and team working for them and one
senior
manager’s
clerk
was Trevor Gash.

Not having met him before I was not prepared when he came downstairs to the Foreign Section where I was working. It was a simple one way conversation along the
lines that as I had unfortunately
had to pull
the Clerkenwell Strollers from out of the previous One Act Play Festival I was an ideal person to join the cast of the
as yet unnamed
Lombard Street Office group.

He left me with a copy of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound; said that the part of Birdboot was made for me, wished me a good holiday and rehearsals would begin in earnest on my return.

I had never heard of the play. I was off to
Majorca
for a week’s sun, sand, sea and beer and took the script along with me for a bit of light reading. No one told me that the part of Birdboot was huge; on stage the whole time, even if dead for a short time close to th
e finale.

It was a lot of lines to learn. The
first
thing I
learned about myself w
as that I had a great
capacity
for
remembering
lines.
I can still speak in
public with the simplest
of notes proving I have read the full written version enough times to stick in my memory.

I returned from holiday and joined the rest of the cast for my first rehearsal in the staff dining room on the eighth floor. From here we could move tables and chairs around to give us the same amount of space we would have on the actual stage and there was plenty more seating to duplicate the furniture we would need as well.

My only concern was that I didn’t know anyone. I knew some of them by name but there is not much interaction between departments in City Offices. I knew Trevor Gash who was directing, and was introduced to Paul Greaves who was playing Moon, Diane Gutteridge who was Felicity Cunningham and Barry Maidment who was Inspector Hound. I have tried but cannot remember any of the other names.

The Manager of Lombard Street Office was as I have mentioned a very important man and his secretary was cast as Lady Cynthia Muldoon. I think her name was Liz and she was as graceful and charming and attractive as anyone would want a Lady Cynthia Muldoon to be. There is most probably no other way that I would ever get around to having a
passionate kiss with the Manager’s secretary unless she was Lady Muldoon and I was the slightly sleazy Birdboot.

I needn’t have worried much for they were good company and in the future if anyone in the Manager’s suite wanted to
know
about the current exchange rate problems, Letters of Credit or Forward Exchange Markets then all they said to each other was ‘ring Birdboot’.

The Real Inspector Hound is a spoof on every Agatha Christie country house murder mystery you have ever had the misfortune to have seen on stage, TV or film. All the ingredients are there; the secluded family home, fog on the moors, an escaped criminal, missing family members presumed dead, cads who play tennis and bright young things who
play
bridge.

All the characters are stock prototypes from the
volumes of country house murder mysteries that bulge from the shelves of our public libraries.
The action
takes place in
the sitting room of the country manor of
Lady Cynthia Muld
oon
. When the play opens there is a dead body on stage which the audience can see but remains undiscovere
d by
the cast for almost
the duration of the play.

.
Birdboot and Moon are two theatre critics who sit on the side of the stage, obsessed with their own thoughts and occasionally commenting on the action. Then the phone on stage rings. No one answers. Moon tries to dissuade him but Birdboot gets up and answers it and from then on both the critics become part of the action. And both end up dead on stage.

This first foray into serious acting taught me one basic rule – pay attention to detail. At your peril!

The play went very well. The cast managed to come up with plenty of props to decorate the stage of the
Golden
Lane
Theatre
(for more of this building see later)
in the fashion of a late 1950’s country house. We got our lines
right, our cues on cue and dropped to the floor dead
when we were supposed to. You only get one chance at a One Act Play Festival. If you get it wrong, you don’t get a chance the next night to put it right.

We came third. We were all amazed.

Most of the props were counted off as we got close to our
performance slot. No one at our level in the world of
Ban
king
likes to be thought of as slightly ignorant. So when Trevor asked if anyone had any anti-macassars we all shook our heads with an apologetic air. No one knew what an anti-macassar was so it was unlikely we
would have
one in our possession.

Trevor put these on his list of things to do and when he wasn’t listening we would ask each other what an anti-macassar was. Almost
at
the last rehearsal before the actual performance someone with I expect a pint or two inside him or her, asked Trevor what exactly was an anti-macassar because they were getting fed up with being asked to supply one.

We all looked at him and he explained that these were pieces of linen placed on the arms and headrests of armchairs and settees to protect the fabric form being ruined by male hair cream.

The penny finally dropped. Macassar oil was very popular in late Victorian and Edwardian England as a hair treatment. It was very, very oily and used to flatten and style gentleman’s hair. It was a forerunner of Brylcreem and modern gels but also stained very easily so house proud housewives placed a cloth on their prized furniture. No self respecting household would be without a set of anti-macassars in the
ir
living room
s
until well into the late 1950’s. British Rail always had anti-macassars in their first class carriages.

I explained that my mother had a drawer full of them. Everyone
was
happy and they did look good on the distressed living room furniture that was part of the standard props used throughout the Festival.

This shows that a polite enquiry can save weeks of soul searching and embarrassment. A small detail but worth noting but worth noting more is the need to get your personal props right before the opening night. Otherwise disaster will strike and haunt you for the rest of your days.

The
play opens with Moon and Birdboot exchanging pleasantries. Birdboot offers Moon a chocolate from a box of Black Magic. Paul Greaves and myself had rehearsed this scene so many times but never with an actual box of Black Magic. We just imagined one being there. We made sure we had one on the night of the performance.

In hindsight it would have been prudent to empty the box and leave just a couple of soft mints but we wer
e novices at
this sort of thing. I picked out a chocolate at random and to my horror it was
the hardest, chewiest and stickiest
lump of montelimar I have ever tried to eat.

My teeth stuck together. I couldn’t utter an intelligible word. I just grunted.

At this stage Moon is complaining about being the
stand-in for Higgs, the newspaper’s senior
theatre
critic. He begins the play by asking ‘Where’s Higgs?’ Higgs is actually the dead body lying in full view of the audience but unseen by the guests swirling around the living room of Muldoon Manor.

Paul just kept repeating a couple of paragraphs. It made little sense but it gave me a chance to gulp down the chocolate and pick up the
script again. There were no obvious reactions from the audience.

This is perhaps one of the basic lessons you can learn in theatre. The audience only see
s
what you want them to see. Unless they have the script in front of them they believe that what they are seeing is what the playwright wrote. That is the magic of theatre.

The lesson I learned was that you make sure you look after your own personal props and if they can move, roll, disappear or fly away
on their own personal whim,
test them before the opening night to make sure they will do what they were intended to do.

The other thing I learned was that I can’t act. I can learn my lines without dropping a word. I know where I have to be and who I have to be with. I can deliver a line but I can’t be someone else. I am always myself, not another person. I am unable to allow another personality to swamp my own. I enjoyed my time on stage. It was fun but I knew acting wasn’t for me and it wo
uld be unfair to the rest of a talented
cast to try and act when I knew I would only let them down.

This was a timely decision because Trevor Gash had another path for me to explore.

The 1980 National Westminster Theatre Club’s production of Call Me Madam taught me one very important lesson. The ne
ed for discipline. This is
the show in which
I learned that and carried it with me for the rest of my theatrical career
.
All go
od musical theatre ends with an
all singing, all dancing, big number reprise grand finale and this chapter is no exception.
But first …