DRAMA IN DRAMATICS

Happen there have been rumblings down at our little Theatre Club this week. Drama in the dramatics if you will. Our leading man who has come to us (don’t ask how) via Los Angeles and Las Vegas has departed, suddenly, like a prima donna in a huff, half way through the production, complaining that the director had dictatorial tendencies. Ouch!

Poor dear! The director in question, (not me) I hasten to add, has never so much as had a dictatorial tendency in his life and the rest of the cast are a fine and happy bunch. I suspect that the leading man, thinking himself indispensable, is sitting by the telephone even now, waiting for it to ring. Well, he better lay in provisions for he will be waiting a long time. In truth everyone is glad to see the back of him.

I know all this as they asked me to read in the part while casting around for a suitable person of the male gender to take over the role. Putting on my deepest voice, therefore, complete with cod Swiss accent, I became Captain Bluntschli, Bernard Shaw’s anti-hero in ‘Arms and the Man.’ If you don’t know the play you will remember Bluntschli as the ‘Chocolate Cream Soldier’ - the man who sensibly keeps a bar of Dairy Milk in his cartridge pouch on the basis that chocolate is of considerably more use to mankind than bullets. A man after my own heart, clearly.

Written against a background of the Balkan wars of a century ago (which differed only in their armaments from the Balkan Wars of our generation) Shaw’s play is a satire on fighting, war and ‘higher love.’ It is still an excellent, timeless piece, full of humour and lightness. Bluntschli loses his war, but of course wins Raina from the dashing, but otherwise stupid, cavalry hero. Meanwhile, Raina is talked out of her noble attitudes by someone who for once doesn’t patronise her with romantic nonsense.

Anyway, they have found someone so I am no longer required and can revert to my duties for this play of being in charge of publicity (a thankless task) interspersed with occasional tea-making. I am being ‘rested,’ or so current fashionable theory has it, so that I may direct the summer production, which I think will be ‘Lettice and Lovage,’ a brilliant play by Peter Shaffer (author of Amadeus) and allegedly produced as a showpiece for the copious talents of Maggie Smith.

I say ‘think will be’ because although the director has the choice of play in practice it does depend on who is available and when and if I can’t find the right people I may have to revise my aspirations.

‘Lettice and Lovage’ is about a tour guide who gets bored with her job and sets about ‘improving’ the history she is given. This, of course, was standard fare for Shakespeare and just about every writer since, but poor Lettice finds herself unceremoniously sacked for this lese-majesté, though not without something of a fight.

The play appeals to me because ‘improving’ history was a fault to which my own father fell particularly prone. The merest possibility of an occurrence became quickly in his eyes proven fact. If good Queen Bess was known to have rested somewhere in the vicinity, then it was in our house that she and her entourage had stayed and been entertained. And if the tale got a second outing, it would no doubt include an offer to show you the room in which she signed Raleigh’s death warrant as well.

Never mind that the records showed that the house wasn’t built at the time. These he would dismiss by saying that ‘of course’ there must have been an earlier house on the site, pulled down no doubt after a disastrous fire started by adherents of the Pilgrimage of Grace of which the locality, he had just learned, had been a hotbed. And so it would go on.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Peter Shaffer had actually met my father and gleaned some of this absurdly extravagant tendency to historical romancing from him. Indeed were he still alive, my father would have been quite capable of claiming that he had, with just a sufficient degree of veracity and attention to detail to make you wonder whether this really was truth or yet another fiction.

In fact he had a history of claiming acquaintanceship with playwrights, insisting that as a child he had sat on Bernard Shaw’s knee and played with his beard. Quite what brought my father and Mr Shaw together sometime in the 1920s (my father was born in 1918 and after the 1920’s he would surely have been too old for knee-sitting) I have absolutely no idea.

As for me, I have never been able to get away with romancing. My lip trembles and there is a twinkle in my eye. All the same I am looking forward to directing ‘Lettice and Lovage’ and interpreting those characters who will invent history before us.