Temporary Shelter - the End

You will know that all theatres have ghosts. It is something to do with bringing characters to life. An energy goes out into the ether; it clings to the walls and the set, so that even long after the final curtain comes down the characters tend to sit around on stage chatting between themselves. In this case Trist (the ex-actor) Larry (the ex-salesman), Marje (his wife) Jean-Louis (the French poet) and Annette (his Polish muse). When I went down to the theatre last Sunday morning they were all talking avidly - their last breakfast together. This is what I heard.

Trist By the time Larry and Marje emerged blearily from their tents. I'd already been up for a couple of hours, helping with the clearing up from the 'Grand Bal des Roses.' Claus, the baker and badminton freak, was up, too, to bake the bread. Larry, however, seemed different. He went off to buy his baguette without being prompted and nor did he seem to care anymore what JL and Annette were getting up to in their tent.

Marje Nescafé, dear?

Larry Good show, Marje! Last night. Got it right for once.

Marje Good audiences - we were full weren't we? Everynight I'd say.

Larry Almost every night, dear. Unheard of I’d say. My suit, you see, girl. They liked my suit.

Marje I wonder why they did come? I mean, it's not as though we got it all right did we?

Larry They still laughed though Marje. And Trist told me that people came up to him afterwards to say how good they thought it had been.

Marje Do you think it was the play then, dear?

JL and Annette emerge from their tent

Anne Bonjour, Marje! Most excellent breakfasting to you! This after the show day, I mean.

Marje Come and join us, Annette dear! We've got to celebrate.

Jean Did Marje sleep OK, Larry?

Larry As cool as the pale wet leaves of lily of the valley she lay beside me in the dawn.....

Jean Well remembered, Larry. I see you are a changed man. A poet.

Anne (with Polish feeling)It is his inside heart.

Marje Let me pour us some Nescafé.

Jean No, have some of ours. You should learn to drink French coffee, Larry!

Marje So, were they pleased? Do you think?

Larry Who, Marje?

Marje Well the Director, you know, the crew?

Larry Sold a lot of tickets, Marje. Made a lot of money no doubt. So I’d say they were very pleased.

Jean You can’t judge a show by the money it makes, Larry. It’s an artistic endeavour.

Larry Good selling job though. Couldn’t have done better myself.

Marje Who’d have thought so many people wanting to see us? And in an eighties play.

Anne If they are ever doing it again I would be watching it myself, I am telling you.

Larry No accounting for taste, Marje. Mind you it was an eighties sort of audience. Took them back no doubt to their own camping days.

Marje We went wrong occasionally, though didn’t we? Got several pages in the wrong order. Do you think they noticed?

Larry Audiences never notice, Marje.

Marje Lucky for the Director then.

Anne Especially with the very experienced actors.

Trist The Director told me afterwards that Annette had never acted in a production before, though you would never have known it. And as for experience, the lighting engineer was a beginner as were the sound engineer and the stage manager. Moreover, one of the actors only became available three days before the play opened and the director had to play one of the parts; while the position of the tent meant that an actor had to open and close the curtain. They also had only in seven weeks to put the show on.

Marje Oh the poor director!

Larry Salesman's pressures, Marje. Now you know why I smoke.

Anne Sounds worse than Warsaw on a Friday. Why then are they doing it?


Jean Louis They are doing it for love. To renew themselves. To reach new understandings. To begin again.

Larry And do you know Marje, I’m beginning to understand what he means. When we return now to Bressingham St Mary........

Marje Your coffee will be cold, dear.


An stage adaptation of Temporary Shelter, an award winning radio play from 1984, by Rose Tremain, was performed by Cowbridge Amateur Dramatic Society last week. Photo shows Lloyd Lee as Larry

STRUTTING AND FRETTING

This is going to be a blog about the trials and tribulations of the theatre in general and our little theatre in particular. I shan't be in the least offended if you turn away now, for I ask myself constantly, "why am I doing this?" - by which I don't mean writing a weekly blog, though I suppose the same question could be just as usefully put in relation to Corner-Cupboard as to the Market Theatre. 'Why, O why?'

When I am acting, forcing myself to learn the lines and then forcing myself again at the end of a hard and long day to remember them on stage while simultaneously trying to remember what the director wants me to do, I say to myself - 'acting is the hardest job in the world.'

My brain positively throbs with this imposed activity. If someone were to cut out a slice it would glow red and yellow with all the neurones firing off at the same time, as I struggle through those lines. My heart goes thump, thump, thump, like a rabbit startled at the approach of a farmer. I strut and fret (oh how Shakespeare put it well).

Of course it gets easier. At some point you know the lines and the movements and how to say what you have to do in a way that holds the audience's attention and doesn't send them to sleep. Or so you hope. It can even be enjoyable then as you slip comfortably into the skin of a villain, a monarch, a witty raconteur, a lover or whatever is called for.

But through those long weeks of rehearsal I feel like Winnie the Pooh who, if you remember, was dragged backwards down the stairs by one leg each morning and thereby hit his head on each successive step - thump, thump, thump. 'There must be a better way,' he said to himself 'if only the thumping would stop long enough for me to think of it.'

And of course there is. And it is to be a director. You miss out on the congratulations at the end of the show, on the adulation - no-one notices the director until you get to the Hall or Spielberg level - you can sink quietly into anonymity. But this is a small price to pay for power without responsibility. The director never has to face dying on stage.

Rather than strutting and fretting yourself you let others strut and fret while you sit in the stalls with your feet up, making occasional notes and encouraging noises. Easy and relaxing. That, anyway, is how it seems to the poor fretting actor.

I last directed a proper play about seven years ago. And just as you forget your lines after a performance so you forget just what a horror directing really is. It is like trying to organise a battle and finding half your troops have better things to do.

So you rush around in desperate Red Hen mode running yourself ragged to find people to cast and do all the other jobs - lights, sound, stage management, props, prompt, costumes, design, front of house, bar. There are tickets to sell and publicity to organise and the theatre to clean and theatre suppers to arrange and all this away and beyond the direction of the actors and the choreography of the play.

Of course lots of people are involved in a production but the director is very much in the position of Owain Glyndwr who boasts in one of the Henry IVths that he can summon spirits from the 'vasty' deep. 'Of course you can', says Hotspur - 'and so can any man - but when you call them do they come?'

And that is the problem - as a director you have all the levers of power in your hand but frequently the levers are not connected to anything. People are on holiday, or won't respond to emails, or can't be fitted on the stage, or things just collapse, or actors don't know their lines, or change their minds or simply give you nightmares.

Then there is the problem of ideas. When people have ideas they assume they are good ideas by virtue of the fact that they have had them at all. It is the supreme example of 'all my geese are swans.' But, quite apart from the fact that it is not ideas that are in short supply but people to do the routine and boring jobs, most ideas that people present you with are not very good. The ratio of good ideas to bad ideas is about 1 to 20 in my opinion. Nevertheless you have to allow people to have ideas.

I don't exclude myself from the above criticism. I have more bad ideas than anyone. But in most cases conventional and boring wisdom will get you further and faster than some clever 'idea.'

So I worry and fret late into the night, wondering whether we shall sell any tickets at all. We have sold six so far out of a possible 280. Whatever possessed me to want to direct again, I say to myself, and I long for the responsibility free domain of the actor. The wheel will turn full-circle again.

Ah well it was ever thus. If you have been, thanks for reading.

Should you be wondering the play is 'Temporary Shelter,' an intelligent and imaginative comedy by the novelist Rose Tremain. Originally written as a radio play (in which format it won the Giles Cooper prize for best radio play of 1984) We have adapted it for the stage and shall be presenting it between 13 and 16 July at the Market Theatre, Cowbridge. Tickets £6. Come if you can - an evening of sparkling comedy awaits you.

A PREGNANCY OF POSSIBILITIES

Ever since meeting Rose Tremain by accident in the hospitality tent at the Hay Literary Festival and finding myself persistently engaged in a conversation that I had not sought to initiate, I have become an avid fan of her novels. I had at the time read 'Sacred Country' but because the publishers had not graced the cover with her picture I had no idea what she looked like and the person therefore who talked to me beneath the billowing folds of white taffeta that June day in the Welsh Marches did not let on that she was an author, or even that she came from Norfolk.

She certainly didn't look like an author - whatever authors look like - but then I suppose I don't look like whatever it is that I am either, come to that, and it isn't everyday that one sits sipping Cava waiting for a Minister who doesn't arrive. In fact the whole experience became so surreal that it might almost have come from one of her novels, which, I suspect, is maybe what occurred to her as well. Life imitating art.

I've just finished both 'Restoration'- which I think her finest book - and a radio play by her called 'Temporary Shelter,' an acted version of which we may well stage at our thespian AGM in a couple of weeks. I won't try to describe what 'Restoration' is about; for one thing I can't say I'm really sure. The novel is so inventive that when the main character - originally a fop by the name of Merivel - slips away at the end of the book you aren't quite sure whether he is dreaming (and if so whether he is awake or asleep); or in a delirium or whether in fact he is quite well and about to step forward into the pages of another book - each ending being a new beginning.

We leave him anyway with a place to visit and a sense of purpose and a young daughter called Margaret after the main character's mother. My mother too come to think of it, though neither of my daughters have inherited the name. And a horse called Danseuse, who pines.

In 'Temporary Shelter' the action takes place more than three hundred years later and on a campsite but the people haven't changed much. The main characters in both novel and play are ones who have been humbled by circumstance. In the first case the cause the humbling is by the King; in the play it occurs thanks to EC Farming regulations. But both are finding redemption in a new life, trying to make themselves useful and to recover their dignities.

In 'Temporary Shelter'- the play - the main character is called Larry and his wife is Marje. But a different, or reworked, or reformed Larry appears in another of Rose's novels written about the same time and called 'The Swimming Pool Season' which I would regard as perhaps her second finest book after 'Restoration' - but then it's a hard choice for all are most excellent and way better than most. All fizz with the same pyrotechnics of the imagination.

The Larry in the 'The Swimming Pool Season' is more philosophical, cultured, softer; he has fewer hard edges, he has less to learn. He, too, has been humbled, by business failure this time in the eponymous swimming pool trade. His wife is called Miriam and she paints, which is something, one feels that the other Larry's Marje would never do - or at least not while Larry was around to demand coffee or wine or soup. Marje would look at the stars, perhaps and like Merivel in 'Restoration' feel a subdued hankering to paint colour. Unlike Merivel, however, any resulting efforts would be simple and elusive.

The one Larry drives a Granada; the Larry in the play, salesman and ex-pig farmer Larry, drives a Cortina. There's a nice ranking of the characters for you. In neither case, one suspects were their wives consulted. Had Merivel had a car I suspect it would have been an Aston Martin. At least he would have saved money on oats. But then Merivel had no wife: or not one that would have been entirely comfortable with Miriam and Marje. She wasn't even comfortable with Merivel come to that.

And now Younger Daughter has delivered to me 'Trespass' - her (that is Rose's) latest novel with barbed wire across the cover. I heard some discussion about the book the other day. Rose herself may have been speaking. I am inclined to think she was. I believe the story is to do with some land dispute or heritage in a family; the ferocious laws of French inheritance. I will let you know. Between the hard covers lies a pregnancy of possibilities