"I'm not being funny, but, right, is this a placeholder for an actual actor? The saxons sound like they're at a tea party. How do I turn them off?" asked Aeronwen (hopefully not his real name, but you never know on forums).
This clearly serves me right. Fishing for compliments should only ever net you the eels of unpalatable truth.
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Just after the show opened, the four of us playing the Swallows reconvened to examine how we were managing to steer the boat round the stage. It operates on a Flintstone Engine and handles like a wonky shopping trolley. All of us have bruised our shins, knees and coccyges whilst sailing her.
After spending half an hour sliding round the stage, it turns out that the main problems are
a) Susan and
b) Me (Roger)
If the two of us stop trying to help, the Swallow can turn more freely, stay on course for longer and crush fewer of the appendages of those pushing her.
This is good news, obviously, I can take it a bit easier on stage. More time looking excited and enjoying sailing around, less time having to get out and shunt (which was hardly helping the illusion of gliding round the lake, in all honesty).
It reminded me of one of my less proud moments in the other kind of theatre I've had in my life.
"Can I do anything?" I asked a surgical consultant of gastroenterology during a routine procedure once. I was wondering if I could get a bit of practical experience like helping clear stray blood out of the surgeon's way or pulling on a retractor. That's the kind of low-end dog work lucky house officers might get to do by way of introduction to surgery.
"Yes. Fuck off out of my way and go and finish the discharge summaries for my clinic yesterday," he said. This is the kind of low-end dog work consultants consider to contain adequate training opportunities for house officers, one of many reasons why I'm now an actor rather than a top gastroenterology surgeon. I'm still getting in the way, though.
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We have two preview nights for the show. After the second, we also have a party. As I'm standing in the theatre bar, waiting in line for the excellent free curry, fresh from a bout of cheery compliments from the theatre's artistic director glowing with vicarious triumph, I realise the tannoy is playing 'There's No Business Like Show Business'. This is a happy and warm moment.
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The reviews are up in the Green Room, and I overhear enough snippets from the others to know they're basically kindly. The snippets make me unbearably curious. After two days of stuffing my fingers in my ears and humming loudly, I cave in, grab the sheaf of reviews and dig in.
'James Hogg has a beard and big hairy legs,' critics agree.
Even though the point of the reviews mentioning my beard-and-legs style of acting is to point out that (remarkably) they didn't find it made me unpalatable as a seven-year-old boy, my feeble ego can't quite accept this as praise. So rather than being glad it's not 'dear god why doesn't he just fuck off and do some paperwork in a back room' as I once became accustomed to, neither is it the 'he's a towering genius of the modern stage' I'm inevitably hoping for.
Goddamn eels.
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My knees hurt all the time. There is still no hot water at my digs. I tried to watch a film that contained a minute-long scene about a dad feeding ice cream to his son for the first time, and got so tearful I had to stop watching it. There is indeed no business like show business. Perhaps we should all be glad.
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Great play, kids and adults alike enjoyed your enthusiasm for the role - one criticism is that you nearly gave me heart failure every time you steered that boat millimeters near to the edge of the stage, how you didn't end up landing in the font row I'll never know. Congratulations to all the cast of Swallows and Amazon's.
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