The Saga of the Saga

When I was a teenager, I went on an outdoors activity holiday with the church youth group. One of the activities we got to take part in was a raft building challenge. The lakeside youth supervisors put us in groups, gave us a big pile of raw materials and oars, and told us the winners would be the team who paddled their raft the round the buoy in the nearest bay in the quickest time.

"That looks awesome," one of my teammates told me as I constructed flotation hammocks out of empty water barrels and blue plastic twine. "That looks really solid, we should win no bother."

He was wrong. I couldn't really tie knots. I was just winding the rope round itself into impressive-looking gnarls. As the barrels popped free and floated off mid-way round the course, my teammate took me to task for their weakness. "But you told me they looked awesome," I said, aggrieved. "It's your fault you didn't check them."

The relevance of this to my recent acting job, Njal's Saga, is what I learned on that holiday, namely that it is pointless throwing blame around when your raft is already disintegrating.

The premiere would have been last Sunday. It got postponed. The last minute crisis meeting earlier this week which was set up to try and get the fractured cast back and talking about how to fix the show got repurposed, also at the last minute. Instead of discussing the next step, it was announced that the meeting would actually be a rehearsal of some of the original material we'd had to abandon weeks ago, and that anyone who didn't like it didn't need to show up.

Half the cast gave up at this point. I'd been trying to keep an open mind, but that was the last straw for me, and I gave up with them. Not gave up, technically, seeing as I'm released on full pay, but that's splitting hairs. It feels like I gave up, a bitter feeling, although I'm probably justified to have done so.

I don't really know how to start explaining how we got to that point, really. I got the job about seven months ago, after auditioning for it. A fairly elaborate audition, in Swedish, for which I sang, did stage combat and learned an Anglo-Saxon poem. I was very excited that I got the job, not least because I love the Icelandic Saga that the play was going to be based on. I also had got a job in a foreign language, and would have (finally) some kind of showcase to invite casting people to.

There was a two-day workshop earlier in the year. One of the actors who came to that fell mysteriously ill after the first day, after we'd worked on some pretty bizarre material. He never came back. Someone else got drafted in a couple of weeks before we were due to start, before anyone had seen a finished script. He asked for one and got one, and told me later he looked at it, had no idea how it could be performed, and said as much to the director.

"We'll improvise our way through it," he was told.

Rather than try and list all the subsequent amazement of the rehearsals, here are some highlights.

• Hearing the play described as a 'Rap Opera' based loosely on the Sagas, rather than the sword-and-axe renactment I'd sort of hoped for
• On being presented with the musical score, finding out that half the four-man cast couldn't read music and that one of us couldn't really keep time
• Being told on the first day to recreate the opening scene of The Magic Flute as a basis for later improvisations. Not any old Magic Flute, either, the Ingmar Bergman film
• Being asked to set fire to full boxes of matches on the plastic-coated floor of the stage as part of an improvisation
• Reading the script, along with the writer's introduction, where he explained he'd started by taking some of the most violent bits from the saga, stripped them of any characters or descriptive narrative, and then decided that was actually all he needed to do and stopped working
• After the first week, learning that the guy designing the costumes and set was going to be doing a directing course in Oslo instead, at a point where the set and costumes had yet to be announced
• After the second week, hearing that we were going to be wearing liederhosen and performing Njal's Saga on a set suggesting German submariners 
• Not seeing the director in rehearsal for more than about four hours during the first two weeks
• Realising that after those first two weeks, almost all of which had been spent working on the music, that we still couldn't sing the highly stylised and abstract score
• Never having more than about four hours sleep a night for the first four weeks, thanks to baby C back home
• Watching two of the actors actually waterboarding each other in lieu of working out blocking for a scene about violence, and then watching the director agree that this was useful work
• Being asked to attend a marketing meeting in which we were asked to produce marketing ideas, seeing as the production team didn't seem to have any
• Watching the daily changes to the rehearsal schedule, but never either sticking to the times or getting a breakdown of what we were expected to rehearse on a daily basis
• Spending three hours at home trying to learn a song which had neither notes nor text, but in which I was to raise and lower a spear (later replaced with a frying pan, later replaced by just my arm) in time to an irregular but horribly precise rhythm for five minutes, and realising I still couldn't do more than fifteen seconds of it accurately
• On the return of our costume and set guy, the announcement that the set would be a golden kitchen bench and our costumes would be just boxer shorts, because the play was now set in Valhalla
• The foodfight (which some of you might have seen on Facebook), and the three hours it took to clean congealed flour, eggs and milk off the floor afterwards with tools including coal shovels and fish slices. Because we're actors, dammit, not bricklayers janitors.
• Once the kitchen was installed, the four-week struggle to have any of the kitchen knives properly blunted, during which we worked with them anyway
• The answer 'we'll prepare food' being used by the director as a catch-all answer for every single query on blocking, textual analysis, underlying thematic concept or request for emergency work on any scene
• Hearing that despite being nearly naked, we'd be preparing food with the working stove on the set and then feeding it to the audience in the interval, even though they'd have watched us writhing about on the hob and slapping each other with the ingredients beforehand
• After four weeks, trying to do a runthrough of the play and managing about twenty-five minutes of hideous, unperformable, unwatchable garbage, most of which consisted of marking the beginnings and ends of scenes we hadn't yet adequately rehearsed, during which one of us cut a toe on broken glass that had been left on set
• The many, many tearful and miserable arguments about what could be done to redeem this mess
• The discoveries that pay was late, or not quite what was originally advertised, or already paid out to other cast members (all since resolved properly and surprisingly amicably, it must be said)
• The astounding introduction, with two weeks until the premiere, of a second and entirely new director
• Delaying the open dress rehearsal so that the design team could finish stapling the set together
• The exit of the new director, three hours before the premiere, on being told that the now-functional piece she'd managed to salvage wasn't going to be performed on the grounds that it the production team didn't feel it was appropriate for the theatre 
• Knowing that I loved the source material, but not a single recognisable scrap of it was going to be included in this play

It mostly sounds funny, reading it back. It wasn't at the time, I can assure you. Even for Fringe theatre, this was chaotic and broken in a way I've never experienced. And I've worked on some shitty gigs, let me tell you - the Hamlet with Two Hamlets, The Albuquerque Dust Storm Macbeth, the pilot episode of Man Versus Monster Truck. A four-hour George Bernard Shaw play that he never intended to be performed on stage, just read aloud to educate his Christmas guests, of whom I can only imagine there were none.

This was a new level of bedlam, the kind that leaves you dazed and doubting your own abilities to comprehend the world, as though you've just been hit by a tornado and haven't quite realised you're now four hundred miles away with a length of copper pipe transfixing your skull.

Actors are lovely people, on the whole - generous, cheerful and hardworking. They also generate drama, that's one of our functions. Put us in a calm and empty room and you'll eventually get the root of all drama, conflict. Putting four of us into an imminent catastrophe and hoping that we'd sort it all out on our own, well, that's like trying to pacify a psychotic tiger by slapping it with raw steak.

Strangely, for all the fury and horror the job brought, I now feel fairly calm and empty. There is no point in staying angry or trying to hold people to account. It would take too much energy, energy I now lack, and this isn't the right forum for it anyway. The raft collapsed, we all nearly drowned, some of us made it to various shores. Better to get on with enjoying life than dwelling on the disaster.

Today, I watched the actual premiere. It was oddly like attending my own funeral, seeing a show I'd worked on for six weeks open from the front row. It was also pretty good - strange, abstract and stark, and certainly not the same as the last time I'd seen it. Two of the original cast have stuck it out, in the end, and I have enormous respect for them. Also for the Icelandic composer, who had endured seeing his score mangled by incompetents for two months before coming back and taking over. Even a leaky raft benefits from a good helmsman, I think. See it if you're in Gothenburg and free for an evening, the cast and composer deserve your support.

As for me, I'd been questioning my staying power in terms of a career in acting even before this started. Funnily enough, though, I feel a new resolve. There's no point in stopping trying to be an actor that I can see, although I am certainly investigating other lines of income right now.

I am, however, utterly certain that my acting career cannot possibly sink any lower than this, and I shall eat not only my own hat but the entire hat section of every costume department the world over, before I ever admit to being proved wrong on this.

Excelsior!