It’s a very weird thing, previewing a new show. Not as weird as The Twilight Zone or the Bermuda Triangle or the ghost I saw in the grounds of Dean
Close School, Cheltenham in 1978. But pretty damn weird nonetheless. It is
excruciating too. Take this morning, the morning of the third day of our run in Shoreditch Town Hall. I woke at 6, having gone to bed at 1, and immediately
switched on my computer, with whom I’ve been sharing a small room in a small flat
overlooking London Fields since 2010. I checked the news of course to see if
there were any updates on the fate of flight MH370. The search has now moved to
the Indian Ocean. Malaysian authorities are rejecting the US’s theory that the
plane went on flying for four hours after it lost contact with the radars, and
in a press conference the day before a relative of one of the missing threw a
bottle of water at a Malaysian Airlines official. I read an article on the BBC
website about some of the passengers. There was – or is (because, as a friend
of one of the missing said, ‘miracles do happen’) - a team of illustrious
Chinese calligraphers, one of them aged 79. There was a couple returning to
their two young kids after a short beach holiday. I recalled a Sunday Times
magazine feature from the 1970’s about the passengers on Turkish Airlines
flight 981, which had crashed in a forest outside Paris (a farmer found six
seats in a field with dead passengers strapped to them), killing all 346 people
on board. I must have been in my early teens when I read the article, but
nearly forty years later I can still remember that a male model had been
amongst the dead. After that I googled ‘The Eradication of Schizophrenia in
Western Lapland review’ to see if any conscientious reviewer had posted one
already (the previous night being press night - though why they're reviewing previews I'm not sure). There were none. Then I thought
I should really get some sleep. I wasn’t tired though so I sent a friend
request to Jake Orr, who we’d met the previous day after a photo
shoot for the show, and who’s just starting as our Assistant Producer. As I was talking
to him, or, more accurately, listening to my colleague David talking to him, I
carelessly poured peppermint tea all down my shirt. Jake, who had a metallic
adornment set at a rakish angle in one lobe, asked us how the photo shoot was
for us. ‘We have to be wary of gurning,’ David said, ‘as the more obvious
gurning shots will inevitably be the ones they publish.’ This is very true. I
spent most of the shoot being determinedly po-faced, especially during the Finnish folk dance, standing there with my weight on one leg,
attempting to protect the arthritic knee of the other one, and watching Woods
leap-frog over Talbot and Paolini. The trouble is, I might end up looking
over-solemn, a parody of deadpan (‘His features lend themselves to expressions
of gloom’; ‘he out-Busters Buster Keaton’; ‘he sings comic songs with a face
like a Lurgan spade,’ and so on). Well, we’ll have to see, won’t we, when the
reviews with their accompanying photos come out. If they come out. And if we can find
out if they’ve come out. Kate Bassett from The Times was there. Terrifying.
She reviewed our two man Earnest in 2005 and wrote ‘They’re just not great
actors…their only option is to play everything knowingly fifth-rate.’ Yes, very
possibly true, but then we were (she didn’t get it, which was of course our
fault) meant to be playing two knowingly fifth-rate actors who were putting on
a production of Wilde’s play. Kate Bassett sat, according to my colleague
David, in the front row, but, perhaps a little considerately, on the far right
side. That was in the first half, before the interval. We swap the audience
round at half time and I’ve no idea where she sat after that. The other very
weird thing about press nights (well, perhaps not that weird) is that once you know the critics are in you start
imagining them. I’ve no idea, for example, if the voluptuously committed Lyn Gardner from The Guardian was in,
but because I’d been on the receiving end of her complaints in the past (she kept on picking up her very large notepad, scribbling in it, putting it down, picking it up again, her response quite clear from the expression on her face, so no need to read the review, really, and anyway reviews are not meant for the artists, are they, they're intended as some sort of guide for the public), but yes, because of all this I imagined
she was in. She was in the front row, just three feet from my right elbow. She had her very large notepad with her and she absolutely hated
everything I did. Also sitting on the domestic side of the play, but on the
other side of the row Kate Bassett sat in, was Ian Shuttleworth, critic of the
Financial Times. Except it wasn’t, was it? It was Tassos Stevens, with a bottle
of beer. There was another man in the front row with a moustache and dyed black
hair and I was convinced he was someone from The Telegraph whose name presently
escapes me. There were also several bloggers. And Time Out, I think, was there.
I mean I felt they were there. I
could sort of smell them. It was, then, an audience made up of critics and Tassos
Stevens and Jake Orr. At one point someone in the audience started talking in a
loud voice. Not a whisper. David, playing my character’s therapist, stared at
them as though they were mentally ill and in need of swift diagnosis and, very probably,
anti-psychotic medication. I ignored them, convinced that although the voice
was deep and manly, they’d only turn out to be Lyn Gardner. Somehow we made it
to the end. We had changed the ending, and will probably change it again,
several times. It currently has a Finnish finish: we exit doing a hunched
dance, wait for the blackout, wait for, hopefully, applause, and then re-enter
for our bows. Or rather, actually, not for bows, having aired our loathing of
the latter the previous night. We’ve chosen to nod at the audience instead.
We’re not bowing and saying ‘we’re so grateful to be serving you, and being given the chance to humbly offer up this little piece for
your entertainment.’ We are nodding our heads (possibly bigger than all the
imaginary critics’) and saying ‘Yes, we’ve spent two years making a piece of
theatre and that was it. It’s meaningful, we think, we hope, so please go away
and think about it.’ And then we bugger off, go for a drink in a Shoreditch pub
that’s quiet (they don’t exist) and return to our homes, knowing we won’t get
good night sleeps…And then, and then, and then…
