The welcome we receive at Northern Stage is amazing. I have been in email contact with them and Bartelt and I know there is a welcoming cup of tea for us, they have asked what time will we be arriving. One of our favourite arrival times is 2pm, so we go for that one. We are met at the door and are taken us into the building. I've never been to Northern Stage before: it's enormous and feels to me a bit like backstage at the Barbican or National Theatre. We go into a windowless room, the green room? There's Erica Whyman, who runs the theatre.
Erica. I met Erica back in 2003 just after I had graduated from drama school. The first show I was in after drama school was a criminally appalling version of Hecuba. The director had decided the Greeks were wrong and that all the violence should be seen on stage, to have plastic helmets and swords and that she should cast me as a dead boy. Dead, yes, boy....? I was quite a bit slimmer then, but I don't think there's ever been a point where my assets weren't almost the most noticeable thing about me, if I have not been giving everyone the benefit of one of my vaulting opinions that is. So, lying on the stage at the beginning of the play, under a blue (nylon) sheet, to signify my having drowned in the sea, I must have looked like some very rocky outcrop, teacherous waters... What on earth has been abandoned under that sheet? The audience must have wondered.
During the run of Hecuba I auditioned for Erica and, miraculously to me, she cast me. This time the show was Electra – we are in my Greek phase. Thus I found myself performing an utter abomination, an affront to theatre, of an evening, and sublimely rehearsing as a fury by day for Erica. Yes, a fury. I was un/dead again, but at least a fury can have hips. And long hair – no need for the nylon wig in Electra. Basically Erica spoilt me for other directors, but more than being a great director she is a truly delightful person, and these days she is running Northern Stage.
I'd told her about the show years before, when we bumped into one another in a cafe in London. She has been enthusiastic right the way down the line and her venue have put their money where their mouths are.
The room has lots of other folk in as well, and a big chocolate cake. Erica does a little introductory chat and then has to dash off to dress rehearse Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which is opening tomorrow in their main space. Bartelt and I stay with what must be nearly everyone else from Northern Stage, it certainly feels like it. It's my job to be mum and cut up and hand round cake, so I do this while answering questions from all sides about the show, the tour and my sister's murder. Bartelt also gets a word in edgeways, which is nice.
We have got very used to people focusing on me, because I'm the actor and because the sister who was murdered was my sister. Amongst theatre practitioners though, there are many questions for Bartelt, including why make this, how he has done it, what else he has done. These guys are so interested, it's quite something. Quite a few people from the venue are coming to the show tonight.
I'm shown my large and lovely dressing room and then we go to the space we are in: it is enormous with a great rig. They are going to make it cabaret-style, which makes sense of the place. Louise is the technician and she is on it. She and Bartelt create some interesting light stuff while I mimsy around like an actor. Little do I know that in a few weeks I'll have to travel to a venue and do the show all by myself; how I'll wish I'd been focusing on the focusing, not twerping around on twitter.
No comments:
Post a Comment