At Least Five Other Actors Who Dress Like Me

 

 I found this commercial or whatever it is while researching Lee Montague, who appears in a gangster-themed Dick Emery Christmas Special from the seventies that my Dad was in and which I might share later. Don't worry about watching the whole thing. The stills below give an idea. I'm unsure what mood, if any, the film-maker's going for. Or rather, since the music is pretty obviously elegaic, I'm unsure how aware the actors were they're participating in an elegy. Maybe I'm just unsure how I feel watching it... I miss the hilarity with which me and my sister would pore over old copies of "Spotlight - The Actors' Directory" as teenagers. Still, it's good to get some perspective. It's almost stupidly obvious to say how easy it is to lose that in lockdown, and so – specifically for any actors reading this – let's keep an eye on the future, and remember that the buildings will reopen one day, and that we will meet again... 

"Charles Bronson, he couldn't get a laugh." The great Michael Craig

 

 theatre, in some form or other, will of course continue, the film studios will reopen...

 

"The women could have been less. On the whole." The great Derrenn Nesbitt

 

and cameras will roll, make-up will be applied, and stories shared, and cushions plumped...

"Don't say to Mr. Chaplin, oh wouldn't it be a good idea if I did this, he said, 

you'll be fucking fired." The great Michael Medwin

 

 all this, again, and for ever, and ever and ever and ever...

 

"I drift into these very, very pleasant studios." The great Freddie Jones.

 

 until one day, if we're lucky...

 

 

"It's not over yet." The great Roy Dotrice 

 

this could be us.

Let's All Lose Our F***ing Minds At The Normansfield Theatre, Teddington!!!

 A seasonal tradition I haven't experienced in decades now is the Going to the Seeing of the Thing. One didn't Go to See the Thing because one would enjoy it, one went because it was only once a year. What exactly the Thing was now I can't remember – a nativity play maybe, or something you parents' friends from work put on – but I have the shadowiest memories of Time itself occasionally dying before my eyes as I sat bewildered in the unheated darkness with no hope of escape now, because Time was dead. I also remember outgrowing this nightmare pretty quickly, and learnt in my teens an adult's talent for appreciating something on principal regardless of the actual happening. It is perhaps in that spirit that this video is posted.

 

  And I genuinely enjoyed Lizzie Wiggons' piss material. And the pipes of John Rawnsley. There was always something in the Thing to enjoy. The Normansfield's proscenium is a beauty too, but it shares with my memories of the Thing  – as I notice I texted Max Hutchinson back when he first alerted me to the space while planning how to beat Covid by staging A Midsummer Night's Dream on cricket pitches – 'a very evocative "why the fuck did I come here" acoustic'. That's why I could only post this around the longest night of the year, because that's when this is needed. Few of us have been able to Go and See a Thing this Christmas, and I've a battered boater in the flat, an even more battered topper, and a bowler hat too small for my head, all doffed to the Paper Moon.

 

"You'll be back..." RICHARD THE SECOND RICHDUX

 Richard Pasco now models Ian Richardson's cape. I hear the two actors tossed a coin each night to see who would play Bolingbroke and who would play Richard. 

Imagine turning up to the wrong one.

 Here is the first act of Richard the Second THE SECOND... From the defeated republic of Julius Caesar, via the elected dictatorship of Titus Andronicus, to the now seemingly unchecked power of God's Anointed, it's interesting how the further back in history Shakespeare goes, the more recognisably democratic become the

systems he writes about. Take that, progress! This isn't Rome then. Kings are a proper thing now, second only to God, and this one has definitely had his uncle Gloucester murdered. Mowbray is definitely the one who did it, and the only hope of avenging that murder is the King's cousin Bolingbroke. Them's the stakes. And the prouder I play Richard, the humbler I can play Bolingbroke, even though the humble man is still going to have to kill the proud man. So maybe the play's about that. Of course by going full Gloriana - or, okay, full Ian Richardson - there is a risk if not a complete inevitability of turning Richard into a full-on, Disney-style queer-coded villain. But... 

 

 Well firstly, those guys are great. But secondly, it might still be a better starting point for understanding this play than what I had before, because if you simply play the King as a wag you make it too easy for the audience to side with him against his huffing and puffing subjects, and that lets him off the hook. There is a system in place where he's the Sun and his subjects have to function within that, which is not their fault. This isn't Rome, as I said. And it isn't Marlowe's Edward the Second. Richard isn't martyred for love. This is the play the Earl of Essex staged as a prelude to revolution. This is taboo. Here's Richard the Second again then, but more alien, with eggshells, stiller shoulders and less busy mouths. Let's see.

"Fred" and Flint

  Oo. I had one of these (a fanned cape, not an Ian Richardson)

.
 Before the Globe reopened and this could be tested, it was taught for some reason that open air theatres in Shakespeare's day required a broader and bellowier, more unrealistic performing style to compete I suppose with the visible bustle surrounding the actors, but this theory never considered the possibility it might actually be easier to connect with an audience you can see than one sat in the dark, no matter how hermetically sealed, or that broad daylight might actually require greater realism. Mark Rylance, the Globe's first actor manager in nearly four hundred years, proved this beautifully. He was not a bellower. He mumbled. He even stumbled. I last saw him at the Globe playing Richard the Second as a man who, like Alfred Ill in Dürrenmatt's The Visit, realises long before everyone around him that they're going to have to kill him (The Visit's very good), and he was superb, and there was a flub: As the King's world suddenly collapses around him he feels compelled to admit to his followers "I live with bread, like you" but when Rylance played the scene Richard, apparently in a state of shock, said instead "I live with Fred..." and I still remember that flub seventeen years later, a mistake made completely in character, a sign of craftsmanship. So when I found the speech on youtube yesterday I admit I was surprised to see, three minutes and twenty-eight seconds in, Rylance making exactly the same flub. "I live with Fred..." It's possible I saw him on the same night this was recorded. But it's not likely. What an artisan. Here's me bellowing, and Bolingbroke being a cock...