Not impressed by the quality of the tickets we had been sent by ATG - the outfit which owns a good chunk of theatrical London, not to mention elsewhere. Which I now know to be the property of one Sir Harold Panter, a stage manager made good, just a few months older than myself. Which is all fine and dandy, but they do not seem to be able to afford to keep the ink topped up in their ticket printer. The phrase about watching pennies and pounds minding themselves comes to mind.
Pretty much a full house, at least downstairs where we were. Nice to be in a proper West End theatre again; the likes of the Barbican and the National work well enough but they don't smell of greasepaint in quite the same way. Some of the audience were of working age and most of them clapped enthusiastically at the end. Even the odd bravo. And the front bar even ran to a real bell to be rung at the end of the interval, although we did not stay to see it rung.
Excellent stage, with rotation. Mainly set in the principal dressing room of a provincial theatre during the second world war. What looked like a Beryl cup in Woods Ware (hospitals and railways used to own lots of the stuff and we still own a fair bit. See reference 2). What looked very like a sideboard we once had in my childhood family home. Set around the occasion of a performance of 'King Lear' put on by a touring repertory company with a matinée idol well past his prime. Terminally past his prime as it turned out. Not sure about the wisdom of all the smoking around all the woodwork; perhaps the wood had been treated with fire retardant.
Lots of entertaining glimpses and vignettes of life in repertory. Which struck me as a rather squalid sort of life, good training for aspirant actors (and stage managers) though it may have been. Living in digs - or diggings as they were known to Agatha Christie. Anti-social hours. Haggling about contracts. Goings on, backbiting and intrigues within the company. Incessant travelling. Low grade audiences. Also the business of how easy it would be, in repertory, to flip into the wrong play. See reference 3 for a musical parallel.
I was struck by the parallel between the matinée idol and his faithful dresser and the aristocrat with his faithful valet, a parallel brought on by the idol on this particular occasion playing a king - an idol who, as it happened, was keen on getting gongs. Hence his moniker of 'sir'. One angle on which being that to be a king is to play a role, a role for which one needs good support from one's attendants. So kings aspire to be actors and actors aspire to be kings; each role feeds off the other. A little later: I now associate to a science fiction story that I once read, a story in which the aristocrats were so bored with their official duties that they hired actors to carry them out for them. So clearly, by no means the first on this particular scene.
The actor playing the dresser was pretty good, apart from his tendency to shout. A tendency which I am advised results from not having been trained to project one's voice properly. The actor playing the actor was great fun - very convincing.
In the round, pretty good. Only a little too long, only the occasional longueur.
Touched on exit by buckets being shaken for the Decayed Actors' Benevolent Fund. From where I associate to our holiday in mid August taken in a cottage just up from Watermouth Castle in north Devon, a cottage which used to be the holiday home of Terry-Thomas, whom I had not previously heard of, but who turned out to be a once-famous actor who ended up dying in rather straightened circumstances. He may have been helped by this very gang. See reference 1 for a holiday which appears to have been taken before the advent of internet enabled holiday destinations. And well before the advent of proper cameras in one's telephones.
Out on the streets, we were treated to quite a lot of a rather different kind of dressing up. I thought maybe loud lipstick is back in fashion.
One aeroplane from the train at Earlsfield. Standard of books at the Raynes Park platform library poor: third class ladies' fiction.
PS: it will be good to see Lear again, having seen Lear from the backstage here. A National Treasure will be treading the boards for me at the Barbican, just before Christmas.
Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/2012_08_01_archive.html.
Reference 2: http://www.ebay.co.uk/bhp/woods-ware-beryl.
Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/preludes.html. Where I notice that another senior moment had crept into my fingers, with installation for installment. Also evidence of my sloppy proof-reading.
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