Madame Galina's Doings Diary

Hello Ballet Lovers

On Good Friday, Lauren Cuthbertson and I wondered, Is Myrtha Jealous Of The Love Giselle And Albrecht Share? On April 11th, Should Juliet Try And Keep The Poison In Her Mouth And Not Sick It Up? On December 23rd, Why Is The Sugar Plum Fairy In Charge Of The Kingdom Of Sweets? And now, my obsession with ballet has fully kicked in again.

Playing an oblique take on the white-face clown, the one in the circus who wrongly thinks he’s bossing the scene, which is what Madame Galina is at bottom, I’ve done a lot of this kind of wondering. There must be enough truth onstage for an audience to agree to suspend disbelief. Then I can cast them as red/subservient clowns, and the “mess” can be made. If I’m not convinced that I weigh seven and a half stone, am Prima Ballerina of the Bolshoi, star pupil of Raisa Struchkova, that my interpretation of Odette/Odile is near as damnit definitive, that Mrs. Putin has found out that Vladimir and I are lovers and has used her mafia connections to arrange my tour to the West, that my grandmother deprived me of Vitamin D to give me sway backs and now spends her time in the day room of the Cherry Orchard Rest Home in Moscow painting pictures of Ghandi, Buddha and the Dalai Llama because she’s a religious nut but can’t paint hair…who else will be?

But it’s Lauren’s fault that I’m awaiting from Amazon “used” copies of Six Curtains For Stroganova, Newman’s Sibley biography and Theatre Street. And Alan Bennett says you mustn’t. Amazonian cheap deals on books are leading to marketing departments dictating publishing lists. If it won’t sell in Tescos then it won’t roll off the presses, they say. Weird that I’m bothered. I’d sell myself in Tescos if I thought it would impress Thomas Whitehead into marrying Galina. Sorry, that’s where we were supposed to start; but I’ve come in the back door.

So…

In the interval of a Mara Galeazzi Giselle, I met nice Bruce Marriot at the bottom of the Floral Hall escalator. He said to me, I said to him, and the moral was… Sorry: silly. Over a glass of what thankfully wasn’t the asthma attack waiting to happen house white, Bruce asked me to write this blog. I can’t write anything nasty, he says, or “I love Tom Whitehead, I love Tom Whitehead” all over it. See, he thinks I have created a believable Prima Ballerina in Madame Galina. As, thank you, do Mr. and Mrs. Bournonville, who saw my show Ballet Who?! in Edinburgh and wished they hadn’t already given out their Award that year when my Swan Queen mime was blatantly more deserving. My Odette’s narrative, let me tell you, had even silenced the smack heads I’d given free tickets to crossing the skate park at tea-time. I thought, brilliant, I’ve reached them. An usher said, no, they were simply concentrating on finding a usable vein.

But Bruce wants to know why I created Madame Galina? Well, the simple answer is: because I am a Cinderella – I come from a line of Cinderellas – and I am determined to make it to the ball and meet my Prince Charming. Through playing Galina. Which is where Tom Whitehead comes in. I don’t know him - we chat for a few seconds if Bunhead Harvey rings him during drunken lunches at Kew Green and hands me the phone - but he has what I see as the Prince look. A jaw-line that could double as a walk-in wardrobe.

He has a serious rival in Frederick James Mortimer Turner, a blissful Old Etonian. I’ve spoken to Fred nine times, which I reckon equates to Galina habitually fetching his pipe, slippers and whiskey no rocks. But Fred only gets me putting Mabel’s Poor Wandering One into my other show Anything for a Tenor. Tom gets fouettes.

See - as Dorothy L. Sayers said re. Lord Peter Wimsey: you often give to your characters to make up for your own lack, but must be careful to show that have their own need for whatever it is. Why, then, does Galina want so much to become Mrs. T. Whitehead? Answer comes there: because she’s a throwback and a drama queen and Tom would take her up North where she would catch something and die of a cough at Scarborough.

That’s enough setting up of your character now. And won’t Tom Whitehead mind?... Ed.

God, he’s bossy…

Thank heaven for little girls goes the song. I beg to differ. For a start, these days, it sounds dodgy. But then, I can talk. To enshrine the night in the Um Qasar officers’ mess when a seven foot ex-guardsman from Bolton stopped barracking long enough to sing just for me (having warmed up with the dirty gay version of The Eton Boating Song) “a songg made fair-merss in nan-teen servernty-wern bah Rolf ‘arris”, I have put this song into my show Anything For A Tenor. I had to order the music from Foyles. I went there on Saturday and told the music department assistant I’d come to pick up Two Little Boys. Oops.

But no: it’s evermore got to be Thank Heaven For Little Old Welsh ladies. I just had my annual Saturday night gig at the Wyeside in Builth Wells. I don’t drive, forgot how I’ve got there before, so rang Traveline North Wales to find out if we were talking taxi, canoe and/or yak here. Nerys sighed into the phone and said I should get the train to Aberystwyth and the bus from there to Builth. And I didn’t ask for a second opinion. Which I have from all call centres since the phone-psychic last July told me I was pregnant. I got to Aberystwyth to find that the bus Nerys meant ran once on the Wednesday they had the market. In three days, ten hours and fifty-six minutes time. Otherwise, zilch.

I was stranded. I was exhausted from touring. The ligaments in my fouette foot were trying to tunnel out via my knee. A Chinese Herbalist had said I must stop doing Giselle’s Mad Scene if I wanted my kidneys to work properly ever again and charged me two hundred and forty seven pounds for the privilege and the herbs. I wanted to do a Linda in The Pursuit Of Love, sit on my luggage and cry. And that’s when the old ladies took charge.

“Awful blotchy you’ve got love while I’ve been standing yer watching you nearly wear out that timetable by looking at it. Lost are you?” said one.

I explained.

“…so: if I don’t get there, I can’t do the gig”.

“And you don’t get your money?” she said.

“Worse than that. I have to compensate the theatre”.

“And where is it you’re meant to get to?”

“Builth Wells”.

“Well, love, why didn’t you say?”

She shouted across three stands.

“Mair!! You’re going home now to Builth, is it?”

“Aye”.

“How you getting there?”

“Bus from yer to Brecon, get Kevin to drive faster the last few stops, and I’ve phoned my friend – you know her: Pam, it is, from the in and out shop – and she’s going to delay the Builth bus till we get there. Why do you ask?”

“Someone to take under your wing…”

Four of them including Mair and my original guardian angel were catching my bus.

“Foot down now, Kevin”, said Mair as he punched the hole in her return ticket.

All across the Beacons she admonished him. “Get a move on, love, we all know the view off by heart. And him that don’t is more concerned with getting his money. Am I right?”

She was right.

She even persuaded Kevin to drive past someone at a stop on the approach to Brecon.

“Don’t bother for her. She combed her hair onto the floor for five stops last Saturday”.

And all the while she was looking for things in her bag as she checked them off on a shopping list. Chocolate, stamps, library books back, letter writing paper, Jeyes Fluid, macaroons, I read over her shoulder…

“Well done, Kevin”, said Mair, as we arrived in Brecon. “Only two minutes after my bus is supposed to go instead of eight. And look, there’s Pam doing a bit of femme fatale with her foot on the step of the fifty-six b so he can’t go”.

We were so early to Builth I sat in the hotel opposite the theatre and filled in my tax return. Does you good to find room in each and every day for some “Once Upon A Time” time…

I warmed up on stage, hoping again that the river flowing past the window would stay outside. It doesn’t always. Feet in parallel first, making free use of my foot roller. Gareth, my Goth-techy, said it looked painful.

“It is. And if the problem gets any worse, I’m going to need considerably bigger rollers. Steam roller size, I reckon…”

I asked Gareth if he remembered the variety act that used to be on TV with the women prone to wedgies in spandex leotards trying to moonwalk huge balls up slopes.

“I’d look a bit like that”, I said.

“Sorry”, said Gareth. “I’m twenty-one”. There was a silence. “I don’t remember trams, either”.

The audience was really responsive. Totally went for the stuff about the Virgin Mary’s espadrilles, and I had to encore Giselle’s solo.

In the bar afterward Tom The Box Office’s brother Joel was over from Hay-On-Wye, so talk got a bit literary and we had to quote our favourite sentence in the English language. I was unable to decide between “Tread softly, for you tread upon my dreams”, “Still through the cloven skies they come with peaceful wings unfurled” and “Buy one, get one free”.

Guy, the artistic director, was beaming and said he hoped we could make our annual event into something like the Melba Nights at Covent Garden. Hoorah! That means I would get to explete like a Royal Marine, to give my name to an organic faggot at Pontypridd Market, and to have Joel brought to my dressing room before I do Giselle’s Mad Scene…

Waving damply goodbye, I asked Guy to send on the audience survey forms, for me to cherry pick more comments. So far we have:

“What an interesting racial mix he must be. My guess is half Israeli, half Maori”.

“I am German. Even the Dutch have better senses of humour. And the Swedes, actually. Does he put in all the double-meaning rude things on purpose?”

“As you may know, I recently retired as a surgeon from St. Thomas’s Hospital after thirty-nine years. I just wanted to say that I remember that mad, knickerless woman spotted with sticking plasters with the halibut in the shopping trolley going back and
forth over Lambeth Bridge. He didn’t make that up”.

“He was exactly the right size for the venue”.

“I’ll make all my mates come and see him at his next gig in Brecon. Fabulous. My God those spins. We didn’t know what it was at first, and I was the one who had to come and watch tonight to find out. We all just looked at his flyer and thought who wants to go and see that fat poof?”

Well, at least it’s longer sentences than Zoe Anderson…

Posted by Madame Galina at May 7, 2006 11:07 AM