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October 10, 2006
Mike And Billy Lay the Method Curse on me...
Tis a puzzlement.
On my first ever public performance of Swan Lake, during the Guildhall Rag Week in…er…too long ago, the Von Rothbart exited the wrong side and squashed me into a corner between the flat and a ladder on wheels. Squeezing round him, I re-fluffed my tutu for the off, clocked my Siegfried mime that by the prickling in his groin something fit this way was coming, reared my arms up behind me and made a run for it. Nothing happened. I couldn’t move. With my entrance music passing me by, I looked back. My tutu was hooked over the ladder on wheels. Unhooking it, I walked on in silence, settling into open fourth, hands crossed en bas, with a very audible expletive.
But this isn’t why Odette’s entrance is worrying me at the moment. It’s that I can’t answer the question “why?” And as a performer, you need to be able to do that. Especially if you’re directed by All3Media mogul Neale Simpson and he sits out front at rehearsals shouting “Don’t believe you”, “Where’s the story, please?” or (in my other Tenor show) “For the love of God butch up!”
I’d had sufficient of this in Colchester one Saturday night Edinburgh preview, and told Neale the Noel Coward story of an actor asking the master what his motivation was and getting the response,
“Your pay packet at the end of the week”.
Neale flushed and raised an eyebrow. “Lovely theatrical gem, all twinkly there, but it won’t save you when you haven’t yet again taken the audience with you and they stop giving a shit”.
See, Neale doesn’t think that ballet is dramatic. When I made him go to Romeo and Juliet, he picked and picked at it.
“All Shakespeare's verbal eloquence reduced to a couple of mincers in leotards. Where's its drama brain? Why doesn’t Juliet tell anyone she’s going to take the drug? Why doesn’t the nurse recognise Romeo when she brings the letter on – Alzheimers? That would at least fit in with the age of the woman playing her. Who didn’t think that one through? She wouldn’t have been expressing milk forty, let alone fourteen, years before…”
“You can’t view it as a straight play”, I said. “There’s music…”
“Too bloody noisy”.
“And dance”.
“As a general theatre-going person and not a specific ballet-one, I can’t appreciate that aspect of it. Other than at second hand sitting next to you simpering to yourself when somebody must have just done something tricksy, let’s all show how expert we are about what we’re watching…”
“Did you not get anything from it?”
“Yes. That ballet is hampered in terms of bringing an audience into a story”.
“But there are dancers who get you over that”, I told him.
I'm privileged to have seen Bryony Brind. What happened to her breaks my heart. But one day I hope to get to a closer look at her six-inch thick file of notes on the Swan Queen…
Asking about the extra bit of mime.
During my time front of house at Covent Garden, Michael Nunn was also a favourite actor/dancer, especially in the Macmillan roles. When I heard he’d agreed to play Siegfried to in the mime episode of Madame Galina’s Whirlwind Guide To Ballet, I was thrilled. As it turned out, it was one good-natured kicking off after another. Sadly, none of this got into the finished programme.
“Can we put the extra bit of mime in?” I asked.
“Which extra bit?” Michael asked, while wardrobe sewed up the rent in the left buttock of his tights.
“Where you mime “you-frightened-why?” and I answer “you-think-there-swan-you-shot at-(was) me”.
“You’re making that up, Iestyn”.
“I’m not. Cyril Beaumont includes it in his book The Ballet Called Swan Lake”.
“Cyril Beaumont was a cock”.
“Moira Shearer said that, actually…”
“What? That Cyril Beaumont was a cock?”
“Not those words, but she didn’t have much time for him”.
“How do you know all this shit?”
“Research".
Me doing research. The blurred boy took the motorbike off the street to hide for a laugh, by the way. Photo: Toby Keane.
"But seriously," I went on at Michael, "this extra bit of mime business does give Odette a reason for her entrance. She knows he’s out there, and is drawing his fire away from the other swans, is how I play it. And it explains why she gestures to his cross-bow. He tried it on her before…”
“Iestyn, you’ve had a very misspent youth”.
“You can talk. I heard you on Midweek, Mr. Brought Up On A Housing Estate In Thames Mead. Joy-riding cars at fifteen…”
“Get your facts right. I never said I went joy-riding. I just sat in the cars. I was too off it on glue to drive them”.
I got my extra bit of mime. Michael is a great respecter of other people’s approaches to their work. And he and Billy are genius coaches. The alien solo they made for me to go in their live Barbican show had a Mazurka step down the diagonal with alternate ports de bras that went from full stretch above head down past the ear. Jokily, I asked Billy what my motivation was for this step. Without thinking he said,
“You’re milking the power from the star-udder”.
After that, it would ill-behove me to not know why Odette makes her first entrance, now wouldn’t it?
‘Tis a puzzlement…
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