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March 15, 2008
Three Chairs In The Dressing Room Revisited
Apologies to anyone that had a ticket for my show tonight in Oxfordshire. As only nine of you did, the promoter cancelled.
“I am sorry”, said Margaret, ringing to explain, “but I thought it was best for you and for the people there. I get the impression your show needs a bit of audience whoomph.”
“It does. Though very occasionally it doesn’t get it, numbers wise.”
(See Three Chairs In The Dressing Room, March 26th 2007)
Margaret said “I need to ring Arts At Large, who we booked you through and discuss the financial arrangements; you getting your costs. Maybe you should ring them, too.”
“As you’re cancelling at such short notice, the financial arrangements are that I get paid in full."
“Are they? Oh. I see. I haven’t read the bit of paper they sent out for a while. That's... But you see: it’s not as cut and dried as that, I don’t think. I can pin-point the reason for the lack of ticket uptake to negative vibes due to you cancelling in November to go to Afghanistan, you see.”
If the cancellation were my fault, I would lose the fee and be liable for admin costs.
“I didn’t cancel. I postponed”, I said.
“Yes, but that’s not quite how people see it here, I don’t think…”
“I postponed three shows for Essex On Tour and I’ve just done the rematches for them; at the two Saturday ones there were people were standing.”
Margaret said nothing for a few seconds, then, “Maybe it’s because the shop where the tickets are sold in the village has just been taken over by an Indian man and he swore blind to people that there weren’t any tickets and I only just found this out as I’ve been away and when I went in on Wednesday there were the tickets bold as brass under the counter where they’d been all along...”
“Bloody hell, Margaret”, I said. “Bit of shysterics you were trying on there."
And people thought it was greedy divadom when Adelina Patti stipulated that her fee had to be paid by two o’clock on the day of a performance, or that she had a parrot trained to scream “Cash! Cash!” at promoter Henry Mapleson…
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