Madame Galina's Doings Diary

Wasted Sympathy

Sharing a recital evening with Galina. Photo: Herring Bone Design.

I hear that people are wasting sympathy on Maria, the insane soprano mentioned in my Look What I Did, Mum blog.

Don’t.

I met Maria when we sold programmes at the Royal Opera House. Among the foyer staff then were a future Creative Director of Classic FM, an Evening Standard fashion editor, a Living TV producer, the winner of the Royal Academy Portrait Competition, Janine Limberg’s son, a dominatrix, and Dominic. Maria and I were starting out on the road to fame in the top flight opera houses around the world.

When Maria, from a rural backgrond, was exposed to the fags front of house she was desperate to be hag to them. Simon and Alessandro, the two most outrageous ones, used to dress her up. After a trip with them to Brick Lane one Sunday, she came to work wearing a Soviet Army coat dyed canary yellow, green dm’s and a bowler hat tied on with a veil.

Maria is a walking How Not To of a singer. She has a rare and outstanding natural instrument and had good solid training. When she graduated from Music College, she got a number of tours singing Queen of the Night in progressively bigger companies. It may have led one day to the major ones, who knew. She was on the ladder. Covent Garden and Glyndebourne to aim at, ENO, Opera North, Scottish Opera, Opera Northern Island, down through the regionals and the taking-in houses, the catchments getting smaller as you go. Opera East of England, Opera West of England, Opera South of the M25, right down to Opera the Two Men Who Wear Cravats and run the antique shop in the village and have opera in their barn.

But for Maria, singing is a spiritual calling.

“You put out into the universe what you want to achieve and breathe yourself into a performing zone where inspiration comes from above. What people want from you onstage is a gorgeous frock, fabulous hair and passion. Oh, and arias with top e’flats. Then the standing ovations will happen automatically. And you can spend your time off-stage having a lifestyle”.

She actually spends her time off-stage earning her living as a nurse. And even then her nobility gets in the way of her lifestyle. I did a lot of house-sitting in Aldeburgh, and advised Maria to register with the local private nursing agency.

"The place is teeming with bed-ridden ex-debutantes from the pre-war era, Maria. You could make a killing."

I swear she missed that one.

"Thank you for putting that out into the space for me", she said. "But I prefer to work in the National Health Sector."

She likes the little victories.

“There’s no achievement in running one, as you call it, bed-ridden ex-debutante from the pre-war era ship shape, it has to be a ward full of the working class. And I can see a difference in two days of me getting in there. Up and down taking them to the toilet all night? That stops. I tell them “no second cup” at Horlicks time”.

She prides herself on her very high patient recovery rate. See, what I skirted tactfully round saying before was that she got a lot of Queen of The Night gigs because she is a fright to look at. Six feet tall. Six feet two in her special nurses’ shoes, black and cherry shaggy perm, face like a jugged hare, bedside manner that led to her nickname Attila the Honey. Wake up to that looming with a bedpan. You would recover. Out of that bed, down the old flesh, piss and Dettol smelling corridors, out through the doors of A. and E. like a scene from Holby City played on fast reverse. Arse hanging out of your backless gown.

But, as I say, don’t waste any sympathy on her. Do you know what she did?

Late last century, we split the costs of hiring Lauderdale House in North London and tried out appropriate repertoire, inviting expert friends along with family and accepting their feedback in a considered and professional way, with a view to giving a second recital to an audience of agents and opera producers. In your dreams. We diva’d around like idiots for the night.

But the point is, the only people I knew that came to see us were my mother and her three gay friends. They were lovely, cuddly, theatre-going gays, with an odd hobby in common: seeing how many things they could buy from Marks and Spencer and return. Once a month they had a race from the branch in Oxford Street to the one at Marble Arch. They were a gang mainly because they had all lost their virginity to American GI’s during the war. As Philip said:

“That’s why everyone thanks the yanks for joining in the wars. Providing everyone with chewing gum, nylons and all their front and/or back bottom needs”.

Don’t look like that. You know what Sol Bernstein said, don’t you?

“You don’t have queers, Jews and gypsies, you don’t get theatre”.

Anyway, Maria had lots and lots of gays out front. Gays love a mother earth figure giving it her all. Or, in Maria’s case, making a dick of herself dressed and made-up by Alessandro and Simon. They had put her hair in ringlets, overdone the autumnal colours and squeezed her into a white envelope dress draped in a green diaphanous cloak. She looked like the brunette Fat Slag in a tableau depicting the Titanic and the iceberg.

During one of her arias in the first half she counted the gays. In the interval she said to me,

“Out of the audience of nineteen, four of them belong to you, fourteen to me, and there’s the usual barmy woman who comes to everything like this dressed as a bridesmaid. I don’t think it’s fair you should get to sing the whole of her song cycle in the second half. Based on the percentages, I think you should sing only two out of the eight songs - and that’s being generous - or take a smaller percentage of the takings.”

“That’s not fair…”

“I’ll go to town with the encores”, she threatened.

I went home with slightly more than my return tube fare. But anything to stop Maria singing (all of) The Saga Of Jenny, Climb Ev’ry Mountain or I Feel Pretty -which she delivered with no hint of self-parody and had the audience not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Or, as the woman who always comes to these things dressed as a bridesmaid said in the interval of the recent sell out one off spectacular Maria Live At An Islington Old Peoples’ Home,

“Feeling rather queasy.”

Tired ballerina, or rather...

...tired retro-variety artiste with certain skills.

People looking concerned about how tired I am.

Because?

In the last six years, next door has had three tenants. Each of them has gutted the house from roof to basement. The work each time has been frazzling and taken at least six months. This is allowed by law.

Building work can take any length of time as long as the daily hours are restricted from eight to six Monday to Friday, and eight till one Saturday. It is not allowed on Sundays or bank holidays. Odours are not allowed, either. (Whether from the work or the workers is not made clear).

I think the law should be changed. Fouettes are tiring enough without being woken at eight am on the day of a performance.

What can possibly have been so wrong with the house each time? Surely it's a case of more money than sense? Actually, on second thought, the tenant before last was director Bibon Kidron. If what she left was anything like the mess she made of Bridget Jones the Edge of Reason, the new tenant would have found mezzanine to atrium Armageddon.

But, take the roof, for one example. It isn't thatch or Japanese paper. Good old slate tiles are quite tough and lasting aren't they? I'll say next door's needed to be to withstand a goulash of Eastern Europeans smacking the hell out of them with entrenching tools all day five and a half days a week for six- out of every twenty-four-months.

Oh, my sainted aunt, says Edward Lane. Photo Ed Lane.

The first day of Bibon's own roof farce was a Saturday in July. She had the Goulash up there by eight sharp. She made them all tea – I could hear her for twenty minutes banshee-like canvassing milk and/or sugar wants - then stood outside leaning on her car, shouting up how they had a perfect day for it, shame she wasn't there for any of it, just off to her sisters. True, her smile stalled when the jazz musician at thirty-one a flung up her window and called her an f-ing anti-social slag. And she got hers over Bridget Jones.

I had a downer on her anyway, because of my mate Lis. German ROH head usherette, mid-eighties, remember? Looked born to play Heidi? Known affectionately as “kraut”? Prone to pulling down the grille of my bookstall at fraught moments and feeding me change of cast slips through the bars?

I inherited my bed-sit in this house from my mate Lis. Lis is a contralto. And she is more dedicated than a Marion Keyes novel. All of us trainee thesps in the foyer from those days learned from Kraut.

Aged seventeen, she came to London and worked for five years as an au pair so that her English would be good enough for her to study here.

When the audition panel at the Trinity College of Music said that her musicianship must be brought up to the standard of her actual singing, she used her savings to rent a mutual friend's cottage in Aldeburgh over the winter. She hired a piano and only looked up from her Associated Board book of Musical Theory in all that lonely time to knit, raid the bakers or read every single Agatha Christie left summer in summer on the bookcase beneath the window that looks out on Ethel Keane's cottage.

"Every night on my way up to bed as Christmas got nearer", Lis remembers, “I would see Ethel hanging yet more and more cards on string across her window. With ten days still to go you nearly couldn't see her pottering about any more."

Meanwhile, back in Foyerland, the rest of us we were picking up sinus infections from the fire-resistant Kingdom Of Sweets shit all over the foyer in honour of the new Nutcracker.

When Lis graduated from Trinity, mid nineties this would be now, I was living in Aldeburgh. Every week she travelled three hours back and forth and we worked on her pieces for Music Society auditions. She's a great one for doing what she calls "the things that you do."

"If you're an oratorio soloist," she said, "you pay the few hundred pounds for the address labels of all the music societies, and you pay another few hundred to record your CD of Messiah and Matthew Passion arias to send to them, and you go up for the open day and do your audition."

For months we worked towards this open day, fitting in lessons around her full-time job as receptionist for an aeroplane manufacturer. She got so tired she stopped singing about Telling Good Tiding to Zion in favour of Selling Tidings to Tie-on, and so anxious about coming down with a cold I once had to talk her out of gargling with Toilet Duck.

At last, here was the open day. And she got two hours sleep.

Nerves? No.

Illness? No.

Because Bibon had a party? Yes.

All Bibon had to do was push a little "sorry, there'll be noise" note under her neighbours' doors. Lis was deputy house-keeper for the Danish Church in Regent's Park. Had she been warned about the party, she would have collected the key for a hospitality room and slept there. But, no. Next door was raucous till dawn.

All right, she sang very well and got bookings. But that isn't the point. If you live somewhere residential, you make whoopee in night clubs, not on the other side of a wall that is as soundproofed as hardened Reddy Brek.

Anyway, back to the building work.

I sent an e-mail to the estate agents for forwarding to the new owners, asking when all this might be over please. I included the above anecdotes to keep things chortley and suggested they have a Working Bee with all their friends and get it done spit spot.

"Shame Bibon isn't there any more", I ended up, "I would have been straight round and missed the wall with the entrenching tool a few times accidentally on purpose".

I got an e-mail back from the estate agent saying that my e-mail had been duly forwarded; and I might like to know that the new owners and Bibon are very close.

I drew myself up un-cowed and sniffed queenily at the pc screen,

"That's probably it for them on the friends' front, then, anyway."

Am off now to buy enough wax earplugs to last at least till Christmas.

2012.

Look What I Did, Mum!

I had this photofitted of Maria as the Figaro Countess. Photo: Camden Police Station.

My insane soprano mate Maria (not her real name) said,

"Take now when we were at Guildhall. Every term I was soaking up the repetoire. I had me top F's out for Queen of the Night, me nice floaty B flats for Madama Butterfly; not to mention all that Germanist stuff like Wolf and Webern we did with your man Rudolf Piernay. But, now, when I was away home in the holidays, me mother would be always saying how what I was new singing was all very well, but "Ah, now, Maria: how about you give us a lovely, nice Barbara Allan?"".

Is there a ballet equivalent of this, I wondered. And I decided: yes there is.

Imagine slogging through a term's worth of rep classes covering Petipa,Ashton and Kylian, going home, and all your mother wants is the Birdie Song, the Hokey Cokey and a Conga round Morrissons.

There. Don't you love finding this kind of parallel between disciplines?

Aurora Jetee-soned. Do you see what I did there?...

The high rise pair. Me and Lizzie Roper, Ballet Who? 2001. Photo: Turns.

I changed the beginning of my Galina show at Torquay last Saturday. Aurora was out in favour of Giselle.

Martin, co-director of the Little Theatre there, had left on the fly rail a rustic cottage flat (from An Ideal Husband, sighs of Tom Whitehead) in honour of my Giselle skit, so I thought I must use it.

It meant the loss of the following anti-Arts Council jokes:

“For sake of fleecing them of funding,” says Galina, “we must make socially relevant story of Giselle. Not have Giselle come skip out of rustic cottage, no. She must come down skyscraper in piss-filled lift. Talking of which, it is Yorkshire that gets most of Arts Council funding in this country. They have had good sense to form Black Dyke Band up there.”

Actually, I lie. I managed to crowbar the gags in elsewhere. Too good to waste, no?

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…