Madame Galina's Doings Diary

Ta ta...

...I hear to Judith Vickers, about to retire from her job as Planning Administrator and Contracts Manager (ooh, fancy!) at the Royal Opera House.

I'm sure she'll be very happy in her retirement, hanging upside down in a nice belfry somewhere in Transylvania.

Someone else said this was a "common" example, I didn't...

Three Chairs In The Dressing Room

Brava!!! Brava!!! Brava!!! Madame Galina The New Forces’ Sweetheart got a listing in The Guardian.

It was for my gig at the West End Centre in Aldershot. And there it was shining forth from the pro forma press pack I got given as I left the theatre.

For once I didn’t want to swap the press pack for something better to take home: like a balloon, a slice of cake and a prize I had won fairly or otherwise at Pass the Parcel.

Hang on there, sorry: that reminds me. My cousin Sheri had a party for her twin six-year-olds the weekend I gigged in Newport and stayed with her, and she wrapped The Parcel for Passing in such a way that there would be a prize for everyone.

“What?!” I was straight on it, “what kind of piss take is that?”

“It takes out any aggression and disappointment.”

“It’s all about aggression and disappointment for O Fy Iesi Bendegedig’s sake. It’s Pass the Parcel, not hot stone therapy with the Thai girlfriend Mark bought.”

Mark is Sheri’s brother.

“You mean brought back. From Bangkok,” Sheri said.

“No, I'm sure I don’t. But anyway, what else are you making a mockery of? Are they going to play musical statues?”

“No. Megan who’s coming’s got this nervous twitch.”

“Hide and seek?”

“No. We like to play Let’s All Go And Look Round All The Nooks And Crannies Joining In Nicely Together.”

No doubt there would be hours of endless fun for the kiddiewinks playing Adopt, rather than Pin The Tail On, The Donkey.

The Right Way To Play Pass The Parcel

The next thing is Sheri won’t inflict Mary Poppins on the twins, and they’ll miss out on the bleak come downs off glue sniffed in the bus shelter post Wimpey that made our generation what it is.

Sorry, back to the Guardian listing.

It made gargouillade-all difference to the ticket sales. I opened my set with “look at all you few!” and included a routine about the theatre manager giving it the pursed lip empathetic look, and smarming:

“For the sake of the intimacy impact factor of your work, we thought it would be best to take you out of the main positive barn of a venue tonight and put you in the studio. Actually, we’ve not so much done that as put you in the work in progress space…no we haven’t: we’ve put you in the bar. I exaggerate: we’ve put you in the corridor leading from the loos to the…oh, all right: we’ve put three chairs in your dressing room!”

It was one of the best gigs I’ve ever done. And if I’d been on a fee rather than a box-office split I’d have been laughing. As it was, what I came away with wouldn’t have left me much over after I’d bought my own Thai bride and treated her to a Wimpey and a bag of Loctite.

Wrong kind of Wimpey, thank you the dipstick at the picture desk

But can I just say that I haven’t invented the story of going to Wimpey in Bargoed when I was about seven with Sheri but without my mother eager for my first non-defizzed fizzy orange experience? My mother, you see, always put a sugar cube in my Fanta to take out what she called the ruptured-sinuses-just-begging-to-happen effervescence. And there I was motherless for the afternoon at a formica covered table with orange bubbles well on the way to up my nose.

“Iestyn Edwards!”, came a voice I knew.

In terror looked round and there was Carol McNamara, my mother’s chief crony.

“Don’t make me have to come over there and sugar cube that for you, there’s a tidy-behaved little boy.”

And now, you’ll have to excuse me. I’m off to snort some Vintage Cava.

Empty. And nobody died...or did they?...

My Day In The Hills, courtesy of the great Alternative Holidays

Phew!

I hope.

Let me explain.

I thought I was going to have to refer to something without being able to name my source. I hate people doing that. At a dinner party where I was sitting two away from her, a friend once used a line of mine without naming me as its source. All right, it was only me describing a local resident with a Billy Bunter grown too old to dream of the tuck shop thing going on; mauve cardigan over string vest, specs with thick lenses, brown suede shoes and baby’s hair: and how he was the type ripe for the police to swoop on his bungalow during his daily stint by the swings to check his hard drive for kiddie porn. It wasn’t a line from any of my scripts. But still.

Reviewing Parachutes and Kisses for Newsday in 1984, Florence King takes the author, Erica Jong, to task for not naming sources. Having said that “Jong’s sow-in-heat prose is impossible to quote in a newspaper”, that she strains so hard for metaphors “we need Lamaze panting exercises to get through her sentences” and that “the book is as cluttered as the remainder table where it deserves to end up”, King writes that “of her better sentences, two sound suspiciously familiar”. The first is “During sex one has a man’s undivided attention” which, she comments, is much too crisp and epigrammatic to have come from Erica Jong’s sledgehammer, and that Mrs. Patrick Campbell is its most likely source. “The second is from The L-Shaped room by Lynne Reid Banks, who attributed it to Irish fold Wisdom. Jong doesn’t attribute it to anybody.”

As if this wasn’t enough of a warning, the review ends: “In my view, Erica Jong is a disgrace to womanhood and the publishing world as well.”

Of course, Florence King isn’t going to read my blog, but the fear is still out there, and I didn’t dare not name my source. I just hope I’ve got it right.

It concerns doing things properly. And ’m hoping that in Kiss of the Spider Woman, Molina, who works as a window dresser, sings of putting a scarf in a manikin’s jacket pocket. The scarf is invisible; but Molina knows that it’s there, and a woman that wore such an outfit would have it there.

I just gigged for Alternative Holidays in Val Thorens; and from the first phone call with Karl in marketing and events, through the fee I was offered, via shipping me out there, the staff, the theatre, Antonio: a Solor who put the arr! into warrior, the food, the stay overnight, to shipping me back, everything was done properly.

Beautiful place. Not fair Galina calling it Gay Colditz

Through nobody’s fault but the snow’s, there was a two hour delay getting from Geneva airport to the resort. The reception staff were straight out to the coach park unloading bags, commiserating and handing out truly better-making non-alcoholic cocktails. Craig, who could be David Peden’s long-lost twin, shook my hand while hoping that I was Madame Galina?

“Thank God you’re here. I thought I’d have to be putting on a tutu and doing it myself tonight. Was the coach journey horrible?”

“No. It was the most gorgeous scenery – Albertville and the lake - and I felt terribly Bond Girl when we went up the mountain. And I had my book.”

He handed me over to Jeff, who runs the theatre. “It isn’t La Scala”, Jeff warned, “but it’s my home for five months.”

The theatre was in one of the bars, the stage was a good size, the technicians’ box was clearly visible, and there was nowhere that punters would be out of sight and might start talking.

And backstage, as overseen by Jeff, was La Scala. Hung with papier-mâché headpieces, lamé, feather boas and paste tiaras, it was spotlessly clean, brightly lit, and with everything I might need laid out: spare make-up, eyelash glue, sewing kit, an iron, Antonio. Just kidding. Antonio...

The whump of gorgeous quads down the backstage stairs, a wifebeater beneath a haze of black and tan, a smile that would take mere seconds to re-split a healed hernia.

“Hello. I am Antonio. I’m the resort manager.”

Imagine Giacamo Ciriaci having partaken of the bigger-making side of the mushroom. I remember giving him my hand to shake, but I don’t think I said anything because I’d forgotten who I was. Jeff came to my rescue, asking me if I thought I might need anything ironed and when did I want to do a sound check?

They wondered if my answer was in some kind of dialect.

Up in the theatre, I went over the sound and lighting cues with Timothy and Ju-Ju. They had the more exciting job of being club DJ’s at curtain down, but paid me the rare compliment at show time of sitting and paying attention. At a couple of cabaret gigs I’ve had where the show techy was also the DJ, he put on my CD at the first cue then left it to run rough shod over all the subsequent cues. And while I ad-libbed frantically to anyone anywhere in the venue that this shouldn’t be happening, he was in the impenetrable dark at the back of the sound box shoving stuff up his nose and/or shoving bits of himself into a groupy.

The show went well, considering I was playing to a group of people that spent over ten hours getting to Val Thorens and were only not in bed because they were gay and there was a party afterward. I got Antonio onstage for the audition, in spite of my earlier promise not to, because he lumbered me with a stooge who was both a real Russian and a trained ballet dancer. Sasha, like Galina a Muscovite, spoke to me in that terribly working class dialect that Galina’s grandmother refused to let her learn, and did the most gorgeous, meant to be upstaging, fouettés. I warned him if he carried on like there would be some nice Polonium for him to lick off the window of the ski-lift next morning.

Oh, by the way, I was terribly showing off my French in the resort. I set the cues for Timothy and Juju in it, talked shop to Jeff in it, and when Antonio arranged for my bags to be taken from the theatre to the accommodation, I gave him my room-number in it.

“Six hundred and twenty-three” I said in my best Montmartre accent.

I was actually in two hundred and sixty-three. The nice woman who found my stuff in her room when she went up to bed, brought it back down.

“This has to be the ballerina’s”, she told reception. “And we use the same mascara…”

Meanwhile, I was in the bar, having a beer with Gabriele Neroni, who as it turned out was the reason I was in Val Thorens performing for Alternative Holidays. I knew I knew him from somewhere.

“You got me on the stage for the Pas De Deux at the Jewish Aids Trust Gala in 2000. So, when I came to work for Alternative, I got them to book you."

“Aw”, said Mike my manager at the time, “look at Galina getting her first review in the Jewish Chronicle”, and you’d think from his head on one side pride he was reading the announcement of her first born.

Talking obliquely of which, I did one of my last Hog the Limelight tour gigs a few Saturdays ago. In the foyer was the montage of a dressing-room, with pointe shoes round the mirror lights, telegrams, flowers, photographs of Pavlova, Markova and Fonteyn and a cast list for Manon.

“Oh, this is fab!”

A smock and cords wearing lady resident in town said she was responsible. “So glad you like it, I didn’t know if you would.”

I picked up the cast list.

“Oh, look,” I said. “The gaoler’s played by Thomas Whitehead. We have a running gag going that he’s going to marry Galina.”

I swear she clapped her hands with joy.

“Oh, and would it be ever so romantic then if you were to come back and do a performance as Manon to his Gaoler for us one day?”

Er…

“Oh, yes”, I said, “terribly romantic.”

Well, I couldn’t tell her, could I?

On Dealing With What’s There...

Some bloody person told me the other day that I was delusional.

“I am not.”

“No, you’re not. I am, though.”

Sorry, I thought, don’t want to join in with Let’s Play Analysts, so just shut up and drive.

We were coming back from a corporate gig I’d done for a local council promoting Dance Awareness in the theatres that it administrates. And, to quote Melba when she had just given a Command Performance for Queen Victoria and was sitting down to eat with her fellow artists: “What a dull evening it would have been if I hadn’t come.”

The idea was to part businesses in town from their takings. For that you must have good booze and nibbles (we did) and a bit of a laugh (I may be flattering myself, but…) and not a long piece from the inevitable troupe of overweight and under-trained girls accompanied by heavy metal in choreography that really should have died the deserved death when French and Saunders lampooned it in their first series for the BBC.

“…and run and run and jump in seconde off balance, and now lunge into plie and arms like the Funky Gibbon minus the funky, and now the pose looking into the middle distance that models use in shoots advertising sailing wear or watches…”

In any case, no matter how good the dancing, don’t waste art on a corporate audience. They don’t want it. Ask a comedian during Christmas office party season. It’s all about crowd control. And the Athenaeum crowd were no different. As one of them said to me,

“The only time I am prepared to watch children perform is at my daughter's Nativity Play. And that’s once a year too often, frankly. Before Madame Galina came on, I’m afraid to say, we all had our hands so firmly in our pockets they’d made a hole.”

A typical corporate event. I'm doing Pacquita Variation Three just out of sight to the left here.

Do I sound delusional? No. But the accusation is part of what I’m noticing in Aldeburgh. A tiny minority there are beginning to see me as a tall poppy. Take when I went to see a show at the Pump House Theatre and had the following bizarre exchange with an old failure from the East Anglian Folk singing circuit.

“You here again?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Have they not thought of giving some others a chance? Maybe that wouldn’t normally be thought of…”

“Er…”

“Well perhaps tonight someone could maybe have left a guitar on the stage and someone else could maybe ask me to sing. A spontaneous happening like that, as a break from the more formal performances you put on featuring Madame Galina. And not needing all that running around with posters and getting in the papers and on the radio that you seem to consider as part and parcel.”

“I’m not actually performing tonight. It’s a poetry evening.”

“I’ve never got on with poetry.”

And off he went. I refrained from shouting after him that I hadn’t actually performed Galina at the Pump House since 2004, and had needed all the posters and getting in the papers and on radio (he forgot ITV Eastern Region) as I was doing Edinburgh and must make as much dosh as I could from previews before I went up there. And what, for fouette’s sake, is spontaneous about leaving a guitar on the stage for it to be used, Chekov’s Act One gun-like, later on?

I’m too busy to be getting up myself, frankly. Back from being adored in Sweden, I was straight on the phone to the National Rural Touring Forum trying to get myself gigs in Village Halls on the outskirts of Swindon. Being a prophet in a foreign land doesn’t necessarily mean being in profit when my tax, internet porn and Horlicks bills have been paid.

And yes, as has got round Aldeburgh, Her Majesty The Queen told the then First Sea Lord to let me sing for longer next time as she thought I had been “rather lovely”, but that only impressed my singing teacher, Pamela Bowling, currently overseeing the recital I’m giving with Louisa Duggan on April 15th, in so far as it was something useful to have on my CV.

“You’re still walking onto the platform like a circus horse. Your “ay” vowel can still sound far too Hampshire Women’s Institute "Jem" Making demonstration. And congratulations on the gorgeous tone you produced in in The Sally Gardens, but you made absolutely no sense of the song at all.”

In fact she went on to say that I had made anti-sense of it. Which is where we came in. The idea of dealing with what’s there.

“The line about her crossing the Sally Gardens on little snow-white feet, is just about this flibbertigibbet of a girl walking across grass. There’s nothing else going on. Certainly - as you made it sound - nothing f-ing Freudian.”

And how do her little snow-white feet make you feel?

It made me think of the recent BBC4 programme where Anthony Dowell coached Carlos Acosta in Prince Whatever You Want To Call Him’s solo from Sleeping Beauty, and Monica Mason worked with Elisabeth McGorian, Gillie Revie and Genesia Rosato on Carabosse. The Dowell segment was fascinating and his dancing in the clips was gorgeous; but I found Mason et al hide behind the sofa squirmy.

Exploring the Method process through the journey of a complex character such as Juliet or Countess Larisch would be instructive. To use Carabosse was ridiculous.

And the way the four hamming lovies were going on you’d think they were preparing for performances of at least Hedda Gabler. In the original language. With Ibsen himself directing.