A Dickens of a Time!

I promised I'd go into some of the preparations being made for Pickwick & Nickleby this time round. All manner of doings have been afoot - I've behaved just as manically as the papers would have you believe. Hell has broken loose, reassembled itself via an ingenious compound of glue and elastic, broken even looser and tossed itself into an incinerator so as never to endure such patronising overtures again. The next time I meet with my devoted creatives will be six weeks before the show starts - normally a luxury in Cambridge theatre, but well under a third of my projected rehearsal schedule. As Gielgud used to say (somewhat prissily, but with a ring of absolute authority), 'the preparation is the all!' Although I type this from the fuzzy domestic comfort of York, where life unravels in a half-conscious blur of preliminary rehearsals, Dickens novels and antiquated episodes of Chance in a Million, I'll be focusing on that last round of mad days in Cambridge for the present.

I've rhapsodised about Chrystal's general aura of splendour before, but this time the gushing is warranted more than ever. Quite simply, she deserves some sort of canonisation for her limitless reserves of patience and resourcefulness in shooting the poster image. Several strokes of good luck were whipped into shape in an extended fit of creative haste. Our striking red polyester napkins (remember them?) were miraculously photoshopped into some semblance of background despite their stubborn refusal to cover up the wall as fully as we'd have liked. Thanks to Jack's well-timed assistance, we came into a beautiful black top hat at precisely the right moment - a vital visual flourish that had proved amazingly difficult to source amongst one of the most pretentious gatherings of people on earth. (A less than proud memory is my fleeting scheme to purloin this holy grail of headwear from a King's chorister, push the young scamp into the dust and scamper off into the distance, pausing intermittently to bay at the moon). In a slight moment of horror, I realised that the golden picture frame I was wielding recalled the set of The Mystery of Charles Dickens perhaps a little too distinctly. Despite my limitless admiration for Simon Callow and the show he filled so supremely - or, to be more accurate, because of it - I remain desperate to avoid any cross-overs or comparisons between the two - accidental or otherwise! They must be completely different animals, and I say this with full knowledge that Peter Ackroyd interpolated severely shortened versions of both the Pickwick and Nickleby readings within the earlier show, which Callow performed with expected bombast and aplomb. At least the poster design doesn't mimic Callow's - as with the images for his current Shakespeare show, the Dickens design was dominated by his lined and characterful mug. I want no such thing. If the show's a disaster - and such things can't be ruled out, particularly with a performance format that hinges on total personal exposure - the last thing I want is instant facial recognition. The setting sun meant another dilemma and another change. To be more precise, a change of some ninety-odd (none odder) degrees, swivelling to a recumbent posture beneath a bedroom window to better catch the light, my scrawny neck propped up with a makeshift tangle of cloth, the top hat needing to be deftly punched back onto my head at set intervals, the looming, Peeping Tom style tripod getting gradually more tangled in my attenuated legs. In the end, we went with one of the earlier pictures, and it's sure to make for an elegant and entirely appropriate design.

Chrystal seems set to take over the ADC with her latest splurge of artistic wizardry. As well as Pickwick & Nickleby (which we both agree to be the least of her concerns), she's going to be tinkering away on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Rent and Passing By. She's also heading up to Edinburgh to perform publicity duties for The Cure, the script of which she's already spoken about with great enthusiasm. I'm becoming steadily more envious of anyone travelling up to Edinburgh by this point in time, now it's finally dawned that a great amount of people that I care about will be cut out of my life for a good three months. I'll resolve to stick with the familiar and preserve my cocoon of social awkwardness at The York Dungeon instead. The thought of returning always buoyed me up through a somewhat tempestuous Michaelmas, and the added thrill of getting to burn witches this time round made the opportunity of returning too good to pass up. There's also the minor fiduciary issue of getting paid to shout and bump into the furniture at home rather than travelling to Scotland to be fleeced for the privilege. It's money that I just don't have right now. Despite such arguments and defences, I still think of it as a bit of a pity. I will go to Edinburgh someday, but now is not the time.

The very first read-through of Pickwick & Nickleby also warrants a mention. An unconventional Saturday, to say the least. For a cluster of reasons I'll go into later, we'd gone and pencilled in an almost perilously early morning slot for the reading. Despite the joys of pivoting my frame into for the benefit of Chrystal's camera lens, reversing this simple operation after an extended rest has recently started to verge on the impossible, and it was with bleary eyes and muttered curses that I stumbled into vague animation. I listened to Ravel's Bolero on the way to Christ's College, which fortunately got my blood rushing and instilled me with an inflated sense of purpose. James (the other one, the directorish fellow) and myself perched on a bench in one of the more desolate and sequestered corners of Christ's. All things considered, it went quite well. I'll detail a few fragmentary nuggets that occurred to me in the eye of the theatrically-charged storm:

Character voices: A decidedly mixed bag. Some go well, some go badly, some flicker in and out of focus like spirits at a seance. Among the victors are Justice Stareleigh (The York Dungeon offers a crash course in poisonous, venom-spitting ministers of law), Serjeant Buzfuz (a Will Seaward parody is always good grounding), Mrs Cluppins (surprisingly, given that's it's no more than a well-weathered impression of my secondary school librarian), Mr Skimpin (thank you, Kenneth Williams), Wackford Squeers (a voice that seems to occupy three separate channels, but it'll get there) and Mrs Squeers (it's not only joyful to make her as masculine as possible, but surprisingly easy). Struggling in limbo are Mr Pickwick (breathiness seems right for this chap, but it always sounds forced, camp and deliberate to me when professional actors try it), Mr Winkle (too many voices in the upper register flying about in his vignette - and that'll be the first thing to go when my voice is under strain) and Sam Weller (I honestly can do pseudo-cockney - it's just that it precipitates a Tommy Cooper scale confusion here, with Buzfuz's accent becoming fogged and besmirched with H-dropping and L-glottalisation). Positively bad are Nicholas Nickleby and Smike, for a sinewy set of reasons I'll delve into below.

Liquid refreshment: With typical resourceful stupidity, I'd gone to the back-breaking trouble of filling a bottle of water before absent-mindedly leaving it in my room at Selwyn. That I managed to maintain full shouting power despite a fatal lack of hydration was very encouraging, and bodes well for the future.

Breath and saliva: The messy business that you tend to overlook. Over the course of the reading, I generate a whopping great quantity of both. I'm reasonably confident that heavy breathing and assorted gaspings can be regulated. Past experience of those mercifully rare but hyper-intensive four hour shifts at The York Dungeon has taught me that such things can always be covered - no matter how much physical discomfort you're experiencing, there tends to be a way of hiding it. Saliva is an unprecedented and unappealing embarrassment. It mars pronunication by bunching up around the tongue in rabid bubble clusters or else gathers at the corners of the mouth to form deep and slimy crevasses. While we're on the subject of assorted drippings and leakings, I'm guessing that sweat will also become a problem once unseated from the pastoral tranquility of Cambridge's scenic gardens and stuffed into the sixty-seater electric-powered oven of the Larkum. A handkerchief will be required. And, my goodness, we have handkerchiefs already... Another piece of the puzzle!

Sincerity: Nicholas and Smike look set to kill me. They have the only moments of sincere emotion in the show, and reining in the comic mania is almost ridiculously difficult after some forty minutes of ranting and raving. I think I originally conceived of performing their sections in an exaggerated and deliberately stylised manner, falling back on the conventions of Victorian stage melodrama as justification for an inexcusable lack of self-exposure. My faith in that approach has died now, although I suppose it remains a back-up plan if all else fails. There's a great danger of Smike going the way of the Elephant Man with that showy approach, and degenerating into a dissonant, incoherent heap of hisses and moans. It's an approach that I strongly resisted when I played John Merrick a few years ago, in line with Bernard Pomerance's stern injunction that 'any attempt to reproduce his appearance and his speech naturalistically - if it were possible - would seem to me not only counterproductive, but, the more remarkably successful, the more distracting from the play'. Smike has to have some touch of strangeness, of weirdness, of the 'other', but perhaps that should come from within rather than without. My ongoing hatred of my own voice makes Nicholas particularly irritating. There's no hope of embellishment when a character shares your age (like the Nicholas of the novel, I'll still be nineteen when I take to the stage). You have to make do with what's already there. Forcing my pompous, self-satisfied drawl into the locutions of this callow youth will demand all the subtlety and understatement I'm hardly renowned for delivering. We'll see what happens.

Hermit instinct: Whenever someone appeared on the horizon, I found myself freezing up, unable to continue until they'd trotted off again. Probably not a cause for major concern - the wish to guard yourself against accusations of schizophrenia in public is markedly different to imitating the condition for a paying audience - but I do hope that the nakedness of the one-person format isn't going to ramp up the stage fright to an unreasonable fever pitch. I know that I'm kidding myself. No matter how well prepared I am, I'm going to be absolutely bloody terrified, and this hermit predilection is no more than an early symptom of that.

Severe discomfort: A sudden lack of faith in the material. Acute awareness of the words as a spidery black jumble impressed on blinding white instead of a clear communication of meaning. This is a phenomenon of read-throughs in general, I find. Forget your artistic integrity - the true art of the read-through is how well you can act on autopilot. I can sight-read with the best of them, but I'm not one of the prodigious few who takes in the sense along with the sound - not first time, at any rate. Read-throughs mean instant recourse to bad habits, which perhaps accounts for nearly all of the character voices detailed above springing from impressions or rehashes over unsullied and allegedly 'pure' interpretations. This is a necessary evil though. Get the read-through out of the way, learn the lines as soon as you ever can, and allow the piece to grow from there.

I complain a lot in the above, but this is all healthy. It shows that the piece is developing, and on the whole I was amazed at how smoothly the process went. With this hurdle jumped, I trundled off (late) to rehearsals for Love's Labour's Lost and The Importance of Being Earnest. 'Twas the day of three rehearsals. An exceptional circumstance, the fatigue of which could be relieved only with a hearty feast of Fox's Viennese biscuits.

I also had the great pleasure of meeting up with Will Seaward again. Few people in life are so refreshingly or dependably consistent in their behaviour. Will was his usual ebullient self - a Falstaff for all seasons. Will kindly agreed to read over a copy of the script, and it was brilliant to get a bit of insight from an individual experienced in staging various different modulations of insanity. This resulted in a few very pertinent observations about internal geography, drop-boxes, the angular limitations of metra-deck, and other exquisitely runic, hush-hush matters that will be kept up under wraps to keep the show's blossoming looniness a passable secret. Andy Brock was also hugely encouraging when I ran into him in that most disquietingly networky of places, the ADC Bar. Like Will, he's a fantastic ally so far as he's had enough outside experience to be able to keep his ingenuity free of the Cambridge bubble and the conventional ways of creating theatre. My discussion with him became the foundation for a complete turnover of my fairly lame design concept. Panicked into whipping my blank document into some semblance of substance ahead of the application, I'd invented some underhand, self-satisfied scenario centered on making the Larkum's simplicity into a virtue by endowing it with the deft elegance of a magician's stage show. Fatuous nonsense to be honest, very A-Level Theatre Studies so far as ticking the boxes went, but just about good enough for that stage in the process I reckon. Now things are on the up and up, and my burgeoning financial breakdown at the purchase of a small mountain of fake candles is testament to that I hope.

As a postscript, I'm pleased to say that Love's Labour's Lost surpassed all expectations. I felt a little trepidation about getting involved in it at first, particularly in light of a couple of apocryphal stories about the Herculean difficulties behind dragging Caesar's corpse into the gardens last year. Despite the positive things I'd heard about the final production, trauma is always to be avoided. In the end though, it was wonderfully diverting, and exemplified the wanton frivolity upheld by May Week tradition. The laugh quota was pleasingly high, which is rarely the case in Shakespeare, particularly at an amateur level. We had an entirely unexpected four-star review in Varsity too, which efficiently removed the common dampener of the generic student reviewer's twisted and capricious sense of superiority to the material. Reviewing, as with acting, should be grounded on compassion - not contempt - and compassion we received in spades. I got a disproportionately long mention for what was little more than a walk-on role as Dull (after all, I was the only member of a rather large cast playing more than one character) and that was fairly gratifying. As with getting these parts in the first place, it's disarmingly gracious when people go out of their way to be charitable, even in the context of a throwaway May Week jaunt. It wasn't a great performance by any measure, just a heap of bad habits congealed into one monstrous, ungainly lump of Dull. Where it did prove useful was as a dry run for Serjeant Buzfuz. If the blustering bass voice can be achieved and sustained sufficiently to override lorries and planes, aural security is assured in the cosy confines of the Larkum. The Importance of Being Earnest went swimmingly as well, so I'll try to catalogue a few of that production's highlights when I get the time.

As ever, theatrical dabblings remain a fine antidote to reality. And avoiding reality is the supreme virtue and accomplishment of Cambridge life in general.