Return to Darkest Yorkshire

My goodness, I miss the people. And the architectural type stuff. Quite enough weather vanes to dispatch eighty Patrick Troughtons. And the endless supply of Garibaldi biscuits, seasoned with black coffee because I could never be bothered to walk that extra few metres to get at the fridge. And the happy, playful silverfish, always a welcome guest as it lapped at my heel and absconded with my big toe. But the people, on the whole. Not to mention the mad, capersome freedom. I used to be able to open my bedroom door and find myself at once in public. Now, venturing outside is an effort that requires premeditation and purpose. But enough tiresome grumbling. Come the cold light of morning (bit of time to go yet then), I'll be steamrolling back to Cambridge to see Simon Callow. Tremendously exciting! Callow remains the supreme master and exponent of the one-man show, and as far as I'm aware he's performed in six in the past: on Wilde (The Importance of Being Oscar), Shakespeare (a one-off performance of the entire Sonnet sequence at the National Theatre, and, more recently, There Reigns Love in Canada) and, of course, Dickens (The Mystery of Charles Dickens and last Christmas's Marigold and Chops). No mean track record, and now he's on to his seventh, and a somersault back in the general direction of the Bard for Shakespeare: The Man From Stratford. I'm particularly interested to see how he takes command of the stage during all the awkward in-betweeny moments when he's not impersonating Prospero or Jachimo or Desdemona or whoever else it might be. Whether there's a clean-cut distinction or a murky overlap between character and narrator - and whether this narrator is going to be the boldly delineated 'SIMON CALLOW' discussed in Being an Actor, or a somewhat less parodic strain, or something else again, entirely different and quite unexpected. It would be a nightmare situation for me if audiences thought that I was playing Dickens in the narrative sections of Pickwick & Nickleby. Such an effort is doomed to fail, and seems crucially out-of-step with bringing an author to life through his creations.

At any rate, I'll try to report back with my findings. It won't be a review as such, because by this stage in life I find it pretty much impossible to give an unbiased judgement of anything Callow does. 'Renaissance man' is a term affixed to Callow with the same catchpenny irreverence that Stephen Fry is labelled a 'national treasure' or David Cameron 'that weed-smoking, Bullingdon-bred, floppy-haired twerp'. Whilst none of these labels are completely untrue (there's a grain of truth in every stereotype), Callow's Renaissance connection usually seems to be relegated to his doing a bit of acting, a bit of directing, knocking out the odd book, and then appearing on a chat-show to envelop the furniture and scarf down all the chocolate bourbons like the Ghost of Christmas Present. But 'Renaissance' also conjures up the spirit of a particular historical moment, and for me at least, this conveys an altogether more favourable idea of the generous and benevolent feeling with which Callow infuses his acolytes. 'Renaissance man' can point to Callow the man - the hopelessly lovable individual who wore the loudest waistcoats in creation and vanquished himself with Highland dancing in Four Weddings and a Funeral; who shared some of the most harrowing personal anguish conceivable in Love is Where it Falls (read it or die painfully); who, long before Ian McKellen railed against Section 28, kept trying to out himself to the British press only to find that nobody was really that interested. I shall go and see Callow, enjoy myself thoroughly, and then dedicate some sort of Ode to his majesty.

I decided to order myself a small gift hamper for my return; various oddments to inspire and serenade me at the outset of this lonely rehearsal period. So, here I sit in my bedroom in Acomb, handling the soundtrack to The Muppet Christmas Carol with gnarled and swollen hands. It's a point made so often now that it hardly bears repeating, but yes, it probably is the best all-round version of A Christmas Carol. And the Muppets are solely to its benefit. Deal with it. I've also come into DVD versions of the creaky old film versions of Nicholas Nickleby and The Pickwick Papers. They're generally considered to be a cut below the seminal David Lean adaptations that inspired them - the 1946 Great Expectations and (even better to my way of thinking) the 1948 Oliver Twist, both of which you are strongly encouraged to track down, pronto! - so it'll be interesting to see what makes these particular novels so resistant to cinema. I have my theories, but I'll reserve judgement until I've taken in the films and reviewed them for you here. I'm a little worried about hitting Dickens saturation point this summer, so I better be sensible and remind myself that next term will be more than counterbalanced by the dark and terrible pressures of the Medieval Paper. Or I could scuttle off to watch a bunch of old horror films instead. Does Olivier's Richard III count as horror? The silent version of The Lost World? Arthur Wontner's Holmes films? Until such time as the American majors see fit to unleash their back catalogue of cinemacabre to Region 2 DVD, these semi-sinister substitutes shall suffice (such sibilance... the pretentious git).

I'm reading Nicholas Nickleby at the moment. It's a rollicking good entertainment. It's also refreshing to visit the nightmare of the Yorkshire school from a more developed perspective than the one advanced in the Readings script - a little like discovering a set of fascinating new rooms in a familiar old house. I'm also reading with one eye squarely locked on the Vincent Crummles sections. I have a crackpot scheme to work fragments of his theatrically-charged patter into a framing device for the show, but I need to check on its suitability (and malleability!) for adaptation first. The Dickens works relevant to my dissertation are The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, two of the Christmas Books and numerous short stories. Critics may shun Dickens's earlier works in favour of later fare such as Bleak House (justifiably acclaimed), Little Dorrit (the eternal snooze-fest) and Great Expectations (alas - now ruined for a generation of A-Level students!), but I'll certainly be going round the block a bit this summer where sheer volume and density of paper consumption is concerned.

I'll probably feel the need to round off the first rehearsal week in a more formal fashion later on. For the moment though, it's enough to say that it's gone alright. Proceedings have ticked by at the rate of two pages a day, but when you're dealing with a fifteen page script, close-typed and A4 in size though it may be, it's a work rate not to be sniffed at. Props are slowly coming together (the fake candles are looking utterly fantastic - to me, at any rate), though I feel a trip to York's charity shops and costume boutiques will be needed at some point next week. As ever, the line-learning is the unpleasant business. I remember a lot of the last-minute tensions on Black Comedy stemming from the company's collective trauma at being unable to get the bloody words out intact - always a killer where farce is concerned. George Potts got off easy on that show (I believe he improvised himself three times the dialogue that Peter Shaffer intended on the final night...), but I later watched him lose a good few pints in terror-sweat when trying to learn meaningless chunks of dialogue before The Relapse (not to single him out or anything - it's just there's only so long that you can pretend there's some degree of logic to whether brass candlesticks and the best china precede wicker chairs or not... and the contrasting void of memorisation in the following week's Silent Canonfire will also have magnified the incident beyond proportion). I fouled up monstrously in Michaelmas with my inability to remember any of the lines in As You Desire Me. That was doubtless the product of my absolute disinterest in the production as a whole, but it was exacerbated by some lazy translation of the Pirandello original (it is most certainly not acceptable to start a character's every line with the word 'what') and my sustained failure to understand the plot (which has blossomed from 'failure' to a sort of lofty, battle-scarred pride recently). No wonder I was laughed off the stage. Nightmare situation. And as for The Alchemist, everyone's lines went madly and anarchically awry throughout, from the first rehearsal balanced on precarious wooden chairs to the last mumpish hiccup that finished it off. I can't imagine how the first night would have panned out had the production gone ahead. It looked set to be a fantastic show... it would just have needed some similarly fantastic ad-libbing to keep the ship afloat.

How then does Dickens stand up to these precedents? Not too badly, actually. Time is on my side. I'm safely out of Cambridge too, which is a big help where this is concerned. One of the perennial failures of Cambridge theatre is the line-learning process. It always seems to be the last priority... Then, all of a sudden, it's too late, and the first performances of a very short run flash by in a haze of panic and stricture. It's possible to argue for the benefits of a shaky grasp of dialogue as tapping into some wild and unpredictable core of spontaneity and energy, but personally speaking, I find that an insult to the playwright (no matter how bad you might consider Luigi Pirandello), dangerously close to expressing contempt for the audience, and deeply difficult to perform through. The text becomes a brick wall in which you search for a crack of meaning by braining yourself against it. Rhythm is the most helpful component in my learning process. I think that explains why I tend to find the 'right' intonation (from my point-of-view anyway) and then cling to it doggedly - and why speed-runs cause the dratted words to become completely unloosed from my mind. With an extended bit of prose, those rhythms have more time to develop, take hold and carry me across an extra few paragraphs. Over half of the lines are entering my head by osmosis, and this is an immediate sign that the absence of university pressure is seeing my brain return to its former efficiency. Line-learning wasn't like revision - like cramming! Oh, not in the golden age! When I used to be able to learn an entire script in the rehearsal room! Although the parts were then a good deal smaller, and when you're playing the Black Imp in gorilla mitts and tight silk trousers for the Poppleton Methodist Players in a Christmas pantomime located in February, who really cares in the first place?

Bit of a tangent there, but an important issue that I think should be addressed more often. Remembering the words is one of an actor's most basic obligations - yet we consistently come so close to compromising this simple requirement at the risk of the audience. I pray that Dickens won't see me repeating the mistakes of the past and eating my words (a bit counterproductive when you're meant to be saying 'em).