The Shadow of Parkinson

Much of the last few days has been lived beneath the shuddering, fearful bulk of what my Engling friend Martha cheerfully termed 'Parkinson's Law' - basically, that everything you have to do will take precisely the amount of time you have to do it in. My goodness, is that the truth. The simplest business is consuming a life-age round about now. I have a grand total of two academic tasks left to do, and bloody hell, they're incurring more energy and procrastination than even in a week saturated with eight times the workload.

All things considered, we had a fairly productive time on Saturday. Having bemoaned the lack of gold picture frames lying in and around the hallowed halls of Cambridge for a solid month, Chrystal and I made tracks around the local charity shops in search of this elusive publicity component. Whenever I was involved in some dramatic activity whilst growing up (often - but not always - to do with vampires) the efforts of my grandma would run down to just such places, so they always stir strange emotions in me. Regardless of time, regardless of location, these establishments court a touching universality. They're always done out in a selection of Hospice-style white and creams, always festooned with the most indifferent carpets imaginable and always littered with the underused and unwanted relics of the dead. They're always a fertile stomping ground for theatrical oddities too, so perhaps I should quit carping and get down to business.

Our excursion brought a few minor successes. We found a small chalkboard that may or may not prove useful for the schoolroom of Wackford Squeers, but was in any case so cheap that it seemed worth the small fiduciary sacrifice. The same goes for a remarkable collection of red polyester napkins. Chrystal, being the inscrutable artistic variety that she is, wants some larger theatrical backdrop for the poster image, which I only hope these paltry scraps can deliver. However, they shall be of definite usefulness for the grand, weepy courtroom entrance of Mrs Bardell, the addition of a rotating scarlet handkerchief a properly melodramatic touch. We also had the sort of seminal brainwave reserved solely for Cambridge students when we discovered we needn't buy a gold picture frame - we could paint one that colour instead! Glory of glories! Chrystal has a preserve of toxic spray-paint left over from the brochure image for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (for which she employed an exquisitely sinister cat-mask), so with a little battering and blasting of our present picture frame, all should be well where antiquarian finish is concerned. An entirely off-topic victory came when I discovered an ancient cassette tape of Christopher Lee narrating 'Peter and the Wolf' and 'The Soldier's Tale'. Haven't the foggiest idea whether it's been issued on CD or not, but I can't wait to get home and play it. You can tell it's old because it's still difficult to spot where Lee's toupee join is on the cover.

These successes were overshadowed by our problems in finding a top hat for the photography session that we know full well is coming up next week... A visit to the joke shop revealed that the felt variety, which looked so amiable and appropriate through the distorting window of an Amazon product-hunt, is (perhaps unsurprisingly) really quite inferior. I think it was the moment that Chrystal noticed the hat's unsporting decision to sit on top of my head rather than fits securely that the penny dropped. Still, I'm optimistic that something will happen. Be warned though - it's a very, very bad idea to cheerfully propose photoshopping missing items in afterwards to a true exponent of the craft. Such will provoke nothing but black stares and muttered curses.

And then there are the lines! The lines for The Country Wife! I can't have had this many to learn since I played Scrooge all those years ago - and that came at a time when I was still young and sinless enough to devote the proper time to learning the bloody things. And, as I'm rapidly coming to realise, there's something infectiously memorable about the verbal peaks and troughs that Dickens weaves into his many eccentric idiolects. The anarchic modulation of tone and emotion, as well as the inexplicable feel of 'rightness' imbued in a character's every turn of phrase, makes it (almost) a doddle to learn. I've had the pleasure of working with some wonderful directors in Cambridge, but none have been quite so keen or diligent as Sarah in securing precisely what she wants from the actors of The Country Wife. We do a read-through and then the way we should be behaving from line to line, and occasionally even word to word, is worked out in the most minute detail. I can see this rubbing some people up the wrong way. For anyone seeking to preserve their 'artistic temperament' (whatever that might mean), it must be a stranglehold to tolerate this Hitchcock-style stream of 'walk here' - 'stand here' - 'shout here' - 'quietness there' - 'raving here' - 'brood on the death of the youngest son of the acropolis and shed a tear there'. Alright, that caricatures things a bit. It's certainly forcing my brain to pick up and animate at a stage in term where (exam-lite as it has been) I simply want to switch off and gape a bit. Given the general hostility of Restoration dialogue to memorisation (the evergreen trauma for just about everyone involved in The Relapse), it's an approach I have nothing but respect for. I only hope that this technique can be sustained under the rapidly diminishing timescales we have to work with. And who knows, maybe I'll have time to devise a characterisation at some point. Mr Pinchwife may be heading towards the school of James Swanton 'point and scream at the top of your lungs rather than carve out a niche of subtlety and nuance' performances, but I'm rapidly coming round to the idea that the time never exists in Cambridge to do much more than fall back on bad habits. Working on the character from the outside in is no more than an extrication of what normally goes on here - at least in my experience.

I also find myself in a state of mild intoxication and bewilderment after attending Mass at George's invitation at the St. John's College chapel. A confirmed Methodist (and a lapsed one at that), never did I contemplate dipping my toe in the ornate waters of Catholicism. A conglomeration of things I quite like actually. Traditionalism. Medievalism. Gothicism. Atmosphere that seemed evenly pitched between Hammer's Dracula Has Risen From the Grave and Taste the Blood of Dracula (an abundantly positive factor). Apart from the brief delight of George emitting 'Cor! Free biscuit!' with attendant Tunbelly-style fat noises before I engaged in the unparalleled criminal campaign of an anti-denominational wafer, thoughts of a more sombre strain prevailed. My spirituality is indecisive to say the least. This was no doubt a splendid venue, redolent with beauty and history. But faced with the the athletically-charged gesticulations of the fellow directing the choir, I instinctively thought of some lines that I cut from the play what I wroted last year:

The church is a sort of theatre too, is it not? Extravagant costumes that distract from the text. Many-coloured lights and paintings that mean something to the audience but represent only a day's pay to the craftsman... Magic tricks. Virgin births, water into wine. The sons of ghosts...

On closer review, I can see why it went. Pretentious, self-clever codswallop. Too many words and all too neat to sound anything but stupid. But if you can get past that basic horror, perhaps it isn't so far from the truth - or at least the 'truth' as far as I perceived it in Mass. I found myself visually tumbling ever deeper into the stained glass window ahead of me, assuming some sort of kinship with the depiction of one cringing, repentant sinner, who I presumed was experiencing the same frustrating failure to tap into a vein of sincerely felt spirituality. It all felt a bit of a sad put-on. Still, I am not scarred by the experience, and will be attending another Mass fairly soon. The immortal Will Seaward will be there (Falstaff in under two weeks - the theatrical event of the new millennium), so I will enjoy myself whether I make any breakthroughs or not.