My friend Robin, a retired financier, is a fine comic actor but he’d be the first to admit he has a problem with lines. He bursts on to the rehearsal stage in a huge grey wig and launches into an anarchic approximation of his part as the Magistrate at Calcutta in Around the World in Eighty Days — my adaption of Jules Verne’s classic, and this year’s Christmas show at Helmsley Arts Centre in Yorkshire.
Robin is off-piste from start to finish, but with gusto and style. The sentences he imposes on Phileas Fogg and Passepartout (for the latter’s failure to remove his hat and shoes in the pagoda of Malebar, you may recall) are rarely the sentences, in either sense, that Verne or I wrote. They vary from one rehearsal to the next, and the other actors just have to follow as best they can. By the time the Magistrate leads them off in an unruly conga at the end of the scene, the director — that’s me — is laughing so much it seems pointless to make them do it again.
This is amateur theatre at its most hilarious. The cast includes the vicar, the window cleaner and a lady who breeds pigs. Three generations of the same family form the backbone of the backstage crew. If you think I sound like Lynda Snell, I can tell you that the real thing is vastly more entertaining as a pastime — almost narcotically so — than anything you’ve ever heard on The Archers.
Christmas shows in Ambridge or Helmsley are about the taking part, rather than the winning of drama awards. I’m a last-minute learner of lines myself, so I’m tolerant of actors clutching their books at the dress rehearsal. But in the end everyone wants to do the thing as well as they can — and don’t think the pantomime genre is easy for amateurs, by the way, because it’s not, as I found out as one of Cinderella’s Ugly Sisters. Whacking doughballs into the audience with a giant wooden spoon while warbling Irving Berlin’s ‘There were never such devoted sisters’ in drag struck me as a lot more difficult than doing Pinter or Chekhov, which just require a straight face and a high threshold of boredom.
My version of Eighty Days is not what you’d call strictly panto — and it has an elaborate narrative about the bank robbery of which Fogg is suspected, his bet at the Reform Club that he can circumnavigate the globe in time, and his adventures en route. But it has panto elements — plenty of ‘It’s behind you!’ and audience singalong. And it will be playing to families with children who have never heard of Jules Verne and his 19th-century fantasy adventure: at best they might have seen Steve Coogan’s atrocious 2004 film version.
So as well as telling a complicated story, the cast have to connect with an audience that may not be getting what it expected — and that includes many of their own nearest and dearest. In a small theatre, in a small town, the proximity of people you know in the front rows is hugely offputting for actors: I was once lowering my bulk gingerly on to a tiny folding stool at the front of the stage during a picnic scene in Ayckbourn’s Sisterly Feelings when I heard my own mother, five feet away, hiss, ‘He’s not going to sit on that, is he?’
My cast will have to ignore whispering relatives, play off each other’s mistakes, fill each other’s silences, and all the while try to obey Noël Coward’s basic instruction to all actors: ‘Speak clearly and don’t bump into the furniture.’ It was always going to be a compromise between what the director first imagined and what’s humanly possible on the basis of two rehearsals a week, a small budget and the favours that can be called from neighbours with handicraft skills. Ideas have to be jettisoned if they can’t be done, and some of the best lines never get delivered at all.
But it’s amazing what can be conjured up. We have dancing temple maidens and singing Reform Club members. We have a magnificent four-seater elephant built by a retired naval officer and his wife — just as a retired colonel has created a slide sequence of the transatlantic steamer Henrietta gradually disappearing when Fogg orders the woodwork to be fed into the furnaces to keep her speed up.
With a week to curtain up the scenery is wobbling, the actors are flagging and my temper is fraying. But against the odds, like Phileas Fogg and his companions, we shall reach our destination in the nick of time.
You might still catch the show — on until 17 December — but if not, don’t worry: we’re already planning next year’s.
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