Five Kinds of Silence by Shelgah Stephenson started its life as an award-winning radio play that first aired in 1997. She then adapted it for the stage, and in May 2000 it had its debut at the Lyric Hammersmith in London. The cast included Gina McKee, Lizzy McInnery, Linda Bassett, Dione Inman, Gary Whitaker and the wonderfully immortal Tim Pigott-Smith in the cast. The tone of the piece is often lyrical, particularly from the revenant ‘animal Billy’ ('the tarmac road made my dog teeth tingle")
Who would have thought that one year on from what would have been our post-production week of Five Kinds of Silence by Shelagh Stephenson we still would have not performed the play, or even have a date in mind of when we can open again?
I have been really enjoying the new series of Talking Heads on the BBC. The first series was aired in 1988 with Alan Bennett in A Chip in the Sugar, Patricia Routledge in A Lady of Letters, Maggie Smith in Bed Among the Lentils, Stephanie Cole in Soldiering On, Julie Walters in Her Big Chance and the wonderful Thora Hird in A Cream Cracker under the Settee. I remember watching these and being totally enthralled. In 1998 the second series was aired with some of the same cast playing different roles Patricia Routledge in Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet, Eileen Atkins in The Hand of God, David Haig in Playing Sandwiches, Julie Walters in The Outside Dog, Penelope Wilton in Nights in the Gardens of Spain and Thora Hird in Waiting for the Telegram. When they were first published I remember appearing in and directing the odd one or two here and there. I even have a dusty old copy of the scripts on my bookshelf but haven’t revisited them in a good few years.
These are shortened and much more condensed descriptions of what were, at times, heart-stopping theatrical nightmares! Each one of these situations was eventually overcome and - thank goodness - solved without the audience suspecting a thing. But for those of us backstage, on stage, or out front we all gained a few more grey hairs on those days.
I am 100% sure there is no ‘good way’ to give this kind of news to anyone involved in the theatre. There never seems to be time to even fully digest what you have just been told because as soon as the news is delivered a plan has to be made (usually extremely quickly) as to how to combat the issue. The time to fall apart is post-show in the bar. But maybe the blow would be softened by some of these gorgeous baby animals delivering the news. What do you think?
When I look at the props list of a forthcoming play and I see that it has some rather unusual props on it, I actually get quite excited about the challenge. However, Steve Darvill - a member of our company who quite often helps to source the props - will probably say his heart sinks! Over the last two or three years it seems that a number of our productions have contained unusual props. We have had to hunt for some quite bizarre items - but more of that in another blog. Our next production, Breeders (What’s On in Eastbourne), certainly has some ‘weird and wacky’ props. The play centres around Santa Lucia Day and I was intrigued to see that Saffrons Buns were included on the list. Having no idea what they were I hopped over to Google to find out more and ended up delving further into the subject than I first anticipated. So, for all you bun lovers out there (said the actress to the bishop) read-ahead!...
