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A night at the (amateur) theatre…

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

There’s been an awful lot of it about lately. This past weekend I subjected myself to it for a third time in a matter of months – a record for me considering how unenthusiastic I am about it, and only explicable on the basis that I am excessively generous in humouring my family’s peculiar whims and baffling desire for my participation therein. But the good news is that for the first time since . . . well, for the first time ever, I was not desperate to throw in the rag, haughtily chuck my bag over my shoulder and storm out on the whole diabolical mess half way through. Which is saying a lot.

I am of course talking about attending an amateur dramatics’ performance.

It is not the sort of entertainment I naturally gravitate towards; being the sort of severely critical person who tends to find more fault than good in it (and, in panic, doubt my critical faculties when the balance is inversed). Even a professional production has to be pretty damn stupendous for me not to wish I’d just stayed in. This time though was different; in spite of forgotten lines and weak passengers, inevitable when the pool of players to draw from is so small, the play (Michael Palin’s The Weekend), sort of worked; and I was quite content to sit it out.

And why it worked should prove instructive to other am-dram groups: the key to success is not to be overly ambitious. The characters of The Weekend are ordinary, ageing, middle-class people, living (crushingly) ordinary, middle-aged, middle class lives. In other words, your average rural am-dram crowd is, by virtue of the typical social profile of their membership, suited to this comedy, and the lucky audience are consequently relieved of the exertion of suspending disbelief beyond the bounds of reasonable possibility.

On the basis of plausibility alone therefore, The Weekend was, in retrospect, always bound to have been better than, for instance, what I consider the nadir and high-point of my am-dram experience: a children’s production of Robin Hood. Therein the title-character, a slight, soft-spoken girl with the charisma, colouring and memory of a gold-fish, tried to persuade us that, as well as being an inspirational leader of men and hero of English folk-lore, she was also consumed by a passionate love for Maid Marion – played by a strapping girl fully one foot taller than her beloved, and alarmingly more butch. Despite this, I may still have been willing to give Robin the benefit of my considerable doubt, had she only bothered to memorise the script. As it was, Little John, who, for better or worse, kept the whole thing afloat, doubled as prompter, breaking frequent, unscripted pauses with such helpful questions as ‘Robin – would you like us to go into the forest?’ and ‘Robin – should we collect food now?’ Perhaps even this I wouldn’t have minded so much, if I wasn’t fully aware that the parents of these vapid blighters paid for them to be taught weekly in the rudiments of acting; the first rule thereof presumably being: remember your lines.

Though at least I can concede that children, being children, are somewhat impaired when it comes to convincing an adult audience that they too are adults, and great heroic characters to boot. Adult amateurs, though, have no excuse, and really ought to resist veering into the opposite sin: acting younger than they are. The efforts of a paunchy, sweaty, balding male lead with an overstrained larynx to convince us that he was in fact a young, dashing, irresistible Lothario of a pin-up hero had my grandmother shaking with silent laughter during a recent performance of The Pyjama Game (and cackling for a good day less silently thereafter). Our Lothario’s one saving grace was that, unlike the remainder of the deluded cast, he at least was practiced in the rather important art of facial expression.

Although deciding whether The Pyjama Game or Robin Hood was the more ridiculous is too close to call, I would advise, on balance, attending an adult rather than a children’s amateur production. At least then you can freely, unashamedly laugh if it is awful, for, if it is awful, the people participating really ought to have accrued enough self-awareness to recognise their true abilities. Though by watching adults you are surrendering the delight of walking amidst child-actors at the end of a play and picking on them at random to say ‘you were awful’, ‘you were ok, for once’, and other such compliments as would nip their futile ambitions in the bud and encourage them to focus on something far more sensible, like accountancy, instead.

If only all thespian societies were as considerate when choosing their play as the cast of The Weekend, perhaps then my judgement on the subject would be a little more lenient and community-spirit-orientated; and my feelings on taking my next village-hall seat would perhaps lean more toward polite curiosity than fearful foreboding.

Georgina Phipps, Editorial Administrator

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