I am a theatre addict. Live theatre is my fix, as in: under the same roof, on the same night, side-by-side in the stalls. I go a lot – or did. Right now, I am in chronic withdrawal. Strung out, I’m streaming re-runs.
This week, I watched a filmed 2013 RSC production of Shakespeare’s Richard II with David Tennant, Jane Laportaire, Michael Pennington, Oliver Ford Davies, Marty Cruikshank heading the cast. (You can find it on marquee.tv/series/rsc Sign up for a 30-day free trial but don’t forget to cancel or you’ll be billed.)
All of the actors – the leads anyway – are stellar. Masters and mistresses of their craft, years in the making. The author deserves some credit too. But there was something missing.
I have a long-cached Vimeo called The Hour. Filmed by Pinny Grylls, the documentary tracks National Theatre actors – Simon Russell Beale one of them – in the hour before the curtain goes up: from the moment they sign in at the stage door, through their warm-ups, and on through all the other stuff actors do to pump themselves up before going out on stage. It’s fly-on-the-wall. It’s funny. And, if you have ever been asked to face down a live audience, nightmarish. (‘You expect me to go out there?’) What’s missing in RSC’s filmed Richard II and The Hour is us. The audience.
Before the plague – Will Shakespeare would get the reference; he wrote some of his best work when London theatres were shut down by an epidemic – I went to London to see Tom Stoppard’s latest – and maybe last: Leopoldstadt. Sitting next to me was a woman from Nottingham. Difficult journey, delayed trains, long haul back. Single ticket-holders – me, her – flash codes. “I’m here on my own. That may seem weird. But I’m here to watch a play not talk. Unless you are a single ticket-holder like me. In which case …” We talked.
She had never seen a Stoppard play. Didn’t know who he was until she heard a piece on the radio and decided then and there to make the trip. On her own. We had our parts to play that day. Before the curtain went up at the Wyndham that afternoon, we exchanged histories: a bit about her, a bit about me, a lot about Sir Tom, a lot about the play, this singular moment that had intersected our lives and brought us, briefly, together.
Another theatre; another recent show. This time Caryl Churchill’s Far Away at the Donmar. 45-minutes long the play; £45 the ticket price. One pound a minute then. Better be good. It was.
Same set-up. Two single-seaters. Pre-curtain as much a part of the action as the show we were both there to see. She was a scientist, she told me. Her husband, a mathematician. Which is why he despised Stoppard. Fake maths apparently. And why, by mathematical deduction, he never went to theatre at all. (Puzzle that theorem, Fermat.)
She, the scientist, did. Relentlessly. We cut to the chase. She had booked to see The Visit at the National. I had seen it already. What could I say? Don’t? I didn’t. She was going to see Leopoldstadt. What could I say? It’s long but Sir Tom’s son Ed does fine work? We bonded – for that one moment – over plays; moths at the same flame.
Live theatre – not the “brought to you live from” sort; nothing against that – is a communion. The high-lit priests up there on stage; we, the congregation, out there in the dark in hushed conversation; a confessional if you will. For one brief moment we – them up there, we down here – are united; all of us facing the same perils, living the same short life, hoping things will turn out for the best – or fearing they won’t.
Richard II is a tragedy. It ends badly. We know now our present tragedy will too. We grieve for the lives unnecessarily lost, the hearts unnecessarily broken. Someday, we hope, I do, the curtain will rise again and bring us back together. I’ll be there when it does. Row G, Seat 5, single-ticketer. This time, I will pay close attention to the story my seat-mate has to tell me. It will be our story. Before the curtain goes up, we will mourn together.
Image Credits: On Stage https://www.onstageblog.com/columns/2016/4/8/dear-actors-crewthank-you-for-tonight .