Break a leg?
Luck? Who needs luck?
And what about that Scottish Play, whose name players fear that they mustn’t say?
As a young actor I made my own stab at the murderous title character in the “unlucky” play (on an educational tour of Northern Ireland from the Belfast Arts Theatre). I suggested to the colleague playing Macduff that we should rehearse our fight with his glasses off — he would have to perform it that way. Yes, I am old enough to have been in Shakespeares that were actually not done in modern costume.
“Oh, no” he said “I want to be able to see what I’m doing.” This was not encouraging.
But his bad luck didn’t come in our skirmish. The poor chap got the sack — for breaking the contract conditions by going home to England on a free weekend. Managements could be tough. Not for missing anything, just for going home. Oh, and for not having the sense to keep his mouth shut afterwards about having gone home. All of us who lived out of the Province had quietly done the same.
Fights on stage usually are choreographed and rehearsed — certainly for preference. But one show produced a scrap that wasn’t. When I directed Dominick Browne’s biblical play “I, Mary Magdalene” we had trouble with Judas, a young actor whose belligerence was perhaps connected with what he was taking. In that play the casting was only too apt. And the tensions produced a bust-up at rehearsal, which got around, perhaps because Dominick the playwright was heir to Lord Oranmore and Browne, his centenarian father who was then still alive.
So was my own father, who rang me in the morning. “Did you know your show is in the Mail?” He didn’t mean for artistic reasons, he meant the rumpus. We were in Nigel Dempster’s ‘Diary’. “Who do they name?” I demanded anxiously. “They name you!” When I looked in the Diary feature, I was named as the director and being ready to go on if we lost an actor. Phew. They say all publicity is good publicity. Thank you, Daily Mail.
My own luck has included going to Cyprus as a boy in the ‘fifties just when EOKA terrorism was building up, and and going out to Northern Ireland as an actor just in time for the beginning of the modern Troubles. In the first case, the restaurant on the ground floor of the flats where we lived in Nicosia took a bomb. In the second, we were at the Arts rehearsing Priestley’s “Time & the Conways” — of all incongruous and very English plays — when the house manager appeared from the foyer shouting “Everybody out!”
This meant danger, not industrial action. So we jumped off the stage and ran in his direction for all we were worth. We were, fortunately, halfway across the fairly large foyer when the bomb went off in the street and all the windows shattered inwards (not for the first time, I believe). Luckily we were clear of the glass. One actress, who played the young woman I didn’t get to marry, was in the loo and at greater risk, of course, being in a smaller space. But she was all right. A policeman outside was injured. We would have been safer running backstage, and leaving the building by the Stage Door which was further down the same road. We were lucky.
As for actors allegedly not wishing ‘Good luck’, a glance round the cards in any dressing room will tell you the opposite — so far as this country is concerned, anyway.
And the luck of the profession is like life in general. The sheer randomness of a career in this freelance occupation is illustrated for me in the remark of the long-experienced Kenneth McClellan: “I haven’t done a great deal of television” (actually he did quite a lot, by many people’s standards) “but I have been in three separate serials of ‘Kidnapped’.”
