Holding your act together
Queen Victoria had been dead for fifty years by the time I was old enough to have heard of her. That being so, it seems odd to me that in the popular culture of the nineteen-fifties in which I grew up, ‘Victorian’ was such a term of opprobrium. More understandable in the ’twenties perhaps, with the inevitable pendulum swing of attitudes being that much more recent. Well, ‘Victorian’ still is opprobrious to some extent, but ‘fifties’ has joined it as shorthand for anything archaic and disapproved of!
I was a bit surprised to read an article by journalist and editor Stephen Pollard saying “I’m 56 and so of an age that remembers what it was like before the words ‘mental health’ were common currency. ‘Pull yourself together’ was the response to almost any kind of adverse experience”. My own childhood was twenty years prior to his. “Recollections may vary”, as has carefully been said of recent royalty — but I remember the modern world of my youth lectured everyone on not saying ‘madness’ but ‘mental illness’, never ‘asylums’ but ‘mental hospitals’. Perhaps the point on which my memory matches Stephen Pollard’s is that though one had to say ‘mental illness’, there was considerably less talk of ‘mental health’. Words, words, words.
As for pulling yourself together, I can’t see that that is the opposite of compassion or understanding. I don’t see how work can get done without such an approach, whatever else is going on in the way of exploring one’s problems. I have several times encountered fellow actors who have ‘cracked up’ with potential harm to the performance the audience has come to see, and surely everyone should be grateful for a bit of pulling together. The results have been various. If people drop out when a performance is imminent, that can be a great worry for colleagues. If there is danger of their doing so during a performance, it can be hell for all.
One actor with whom I was doing Shakespeare — well, I won’t name him, I liked him and sympathised with his problems and sadly he has since died, in his late forties. He was a recovered alcoholic — a not unique discovery about fellow actors — and had had a bad accident, which was presumably related. On this occasion, we were in the last week of a run when the police called at the theatre, apparently after being contacted by the actor’s mother, alarmed that he was not taking his medication. They were eventually persuaded that the best thing for him was to carry on with the show, and with some concern we got through the evening. At the end I congratulated him warmly, and with relief, for keeping it together, adding the automatic farewell “See you tomorrow.” “I don’t know if I am coming tomorrow” he replied darkly, returning the situation to Square One.
Next day we were called in early to run through his part with a possible replacement who had been put on alert. The inevitable happened, and the man himself arrived while his scenes were being rehearsed with someone else. Well, we got through that night without needing to replace him. And we got to the end of the week with him, not always comfortably. The actor who had had most to do with him in the play never forgave him.
A comparable situation had arisen much earlier, in a play in Yorkshire. Someone cracked under the strain of the repertoire — which can be a very real strain — and was threatening to throw up the season. That time too a replacement was alerted, and we rehearsed a contingency arrangement and then the person concerned walked in and we did the show as usual. There was another night too when we had been afraid he would not go on, but he did and then in a crucial scene put his hand in his pocket to produce a vital prop. He didn’t find it there. “Ah! I’ve left it in the car” he told us, and rushed off stage. As there was nothing to fill the gap we were mightily relieved when he returned with it — and that he returned at all.
This last situation, the missing personal prop (meaning one the actor has with him), also arose on a tour I did, though it had nothing to do with mental fragility and it concerned an actor much better known than those remembered above. Who was now getting on a bit. Not sure how many times we’d done it, but we were in Richmond (Surrey) when the star went to produce some ID which was essential to the scene and the plot. His hand came empty out of his costume raincoat.
No one can say that that cast lacked initiative. About four of the actors on stage adlibbed a line to cover the hiatus and to try to move the scene along. Unfortunately all the ideas were different and cancelled each other out.
When the star got off stage he was less mortified than puzzled. “ I know I set it in that pocket” he insisted. Back in his dressing room he discovered the explanation. He’d been in a dressing gown to keep his costume suit protected — and before he changed into the raincoat, he had mistakenly placed the prop in the corresponding pocket of the gown.
After that, the Assistant Stage Manager who checked the ‘personals’ before each show was careful to see not only that he had the prop, but where he had set it.
These things happen.
