Out of Town

      (In April Hamlet opened its out-of-town, pre-London tour at the New Theatre, Oxford.)

Getting-In

      No one on the production staff of a touring company ever has a free Sunday.  Sunday is the day of the ‘get-in’—the theatrical word for moving house.  The scenery has to be set on a strange stage, the costumes and wigs set out in strange dressing rooms, the lighting rigged and pre-set—all of which takes the best part of the day, apart from travelling time.
      The costumes arrive hanging in eight box-shaped wardrobes, gaily painted with stripes or clouds or animals.  Inevitably they are never quite ready.  The wardrobe mistress and her assistants immediately set about sewing, or dying, or repairing them further.  Some are being sprayed with aerosols of grey paint to age them.  One still has to be made—for the English Ambassador, a role that was cut early in rehearsal and only restored at the last moment.  ‘I’ve told them he can’t be put back till his frock’s ready,’ says a harrowed wardrobe mistress.  To the wardrobe, all costumes, male as well as female, are ‘frocks.’
      One of the scenery drapes has been left behind in London by mistake and someone has been told to bring it.  The props travel in skips and are being set out in the dressing rooms or on tables behind the stage, one left and one right, according to the entrance at which they will be needed.
      Every theatre raises different problems.  The New Theatre, Oxford, has what is called a ‘bastard prompt corner’—that is, it is stage right instead of the usual stage left. The deputy stage manager, who is going to operate it, has to discover how much, or rather how little, of the action can be seen from there, besides mastering all the switches which confront one like a pilot’s panel.  While operating the cue lights, the DSM is also following ‘the book’—the acting text as finally amended—to prompt any actor who ‘dries.’  
      It is early on Monday morning, the day of the technical and dress rehearsals.  Most in evidence are four deputy or assistant stage managers—Marje, who will ‘run the corner,’ Garth, who operates the music and sound effects, Ted, who supervises the setting and striking (taking on and off ) of stage furniture from scene to scene, and Lance, who is responsible for sending everyone on with the correct props—be it a dagger or crown they should be wearing, a scroll or goblet they should be carrying, or Yorick’s skull which must be hidden inside the grave convenient to hand for the gravedigger to unearth.  The better the actor, the better he is at remembering his own props—but they must always be checked.
      One of the less enviable tasks of the stage management, usually the junior ASM, is to set off the maroons.  A maroon, which is the size of a large cotton reel, is really a highly-compressed firework, which has to be set off well away from the stage to provide the effect of a cannon.  The rules stipulate it must be inside a welded tank. ‘Right!  Loud Bang!  Everybody ready for a loud bang!’  People affect nonchalance and go on climbing ladders or hammering nails but the test explosion, when it comes, makes everybody jump.
      Meanwhile, on hands and knees, people are marking the positions of the corners of the throne, the council table, the Queen’s bed, Ophelia’s tomb, with pieces of coloured sticky tape—red for this scene, yellow for that, blue for another.  Small as they are, they have to be found in a hurry in the dark or an actor may have his moves and his concentration ruined by finding that a table or a chair is a couple of feet out of position.
      Another stagehand is moving about the stage being ‘lit’ in the positions that will be occupied by the actors.  Every theatre’s lighting board varies and the touring company brings and rigs extra lamps of its own.  The theatres they play provide their own chief electrician, master carpenter, dressers and housekeepers. 

      The company manager is responsible for the delicate exercise of allocating dressing rooms.  ‘You learn,’ says Clare Fox, ‘by bitter experience who can’t stand whom.’  Only the two, or perhaps three or four, principals get a dressing room to themselves.  Tradition has it that the more junior the actor, the farther his dressing room is away from the stage.
      The walk-ons, like the wardrobe, are always at the very top of the steep backstage stairs, which makes little sense in Shakespeare when most of them are continually changing their costumes and their parts as members of the stage army.  In the course of the evening a junior will walk on in perhaps six different guises as soldier, courtier or servant, with no time to hare up and down three flights of stairs between each change.  Many of them have to use quick-change areas just behind the wings, dressing directly out of the travelling wardrobe boxes.
      Clare describes her role as company manager as ‘a glorified nanny—if anything goes wrong it’s my fault.’  She it is who finds digs and doctors, copes with private crises or bad news from home, smoothes hurt feelings and, most important, produces the pay packets every Thursday.  They are ordinary buff pay packets with hard cash inside and the actors’ names outside, even those of the stars.  Actors on tour need the money in the hand.  Prudently she sees that the money is well concealed about her and handed over at varying times and places.  ‘You wouldn’t guess I was carrying £8,000, would you?’
      In England the cast are left to find their own accommodation.  Many have their favorite places from previous visits, though the reliable old theatrical digs run by theatrical landladies are disappearing now, because touring is on a much smaller scale.  ‘We’ve got everything this week from the grandest hotel to the cheapest digs—no baths after 9:30 p.m.  Someone’s staying on a houseboat.’
      Everyone is required to write his address on the notice board inside the stage door.  It is chock-a-block with lists.  Call sheets, dressing room details, good-luck telegrams to the company in general from well-wishers and from the leading actor, Derek Jacobi, all compete for space and drawing pins; and somewhere, hanging on forlornly dog-eared and pin-holed, is the invitation from the local padre representing the Actors’ Church Union.
      Over in the prompt corner, Marje, the DSM, is sorting out the cue board.  There are rows of button switches operating cue lights in red for “Stand by,’ green for “Go,’ some of them irrelevantly labelled ‘Orchestra,’ ‘Projector,’ ‘Limes” or ‘OP Trap.’  These are being altered with sticky tape to ‘Musicians’ (backstage, not in the pit), ‘Maroons,’ ‘Electrics,’ ‘Flies,’ or ‘Houselights.’  Beside the cue board hangs the house telephone by which she can get through to the front of house, the lighting console, the stage door and so forth.  In front of it is the microphone through which she can address the cast via the inter-com.
      Marje is in a bit of a spin because at the last minute the interval has been moved.  All those cues written in the prompt book need altering for several pages to take account of it.  ‘And to think I turned down a nice, simple show because I thought this would be more interesting.’
      It is, of course, more interesting.  But at a moment like this, with only one rehearsal to finalize everything—they have just decided to combine the technical and the dress rehearsals for lack of time—the responsibilities for getting everything right in that prompt corner are fairly frightening.  
     During the morning the actors have been arriving, by rail or road, and drifting in to look at the stage and get the feel of this unfamiliar instrument which they will have to play.  The rehearsal is called for one o’clock and starts 50 minutes late because a new lighting plot for the play’s opening has to be tried out.
      Much of an actor’s life is spent waiting.  While they wait, they lurch about under the unfamiliar restriction of cloaks and boots, helmets and crowns.  What seemed nimble moves in rehearsal now seem impossibly slow and ponderous.
      The actors feel and look like strangers.  One spear-carrier misses an entrance completely because he has gone back to the dressing room.  Another finds himself on stage at the wrong moment altogether.  ‘We don’t usually have the pleasure of seeing you in this scene,’ remarks Claudius with gentle irony.  ‘Wear the costumes, don’t let them imprison you!’ calls the director’s voice from the darkened auditorium.
      It is 6 o’clock before they break for drinks and sandwiches, brought in from the pub next door.  Further difficulties arise in the second half.  The Queen’s bed sounds like a stage coach as it is trundled on for the closet scene—‘For God’s sake pick it up and carry it!’—while the Queen’s long velvet train is coming away and has to be sewn back on to her.
      Behind the arras a DSM crouches holding a block of polystyrene for Hamlet to plunge his sword into, in place of Polonius.  The trouble is, it squeaks when the sword goes on.  ‘So would you,’ says the DSM testily.  ‘We’ll try foam rubber.’
      After eight hours on your feet, most of them waiting, it is hard to love the director, the play or the author, who seems to have contrived so many difficulties in staging.  By the final court scene, tempers are short. They break at five past ten, just soon enough to get out of costume and into the pub for the last quarter of an hour’s drinking time.  They need it.      

First night

      The final night at Oxford begins casually enough, an hour before curtain up, with two stage hands sweeping the stage. Clouds of dust are rising in the patch of light that surrounds Hamlet and Laertes, who are rehearsing the duel under the critical eye of the fight director, Ian Mackay.  To one’s surprise he is small and bird-like, one of the highly select company of fencing masters who arrange fights for the major companies.
      However often it has been practiced—and they have been practicing every day for a month—the duel has to be rehearsed before every performance for safety reasons.  Hamlet, after three hours on stage, is bound to be tiring.  Any uncertainty can mean injury.

      Mackay varies each duel according to the fencing abilities of the actors (‘These two are very good’).  There are 72 moves in all, with cup hilted rapier and dagger.  They are divided into three sequences by the dialogue.  The whole fight lasts over two minutes. Each lunge and answering parry is written down in a ballet-like notation with tiny drawings and the name of each position written beneath.  It is as easy to ‘dry’ in a duel as it is in a speech.  ‘The most important thing is to keep eye contact,’ explains Mackay, ‘so that if that happens, the other actor can see it and both go into the “escape routine.”  You bring both weapons down, close together, and go back to the beginning of the sequence.’

      Apart from practicing the fight, Derek Jacobi has been in his dressing room since 5:30—two hours before the show will ‘go up.’  He hasn’t slept for two nights and this afternoon there was a drill going outside his hotel.  ‘I spent the night with the show going round and round in my head—entrances, exits, cuts.  I’m not able to eat yet.  I’m living on Dextrosol.  I feel desperately tired but when you get out there, you somehow find the energy.  There must be a way of doing it without flogging yourself to death, and I’ve got to find it.  And yet, if you don’t go flat out you’re not giving 100 percent of your performance.’
      To add to his worries, he has had an unspecified throat infection that has baffled the doctors all through rehearsals.  Glasses of water are set for him at strategic places in the wings.  It is all that can be done.