Merely Players -My Performance at the Royal Albert Hall

Merely Players
My performance at the Royal Albert Hall

Ms Paige Turner is publishing this – available from Serving Bluebird Pie – on Kindle – in honour of Mr Red Hat’s (Mike’s) 60th birthday. This is what we got up to when we were very young …

It’s circuitous – how I got to be there. David Putnam saw me in a play and cast me as one of David Essex’s many girlfriends in the film That’ll be the Day. Twenty quid for two days’ filming and the all elusive Equity card would be mine. Jackpot: if I hadn’t just started at drama college where there was a veto on outside professional work. You could busk or sell beer, but not work in the profession for which you were training.
“So, you want to be a film star and no-one will let you.” The new principal was sympathetic but firm on the issue as he poured me a dry sherry – a sweetener for the lost opportunity of gaining my union card. Forget the ride on the roller coaster with David Essex.
The bearded god scanned his desk for something to appease this block on my ambitions. He reached for a piece of paper and said, “Could you do me a favour?”
Rich, I thought, under the circumstances.
“Shelter is in need of young actors to perform some kind of …” and here his forefinger went into circular orbit, “scenario at the Royal Albert Hall in a charity show. It’s for about fifty or so. Give Thekla a ring on this number.”
Thekla asked – Could I find a male friend for the other speech and a girl to hold the baby? I asked my flatmates Mike and Charm. Mike asked if he had to learn his speech and I said, “Nah,” as I was drawing a trachea for my voice notes, “there’s only fifty in the audience.” So Mike didn’t bother to learn his speech and I became ‘acquainted’ with mine – which means you know the lines well enough to look up when you are reading.
Thekla – a snapper of a Greek, showed us our dressing room prior to the dress rehearsal. Charm remembered her doll and I remembered my script. Except Thekla said afterwards that we should ‘say’ the lines and not ‘read’ them. We had two hours to go before the afternoon performance. I said that lines needed a long term memory to be like – well – remembered. (I was eighteen at the time.) Then, can you believe this? Mike actually started learning his lines. How can anyone learn their lines two hours before a performance? Charm said, “Oh, have a go, Jan.” I told her to shut up as she was only holding the baby. I refused point blank to go scriptless and I think Thekla got a bit cross.
Anyway, when our time came, she led us to the pit beneath the stairs which led up to the arena. It was very noisy. I said, “That’s a bit noisy for fifty in the audience, Thekla.” She turned and frowned at me. “Fifty charities,” she said.
“Fifty?” I said.
“That’s eight thousand people,” she said. Only I was hardly conscious. I was certainly in the pits.
We ascended the stairs to our arena above – less like gladiators more like galley slaves. As I grabbed the handrail of the short flight of stairs which led upward, I felt the Greek at my elbow. “Be brave,” she said as she ripped my script away from me. Our overture had begun.
Mike was wonderful on the microphone. He pranced around calling ‘Shelter care – do you?” I discovered years later when I called him in to play Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at twenty four hours’ notice that he just made lines up. In later years Mike became a disc jockey which says something.
I got through because you do.
Thekla was thrilled. So was I. It was all over.
But no, the ordeal must happen again. Thekla had failed to inform us there was an evening performance. Sold out. And Thekla had hidden my script. We were lacking our mother and babe. Charm had a party to go to.
When Mike and I walked out of the Royal Albert Hall and made our way towards the underground, we didn’t speak for a long time. Then he said, “Cor. Cor, we’ve just performed to sixteen thousand people today. I’ve never done that.”
Neither had I. The sad thing was, we were never likely to again. Not live. Unless anyone offers me a floor show.
I still have the nightmare. It recurs: Thekla at the bottom of the pit, ripping my script away from my right hand and above me there are sixteen thousand lions in the Royal Albert Hall smelling my fear. But in my nightmare, I am, of course – naked.
Now that’ll be the day. Yah!!

Happy Birthday, Mr Red Hat
If you have read – MY NOVEL – BLACKBERRY PROMISES – and enjoyed please leave a short review on Amazon.

Last bi-month’s intentional error was the spelling of ‘Connecticut’.
A few places left on both Tuesday (Get Inspired) and Thursday (Get that Book) Creative Ink courses. Both courses are running
Dermot Fitzpatrick’s Creative Ink talk – An Acre of Diamonds – and my Beaconsfield Library talk on MY NOVEL – BLACKBERRY PROMISES – went swimmingly.