Don't Put Your Daughter On The Stage Mrs Greenspun!

I was a member of the 'drama club' and my biggest and best role ever was as the KAISER in a comedy play written by the history teacher, you can imagine the mysteria however it was put on in a double bill with London norphan drama "The Chimney Sweeps" so actually people were pretty pleased for even the very minor light relief offered by my comedy German accent.

Unfortunately the result of my stardom was that there was a picture of me in costume-chest military dress up on the wall of my hall for years and years and it mortified me. I think it's now been moved somewhere where it doesn't confront every single visitor to my parents house.

It will be good for your confidence...

I did loads from the ages of about 11 to 18. So the awful photos range from a small me dressed as a flapper girl with Egyptian eye-make up (Phaoroh's wife in Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat) to a teenaage me in an okay-ish 19th C. black velvet ballgown affair. That was Anna in Anna Karenina - but for youth theatre the adaptation was quite racy and I've never quite got over having stimulated sex (although still clothed) in front of my parents and 300 other people.

Tom, you played Mark C???? that's brilliant.

I played Ratty in our production of wind in the willows, I learned my lines quite easily which amazes me to this day, but come the night I donned my brown tights, strode across the stage, past a table... that promptly put a leg-long ladder in my tights aaarrggh, cue much embarrassment and lots of giggling from the audience. I didn't want to do it any more so I feigned illness the next night and my understudy had to do it. Apparently he did very well, git.

Surely Tom, your best role was as an alcoholic journalist, passed out under a desk in _Pravda_?

I recall playing, at various stages: James Pond's girlfriend in a 'hilarious' parody; the 'obsequious lisping Squeak' as the reviews had it in _Billy Budd_; random townswoman in _Huck Finn_; Dionysus in _The Frogs_, possibly the worst production my school had ever seen; various roles in an adaptation of _Under Milkwood_, possibly the best production my school had ever seen; some bloke in a terrible play about a ghost; various roles in some experimental drama called 'Gum and Goo'; an agressive Brummy footballer who twats a philosopher in Tom Stoppard's _Professional Foul_. Probably others. I acted once at university where drama was run by a very cliquey group of yahs and ponces (alumni including (I think) Daisy Donovan, someone out of Hollyoaks, Darius off, well, everything) and gave up in horror.

"stimulated sex" may be my favourite Freudian slip of recent times, Anna.

My career on the boards. Age 9: cute turtle in 'Snow White' (I got this role because my nickname at this time was touche turtle). Age 10: the baby elephant in 'Jungle Book' (notable for my impressive Method speech impediment). Age 11: a policeman singing "If you want to know the time, ask a policeman" and "Wally Wormwood-Scrubs", a Stanley Holloway-type monologist, reciting a v long poem about Albert Ramsbottom (which I can still remember vast chunks of) in the school Music Hall. Age 16: Fabian in 'Twelfth Night'. Age 19: Phulas in 'The Broken Heart'. This final role put me off acting forever - it was an incredibly lame student avant-garde production of a Webster revenge play. The great thing I learned from my acting career: it is a great way of meeting gurlz, especially when you are condemned to five years at a boys school.

oops

my glittering stage career spanned the ages of about six and eleven.

warmed up with: my first stage performance as tap dancer #1 in the King and I - jazz-tap being hugely popular in the royal court of seventeenth century Siam.

which gave me confidence to: demand a solo performance in school play aged 8 singing a song about raindrops. midway through performance idiot on curtain *sabotages* my moment by closing the curtains. my nose is the only thing remaining in audience view. the auditorium peels with my wailing. i run off. am urged to return and begin again, which i do. however the magic is lost.

the post-glory years: condemned to playing the angel messenger in two school nativity plays in my mum's nightie and a pair of tin-foil wings.

i could have been a star.

I'd forgotten the alcoholic journalist. I'd also forgotten 'The Frogs', which was a mercy.

Worst aspect of my school drama club (not same school as alext, earlier one) - we only had two bits of scenery. One was a huge wooden block and the other was a really crap wooden throne. So every single play - many written by the history teacher, as mentioned - had to have a throne in it somewhere.

Directing was loads more fun than acting.

When I was 5 I was the narrator for the school nativity play cos none of the thick fucks in my class could read, so I won the part by default.

i was a cockle shell in a brave musical adaptation of Mary Mary Quite Contrary (my understated performance was much lauded in method acting circles). my costume consisted of my school uniform with an inexpertly drawn picture of a cockle shell safety-pinned to the front.

i was also mary in a nativity play. i had one line to say, and i forgot to say it. doh.

When I was eleven, I played Dracula in a school play. I had my pre- orthodontic treatment buck teeth painted with black triangles so they resembled fangs. I had to dance around with all these other people dressed up as Frankenstein's monster etc to Bobby Boris Pickett and the CryptKickers' "Monster Mash".

I was pretty actively involved in the drama club in high school, but mostly with the behind the scenes stuff like painting sets, etc. I was an incidental extra a couple of times, but I was so painfully shy I knew I would choke if I had to do any real acting in front of that many people.

I was never picked for school plays - too ugly, they said. I offered to write some but my housemaster said they were far too way out. I wish I could've been more like Dennis Potter; he had charisma and I didn't. That's how it goes, I guess.

When I was 5 I was the only child who didn't have an acting part in a school Christmas play. It wasn't that I was bad or unusuable or anything. They just forgot to give me anything.

When I was 11 I played The March Hare in a production of "Alice In Wonderland". This was my best performance ever.

When I was 12 I played Ophelia in a pretty shoddy version of "Hamlet" (all-boys schools = ACE, clearly); my wig looked like Agnetha put through the ringer, with bits trailing along the ground. The kid playing Hamlet looked more girlish than I did.

When I was 13 I played The Undertaker in "Oliver". My song was a marvellously doomy Nick Cave affair, but losing my voice by the third performance put paid to my glorious but still-artificial baritone croon.

When I was 14 I co-wrote and co-directed a play instead, having realised that the key to my talents lay in keeping my mouth shut and my face unseen. It was a three hour epic with fifteen main characters and no plot to speak of. But we liked it.

When I was 15 I again co-wrote and co-directed what was intended to be an adaptation of Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera", but ended up more like "David Copperfield's Creek - The Musical Episode".

I haven't done any drama stuff since.

I'm sure we've done this before. And I have mentioned the time where they forgot about me. And I didn't get a part. And I was sitting at the back of the hall, wondering when they were going to call me up to the stage. They didn't. Then I tugged on the sleeve of a teacher and asked 'where do I go miss'... the teachers looked at each other, and then down at me, the child forgotten.

"Just go and sit in the corner for a while". I sat with the year below me. In a stupid group chorus. Acting. YEAH RIGHT.

8th grade -- lighting tech.

10th grade -- talent show

11th grade -- Mayor Shinn, _Music Man_

12th grade -- announcer/pageant coordinator, _The Skin of Our Teeth_

Illustrious!

My first role was as Dr Livesey in Treasure Island when I was 13 or so and I realised I could pull off the whole pompous victorian thing pretty well.

Then I had a pretty big speaking part as "the sailor", sounds crap but it was good honest, in Candide. And it was a huge fancy Candide production so I was very pleased. I had all these funny silly lines and the people I ended up meeting through it would get me to say them, one was after an earthquake, and hilariously comically timed, "and everybody died".

Then the drama teacher decided that cos I couldn't sing (HE THOUGHT GRRR) I would be better off in plays as opposed to musicals. I got to play Pickwick in The Pickwick Papers, MY FINEST HOUR.

Our secondary school discriminated against my thespian efforts (previously: assorted Nativity characters inc. angel & shepherd; Joanna one of the women who discovers Jesus' tomb is empty; The Sleeping Beauty, Adrian Licheri whose mum was a hairdresser had to kiss me, ick) by a) only ever doing musicals when everyone knows I can't sing and b) only allowing girls called Charlotte to be in things.

I was once the Artful Dodger - crowd say bo selecta 'cos you've gotta pick a pocket or two etc. etc.

Did Drama for 'O'-level, so plenty of opportunity for arsing about on stage in self-written 'comedy' 'sketches'. For the actual exam practical though, I found myself plunged into an indoor recreation of the football scene in Barry Hines' Kes (I think I was off with tonsilitis the week everyone had to decide what they were going to do, and Dave Morris and Paul Shirley snapped me up for their grand production in my absence). I was Billy Casper, natch. Ken Loach later heard to remark "if only I'd waited..."

i was a dancer in Oliver! and a person in a mob cap in A Tale Of 2 Cities (my friend Natasha did a hilarous spoonerism on that one). but best of all was when i WROTE our 6th form panto - ahaaaaaah, ph34r my casting power! and i played Jarvis from the MAry Whitehouse Experience, cos it was dead fuuny back then knoworrimean?

I was a theatre techie. I did lighting designs for, In parenthesis, Amadeus, The Magic Flute, Much ado about nothing (outside) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Deathwatch. I did sound design on a very complicated radio play our headmaster adapted for the stage called 'In Parenthesis'. An orchestra had to be recorded and we borrowed a pan pot from the national theatre and a sampler and made the shell's 'fly' over the audience. The shell noises were taken from the imperial war museum's sound archives.

I worked on a whole load of other plays aswell.

Christ. I was Dick Whittington in one of my later years at Primary school. Starring role, ja, ja. Of course, though, our school was 'right on' and half the time only ever produced plays about obscure African tribes, so they had to change a few things. Such as making a stand against the oppresive regime of the Mayor of London keeping the females down, man, through the brutal and outdated institute of marriage. So, yeah, the chick wouldn't marry me. Apparently because I had "smelly feet". You should have seen the mirth that one caused amongst the tricycle riding hippy dippy parents.

I can't believe someone else here was a cockle shell! I'm so pissed - and here I thought they'd retired that role when I was done with it.

in 7th form i played polly browne in that godawful musical "the boyfriend".

in primary school, whenever there was a school play i would insist on playing the witch. there was no argument really, because i was the little girl who would hang by herself in the trees, mixing potions and casting hateful spells on her peers during playtime. i also had a wicked cackle which was inspired by "bad jelly the witch".

I honestly can't remember any mandatory school activity that required a stage presence, apart from gradudation exercises and the like. However, in the belief that forced good cheer does wonders for the developing child, my day camp held “talent shows” at least twice every year, maybe more.

These were looser and more irreverent than school programs. Sort of a highly devolved version of an end-of-the-year college revue. Sometimes it would involve all camp groups putting on skits arranged around a theme (I got dressed up as Elvis for some Americana extravaganza the year before he died), and sometimes it would be a potluck talent show, and sometimes it was some kind of group fight- song competition, and more often than not it involved everyone in your group wearing crepe paper costumes while singing in front of an audience that in theory included your parents. The song might just be something your counselors put together, a bunch of unwieldy lyrics about how badass their group was, set to whatever tune these guys had taken a shine to that year. Queen was quite popular year-in year-out, as you can imagine. In ‘82, it seemed that every counselor in my camp was profoundly affected by the movie Stripes from the year before, because when the group songs weren’t based around Murray’s drill routine, they were based on "Da Doo Ron Ron.”

I can’t claim to have a precise recollection of what they sounded like, but when I put my mind to it, I imagine a chorus of young boys whining to their moms that they were too sick to go to school. Nobody could sing. Or if they could, they made something of a point of not being able to. Maybe keeping in tune was for girls or some such bullshit.

It's easy to smug about these things now, but you must understand that I hated these shindigs so fucking much. None of the other boys liked them much either, and I just deeply resented being forced to put on a humiliating dog and pony show just to please some condescending asshole adults. (It seemed as if girls liked them because it gave them the opportunity to do gymnastic routines to Laura Brannigan, though memory may exaggerate the universality of this.) While I was a "good" kid (albeit one who refused to play any sports and was beat up a lot), when it came to the talent shows I did everything I could to "act out." I walked offstage in the middle of one sing-a-long, maybe more. One time I claimed I couldn't sing “Food, Glorious Food” because the “custard” and “mustard” rhyme made me nauseous. Another concert I managed to nap my way out of; the next time I lamely faked sleep and it worked, too. Most counselors were just not up to dealing with me in full-on passive-agressive mode and relented to my whims without a fight. Of course, sometimes the counselors would try to guilt-trip by reminding me my parents were in the audience, but this was pretty pointless after my mom realized it wasn't worth the bother to come to these things if I refused to go on stage. (My dad, however, didn't need to be convinced. He never came to these things to begin with.)