“When my cue comes, call me…” yawns Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, awakening from an erotic adventure with the sudden realisation that he’s supposed to be appearing in a play.

An actor’s nightmare is to find himself “off” or, even worse, forgetful of his lines, though audiences never really mind about this too much: the reality of the contrived situation of theatre, and their part in it, is reinvigorated by such mishaps.

But the New York Times today reports something a little more serious: customers at previews for the actor Matthew Broderick’s new off-Broadway play by Kenneth Lonergan have been joined in the front row each night by a prompter feeding lines throughout the performance.
 
This is because the play is being re-written before a now delayed opening night. And the article goes on to say that 84 year-old Angela Lansbury had an ear-piece to stay “on cue” during her recent Broadway appearance in Blithe Spirit.

One feels sorry for both actors, one plagued by chaotic creative conditions, the other by failing faculties.

The ear-piece is the new prompter for elderly actors, and the teething problems of the device are mostly overcome; in the 1980s, both Michael Redgrave in London and Mary Martin on tour in America picked up taxi signals that echoed round the auditorium.

The suspense of knowing that an actor is struggling to remember the next line is one of the most deliciously unpleasant in the theatre, and it’s a gag that almost every Polonius since Michael Bryant at the National exploits on the line, “Now, what was it I was about to say…”

Drying, as forgetting one’s lines is known, need not be a serious problem in blank verse drama. Victorian actors used to have bits of blank verse up their sleeves for almost any situation.

As the great Seymour Hicks used to say, “Have something ready that sounds like verse, for if you speak in a ten foot metre, you can talk utter nonsense and with luck get a round of applause on your exit.”  

It’s much harder to survive in prose, and there are countless stories of actors passing the buck, or facing upstage, in order to wriggle out of a crisis.

The New York Times also has the story of an actor fired from a production in the provinces because he’d taped bits of dialogue inside his hat, which he kept doffing and inspecting throughout a difficult scene.

I used to know a leading amateur actor, James Cooper of the Renegades in Ilford, Essex, who had most of the play sellotaped around the scenery and his own costume; as he directed, designed and lit all the productions, as well as playing the leading role, he rarely had time to learn the part completely in just a couple of weeks.

His genius, though, was to find his cue whenever he dried and make it look as though the other actors were at fault.

His whole performance, in fact, was often a ballet of opening doors, or drawers, looking craftily through windows and behind pictures on the walls, shooting his cuffs and checking his trouser bottoms, and indeed his titfer, thus re-entering the dialogue with a renewed, scene-stealing emphasis.

My favourite prompt story is that of the celebrated Lunts, Lynne Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, a married couple — she, coincidentally, was also from Ilford — who appeared in many light comedies together, joined at the hip both on and off stage.

One night, their merry onstage banter  ground to a complete halt. The prompt was heard once, then twice, then again, even more loudly, echoing to the rafters.

Finally, Alfred Lunt stepped purposefully towards the downstage corner of the stage and hissed in the prompter’s face: “We know what the line is, but which one of us says it?”
 

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 10:56 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.