Bored of the Boards?

 It is seven years since I last did any theatre and that's a rather frightening thought. Hermann Kafka in a rather fabulous production by Sarah Esdaile  of "Kafka's Dick" by Alan Bennett at Watford Playhouse. A fabulous cast, four weeks rather enjoyable rehearsals and then the play was on. We had a relatively short run for two weeks after the press night, but by the end of that time I was longing to move onto something else. These days my boredom threshold is quite low, and going into something for three or four days and then moving on suits me absolutely fine.

 Yet theatre was what I trained for. My desire to become an actor born out of school plays and plays created with neighbours children in back gardens during long summer holidays. My training was almost entirely theatre based, apart from two weeks in my second year doing a piece of theatre in front of some television cameras. When you left drama school in the late 1970s, theatre was what you were expected to do, and it's what I was lucky enough to do for quite a long time. Sure, there were little bits of television dotted here and there.  A couple of days on the original "Brideshead Revisited", a clutch of episodes of "All Creatures Great and Small"  filmed in the idyllic Yorkshire Dales during the long hot summer of 1979,  but theatre jobs were my bread-and-butter.  Pantomime in York,  two fabulous plays at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, one of which took me all over Europe, and seasons in several great repertory companies with fantastic fellow young actors.  Huge fun.

  These days doing theatre proves rather problematic. My bread-and-butter is corporate work mixed in with a couple of  days most months doing some TV. To clear my diary for eight or ten weeks to go and do a play is almost impossible, and it's the bread and butter work that provides the money for me to subsist on in the style to which I'd like to be accustomed.

  

  So this week it was great to visit the theatre, to go up for a recall for a piece of theatre, and to prepare to take part in a reading at the Globe Theatre tomorrow.

  

 Adam Buchanan was the winner of the Alan Bates award in 2013 and he's just coming to the end of a very successful run playing "Mr Bingley" in "Pride and Prejudice" at the Crucible theatre in Sheffield. The Crucible was the theatre of my youth. As a sixth former I attended the first Saturday matinee there in 1973 or thereabouts, and to walk into it again on Tuesday night was a thrill. It's a brilliant magical space, and in this instance filled by an inventive lively and energetic production. I'm not a great fan of Jane Austen, and if there were any longeurs in the evening, it was down to her dialogue, but a brilliantly energetic cast worked hard to make it an entertaining night out. And of course Adam was fantastic, but then I knew that already.

I went back for a recall for a play coming up at the Park Theatre which for purely selfish reasons i'm keen to do as it would fit my dates brilliantly. On both the initial audition, and on this recall, I was struck by just how much more work one does as an actor in a theatre audition than in a TV casting. TV castings are normally limited to you giving your reading for camera, and a second one if you feel you can do better. In these two interviews my opinion was sought as to why the character is like he is,  and as a result I left the meeting feeling both engaged and involved. I don't know whether I've got the job, and I don't know whether I'll be able to do it if I'm offered it, but I was thrilled to get the chance to do the meeting and test my mettle.

 I will be testing my mettle in a different way tomorrow when I take part in Read Not Dead, a series of play readings that take place at the Globe Theatre during the summer months. Actually they've been going now for 20 years, and I have a distant memory of taking part in one during that first or second year, and also directing one. The actors meet at 10 AM on a Sunday morning having been sent the script of  some obscure play a few days before - ours is John Ford's "The Lovers Melancholy"- and after rehearsing for a few hours, they throw themselves into presenting it for an audience at 4 PM that afternoon in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Hectic I'm sure, and theatre presented in a way that demands you make instant choices.  There will be no time for the boredom factor to creep in here, and a particular joy and highlight of this job is that I will be sharing the stage with Luke Dale, the Alan Bates winner 2015 who I am mentoring for the next year. Taking part in tomorrow's reading is part of Luke's amazing prize bundle, and it was a great idea from somebody at the Globe that as I had done two of these readings 20 years ago, I should take part in the same reading as him. Given that he is coming to the end of three years intensive training at Guildhall which will have included an awful lot of theatre, I'm not sure just who will be mentoring who tomorrow. It will be great to go through the same experience as him. A shared common experience which brings joy. and surely that's what theatre is.

The brilliant Adam Buchanan strutting his stuff as Mr Bingley.