MY PERFECT MIND IN PLYMOUTH

Edward Petherbridge and Paul Hunter in My Perfect Mind.
Photo by Manuel Harlan

The first reviews for My Perfect Mind, which opened in Plymouth last Thursday, have been posted on Edward’s News blog. More reviews and photos will appear there in due course.

After Plymouth, the show moves to Liverpool, Salisbury and the Young Vic. For details of dates and venues, also see the News blog.

Don’t miss this unique and beautiful piece of theatre.

KR

PLYMOUTH HOE!

Photo by EP

Monday We’re speeding South West on the train to Plymouth and I see from our rehearsal schedule that tomorrow morning we begin at 10am and finish at 10pm. Kathleen Riley and I are squashed into standard class, which Kathleen tells me is rather more generous than economy class on the twenty-four-hour flight from Sydney. We left London in three inches of snow with more falling. That was peanuts compared with the news from America, but much of the West Country farmland seems to be flooded. Having just passed Newton Abbot racecourse with the sun struggling unsuccessfully to make a last-ditch showing, we are looking forward to Plymouth’s Devil’s Point and the promised excellent restaurants in Royal William Yard near to where we are staying.

Was it in another life that I played the Ghost and Player King in Hamlet, Master Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor and King Cymbeline in a Royal Shakespeare Company residency in the Theatre Royal Plymouth, some 15 years ago? Certainly there is only green sward where the old Hoe Theatre used to stand, a kind of aircraft hanger in which in 1973 I played Prospero in The Tempest on a tiny makeshift stage. It was a rather well-designed production, brought from the Northcott Theatre in Exeter and crammed economy class against an adapted set which, for some unknown reason, was like an enlarged detail from an upended yellow-and-white chessboard. After a particularly dull children’s matinee, I rushed out to a DIY store and bought a great deal of Dulux white matt and a brush, believing that an abstract set would be better. As the cast returned for the evening performance, they saw I would be hard-pressed to finish in time for the curtain up, so I wasn’t alone in my scene painterly transgression as members of the cast hove to. As a matter of fact, it occurs to me that I shall be doing something equally anarchic on a nightly basis in My Perfect Mind. Perhaps fate has forged this unexpected link between my very young Prospero and my elderly Lear.

Wednesday Here you see the glories of 1960s Plymouth as glimpsed from the green room window:

Photo by EP

Photo by EP

And some of the glories of Plymouth’s 1830s Royal Naval grandeur and its victualling yard, adjacent to our digs, now swishly converted to a complex of bars, restaurants and galleries:

Photo by EP

Photo by EP

Thursday

This worthy scaffold, blank page at a slope
I now presume to mount, yes strut and fret
To claim this ground and leave my mark, in hope
That this rectangle, though confined, will let
Us use it as a launch pad; levitate
Float free and yet retain a gravitas
So even our charades will never vitiate
But make a show in limbo veritas.
Perforce like you we’ll mingle fact with fiction,
Kings of our castles – commoners and fools.
Perhaps we’ll falter, muddle our depiction,
Journeymen mishandling our tools –
But in this game we vow to play our best;
Prepared to see ambition face its test.

Model set for My Perfect Mind, designed by Michael Vale.
Photo by EP

Posted from the dressing room of the Drum Theatre, Plymouth where we have our first performance tonight.

Photo by KR

HMV REPRISE

HMV, which I still prefer to remember as His Master’s Voice, is in administration and so to mark the event we have remade our little feature of April 2010 celebrating the label and the artist who made it famous, Francis James Barraud – not forgetting his dog ‘Nipper’.

TWELFTH NIGHT, OR WHAT YOU WILL

NOW, now the mirth comes
      With the cake full of plums,
Where bean’s the king of the sport here;
      Beside we must know,
      The pea also
Must revel, as queen, in the court here. 

      Begin then to choose,
      This night as ye use,
Who shall for the present delight here,
      Be a king by the lot,
      And who shall not
Be Twelfth-day queen for the night here.

Robert Herrick, ‘Twelfth Night’ 

In celebration of the last day of Christmas, a little retrospective compilation of Twelfth Nights I have known, or indeed played in. In the course of two decades I appeared in three productions of the Bard’s rich and poignant comedy, each time as a different character: Orsino, Feste and Malvolio. In two of these productions, my wife Emily played Viola.

Pastel by EP

As Malvolio, during the roistering scene, I had a long entrance, appearing on an extensive high balcony in nightgown with candle, skittering appalled down the long staircase, slipping slightly on the bottom step, and then holding a pause in silence staring at the recreants. I discovered a piece of business almost by accident. Holding Malvolio’s lit candle in the wings, I coughed slightly and blew it out. I found a match to relight it swiftly – so as not to be late on – but was keen to recreate the moment in the scene. So at the bottom of the staircase, I did a disgusted, affected little cough before starting on ‘My masters, are you mad?’, causing Malvolio inadvertently to extinguish the candle and thereby puncture his own dramatic moment. This inspired detail drew an appreciative titter, but Dylis Laye, our Maria and the only person on stage who saw it (the others were looking away), thought it was a piece of unfortunate reality and turned upstage, crippled with stifled laughter. By the time Sir Andrew, Sir Toby and Feste turned to me, I had caught the infection and was incapable of speech, though I managed to disguise my mirth so well that Guy Henry’s Andrew Aguecheek thought I was having some sort of seizure. 

Pastel by EP

As the run progressed, the business found its proper place. But then came the night when the computer-governed balcony, which was adjustable at various heights, got stuck in the flies and I was told my entrance in nightgown with candle would have to be made through a stage-level door: a disappointingly less effective entrance, but I did the cough and played the scene and, without thinking, made my exit as usual up the high staircase, only realizing, when I was three quarters of the way up, that there was no way to make my exit, no way down off the steps, but just enough room to perch vertiginously on the top of the stairs, hidden behind a foot of curtain, facing a sheer drop. Of course the others were left to finish the scene as best they could, corpsing at the thought of my perilous position.

Photo © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and pastel by EP

Happy New Year!

Announcement

To those of you who have pre-ordered your boxed set of Slim Chances with Additions and Afterthoughts, these are now ready and will dispatched to the four corners of the globe later this week.

If you haven’t already ordered a copy of this handsome 4-CD audiobook, and would like to do so, please visit the Merchandise page of Edward’s website.

KR

THE WAYS DEEP

The grate had been removed from the wide overwhelming fireplace, to make way for a fire of wood, in the midst of which was an enormous log glowing and blazing, and sending forth a vast volume of light and heat; this I understood was the Yule-log, which the Squire was particular in having brought in and illumined on a Christmas eve, according to ancient custom.

Washington Irving 
(who visited and celebrated bucolic West Hampstead)

A Very Merry Christmas 

to You All!

Photo by EP

Postscript

You might like to revisit, or indeed see for the first time, Edward’s beautifully moving performance of Dickens’s Doctor Marigold, written as a Christmas story in 1865 and here presented at Stratford’s Other Place in 1999.

KR

PRE-ORDER SLIM CHANCES, THE AUDIOBOOK

The special-edition 4-CD boxed set of Slim Chances with Additions and Afterthoughts is now available to pre-order on Peth’s Staging Post.

Visit the Merchandise page and pre-order a copy at the click of a button with PayPal.

The boxed set will be shipped to you immediately on its release (we hope in time for Christmas!). The audiobook will also be available soon as a download.

Watch the trailer for Slim Chances with Additions and Afterthoughts here.

KR

ADVENTURES OLD AND NEW

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul. 

Somerset Maugham

I am preparing for the second week of rehearsals for My Perfect Mind, reminding you that the title is derived from King Lear and the king’s line in the waking scene of Act IV, sc.vii:

And, to deal plainly, 
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

When I say preparing for the second week, I must tell you that the previous five-day week has been so intense that the phrase should properly be ‘recovering from the first week’ rather than ‘preparing for the second’. Paul Hunter and I, aided and abetted by our director Kathryn Hunter, and watched over by our designer Michael Vale, have had a fascinating time; not at all tiring whilst it’s been happening, but on the bus and train home I always spent the time looking forward to doing nothing and going to bed early. I have done devised shows in the past, but I don’t think that I have ever quite experienced the rehearsal room becoming such a working adventure playground of the mind and, dare I say, spirit as each day we have navigated ‘unpathed waters, undreamed shores’.

I hope you enjoy watching the trailer, which Kathleen has devised, for my new audiobook of Slim Chances. Reading aloud, even the five-hour abridgement with afterthoughts and additions, was to re-visit so many people and places whilst being enabled to bring the book up to date, at least as far as the eve of the first of the rehearsals I have been – as you notice – unable to write about as yet!

Postscript
The CDs of Slim Chances, which will appear in a handsome boxed set, are being printed as we speak and we hope to announce details of their release very shortly, here on the blog and on Edward’s website. And a reminder that details of dates and venues for the tour and London run of My Perfect Mind are available on the News blog.