I need to be clear however from the off that there is a theatrical background, of the backstage and front of house sort, in the family. Wardrobe, scenery, carpentry; ticket sales, programmes and ice creams, that sort of thing. Perhaps even further back some performing. It's a little vague (or I'm just hopeless at recalling it)...I'm no keeper of history, family or otherwise, and this occupation (hazard, you might call it) has now skipped a few generations. All that remains is a love of going to rather than working in, behind the scenes or in front of them.
So what did I do after Miss Hanff? I turned to Angela Carter's Wise Children. Dora and Nora Chance, the main set but only one of numerous sets of twins. Theirs is a complicated history alright. Chance by name, chance by nature. Coincidentally, it was quite by chance I came across Angela Carter's last, perhaps her best, and most comic novel; I found Dora and Nora sitting gossiping, well, Dora was doing all the talking, in a railway station waiting room, and since they were lost I took them on the train – with me to work - and then brought them home again with me at the end of the working day. And here, well, here they are; sitting pretty on a shelf next to Expletives Deleted, with every now and again a one week holiday.
Dora's reminiscences of their growing up and glory days (on and off the stage) put me in mind of my own. The Saturday ballet lessons in St Mary's church hall, though I'm not sure now I was built for it, or even if I enjoyed them. I liked the slippers. We didn't wear tutus; I can't remember what we did wear...leotards I think, shiny and stretchy material, that as you grow older and taller (my height marked every few months on a wall) shows up all manner of lumps and bumps, as if you didn't feel awkward enough already. This duck will be a swan. Leaping across the room diagonally, arms flung, rather than floated out. Grace came later, well, some, anyway. I didn't have a Grandma Chance watching on (guardians or parents were forbidden to stay), but Grandma M, in later years, was, like Grandma Chance, partial to a Fox's glacier mint. Maybe that too (I've just cottoned on) was digestion related, just as today my after-dinner extra peppermint gum neutralises acids.
The end of terms shows I will gloss over. A leotard monkey, a tea-towelled wise man. The country dances on the school field, round a maypole. And the recitals, musical recitals: I and a recorder. I and a guitar. Painful playing. The school choir. Oh Lord. I should have known better. I was not a Thespian. So why try? God knows why!
There were plenty of 'unofficial' plays (with plenty of rehearsals beforehand), too, put on in the garden, with costumes and props, from the dress-up box or magicked up from somewhere. Grandma M (the amateur Charlie Chaplin and actor-manager of the family) encouraged it, and would join in too with an impromptu performance of her own. She'd steal all the laughs, and all the rolling eyes, though she too had never been on the theatre stage (that I know of), but mostly behind or in front of it. But if you're of a large family, as Grandma M was (and orphaned young), you entertain.
So, no, again I repeat, though I felt it in my blood (and sometimes my waters too) I was not born to it. Even my toy theatre (not at all like the theatre Dora and Nora were given by their uncle/father on their seventh birthday) couldn't convince me of that, despite hours of play, of moving cardboard actors around on plastic rods. What thrilled me to the core was the theatre – the big theatre - and being in the audience. One of its anonymous members, and yet not entirely faceless because you always felt singled out. You never imagined the performers couldn't see very far; they were speaking to, looking at, you directly. Of course they were! Starstruck. By all of it, the actors, the music, the props and backdrops, the change in costume.
The anticipation, however, was the best bit: the warming up. The band taking their places in the pit and tuning up, the lights dimming, the curtain rising. After that you'd either be swept up and swept along, or would, on extremely rare occasions, beg to leave (forgo the ice-cream, the bar, and the queue for the ladies loos) rather than suffer through the second half.
Picture credit: The Orchestra Pit, Theatre Royal, circa 1935, Dorrit Black (source: WikiArt).
Written June 2020.
