UPSTAGED BY PEACOCKS. Wendy Macfee
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She complained bitterly that she had not expected to be attacked by fleas and a bat during the performance of a play.
“You see”, said Anne, “You have been given primary experience of theatre as it used to be in “old-time fleapits” and a very rare familiarity with a bat. You can’t get that in normal theatres.”
In subsequent years the custodians decided to clean up the hall and get rid of the straw and the fleas but the descent of the baby bats continued. The cast then knew what to do for them – just gently scoop them up, put them in a dark corner of the hall and then when everyone had gone, the mother and baby bat would communicate with each other through their echo-location and the mother would come down and take her baby up to the rafters gain. Anne who usually urgently rescued the bats away from the trampling feet of the audience, considered herself privileged to have had that experience, especially as she knew that the need to remove the bats from immediate danger to a place of safety gave her a rare excuse to hold them, as, unless you were a registered bat-expert, handling bats was forbidden.
She remembered the company’s first experience of a baby bat interrupting a performance in the 1979 Twelfth Night in the courtyard of Beningbrough Hall, Yorkshire. Straying from a nearby tree, it fell at the feet of Susannah Best, the actress playing Viola, and it flapped its way backwards and forwards across the stage, blocking her stage moves. She improvised the scene around the bat, pretending that it was part of the scenario until the bat flapped its way off the stage and back under the tree from where it was ultimately rescued by its mother up into the high branches.
CATS
At the beginning of the same season Susannah had experienced difficulties with another creature, a seemingly-very-tame-and obliging cat belonging to another member of the cast and which he had hoped might become a feature of the performances at Forty Hall, Enfield. It seemed a good idea at the time that Susannah as Viola should make her entrance holding this cat in role as the ship’s cat which she had miraculously rescued from the sinking vessel from which she herself had been saved. However in the first rehearsal of this scene the cat would have none of this stage business and shrieking protests and struggling from Susannah’s grasp, ran off into the surrounding undergrowth, her owner in hot pursuit.
Cats of course, know how to become the centre of attention in any event or location. The house cat belonging to Arreton Manor in the Isle of Wight decided to take centre stage in the 1997 performance of Twelfth Night on the lawn there as it demonstrated its prowess in catching a mouse. At last with the stage lighting and public audience happily beyond its previous experience of approval, it flung the mouse up in the air and then down at the actors’ feet in an ecstasy of triumph. It was difficult for the actors to continue with the play until it was persuaded to take the mouse off stage.
The house cat of Kentwell Hall, Suffolk did not need a mouse to attract centre-stage admiration. In a performance of The Winter’s Tale in 2006 it boldly strode into the stage action, sitting between the actors and looking up at them expectantly waiting for attention. Tony Portacio, playing the character, Leontes, could not reasonably ignore this spectacular performance and gestured at the cat in a movement which conveyed the genius of the new cast member’s tactic to upstage the play with such little effort. Only the cat’s owners could persuade the cat to leave the arena so that the play could continue.
DOGS
Tony Portacio was not so calm in a performance of Antony and Cleopatra in Heathfield Walled Garden in 1999 when a dog appeared from nowhere in the dark night, brushing against Tony as it made its way between two rostra and destroying the illusion that the gap between the rostra represented the space between the area where Tony as Antony lay mortally wounded and the higher monument (on the adjacent rostrum) up to which Cleopatra was trying to have him carried. Tony was wary of dogs at any time and broke character as he started with a fear uncharacteristic of the heroic Antony at this seeming apparition. Evidently the dog belonged to a person normally working on site and it had come through the stage area to find its master who was seated in the audience. Sadly it destroyed the moment in the play when the tenderness between the dying Antony and Cleopatra is most poignant (see the cover photo)!
Theatre Set-Up’s first experience of the capacity of dogs to destroy a moment came at the first site meeting in 1976 on the West Lawn of Forty Hall which was the home venue for the company for 29 years. Hoping to impress the custodian of the site with the quality of some costumes and props that had already been made for the forthcoming production of Hamlet, Anne had arranged them neatly in a pile in the middle of the lawn. Seizing his opportunity to possess these by signing them, Prince, Forty Hall’s resident dog, marched up to the pile, lifted his leg and urinated over it. In spite of this initial mishap he later became an accepted part of the productions at Forty Hall and routinely checked out the performances to make sure that no other dog was trespassing on his patch.
This could have presented problems in the 1977 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream when one of the actors brought in his dog Judy, to be the dog referred to by the character Starveling as partly representing the moon in the play-within-a play of Pyramus and Thisbe. Judy enjoyed the rehearsals for the play enormously and never needing to be taken onstage on a lead, or told when it was time to go on, was always ready for her cue to enter whenever the actor playing Starveling was in the stage action, especially in Act V when she was centre stage, featured as representing the moon. She became very confused, however, at the technical rehearsal when the scenes were “top and tailed”, cutting out any dialogue or stage business irrelevant to technical business or costume changes. Onstage she would go with Starveling and the other actors playing in the scene and no sooner had she settled down to enjoy the scene with them when she was rushed off again and plunged out-of-order into a changed scenario. Once offstage she settled down as usual to rest between her appearances when to her dismay she saw Starveling and the other actors going on stage. Rushing to join them and seeming distressed that she was uncharacteristically missing her usual cues, she made the technical rehearsal, usually a stressful occasion, a cheerful occasion with everyone’s admiration of her professionalism. When the play’s season had finished she was devastated. At the usual time of day when she should be ready to go to Forty Hall for her stage performances she would jump into her master’s car with eager anticipation and could not understand why they were no longer driving off.
Prince got used to her being part of the cast and accepted the inevitability of her continual presence in his domain during the rehearsals and performances of the play. During one performance he came onto the stage where she was part of the stage action and members of the audience froze, expecting him to challenge and fight or even mount her. However he gave her an approved nod which seemed to say, “Oh, she’s just part of this outfit”, and moved off nonchalantly.
Many people took their dogs for walks in the grounds of Forty Hall during the day and early evening during which times Prince was kept inside to prevent incidences with these dogs, but at night he was free to roam and although he was quite small, functioned as a superb security dog. It was only when he and his master were moved from living in Forty Hall that burglaries and vandalism took place there.
Another somewhat larger dog whose function as a guard dog was legendary was the one owned by the custodian of Sudbury Hall, Derbyshire for many years. He kept all the treasures and buildings of the National Trust there intact and continued his unpaid services to the National Trust at Corfe Castle when his master was transferred there as custodian. When Theatre Set-Up performed The Comedy of Errors at Corfe Castle in 1986 the dog had caught burglars trying to rob the National Trust shop there the previous evening. It convinced Anne that often the old ways are best and a dog can sometimes be better security than technical devices.
This was certainly the opinion of the owner of the car parking facility at Penzance where Theatre Set-Up were obliged to leave their van and car before sailing to the Scilly Isles for performances in St Mary’s and Tresco. This dog, a very large German Shepherd dog called Sailor, made sure with his teeth bared and threatening bark that no unauthorised person could enter the enclosed car parking yard or rob any of the vehicles (like Theatre Set-Up’s van) parked just outside it. Over the many years that Theatre Set-Up came to Penzance Anne and this dog became friends and every year when the company came to park their vehicles, Sailor’s owner would release him, much to