UPSTAGED BY PEACOCKS. Wendy Macfee
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and he would greet her as a long-lost friend. However one evening Anne saw him keeping guard in the parking enclosure and expecting a friendly welcome, approached him as usual. Bared teeth, threatening posture and barking made it quite clear that he was then working, that this was not friendly territory and she would be given the same treatment meted out to anyone straying there.
At Plas Newydd in 1981 Anne could not understand why a dog was keeping constant watch outside one of the outer buildings of the mansion. The custodian, on the other hand, was full of admiration for the dog who, he explained, was courting a bitch there.
“Good on you boy”, he called to the dog, “you deserve her”. “And at just the right time”, he said, “She turns her bum.”
There was always a friendly welcome from the house dogs at Pencarrow in Cornwall. In all its printed material Theatre Set-Up always advised its audiences, “Please bring own folding chair or rug”. Anne commented to the dog’s owner that one of the house dogs must have been able to read one of these signs as when she appeared on site this dog brought her a rug in its mouth as if to show that it was ready, like the Pencarrow visitors, to sit in the audience.
“He’s a retriever,” explained the dog’s owner. “He will always welcome you by bringing something to you in his mouth.”
This hospitality, typical of the generosity of the human owners of Pencarrow, became increasingly bizarre as the dog presented Anne with whatever he could find in the house or garden. There were beautiful antique dolls on display in the house and on one occasion the dog appeared with a pair of Victorian doll knickers in its mouth. His presents became even more embarrassingly inappropriate when he appeared at Anne’s music desk with expensive exotic plants between his teeth that he had rifled from the garden pond. His owners always forgave him for whatever wrong he had done, as he was a very affectionate dog with what seemed to be a permanent smile on his face.
A large beagle dog with floppy ears called Harold rejoiced at the chance a Theatre Set-Up performance in the Temple Amphitheatre, Chiswick in 2005, gave him to achieve an ambition to jump into its central pond. Evidently he had been taken for his daily walk past the amphitheatre and had looked longingly at the pond, prevented by going into it for an enjoyable swim by the fence which surrounded the site. On this occasion the gate in the fence was open to allow the audience to enter, and taking his chance, Harold escaped from his owner who frantically called out to him as he raced through the gate and bounded down the terraced slopes of the amphitheatre, his ears flapping wildly, at last plunging into the pond and swimming around it in delight. It took some time for his embarrassed owner to persuade him to come out of the pond and to succumb to being put on a lead for an exit through the amused audience settling down to eat their picnics before the play began.
A reference to a dog far from the scene of the performances caused a hiatus in the performance of Romeo and Juliet in 1996. The actress performing Juliet, Victoria Stillwell, loved dogs, later abandoning her acting career for one specialising in dog behaviour, presented on television in the UK and the USA under the title of “It’s Me or the Dog”. Anne was performing her favourite stage role of the Nurse in the play and was waiting offstage for her cue to enter into the play’s action when she began to tell Victoria about the games she enjoyed playing with Oscar, the much-loved dog which lived downstairs with her neighbours. Both she and Victoria became so engrossed with this description that Anne missed her cue and was astonished to be hauled by her arm onto the stage by the actor also directing the play that year. Considerable bruising on her arm reminded her of the occasion and her need to prioritise the stage action rather than remembering the beloved Oscar.
Sometimes dogs in the Theatre Set-Up performance sites were an integral part of the house arrangements. Muffin, a tiny dog at Kentwell Hall, Suffolk was one of these. At the site visit during which Anne and the property’s owner were deciding on the location of the play, they chose a bank beside the Hall’s moat. The plan was that the audience would sit on the opposite bank which slanted down to the moat, providing a tiered effect in rows of chairs one above the other. Muffin seemed to question the wisdom of this as she stood sideways on the audience bank with a quizzical look at her owner. In spite of her disapproval of this arrangement, the performance went ahead in this location, but the back legs of the audience chairs had to be fixed into the bank. This was fine when rain had made the bank soft, but dry hard conditions made this impossible and endorsed Muffin’s criticism as the audience tried not to be tipped forward into the moat on their sloping chairs.
The dog with the most site responsibility was Topsy of the Baroniet of Rosendal, Norway. She welcomed in all the hundreds of visitors who came to her resplendent home and was in charge of general security. She became very disturbed during a 1996 rehearsal in the Baroniet courtyard of the duel between the actors performing the characters of Tybalt and Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet.
“Fighting in my courtyard?” she seemed to be exclaiming. “Which of these is the guilty cause of it?”
She watched for a short while and then, taking her decision, bounded reprovingly over to the actor playing Tybalt, the belligerent character in the play. Such accurate discrimination complemented not only her ability to detect Tybalt’s aggression, but the actor’s intention and portrayal of this characteristic of the role.
In Cornwall people were often given permission to bring their dogs to the performances. At one of the performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1995 in Trevarno there were 13 dogs of varied species in the audience. The actor performing Puck made a sudden loud entrance onto the stage and all the 13 dogs barked their alarm in a cacophony of tones. It was a good moment in the play, heightening Puck’s supposed supernatural presence!
In 2011, much to the amazement of the local animals who had become accustomed to the peace of a semi-wild garden haven, permission was given to the company to rehearse the play in a rear extension of a suburban garden which backed onto a park and would not thus disturb any neighbours. Foremost of these animals was Duke, a huge Great Dane dog whose fenced garden adjoined the rehearsal area. He had made acquaintance with members of the company while taking his master for a walk in the nearby street and had enjoyed their admiring attention. When their rehearsals began he had no intention of allowing that to cease as he thrust his head above the fence of his home waiting for the expected patting of his head to occur. Of course the cast did not want him to feel rejected and the appearance of his head above the fence always created a break in the rehearsal schedule.
The dog who belonged to the owners of the rehearsal space was Otto, a lively dachshund. One of the company’s cast members owned the house and garden next door and had always had problems keeping Otto out of his garden into which he could wriggle through gaps in the dividing hedge. You can imagine Otto’s indignation when he saw this neighbour delivering his spoken lines and being put through his paces in the play in what Otto considered to be his own territory. He stood looking at the actor in dumbfounded disbelief at the outrageous cheek of it!
Other creatures, accustomed to being able to wander freely through the rehearsal space, watched the unfolding of the play with astonishment. A neighbouring cat took advantage of the roof of a shed at the edge of the garden area to survey the extraordinary proceedings in the style of an attentive member of a theatre audience in the dress circle. This was at an advanced stage in the rehearsal schedule and the cat obviously could not understand the formality of the action, lacking the spontaneity of the human behaviour usually manifest in this spot!
SHEEP
Many of the beautiful sites where Theatre Set-Up’s performances were held were surrounded by grazing sheep. These contributed to the pastoral reality of performances of As You Like It in Bowhill, Scotland. During any scenes involving the characters of the shepherds in the play the actors offstage used to enjoy making sheep noises. These were so realistic at Bowhill that the sheep in an adjacent field responded loudly and ran towards the tents to recover which of their flock they assumed had strayed there.
FISH
A fish made a surprise appearance at the performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1983 at Sudeley Castle. The actor performing Starveling as the Pyramus and Thisbe play’s character of the moon had a carved flat wooden dog representing the moon which he usually