Perhaps it's a flippant thing in theatre these days, but it's something I stand by passionately - when you're not onstage, you're dead silent. Some plays it's easier than others, like if you're on for many scenes and you always have to keep an ear open for your cues, but in the last two plays I've been in, Ruby Moon and Alice in Wonderland, most characters only have one scene, and whatever occurs afterwards is of no concern to them.
So what do you get? Conversations. Loud ones. Over what's the goss according to Cosmopolitan or something akin to that. And lord knows, I hate being the shusher. It's a frustrating task, because honest to god, nobody seems to give enough of a shit to stay quiet for more than a minute. It's not a long play. It's two hours, and that's it. Is it too much to ask that, if you really have to talk, that you keep it down?
Maybe I'm just beyond the times, or some sort of anti-social pretentious git. All I know is, I'm here to put on the best damn show possible, and backstage noise can only detract from that.
It's a dying art, that professionalism thing.
Tony you are beautiful.
ReplyDeleteOne day we will do a show together, in which we spend a lot of time backstage, and we shall both be superbly quiet.
I was going to say we'd do a two-man show, but then I realised that that would result in very little time spent backstage together.