Inevitably in any Oxford student cast, there will be one poor mite who has never set foot on a stage before. Though this isn’t necessarily a problem overall, never is it more of a problem than on the opening night. Whilst other, more weather-beaten actors calmly beat their heads against the wall, confident of their time-honoured techniques of getting into the mad Ophelia mindset, the faces of the newbies blanch with the one fear they’ve never encountered before: the terror of drying up on stage.
However, although it could go either way with an acting virgin, at least they’ll be scared enough to actually bother learning the lines. If there’s one thing I’ve learned during my years of working with arrogant theatrical upstarts, it’s that the better an actor thinks he is, the finer he’ll cut it when it comes to knowing by heart what he’s supposed to be declaiming. I know this because I am one such arrogant upstart myself. When you know you physically can learn it all on the night of the dress rehearsal – because you’ve done it before – you know you surely will. It becomes a sort of game. An Eton scholar once told me how, when taking public exams, he and his friends used have bets with each other about how long each one could hold out before turning over the paper and beginning, simply because they knew they could. One finds the same such tomfoolery with learning lines.
What truly marks the amateur out from the expert, however, is the ability to claw it all back when you’ve literally lost the plot. When putting on a play, no matter how much your cast take the piss, you need to know that if someone does have a mental blank, they’ll be able to cover their tracks. And there’s only one way to do that: improvisation. When starring in Tom Stoppard’s light-hearted, abridged version of a Shakespeare classic in this year’s Cuppers, one befuddled Hamlet came up with: “Dog will mew and cat will have his day… apparently.” However, making light of the situation only works if it’s a comedy. If the play is in earnest, that’s when you really have to think on your feet. As did a certain friend of mine who, having completely forgotten her thirty-line monologue supposedly in response to someone on the other end of a telephone, said “I’m sorry, I can’t really hear you… I think you’re breaking up.” The audience didn’t notice a thing; desperation is sometimes the most fruitful muse.
