On-going

Just back from our second night of As You Like It, though since we kicked off at 4.00 pm in a sort of matinee version, it might be better to regard this one as the afternoon version. It occurs to me that it's quite a while since I've been involved in a show running more than a couple of nights. I've always favoured four performances for school productions, this being draining, but bearably so, and affording a deeply rich learning experience for the players as they realise how much shows grow in repeated performance.

Something else that I've realised more acutely than usual. We're doing this show outdoors, as it were, the performers having the cover of a couple of school corridors, but the audience being out in the open. Yesterday things were touch and go because it had rained hard all day prior to kick-off, and we actually started proceedings in a light drizzle. This demanded a lot of patience and understanding from those watching, and they gave of that plentifully, prompting me to remember a mantra I hit upon a few decades back: You don't get good drama without good audiences. (I think this is original, by the way, though I may well have stolen it from someone wiser.)

Oh, and I should add that yesterday we had to deal with a burst pipe and a flood backstage some forty-odd minutes ahead of my introducing the play - except that most of the 'dealing with' was done by the guys from our Estate Department, who were also coping with minor flooding in other spots. Without their intervention we would never have been able to proceed, reminding me of Peter Gabriel's pithy observation that there's always More Than This, always so much more than the talent on stage. Always so many others we rely on in a world more connected than we can possibly understand.