Rehearsals start soon!

In a couple of months time, I will be poncing around on the Barn Theatre stage dressed in a floaty fairy costume as Titania, Queen of the Fairies, in William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.

This is a part which I have wanted to play for a long time and I was delighted when I got it. As The Hubby said, there aren’t many times he sees me dance round the kitchen after  getting news about casting in a play, but this was one of them. And it was even better to get a part for which there was a lot of quality competition, and there was for this one.

Apart from majoring on pantomime villainesses, I’ve done well in the last few years playing ambitious parts which I wanted – last year it was Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s wonderful “The Importance of Being Earnest”, which I got the chance to do about ten years before I thought I was old enough (we are all influenced by the Edith Evans interpretation – which personally I think is rubbish - although of course Lady Bracknell is the mother of Gwendolyn who we know from the script is in her early twenties, so Lady B could be anything from early forties upwards), and the year before played Muriel Wicksteed in Alan Bennett’s “Habeas Corpus”, taking my clothes off on stage (yes, again!). Several years ago I played Miss Hannigan in “Annie” (the only time I have ever cried when a show ended because I loved it so much) and I have also played Ruth in the Broadway version of “Pirates of Penzance”.  So I’ve done OK.

Midsummer Night’s Dream is the very first play I ever did at the Barn Theatre when I was 17, and in which I met my first husband (so it has a lot to answer for!). I played one of the lovers, Helena. That was a very traditional production and I hope that this time the female fairies will be a little more surreal and more mischievous, and not quite so prim and proper. Titania is obviously quite a girl and that should be reflected in the performance; she is disobeying her husband, sticking up for her own property rights and holding wild all night parties with her girlfriends. She has, as that old fashioned and much mocked phrase puts it, quite a bit of spunk!

I am going to start trying to learn the lines soon. Shakespeare is relatively easy to learn in some places because it rhymes, which helps you, but the phraseology is so different to that we use nowadays that it takes quite a bit of time to familiarise yourself with it, and to get it right is so important to the overall piece. I won’t go into the first rehearsal with lines learned, but I ought to be very familiar with them.

I think it’s great that the drama group has started doing Shakespeare again after several years shying away from it, and for the future I have asked to direct a shortened version of ‘Macbeth’, which is a wonderful play of human deceit, greed and manipulation. My only regret is that I won’t be able to play Lady Macbeth, another of those parts I have a great ambition to do. I just know I will want to get up there and do it myself, but there are plenty of good female performers out there capable of it, so I will just have to restrain myself.

But that’s for the future and for now I am, for a change, playing a good fairy instead of a bad one. It will be nice to be pretty and blonde for a change instead of dressed in black velvet with black hair and a scowl. Can’t wait!