What Are You Looking At, Pal?
Extremities by William Mastrosimone
Derby Playhouse, 1996
Extremities is a play which achieves much of its shock effect through physical violence. As fight arranger for this production, it is Nick Hall’s job to make sure that such scenes not only look convincing, but also – and more importantly – that they are safe for the actors. Robin Seavill asked him how he went about it.
“I like to work organically,” he says. “I talk to the director and the actors, find out exactly what tale they want to tell, and take it from there. The director will say ‘I’d like to do it like this.’ It’s then my job to work out how it can be done or, if it can’t be done, figure out a safe alternative.”
The graphic sexual assault that opens Extremities is obviously a difficult scene to play. It was among the first to be rehearsed, so Nick spent several days with the actors and director at the start of the rehearsal period developing it. “Stage fights are always slightly larger than life. They need to project to the audience, which is why they are usually more involved and detailed than in real life. When people clash in the street there’s always a lot of bluff going on, but on stage or screen that conflict has to be translated into physical action.”
Usually the risk of injury can be reduced by the judicious use of padding, but the actress in the present play is not allowed any such luxury: dressed in little more than a bath robe, she can’t carry any padding with her, so the most that can be done is to ensure the rug onto which she is thrown has a thick underlay…
What are the main qualities a fight arranger needs? “Sympathy, imagination, and the ability to teach the craft,” says Nick. He always arrives at rehearsals with plenty of ideas on how to play a scene, but makes sure he remains flexible enough to fit in with the director and the performers and the needs of the moment. Anything from the design of the set to the potential weapons at hand can affect the way he choreographs a scene.
That word ‘choreograph’ cropped up several times in our conversation; it seems there are distinct parallels between the arts of dancing and fighting on stage. Both require empathy and respect for one’s partner, the ability to follow a sequence of carefully rehearsed moves, and mental discipline. Basic co-ordination and a reasonable degree of fitness naturally help though these apparently are less important than having a mature attitude. “Fights can usually be arranged to accommodate the varying abilities of those involved. Some people think they can’t do it, but then if you stretch them a little, they often find they can do more than they realised and so they enjoy it more.”
On the other hand, there’s always the possibility you’re going to run up against an actor with the equivalent of two left feet. “There’s a standing joke among fight arrangers that the Tybalt who gets cast in Romeo and Juliet, the man who’s meant to be the best swordsman in Verona, has never picked up a sword in his life!” I asked whether there was a preponderance of actors concerned about the thought of fisticuffs (“Not the face, not the face!”), but was assured that many performers can be surprisingly physical when required, and seriously devote themselves to learning the necessary skills.
Just as fight arrangers need not be Arnold Schwarzenegger types, so it is better for actors not to be too conceited about their physical prowess in order to avoid the macho element of competition. “I’ll probably get into trouble for saying this,” says Nick, “but you often find women are better at learning the moves than men, because there’s no machismo to get in the way. They tend to approach it as a learning experience and so follow instructions. The thought of actually hurting your fellow actor on stage is one of the most important elements, because that leads to respect and an unwillingness to take unnecessary risks.”
But a fight arranger doesn’t just arrange fights; any action on stage or screen involving physical contact – from threatening someone with a hammer to falling downstairs – needs an expert’s input. Take something as simple as a slap to the face: do it with a cupped hand in the wrong place and you can burst your opponent’s eardrum. A hangnail can cut the face. In Venice Preserv’d, Nick Hall had to oversee the preferably bloodless whipping of a character by his mistress, and last year on the films In the Bleak Midwinter and Othello it was his job to make sure the likes of Kenneth Branagh and Laurence Fishburne didn’t do any damage with their swords. The most common injury from swordfights on stage is not, surprisingly, stab wounds, but rather bruised fingers, which is why most actors will wear gloves when swashbuckling.
At the other end of the scale, the most obvious weapons are not always the most lethal. Nick also teaches at the Central School of Speech and Drama, and he once asked his students to bring in any household implement whose primary function was not combative. The harvest they produced included chip pans, a hoover hose, dust pans, brushes, and many other items equally humble. “In The Miser at the Manchester Royal Exchange recently I even had someone attacked with a sink plunger. It’s interesting sometimes to use things which aren’t considered as weapons.”
Does Nick Hall ever consider the effect on the audience of the violent scenes he helps stage? “Yes and no. The audience have already made certain subconscious decisions by coming in. Others have made the decision to write the play and put it on. I’m there to do my job as well as I can. In the case of Extremities I’m not glorifying sex abuse, but helping the production to tell the story it wants to tell.”
As for the wider question of how violence on stage and screen affects society, Nick is not satisfied that the debate has been properly engaged. “Violence takes many forms, from opportunistic hooliganism, like the ‘tribal’ football flare-ups, to more sinister pre-meditated criminal and political violence such as terrorist bombings or the shelling of refugee camps. Our society seems to want an instant panacea for its ills, a bogeyman to blame, and I don’t think it’s that simple. The more I read of history, the plainer it seems to me that the capacity for violent behaviour exists in most of the human race. A lack of respect for each other and the social pressures we all have to live under could well play a part in triggering it.”
Speaking of which, what advice would a professional fight arranger give to anyone who might one night be cornered in a dark alley? “If you can, run away,” is the firm answer. “That’s what I’d do. Your pride will hurt a lot less than broken bones or missing teeth.”
And how badly hurt has he been in the course of his job? Nick Hall has been arranging fights since 1981, and has so far got away with just the odd bruise, and once a cut on the hand from a sword. After fifteen years of training actors to give and take punches, it is perhaps surprising he hasn’t been wounded more often. Ironically his worst injury was incurred in his days as an actor. Playing the part of an acrobat in Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, he was required to be shot out of the middle of a human pyramid, fall, and roll off stage into the stalls. Having fractured a lumbar vertebra in the dress rehearsal, he was as surprised as anyone to find that he could continue playing the part of the tumbling acrobat just fine – it was the long walk back to the dressing room afterwards that caused him the pain!
PS
Looking at this now, I realise I could have made it a bit more interesting by asking for a few specifics, like, for instance, which of the Upstairs, Downstairs cast looked like they might be the tastiest badass, or was it true one of The Professionals once cowered in a corner whining about a broken nail. You know, get a few real names. It’s not likely any proper fight arranger would have obliged me, but I should have tried. It might have been fun to find out that, say, Richard Griffiths turned out to be a surprisingly good fencer, or Judi Dench, in the days before her damehood, once got Brian Blessed in a headlock.
Anyway, this was the professional approach, when presumably the insurers insist a bit of money is thrown around to obviate the possibility of some expensive actor getting clobbered. Down at the amateur end of the market, where I used to do my acting, things were rather more rough and ready.
For instance, I could have done with some professional input on this sex scene I had in Fay Weldon’s Action Replay in 1982. More on that here. As for props, a few years later, in the panto Woad, which my future wife and I wrote for the Arts Centre Theatre Company in 1987 (aka ACT, geddit? What are the chances?), I as the Roman soldier Maximus Muscules had to knock our Julius Caesar unconscious with a wooden club. Now Walter B was a lovely chap and I was anxious not to cause him any damage, and in the normal run of things I would have questioned the director quite closely as to how we were going to orchestrate this potentially lethal moment of stage business. Unfortunately, since I was also the director, this would have been at best a one-sided conversation, and at worst a waste of breath.
Obviously, then, we were duty bound to get the experts in to limit the danger of fractured skulls and blood clots, and call on stage management to scour the acting area carefully to reduce the chances of the actor coming to grief against any stage furniture or even impaling himself on some rogue nail sticking up from the floor. At least have some first aid on standby, should worse come to worst. But we didn’t do any of that, instead we just made a fake cudgel using a long cardboard tube from some industrial plastic wrap, and a ton of scrunched up newspaper and hessian painted to look woody. The thing ended up about three feet long and must have weighed several pounds.
So how did it all turn out? Well, you know those Laurel and Hardy films where one or other of them is sitting in a fireplace with his hat off and the other one drops a house brick down the chimney on top of their head? That hollow thock sound? Well, it wasn’t quite as loud as that, more a kind of papery crump, enhanced, I think, by the open end of the tube which acted like a kind of trumpet horn and efficiently broadcast the noise to every quarter of the auditorium. Walter went down like a bull sacrifice in the ancient Roman cult of Mithras, and luckily, since the moment of thuggery happened shortly before the interval, he had plenty of time to gather his wits and pick his dentures up off the floor in order to open the second half fifteen minutes later with a bit of comic byplay with the Soothsayer, Sybil. It generally took him a bit longer than that to stop his eyes swivelling about, but he was a trouper, and as his director, all I can say is that I was very proud of him and the dedication he showed to his thespian calling.