Ring Round the Moon
Little Theatre, May 1987
The New Bristol Theatre Company presents
RING ROUND THE MOON
by
Jean Anouilh
Adapted by Christopher Fry
CAST
Joshua - Brian Harding
Hugo - Robin Seavill
Frederic - Robin Seavill
Diana Messerschmann - Mandy Langston
Lady India - Cassy Walkling
Patrice Bombelles - Tim Prior
Madame Desmortes - Daphne Ashton
Capulet - Beryl Phillpotts
Mersserschmann - Oliver Barton
Romainville - Noel Thompson
Isabelle - Barbie Davies
Her mother - Marlene Whyment
A General - Chris Checketts
Directed by
Chester Williams
PS
I’ve forgotten my lines on stage precisely the same number of times I’ve been drunk in my life – that is, twice – and the second time was in this production of Ring Round the Moon.
It’s hard to know why so many of us are so nervous about performing on stage, even those of us who ostensibly enjoy it. For one thing, it’s a completely avoidable source of anxiety – nobody forced you to go tramping out there under those lights, in front of all those strangers, preparing to give a performance that has taken weeks if not months of study and rehearsal to get right. And if you do make a fool of yourself, so what? You’re never going to see any of these people again. Well, maybe one or two of the friends or family who happen to be in that night, but they’re going to be the first to understand and forgive you anyway, so who cares? All I know is that if you care anything about what you’re doing, you do worry, and it’s when the worry overwhelms you that you become vulnerable to the sudden blanking out of the memory and the sweaty palms and dry mouth that instantly ensue.
Songs, I’d found, were always easier. They’re generally shorter than a role in a play so they’re always quicker to learn. And more often than not you absorb the lyrics by osmosis anyway. How many of your favourite songs growing up can you still sing along to, from start to finish, word perfect? Practically all of them. (Once karaoke became a thing, of course, we were often astonished as to the actual lyrics we ought to have been singing as opposed to the words we had been cheerfully and wrongly warbling all this time, but that’s a whole other question.) This is why some actors will record their entire part on tape and then spend many hours constantly listening to it over and over in order to din the part into their brains. It’s a technique I never tried, possibly because I had no great desire to finally find out what I actually sounded like, but perhaps it would have been advisable on this occasion.
I’d snagged the part of identical twins, Hugo and Frederic, one decent, the other devious, and you can bet I was well chuffed about the whole thing. There was never time for any major costume changes so I wore the same flannels and silver waistcoat for both brothers throughout (formal tails in the second half), and sought to convey their contrasting natures by subtler means. So I settled on raising my voice register and my eyebrows to play the nervy one, fluttering my hands in front of me the while, and employed more open body language – hands in pockets, weight back on the heels – to portray the rascal.
Hugo with Madame Desmortes. She looks like she likes a bad boy too.
Ironically it was the rascal who forgot his bloody line on the first night, in the first scene, and however depressingly predictable this might have been for the audience, it was nothing to how annoyed I was with myself. There was no excuse, it was amateurish, and I felt awful. The reason it happened, I think, was because I was overthinking it. If I could have forced myself to relax enough not to have to think about it while I was doing it, relying on muscle memory instead, I would have been fine, I could have carried it off effortlessly the way any of us could sing ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ while doing the dishes or mowing the lawn. But it’s like doing anything which should be automatic, from writing an informal email to driving a car, the second you step outside yourself and catch yourself doing it, you suddenly come over all fingers and thumbs, and start making grammatical errors and driving into dustbins.
With Barbie D and Daphne A. Frederic was all about the eyebrows… I decided.
Other than that, it was a charming production of a strange little hybrid play, and probably quite old-fashioned. The set was all steel and wire and our costumes white, silver and black, making us look like figures carved from moonlight. And maybe that was in order to reflect the title of the piece itself, which it had been given by the translator Christopher Fry to indicate it was an adaptation rather than a straightforward translation. Jean Anouilh’s original French title, L’invitation au château, Invitation to the Castle, would have worked perfectly well in my view – though if Castle were to be replaced by Château it would have been even more apt, suggesting the backdrop was more swanky and aristocratic than medieval and martial. And it was only when I researched the play’s origins very recently that I found out for the first time that it wasn’t just the dialogue Fry had adapted, he had also changed one of my names. Anoulih’s young man-about-town twin had been called Horace, not Hugo, which just goes to show you what baggage a name can carry. In French, the name Horace is pronounced ‘O-rrrass’ (short O as in pot) and arrives draped in antiquity, recalling not only the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, but also classical painter Jacques-Louis David’s ground-breaking masterpiece The Oath of the Horatii, recruiting poster for the Revolution, which depicts a trio of Roman brothers courageously preparing to sacrifice themselves in the service of their city. Their story even formed the plot of a play by classical author Pierre Corneille in 1640. There is a Horatio in Shakespeare’s play who gets to learn his friend Hamlet knew Yorick in his pre-skull days, and before any of these there was a historical Horatius who once stoutly defended a bridge and whose exploits were famously rendered into stirring verse by Macaulay in his Lays of Ancient Rome. Horace, the anglicised version of that august name, hardly does any of this justice, applied as it is by JK Rowling to a minor Hogwarts staff member and by John Mortimer to a rambunctious old barrister.
On the other hand, Wikipedia also reminds us that in a 1953 revival of Anouilh’s text, the part of Frederic’s eventual girlfriend Isabelle was played by a 19-year-old Brigitte Bardot. Now there’s a thought. Hmmm.
Forgotten what I was going to say now…
Noel T, Barbie D, Daphne A, Beryl P, RAS