The Provok’d Wife

Little Theatre, October 1985

The New Bristol Theatre Company presents

THE PROVOK’D WIFE

by Sir John Vanbrugh

CAST

Sir John Brute - Don Phillpotts

Heartfree - Chester Williams

Constant - Noel Thompson

Tremelo - Alex Turasiewicz

Rasor - Robin Seavill

Lord Rake - Michael Lockett

Colonel Bully - Alex Turasiewicz

Page - Jill Reeves

Tailor - Michael Harris

Constable - Andy Brown

First Watch - Ceri Seel

Second Watch - Roger Tunstall

Justice - Robin Seavill

Lady Brute - Mandy Langston

Belinda - Sally Morton

Lady Fancyfull - Daphne Ashton

Mademoiselle - Marlene Whyment

Cornet - Jill Reeves

Pipe - Lisa Butt

Lovewell - Cassy Walkling

Harpsichordist - Chris Golding

Music composed by John Telfer

Directed by Nat Brenner

PS

This was an enjoyable and colourful production of Vanbrugh’s Restoration comedy which inspired me to write a brief parody for performance at the cast party afterwards (see The Provok’d Beaux), which in turn led to more of the same over the next couple of years. And jolly good fun they all were, IMO.

Things did not get off to an auspicious start, however. I had recently joined the New Bristol Theatre Company, and on my way to audition for this, which was to be directed by legendary Old Vic Theatre School alumnus Nat Brenner, I was standing at the bus stop when a scooter came a cropper in front of me. While several of us dusted the rider off and helped him remount, my bus arrived and departed without me, causing me to miss the audition. I was disappointed, as I’d thought I might have made a decent fist of one of the suitors, but in the end I was cast as the conniving servant Rasor, doubling the Justice, which meant deploying the doddery old man voice again (see Mrs Warren’s Profession), and necessitating the donning and removal of thick, ageing make-up halfway through the show for a single five-minute scene. Welcome to showbiz.

I don’t think the make-up helped. You can still tell it’s me.

So while I did not necessarily get a lot of ‘boards-time’ as we old pros used to call it (no old pros ever used to call it that), the few moments I did have were memorable. At one point I had to carry off a drunken and comatose Sir John in a fireman’s lift. Remember, I was about six feet at this point and weighed around ten stone, so even though the gentleman was as spare as me, and I was familiar with how effective the technique could be in distributing the weight of a burden among the body’s strongest muscles – the back and the thighs – I had never had much cause to practise the manoeuvre. Plus, my back at this point was nothing much to write home about, as it was already showing signs of a debilitating condition that would in time turn out to have a singularly repellent Greek-sounding name. So while I could generally manage to hoick my fellow-actor onto my shoulders, I could never be sure I wouldn’t walk us into the scenery as we blindly teetered off. One night, through the usual red mist of pain, I heard a muffled thump and a groan of empathy from the audience behind me. It was Don getting his wig scraped off by a passing flat.

Ahead of the fireman’s lift scene, while Don and I (far right) could both still walk

And then there was my sex scene. All right, a bit of roguish banter and a single smacker on the lips. But I couldn’t even get through this without endangering life and limb. Since our director was busy elsewhere, my co-star and I had run through the lines and worked up a bit of business between ourselves. The servant Rasor (moi) is trying to get (back) into the good books of the lady’s companion Mademoiselle (Marlene W) and at one point she sits down on a bench and he thinks this is his cue to jump on her. He begins his run-up and pounces, but not before she has got up and moved away again, leaving the bench empty enough for Rasor to crash-land with a grunt, slide along its full shiny length, and disappear over the end of it, landing upside down in a heap. It must have looked spectacular because it never ceased to get a laugh, and just as bloody well, because not a night went by but I didn’t either wind myself, burn off several layers of skin on the planks, or crack at least one tibia against the edge of a flat. The only night I didn’t do one of those, I did all three. Luckily the adrenaline of performance invariably carried me through the rest of the evening, but by the end of the run that servant’s costume was beginning to look like I’d worn it all the way through the Battle of Ramillies. And all because I missed a bus. Who still rode a scooter in the eighties anyway? Twat.

As Rasor with Marlene W