There’s space in these ridiculous OH Plays for a celebrity cameo. The priest. At the Wanamaker we had Dom, who was in the year below me and went on to make loads of telly. He recently employed a good mate of mine in a big job. I got to thank him which was pleasant.
Today the cameo was an 88 year old civil servant, doing the stuff my grandad was doing but at a higher level. He was bright eyed despite movement issues. His joy of being on stage in the Speech Room was contagious. His portrait is on the wall in there. “I loved what you were doing with your eyes in that scene,” he told me. I have no idea what I was doing with my eyes but I’m glad of his approbation.
The Harrow Boys Shakespeare Play in Speech Room hasn’t happened for some time. It used to be an institution. Ronald “Ronnie” Watkins was a teacher (a beak) at Harrow. He was also instrumental to Sam Wanamaker’s campaign to rebuild The Globe. He was no longer teaching when I was there but had passed the baton to Jeremy Lemmon. Ronnie has a rehearsal room named after him downstairs at The Globe right next to where I work all the time. He and Jeremy taught generations of us how to vocally fill a difficult space. The Old Harrovian Play is all that’s left. They absolutely must reinstate the Harrow boys Shakespeare play.
My presence at The Swan at the Globe has absolutely nothing to do with the school connection but I’m proud of myself for having drawn that line. I had to do it longhand because when I was at school Jeremy didn’t much like me. Too awkward and lumpy in my adolescence I fear. Not gamine enough even if I suit a pair of tights. And certainly too scruffy. He still used me from time to time. I took what scraps I could. I was always Martin’s boy, and there was invisible politics. And then Andy stepped up with his grounded commercial musical theatre connections.
It’s mad when I think about it. This is what my father paid for, of course. We had the drama studio, where we could try stuff out. We had Speech Room. The theatre wasn’t built yet but we were doing everything we could despite that.
I learnt how to use my voice in Speech Room. There’s a reason it has that name. It’s a space that asks for conscious diction and shameless projection. I can work in film and dial it back, of course I can. I can dial it back for telly, for theatre. But in a space like speech room like the globe main stage like so many spaces, I know how to make sure the audience hears my words. With nuance. It is considerably harder for someone with no vocal technique to scale up to a place like that than the reverse. I know this and trust people to understand. They don’t.
Drive to the road. Play to the space.
What I did tonight was big. Because I’m playing Sir Toby Belch in Speech Room at Harrow School. You can’t get much bigger than that outside of Falstaff and without a fatsuit the solution has to be vocal and energetic to make the man vast.
I remember Ross Beckett, my housemaster, sending me to the Old Harrovian Play to write a punishment essay. Cymbeline. The one we are working on with The Factory. I still have the essay. “Hurrah!” he wrote, as his comment. Ross was a good man watching me negotiate the people around me.
It’s a good school, Harrow. Better be at that price. But it really is.
