JILL TUNSTALL, BT Welsh Feature Writer of the Year 2000, takes a look behind the scenes of open-air theatre and discovers that with rain, cows, dolphins, low-flying Jumbo jets and tipsy audiences, both theatre-goers and players should expect the unexpected
THE skies are leaden grey like wet slate, a member of the cast is injured in hospital, a recalcitrant trampoline is refusing to stand straight and yours truly has just dropped in to discover what life is like for an open air theatre company.
Understandably the actors who make up Illyria, celebrating 10 years of performing in the grounds and gardens of some of Britain's most beautiful houses, in weather that has varied from tempest to heatwave, are more than a little stressed.
"I've been in casualty all afternoon with Bobbie (Robertson) who has injured her back, so I'm feeling a bit jittery," apologises Emmy Bradbury, 24, the company manager, a mobile phone clamped to one ear, a script in her other hand, as she organises the crew, the stand-ins, the props...
How about a word during the performance, I suggest. "I'm in the performance too," she practically wails. But she is used to adversity, her first role as Little Red Riding Hood, aged five, was cut short after just one night, thanks to chicken pox.
Clearly she has no time to talk and gets on with the business of getting the show on the road at Plas Newydd on Anglesey. Later, when she appears on stage as, in turn Helena, Titania, Egeus and a handful of Midsummer Night's Dream's other characters there is no trace of the off-stage drama.
Afterwards she says, without irony: "It takes a certain type of person to work in open air theatre, you have to be able to cope with an ever changing situation, ducks and pigeons landing on stage and even heckling from people who have had too much to drink.
"We sometimes get members of the audience who are roaring drunk because they have arrived early and consumed all their picnic. Northern audiences tend to be more vocal than those from the south."
The company's most feared venue is Harlech Castle, in North Wales, Emmy reveals. "We have two flights of wooden steps to climb, with all the steel deck just to get into the castle. Then we have to do it in reverse, in the dark and often in the rain."
The ability to sing, dance and act, and a love of the greasepaint and the crowd, are simply not enough then for open air actors who must be impervious to rain, hail, wind and midges, able to haul heavy equipment up stairs and set out scenery on some of the country's best-known, manicured lawns.
And so it was that the show did go on at Plas Newydd, despite Bobbie's fall, with the help of some local pupils, who performed Midsummer Night's Dream at school last year, reading from the wings. It is the ultimate in improvisation, and that's something these actors are more than used to.
In fact, as their founder and director Oliver Gray asserts: "Necessity is the mother of invention, and Illyria is a prime example of finding new and imaginative ways of doing things."
The audience, ranging from small children to those who have spent more years watching Shakespeare than they care to remember, are unworried by the late change of performers. Many know Illyria of old, expect the unexpected and have arrived suitably equipped with picnic, wine (bubbly for the more affluent) folding stools and chairs (rugs being too uncomfortable) waterproofs, insect repellent, umbrellas and even, in one case, a fisherman's tent!
The first-timers are easy to spot in flimsy cotton skirts or shorts, sandalsand bare legs and are on a learning curve of Everest gradient, as the rain starts, followed by the midges, followed by the damp cold seeping up from the nearby Menai Strait. Needless to say the atmosphere in the soup tent in the interval is like the first day of Harrods' sale.
Performing outdoors, despite the backdrop of the country's most impressive properties, undoubtedly has drawbacks as Bobbie discovered when slipping in torrential rain at Plas Newydd. Happily she has since rejoined the cast.
Britain's climate being as it is rain is guaranteed during the three month tour yet, incredibly, rain has only stopped the play twice in 10 years.
"When it rains everybody gets wet and yes it makes life a little harder for my guys who are out in it six nights a week and there are people who think we are a little bit insane. But you get to a point where it's impossible to get any wetter and you just have to make light of it," says Gray philosophically.
"The rule is that unless there are more in the cast than the audience you keep going, unless it isn't safe," adds Emmy. "To be honest when it starts you get a rustle of umbrellas being put up, which is quite off putting, then everybody settles down. It's a very British thing, but people seem very pleased with themselves when they do manage to outlast the weather."
Other hazards include animals, which can be more stage struck than people. "We had a dog last week that strolled right across the stage and a cat once slept on stage throughout the whole performance," he recalls. "But my favourite was the night a herd of black and white cows lined up along the fence during Twelfth Night, where all the costumes were black and white, and at one point Sir Antony Aiguecheek declared 'I am a great eater of beef,' at which all the cows mooed and ran to the other end of the field. It brought the house down."
Rosalind's declaration: "There is no clock in the forest," as the stableyard clock bonged loudly and Oberon's: "In silence sad, trip we over night's shade" yelled over the roar of a Boeing 747 are other unforgettable moments, along with the night the company were upstaged by a shoal of dolphins at Cornwall's Minack theatre.
"Last night we were doing the wedding scene and all the church bells began to ring, with perfect timing, in the local church," says Emmy.
Plas Newydd plays host to Illyria every year and the elegant 18th century, creeper-clad mansion is the very epitome of the setting that Gray imagined when the idea for a theatre company first dawned, during a particularly atmospheric production of Macbeth in Regent's Park.
"Half way through the performance there's a line 'the crow makes wing into the rooky wood' and at that moment, on a very dark and stormy night, a pigeon swooped across the stage and into the gloom and that really seemed like a very significant moment, it was absolutely breathtaking, and I thought 'There really is something in this open air theatre business'," he recalls.
"I was a National Trust member at the time so decided to approach them and in 1992 launched a nine-week tour of Midsummer Night's Dream with bookings throughout the country."
As a former Dr Who Dalek and cyberman, with a degree in philosophy at Lampeter University, Mid-Wales, Gray was interestingly qualified for the job he had created. Maybe that's why he was adamant from the outset that the productions would consist of no more than five players and no cuts were to be made in the text. Miraculously the players never end up talking to themselves. On stage,anyway.
Despite having all the washing of costumes, mending of properties, planning of programmes and a thousand and one other jobs to do at the end of each season, he says he would not want to return to his days as a Dalek or a philosopher, although a little of each lives on in his wickedly individual interpretations of Shakespeare's plays.
"I don't think I could ever do anything else now," he enthused. And this at the end of a conversation over a carphone while he drove from Edinburgh to Cardigan to pick up Bobbie's replacement for that night's performance in ... Exeter. Still, all's well that ends well and let's face it, a labour of love like this is never lost!
jill.tunstall@dailypost.co.uk
http://www.icnorthwales.co.uk