Premier Angst
January 26th
I’m a bit anxious. My one-act play Tom & Gerry is to be premiered on 27th February in Carnoustie, and I’ve got first-night jitters already. Will the audience like it? Will they laugh at the jokes? Be moved by the story? Relate to the characters? – characters that I’ve created?
I’ve had this feeling before, both onstage and off. The nervous anticipation you get before a performance. As an actor, my routine, almost a ritual, was to pace up and down a bit manically. Others had different routines. I knew a guy who created what he called ‘a cocoon’: he sat in a corner with his head bowed and his eyes shut. And woe betide anyone who tried to break in, he got very shirty indeed!
Being a playwright is different, and much worse. At least as an actor you have some control over your destiny, but as a playwright you have none. You sit in the auditorium or at the back and watch the audience’s reactions to your baby – which you have written and rewritten, honed and proof-read. You’ve lived with your characters for days or weeks and changed the ending a dozen times. Now all you can do is sit and wait.
February 6th
The idea for Tom & Gerry came to me over a few days just before Christmas of 2014. I’m a great fan of Neil Simon. I remember taking part in an amdram production of Plaza Suite Act 3 in the nineties. The play is set in a hotel bedroom minutes before a wedding ceremony is due to start. The mother and father of the bride, Roy and Norma Hubley, discover to their horror that their daughter Mimsey has locked herself in the bathroom and won’t come out. My character, Roy, threatens to break the door down if Mimsey doesn’t come out. She doesn’t of course, so I gave the door an actorish shoulder-charge, a move I’d rehearsed over and over with the Director. The door flat wobbled, but not disastrously so. However I realised I’d knocked my wrist on the doorknob. My next line was, “Get a doctor”; which I said, but before the actress (whose name also happened to be Norma) could reply I added, “Norma, I think my wrist is broken.” She frowned as if to say don’t you dare ad-lib, but with amazing sangfroid she hissed, “No, darling, your arm is broken, not your wrist!”
The idea for Tom & Gerry of course didn’t come from Plaza Suite, but from Neil Simon’s masterpiece The Odd Couple, familiar to most people from the 1968 movie starring Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. It features two mismatched roommates, Oscar Madison, described as ‘a slovenly, recently divorced sportswriter’ and Felix Ungar, ‘a fastidious, hypochondriac newswriter whose marriage is ending’. The idea was to translate New York to Edinburgh, and so Oscar and Felix became Tom and Gerry. They are retired veterans, and the plot centres on Remembrance Day. One idea followed another, and soon Tom and Gerry had partners, Molly and Wilhelmina. Gerry and Molly have already met through a ‘serendipity’ moment in Sainsbury’s. Tom and Wilhelmina meet fortuitously when she reverses her car into Tom’s parking space and scrapes the side of his BMW. A simple romantic entanglement follows with Tom initially not liking Wilhelmina. He pretends to be gay with comic results. The denouement involves music, is very satisfying and a lot of fun.
February 27th
Well, I had no need to worry. The cast performed the play wonderfully well, and the audience seemed to like it. Brian Marjoribanks, the adjudicator, too. The team won two prizes, first overall and best stage presentation, and are on to the Divisional Final in Aberdeen on the 24th of March.
March 24th
Another excellent performance from the team, good ensemble work, word-perfect and well-paced. More laughs than at Carnoustie. The opposition is less than impressive. We’re in with a chance!
March 27th
Disaster! An email from Director John McSkimming tells me that we weren’t placed in the first three. He adds that the standby adjudicator told him he had us in second place, but it’s no consolation. The winning play is a two-hander called A Bench at the Edge by Luigi Jannuzzi, which I think I’ve seen before. I google it and discover that it is just about the most successful one act play of the last twenty years and has won countless awards, including best play at the British Finals of this competition in 2001. The synopsis reads, “A man sits on a bench at the edge of an abyss watching the human race rush into it. Along comes a second man contemplating ‘a heroic dive’. What is the abyss and what are these men doing here? Terrifying concepts and visions of deepening mysteries emerge from their confrontation, and they conclude that life is precious after all.” Gulp!
April 23rd
A Bench at the Edge wins first prize at the Scottish Finals. Ah well, we were up against it. A simple comedy on the one side, and on the other a complex drama about the abyss, a play that wins competitions; and is liked by adjudicators We are always told that in competition it’s not the choice of play that counts, but the way in which it is done. I sometimes wonder about this. There are plays, and there are ‘challenging’ plays: it’s like Degree of Difficulty in diving competitions. Here’s the conundrum: if an adjudicator is presented with two plays, one a serious play on a weighty subject, the other more lightweight, and if both are equally well performed, which one will he or she choose?
