There was an attempt to…tread the boards

As mentioned in previous posts, the search for an engaging pastime has been a lifelong pursuit. This search was no easier in my childhood than it is today. I was quite a solitary youngster, so in order to broaden my social skills I was encouraged to join a club or group activity. I was already not the sporty type back then, which limited my options.  However, there was one possibility that I thought I could give a go, and that was joining the local amateur dramatic society. We will never know if this was motivated by a serious desire to tread the boards, or that a childhood crush was already a member and maybe it was a chance to impress her with my thespian skills, but it came to pass that I was going to be an actor in my spare time.

I grew up in the west country of England, and since moving away I’ve spent many a conversation trying to convince colleagues that Devon is not in fact Middle Earth.  It doesn’t help my argument if I mention that the name of the troupe was the Fremington Players; it now sounds like I was part of a group of traveling troubadours, strumming the lyre, swigging mead, and telling tales of heroes and magical amulets. Of course, that idea is ridiculous and our stagecraft was much more serious than any of that nonsense; I had joined just in time in order to be a part of the village panto.

My memory fails me on exactly which panto we performed (…possibly Dick Wittington?), but this I do recall: I was mostly part of the chorus line and background characters, with one big moment of my own as an opportunity to shine. During a song about the king’s birthday, the cast would sing how he was “21 today” and I, one of the page boys, would unveil a scroll with a much, much larger number.  This was clearly comedy gold in terms of the art of pantomime, and it meant that my first role would be to make people laugh.

For this scene, I would need a costume change into the Medieval page-boy (this is again not helping dispel the “I come from Ye Olde Kingdom” narrative). This costume involved a very short tunic and bright red tights. Amazingly, at that age I seemed to have no sense of embarrassment in this prospect.  I was still pre-secondary school age, and so it was before any teenage hormones could trigger an embarrassing “tights tentpole” incident from having to picture the audience naked to counter stage fright.

(Regardless, whoever came up with the idea of picturing the audience naked to calm any performance presumably never had to perform in front of a group consisting of their parents, teachers, and local shopkeepers.  My *best friend’s mum* was in the front row, for god sakes.)

When it came to the actual performance, the pantomime was a rousing success; All of the shows passed without a hitch, there were zero moments of stage fright (despite me looking like a startled-yet-serious deer in the photo), and I think I may have actually gotten a taste for making people laugh with my scroll-unveiling cameo that would linger in me for years to come. Sadly this moment in theatrical history was my only performance with the Players. By the following Christmas, I was another year older, and the idea of performing to a room of people had started to get a little more tinged with the worry of making an unintentional fool of myself.

It’s still an experience that has provided lasting benefits; whenever I have to do any sort of public speaking these days for work, I always try to summon the confidence of that little page boy, albeit with mixed results. As for the wearing of a short tunic and tights, this has been relegated as an event for special occasions only.