Friday, 3 November 2006 (2)
Tumbleweed Night
Simon warned earlier this week that all the shows he'd worked on had got cool receptions from audiences at least once during their runs. I was starting to feel a bit complacent that it wasn't going to happen with Salt'n'Sauce, but it happened tonight.
Things were looking good at the start of the evening. The show seemed to be sold out and several people were either put on the stand-by list for seats or turned away, and I thought I'd be sitting with Sam and Kirstie in the lighting box because there were no free seats. Several of those who'd booked didn't turn up, though, and the final audience was 45 - one closer to capacity than Tuesday's performance.
By the time I got into the theatre, my usual spot at the back right was taken, and I tumbled into a seat next to fellow Southwest Scriptwriter, Adrian Henderson. I was interested in Adrian's take on the show because he's lived in Edinburgh and worked on the Fringe. Moments before the play started, though, a large, elderly man shuffled into the space and groped for a seat. As someone who's both partially-sighted and a bit uncoordinated, I knew what he was going through, and offered my seat, thinking I'd sit at the back with Sam and Kirstie after all. People in the row shuffled along a seat, though, and the aged prised himself into a newly-vacant seat between me and Adrian. I'm not sure whether your other senses really do compensate if you're visually impaired, but the stench of stale urine is worse than someone screaming at me.
Lights up on the first scene and it played indifferently - a glimmer of laughter at the 'I'm with the Luftwaffe' line, but mostly quite subdued (the laugh lines aren't exactly thick and fast in the opening scene, anyway). The Aged Pee fidgeted and supped his drink - milk, apparently. I was still expecting the performance to come alive once the play kicked in with the audience, though.
It didn't kick in with the audience. There was laughter, but it flickered and fizzled without catching. The missed lighting cue scene probably worked better than it's worked all week with a great response when Simon dropped his underpants. After finishing his milk, AP yawned and sighed like a furnace for a bit before eventually dozing off, filling the intimate space with his heavy, regular breathing, and sucking energy out of the room with every intake. I've had the odd narcoleptic episode during shows at the Alma - it can get very warm and soporific in there, especially if you have a couple of drinks beforehand - but I hope I've never made focus-drawing pneumatic noises in my nodding moments. To be fair, people sitting further from the Aged said afterwards that they hadn't noticed him, but there was, I felt, a big knock-on effect from this distraction.
The moments where the show did play were those where John is physically intimidated by the sexually predatory Paul, but this is just a strand of the story and the positive reaction to it didn't carry over into the rest of the show. This meant that the cast were back to a standing start after every reaction they coaxed from the audience. The music Sam and the actors picked for the black-outs has buoyed the show up nicely at this week's other performances, but the audience weren't giving an inch tonight and the scene changes seemed interminable. If I needed the fact that it's a fine line between an audience responding to a play as one and their just being a bunch of people watching other people recite lines in a darkened room brought home to me, tonight's show brought it home. The tumbleweed blew into the Alma on the chill wind of this autumn's first cold snap.
The final scene did play reasonably well, although it was helped by bucketfuls of unintended irony. The audience liked the morose munching of poppadoms at the start of the scene, but laughed louder at the lines, 'Was there even one of the residents of the Bonny Glens Retirement Home who didn't need the toilet at least three times during the show?' / 'Don't think the one who dozed off needed it. I thought he'd died.' - our fragrant friend was spark out again at this point. As if to heap irony on irony, following an animated discussion with the man next to her, a woman in the front row hurried out of the theatre to relieve herself (I assume), exiting over the stage. Again, some sympathy for the predicament (I'd like to apologise here to Sean Tyler for clattering out of a performance of his Falling to Heaven in 2003 - it was a straight choice between getting out or wetting myself - I did leave by the fire exit at the back like you're meant to, though), but it was as if the audience was behaving exactly as described in the play - life imitating art imitating life. Well, it all chimes with the season's 'Inside Out' theme, I suppose...
The final applause was not without warmth or longevity, but, unsurprisingly, devoid of Thursday evening's cheers. It should have been my cue for a sharp exit and a swift pint, but the Pungent One had kicked my jacket under the seats in front and I couldn't see it in the gloom, so had to wait for the whole audience to file past me before I could get a proper look. Several people congratulated me on the play, but I got the feeling that these plaudits fell into the 'they would say that, wouldn't they?' category. The last person to leave spotted my jacket and kindly picked it up for me.
In the bar afterwards, Sam was going for the 'least said, soonest mended' approach, while I favoured the 'drone on obsessively to anyone who'll listen' one. I feel it's really spurious to blame the audience if a performance isn't a success - it smacks of the proverbial workman blaming his apocryphal tools - but what are you meant to think when a show that has been well-received on its last three outings flops on its fourth? After a short postmortem with Adrian - who said he thought he'd try to see the show again - I went to canvas opinion from the cast.
Jo was upbeat. She said that the performance had been fun for her and she'd got her share of laughs. Simon was more philosophical, reminding me that he'd warned that there'd be nights like this one, adding that there was usually about one a week. Paul reflected more on the problems of performing to an unreceptive audience and trying to work harder to get them on side.
From the little knot of Southwest Scriptwriters in the audience, Cathy Swingler broke cover and admitted that she hadn't engaged with the play. Ed Viney has always been keen on the script and, because he was up for directing it, followed its progress from the treatment, so I was taken aback (bearing in mind that I was feeling prickly and defensive) when he said, 'Bits of it work.' 'Bits of it!' I snapped back. Ed back-pedalled like mad, and we agreed that what he'd meant was, 'Bits of it worked tonight' - not an irredeemable flop, then.