Tim Bannerman's Diary of a Pantomime - Final Act
It’s done. The “phantomime”. The last “bravo” fading like a dying firework into the dark, swallowed by Elon Musk’s swamping of the space-and-everything-else waves.
As is my back. Or was. Both Gill and I flattened after all that work, starting back in November last year, with the fateful, Malbec-inspired: “Yes. I’ll lend a hand.”
The nights staring at blank sheets of paper with a head chaotically crowded with conflicting plot-lines. 32 characters to chip from the rough stone of Garway Hill, dig up from the rich mulch of the valley and fashion into some sort of coherent gallery that would people: “The Ghost of Garway Hall”.
If anyone should tell you that a village pantomime just happens by some kind of spontaneous communal osmosis – don’t believe them. As my former colleague who now runs my old company that kept us afloat all those years said before we started: “People don’t realise just how much work goes into these things”. How right he was! And it all started with a passing fancy many years before when Gill and I were in a Tai chi class, as one does, in the old, tin-roofed Garway Village Hall, shivering as the meter-fed heaters struggled to drag the February temperature above freezing – inside.
“The Ghost of Garway Hall,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” said Gill.
“That’s what I should write one day. Look at those tatty old curtains attempting to hide the passageway to the toilets along the side there. They’re like Hamlet’s arras.”
“Hamlet’s what?” she asked.
“Arras. You know, when he said: How now? A rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead. And ran his sword through Polonius who was hiding behind it, this arras, curtain thing, where he’d been listening to Hamlet’s conversation with his mother.”
“Oh,” she said. “That.”
“There must be so many stories those threadbare old rags could tell.”
“Go on then,” she said. “Do it.”
And then several years went by. The new “Community Hall” was built and the lovely, tatty old green building that had seen so many pantos and tribute bands and folk concerts, let alone Tai chi classes, Women’s Institute and parish hall committee meetings and the like over the last 100 years or so, was left quietly to decay and die. To become a ghost of its former self.
But, against all the odds, just over two weeks ago now, The Ghost of Garway Hall arose and told his story to his fellow “ghosts” (as are any audience in the dark at a play, if you think about it), for three nights in succession, with a matinee on the Saturday afternoon.
And that was what did it, I reckon. My back. That and near-catatonic exhaustion after two successive Saturday shows in the infernal, if ingenious “ghost conveyance” contrived by the man who played the Dowager Countess of Archenfield. A retired civil engineer by trade, now gentleman farmer and genial, cross-dressing (if only for the show) eccentric up on the hill overlooking our valley, he’d taken up the idea of the headless ghost early on – and how.
This “conveyance” entailed my being stuffed into it in the hectic pit-stop between having my head chopped off as the Green Knight and appearing, minutes later, as the Ghost. It required bending down in the semi-darkness off-stage, twisting round and inserting my head up through a hole in the two layers of cloth draped over the headless dummy above, one a grey gauzy affair over a pale green covering below. Once through, I gingerly lowered my bottom onto a little stool, manoeuvrable around the floor on castors, having previously threaded my legs through a small wire hoop attached to the seat, behind and above which was fixed the vertical post supporting the mannequin bust of the headless ghost.
Two things we learned the hard way between final dress and first night:
Take off the Green Knight’s green cape before getting into the contraption, otherwise my arms would be trapped inside and unable to gesture with the left and hold the torch (see below) with my right;
Take off my long, Gandalf-esque wig ditto, before having to put it back on and making my entrance, otherwise my head risked getting stuck in the hole and the wig hopelessly entangled, by which time the music and lighting cue for the ghost’s first entrance would have extended way too long and all sense of spooky expectation lost.
Once in and ready, if sweating and trembling, I would appear through the curtain stage left at floor level, courtesy of Jeannie, the prompter, who held it open for me, perched as she was beside the raised rostra of the stage itself. From there I could propel myself, swan-like, up and down the central aisle of the auditorium, extemporising with my fellow phantoms at the opera, with my (real) head under my prosthetic arm, my (false) stump of a neck above that and just my (all-too-real) feet paddling away down below in the proverbial manner. But it was still some way from plain sailing…
It was partly the wig, which I found I was wearing back-to-front on the first dress rehearsal, and every time I breathed in, long strands of artificial hair would lodge in my throat prompting the kind of gag-reflex you really don’t want before your opening line.
And then the prosthetic arm.
Well, I’m not surprised more than one small child had to be removed, screaming, as I approached up the aisle towards it, my hollow eyes gleaming like Boris Karloff in the light of the torch I held pointing upwards just below my chin. But the arm itself had a habit of slipping out of the opening it shared with my head, which it was supposed to be supporting. Dangling lifelessly, a strange luminescent yellow glove around its non-existent fingers, it brushed eerily against those I passed too closely in the half-light like something out of Edgar Allan Poe. Nevertheless, I won a few friends along the way, I’m told. Those who weren’t permanently psychologically scarred, that is.
After the two performances on Saturday, I felt the first twinges as we began the clear-up, or “get-out” as I used to call it back in the day, on the Sunday morning. By the end of Monday I could barely move and, come Tuesday, it took the slightest movement for Hamlet’s sword to run me through in agonising spasms.
Gill was not best pleased.
After all those months of hard work contributing to the Ghost, the deal was that, as soon as the final curtain fell, it would be “Shed World”. By which she meant that we had two weeks before the men arrived to assemble the new garden shed – on top of a concrete base, yet to be created, by us, on what had been a series of compost containers in which several rats had expired over the winter. My job was to clear the compost piles, and the corpses therein, ready for the process of levelling an earth base for the scalpings – a ton and a half of small gravel stones – and then five inches of concrete on top of that. Well, I couldn’t.
At least I had the good idea of knocking on the farmer’s door across the road who conveniently not only had 30 tons of scalpings tucked away in his yard but a load of ready mixed concrete arriving at the perfect moment with enough to spare for us. So, with the help of our strapping, second son, Josh, and my gradual recovery by the end of the week, but mostly Gill’s ferocious, solitary hard graft, we got there. And today the two men arrived at 7 am, their strong Black Country accents reminding us of the pair of hapless builders in the play I called Jeff and Wilson (played by two women, one short and one tall, who brilliantly mastered the art of plank and custard-pie slapstick, let alone the rest of it). But this pair knew what they were doing and erected the shed in two hours flat. By which I mean not “flat” but actually a fully functioning, upright, handsome piece of work, ready for some serious gardening business.
Meanwhile, life is gradually returning to normal. “Normal” in my case meaning no longer living and breathing “The Ghost of Garway Hall” day and night for months on end but actually doing all the things that have been virtually abandoned in its wake.
The list includes: urgently bottling, or more likely, bagging 600 litres of cider and perry, the best of which is entered in the “Big Apple Cider and Perry Trials 2022” to be held in Putley Parish Hall on 30th April; a mass of garden jobs, or such as Gill entrusts me with; actually stepping beyond Herefordshire this weekend and visiting London for the first time in well over two years to meet up with some old mates, again not seen in all that time, to listen to Nick Mason and friends do their “Saucerful of Secrets” not-quite-Pink Floyd stuff at the Royal Albert Hall; and, well, breathe a Ghost-free air once more as the pear and cherry blossom paints the valley all shades of pink and white – much as the orchard in our play was imagined to be.
It was quite a show, though, even if someone allegedly compared me to Hitler at one point in the rehearsal process. Well, you try herding the cats, all 32 of them, to ensure the ground is covered when dogged by Covid fall-out and all the other potential reasons for not turning up to rehearsal – or learning your lines… But it seems it was generally agreed by cast and audience alike to have been more than worth the blood, sweat, tears and a lot of laughter along the way.
From the five fantastic Mice, aged 5-10, to the eight characterful witches (including a very purple Gill), aged 10-75, to the eccentric Archenfield family – the two sons, Ethel, short for Ethelred (played by a woman), and Perry (played by a man), the formidable Dowager Countess Letitia (“Bless you”) himself; the two genuinely octogenarian maiden great-aunts (also real-life husband and wife) whose Tango song and dance reminiscing on their “First Kiss” broke all hearts; oh, and the unsuspected coup de theatre at the end of the dissolute 37th Earl, having not been seen, presumed lost, since he left a pile of his clothes on the beach at Monte Carlo. I’m glad to say though that he sported the kind of rather fine, dove-grey handlebar moustache a thorough-going cad jolly well should, thus helping to distinguish him from my other part of the Ghost. But that was only half of us.
Ella, the Cinderella/Annie/Snow White, etc character, was the glue that held all the plot-lines together and, boy, did she not stick it to us, brilliantly and faultlessly, in song and wonderfully focused performance from start to finish, despite this being her first foray on the stage since primary school. Thomas Hardy would have fallen hook, line and sinker for her had he been around, and she and Ethel melted all hearts in their beautifully sung, if entirely soppy duet, with Ethel a convincingly devoted “father-figure” throughout, for all his androgynous confusions. Ella also had a different kind of sticky fun with Jeff and Wilson, the previously mentioned comedy builders, who got variously hit by a plank, glued to the wall-paper and well and truly custard-pied by Ella’s birthday cake after a chase round the audience in time-honoured fashion.
Another pure, if more operatic voice to charm the birds from the trees came from the mysterious Rose, who appeared right at the end of the first half, which she didn’t thank me for, and it was usually a sharp 8 year old who got there first in answer to the question: who is she and why is she there? Clue: Ella – left on doorstep in basket as baby 18 years ago; Rose – first time back at Garway Hall for, ooh, enough time for baby Ella to have become young woman on brink of 18th birthday. Well, it’s not rocket science but you’d be surprised how many seemingly functioning adults missed the various clues along the way.
Same for the brash, rich American, Joe Saddlebow, who, too, had known Garway and the Archenfields in boyhood and Rose, for that matter, as a hot-blooded Romeo back in the day, before fleeing to make his fortune in the good old US-of-A. Now he was back with a vengeance, intent on a hostile takeover of Garway Hall to turn it into an exclusive golf course. “Oh no! Not golf!” cried the Mice as one, when told the bad news. But to the same question: who was he – why had the writer really put him there? Other than his Mum having been a witch, the Nine Witches being one short and little orphan Ella – you get the picture.
Similarly, Dave and Glenys from “oop North”, another real-life husband-and-wife team who were among the most studious of all the cast, which paid off so well in their various silly scenes on the hunt for the missing priceless Wassail Bowl, stolen by Glenys at the last Cider-makers’ Ball some 18 years before. Or so many believed. You see, she’d been the cook at the time and was effectively made the scapegoat for the missing bowl which had caused such mayhem along the way, ever since it had been stolen originally by the 1st Lord Archenfield 800 years before, truth be told. And believe me the truth will out – even if it took till the final scene for all to be revealed.
Which only leaves, who else, but “The Young Farmers”, two of whom might have been technically described as such, being 10, whereas the others were, with one exception, happily drawing their old age pensions. The exception was our local polymath electrician whose astonishingly extensive family wins all the quizzes for miles around. He also doubled as the Bearded Minstrel who sang us in to the arcane tale at the beginning of the show and picked it up again at the beginning of the second half in case the excitements of the interval raffle had caused viral short-term memory loss beyond those already terminally confused. The other farmers also doubled as Mice, Witches and Dave, which the more perceptive amongst our audience might just have spotted – but who cared! What more did we need but their lusty singing of “The Lads of Garway Hill” and “The Cider Song”, with immortal lyrics such as:
The lads of Garway Hill are we, fa-la-la, fa-la-la, lah
We tie our trousers up with string
And then this song we sing
So fa-la-la, la-la-la, la-la-lah
The lads of Garway Hill are we,
The lads of Garway Hill.
or:
We drink a merry toast to all
Who make this golden fluid
And praise the apples on the tree
And the farmers who have grew it.
Oh, cider, oh cider, there’s nothing like it in this world
We drink to all the cider-makers young and old.
You had to be there.
But my friend, Chris, up the hill, who composed and performed all the original music (and wrote the worst of the lyrics, see above) was a power-house of musical invention right from the outset, condemning all who took part to living with the tunes going round and round in our heads – known as “ear-worms”, I’ve learned – ever since. His other half, Liz, complemented his keyboard on recorder, accordion and temple bell to resounding effect, particularly in the beautiful, mediaeval-sounding Wassail Song with which we kicked off the whole affair.
So now the hall, the nice, new Garway Community Hall, is quiet again, except for its usual weekly round of activities. Just down the road, however, the stunning 13th century, Romanesque “Templars” church of St. Michael’s, source of much of the inspiration of “The Ghost of Garway Hall”, will come alive very soon with many of the same voices so recently heard in the play.
The Archenfield Arts Festival takes place in Garway Church on 14th May and will be the first for three years since the pandemic struck. It’s a chance for anyone, of any age, any experience, including complete beginners, to perform anything they like in front of a willing audience of fellow performers, family and friends. I’ve been Master of Ceremonies on several past occasions now and it’s always been a privilege to spend the day, from 11am-5pm, enjoying the wide diversity of entertainment of all kinds in this uniquely beautiful setting. Just bring a good thick woolly jumper if you’re able to come along. It’s usually a lot warmer outside than in!
Meanwhile – the Big Apple Trials at Putley loom this weekend. We’re entered in “draught dry” for both cider and perry – but still haven’t decided which varieties to go for. We have a reputation to uphold, you know, with a 3rd in draught dry cider back in 2019, and 2nd in sweet perry last year. Should it be the barrel blend or the single varieties? As for the bottle fermented perry – well, it’s no contest. What could be better than Hendre Huffcap in all its frothing glory?
