After two days of previews, today was our official opening. The past few days have felt about a month long and about five minutes long simultaneously.
Our first preview was a bit of a blur. The joy of the Fringe is that you don’t really find out what your get in/get out will be like until the first day, when everyone has moved into the dressing room, the venue is full of people and time is not on your side. By the end of the show we were all completely wrung out, but the audience feedback that we got was positive and enthusiastic and we were all set for Preview #2.
The following day I got a call from Susanna, who plays Christian, letting me know that she was unwell to the point of being unable to stand. My heart breaks for any actor who ever finds themselves in this situation. Being unable to perform sucks massively, and all it takes is breathing around the wrong person, touching the wrong door handle or having the wrong person hand you a sandwich. It’s rubbish, and we missed her badly.
I stood in on book, since we had a decent number of people booked in and didn’t want to cancel at such short notice. It’s been a while since I last performed in anything that wasn’t spoken word, but if you’ve ever seen my spoken word you’ll know that it’s all sneakily theatrical character stuff anyway, so the transferable skills are there. More importantly, Marion and Andrew are absolute stars who handled the new dynamic with ease and supported me through the whole thing. I’m so, so glad to have such a lovely, tight-knit and capable team (and so, so glad that everything went well, since several of my EAS students were at today’s performance!)
Tomorrow we should have Susanna back, and I’ll be so happy to hand back the witchpricker’s needle and go back to my rightful place out front, notebook in hand. It’s been fun, but I love her version of the character, I have no desire to wear the torture bra ever again, and I am itching to see the whole beautiful cast back together.
We’ve also had our first review, and I’m pretty pleased that even when we were one actor down and the understudy was literally limping through the part (I sprained my knee last week and the choice was to use my stick or the script – I chose the script), we got four stars.
The Chair awaits Susanna’s return.
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