Why people in general are not aware of it I am unable to understand. I’m talking about the ability to link mind to mind through the eyes, a form of communication that is close to telepathy. Perhaps it is telepathy. For instance, in the street, something happens and you find your eyes meeting those of a complete stranger and you share a mutual pleasure or disgust. You know what they’re thinking. They know what you’re thinking. Surely it happens to you. Can it only be me?
In my case, the complete stranger always seems to be a woman which is strange because I tend to loose my meagre supply of self confidence where women are concerned. I even find it hard to speak to women that I know well. My wife says that I would still be single if she hadn’t taken the initiative.
Most people try to tell me it’s simply a matter of reading the facial expression but I know that it’s more than that. Years ago, at an Easter Show, I was standing by the dodgems waiting for my cousin to return from the toilets. Across the alleyway, straight opposite, was a show tent and on the staging outside the showgirls strutted their stuff and a barker sought to drum up business for the next show. Yet it was not the showgirls or the barker who were dragging in the customers. Something very strange was going on. There was a tiny ticket box with no internal lighting. It had a tiny opening through which could be seen the face of an elderly woman. To be more accurate, the eyes of an elderly woman. It was fascinating to watch. Young men would be walking by in twos and threes completely ignoring the tent’s outside show but if one of them should accidently meet the eyes of the ticket box woman he would stop dead, as if hitting an invisible wall, and insist that his mates come with him into the show.
Or to give another example. I was at a performance of the Osipov Folk Orchestra in the old His Majesty’s, and that will tell you how long ago it was, and for one piece there was a solo soprano who stood stage left. I was sitting half-way back in the stalls, the house lights were down, and it seems impossible that she could see that far beyond the stage lights and yet our eyes locked. Two strangers without a common language looking into each other. We were locked together for little more than a second but for her, in the middle of a performance, it was a frightening intrusion of her being. She shook her head resolutely and the bond was broken.
Now to jump forward to more recent times. I have already mentioned my lack of self-confidence. I have always envied acquaintances who were sure of themselves although wondering in many cases what right these people have to be confident. It does seem that those who know least of what they are talking about are the ones impregnably confident and when I was younger it seemed to be the guys who fancied themselves who got the girls, real worth was never the issue. Like business confidence, it seems that personal confidence comes first after which everything else falls into place.
To get to the point, my wife came across an ad. in the local paper and poked it under my nose.
“This is what you need,” she said. It was the High School’s list of evening classes for the coming year and the particular course that she was underscoring with her fingernail was ‘Speaking With Confidence’. My wife, I should mention, is on a number of committees and has no difficulty in standing up and adding her ten cents worth.
“I can’t see what the problem is,” she says. It’s alright for her. Me? I don’t mind helping with fund raising and such-like but, speak to a group? No way! And I told her, “No way!” to this High-School thing but she went ahead and enrolled me anyway.
I was surprised at some of my fellow classmates. People whom I would have assumed to be brimming with confidence. Take Tom Skinner our auctioneer, a top entertainer and a clever salesman. Always ready with some smart remark to take the mickey out of his weekly audience and he gets away with it. He has us laughing at ourselves. Who would think that he would have trouble getting a point across? BUT!
“It’s a matter of what you’re used to and what you’re not used to,” he tells me. He was thinking of having another try for the District Council. He had the feeling that no-one had taken him seriously the last time around.
Our tutor Martha Stretton was head of the school’s English Department and nearing retirement. She led us into things gently. At the first class she had each of us stand before the others and tell them a little about ourselves, our interests, why we wished to be able to speak publicly, and that included those of us who said, “But everyone here knows me. They went to school with me.” For most of us even this toe-in-the-water was a trial.
In the weeks that followed we were gradually introduced to various aspects of public speaking. Preparing outlines, minimizing the use of notes, arousing interest with our introductions, making audience contact, logical coherent development, the use of illustrations, variations of pitch, pace and power, to maintain interest, drawing the threads together in a conclusion that moved people to action, and more. Each week, we considered one of these subjects and four of us were assigned five-minute talks for the following week in which we were expected to demonstrate everything leaarned previously and there was a general discussion afterward on our success or otherwise, and a further aspect of the subject explained. We were urged to look for opportunities to apply what we were learning.
I became something of an enthusiast, eager to excel in the art. I acquired John A. Lee’s ‘Simple On a Soapbox’ and a cardboard bound series by Kenneth Melville from the early forties. It was possibly my enthusiasm that led me astray.
As I mentioned before, Martha was Head of English and for that particular year Busury Students were required to study Shakespeare’s The Tempest. As she tells it, with something close to despair, there is great difficulty in getting students to see Shakespeare’s work, or indeed any other great work of English literature, as anything other than an unjust imposition, a roadblock to be circumvented with the minimum of effort. Never as something of beauty to be savoured. Never as an open window into the psyche of mankind.
And so the great idea was born. The Bursury Students would publically perform The Tempest in which case they hardly avoid knowing it intimately. It would live for them. Or so it was hoped. It would be performed as in Shakespeare’s day with the minimum of scenery and with actors, supposedly hiding, in full view of the audience. Costumes would be borrowed from the Little Theatre of which Martha was a member so that it could, hopefully, be produced on the cheap.
But there was one major snag. Even though The Tempest requires a smaller cast than many of the other plays of the Bard and some players can take double roles which is normal practice, there were still not enough Bursury Students. So you can guess where Martha turned her attention. Her night class!
The idea was that the Bursury Students would practice their parts in school hours with Martha reading the absent roles and she would perform the same service for the press-ganged members of the night class who had to work during the day. The two groups would then get together a few times toward the end of the year to walk through their parts. It was expecting a great deal from unseasoned actors.
I am a push-over at any time and was one of those roped in. I became Ariel who is described in the Dramatus Personae as ‘an airy spirit’ although how anyone could imagine me as ‘an airy spirit’ I do not know. My wife laughed herself sick when I told her.
One wonders how the actors of Shakespeare’s day managed to commit the longer speeches to memory. The plays did not have long runs as they do today. They were presented for often no more than a few days and when the audiences fell off were replaced by something else by the same company. The Elizabethan theatre had as insatiable a thirst for new work as television has today which is why plays were written by teams of lesser writers working with a known playwright. Even Shakespeare had collaborators and he helped himself to other people’s stories quite shamelessly but then that was the norm. It was his deft touch and his dramatic sense that made his plays stand out.
Pity the poor actor in this hectic melee. No short takes, no editing out of fluffs, but multiple roles in the one play, fifty lines and more without a break from the hundreds learned in days. At that time, one went to hear a play to hear rather than see it so the words were important although that didn’t stop their audience talking among themselves and cracking nuts. A few days later, it would be a new play and new roles. How many of us have that kind of memory? Not me certainly which is why I was not too enthusiastic at the start.
I approached the first run-through of we ring-ins with anything but confidence. I could read my part at home with what I believed to be conviction, gesticulating and addressing my imaginary audience with aplomb, how I would go before a real audience was another matter. Put my script down and I was floundering immediately. Yet at that reading, I had it completely at my fingertips. I outshone the others who were still having difficulties. My script lay on a chair unneeded. It was unbelievable! But home again and the words were for the most part gone.
It was only after several read-throughs, or not read-throughs in my case, that I realised what was happening. Martha sat before us with the script in her lap giving a running critique and bridging the missing roles. I would say that she prctically knew the play by heart anyway having taught Shakespeare for many years. At my least hesitation, she would look up enquiringly and the words would come to me. Quite unknowingly, by that look, she was feeding me the words.
I said nothing of this telling myself that I wouldn’t be believed anyway. The real reason, probably, was that I was enjoying my apparent superiority, my opportunity to crow. I found myself to be a better acttor than I had imagined and my hesitations became convincing dramatic pauses. And what was the harm of it? I was playing the part and playing it well. Surely that was all that mattered and who would find out anyway? Martha would be acting as prompt for the combined rehearsals with the Bursury Students and during the actual public performance. I just couldn’t go wrong.
At the rehearsals, we oldies did better than the students. Perhaps we had the increased confidence of age, less inhibitions perhaps and I am sure that the public-speaking course had helped us, or could it be that we had actually seen stage plays. I don’t know. The students had the words quite well in hand but were flat and not really into their roles even in the final rehearsal. We solaced ourselves with the old saw that it was bound to be right on the night. I, of course, would be word perfect.
We had a month’s break before the final rehearsal. This was unfortunate but necessary because the public performance was to come after the Bursury exams and the students needed that time for any late cramming, but it had the effect of taking everybody off-peak which would account for the increased number of dries at that last rehearsal and some bad cases of nerves before the actual performance.
And yet it did seem to be right on the night. Even my singing went well. As you may know, Ariel has two songs in Act 1 Sc II. ‘Come Unto These Yellow Sands’ and ‘Full Fathom Five’. I had a guitar and two flutes to accompany me which, I admit, definitely helped my pitch and I will always cherish the look of surprise on my wife’s face. I had not told her that I was going to sing.
Scene followed scene smoothly until the end of Act III when, after a whispered conference, Martha surrendered the prompt book and came backstage. What was I to do now? We had reversed the situation of Shakespeare’s day where young men played women. Our Prospero was a girl who now claimed a sudden illness and Prospero has the first speech in Act IV. To save the show, Martha must quickly take the guise of the rightful Duke of Milan.
The replacement prompt was a woman whom I had never seen before and I was in a panic as you can imagine. I spent the rest of Act III and the first 164 lines of Act IV in a total stew. There was no way that I could see myself coping.
Then the lights went out and a quick check showed that the whole district was out. At first, I thought that it was my salvation. But no! When it appeared that there was little chance of the power returning any time soon, we of the cast were assembled on the stage with the fading light of a torch. We would finish the play in the dark.
That was one advantage of a play that was meant to be heard even more than seen. Martha explained the unseen action and we spoke our parts. I was surprised to find myself not only coping but actually living the part.
Our audience was right with us and when I sang ‘Where The Bee Sucks’ at least half of them sang it with me. There were cries of “Again! Again! And we sang it twice more.
The lights returned, to the usual ironic cheers, just a few lines before the Epilogue and Martha, as Prospero, had to wait for the noise to die down to make this final speech.
Strangely, everyone thought the whole thing a huge success. Perhaps even more strange is that I’ve joined the Little Theatre.