A life in letters: Theatre

My parents suspected that attending the theatre was ‘worldly’ and therefore not appropriate for Christians. And so it was not until I was about ten that I had my first experience of the magic of drama.  A travelling theatre company came and set up a portable stage in the hall at Carluke Primary School where they gave a performance of the story of Pinocchio. The scenery may have been basic – we could see the rails on which the curtains moved -  but it was enough for my imagination to work on. Sitting near the actors I was captivated. It was as though Pinocchio was real, standing feet in front of us, fantasy made reality before our eyes.

The only other time I saw a play before I was an adult was when our 6th year English teacher arranged a trip to Glasgow’s King’s Theatre to watch Nyree Dawn Porter starring in Shaw’s St Joan – the very syllables of the star’s name had mystical allure. ‘You can go,’ my mother told me severely, ‘as long as you don’t let it give you a taste for the theatre.’  But the play didn’t connect with me – in an alien environment I was struggling with my habitual sense of anxiety.

In 1983 I saw a performance of Macbeth with a group of friends from Airdrie Baptist Church, and perhaps feeling securer in their company, as I looked down from our cheap seats high up in the gods I was captivated by the quality both of the performance and of the language.

I was hoping for a similarly enriching evening when, some years later, I went the theatre in Glasgow with a couple of colleagues, Elizabeth and Barbara, to see Hamlet. But in fact, anxiety and panic got the better of me, and it was one of my worst experiences of my life. We were sitting in a short row of seats immediately above the stage on which an extremely energetic Hamlet sweated his way through three hours of angst.  The stage design was minimalist, dominated by a huge, gently-inclined ramp of uncertain significance.

Some time after the performance began, when we’d already begun dipping into the box of chocolates we’d brought with us, my heart began racing for no apparent reason. It wasn’t that I was particularly empathising with the disturbed Prince of Denmark, or distressed by anything he said. I guess the episode was triggered by the dramatic lighting effects and the pervasive atmosphere of tense, raw emotion. I began taking deep breaths, trying to control the panic and the pounding heart, while at the same time part of me was clinically monitoring my pulse rate – well over three hundred a minute it seemed.

I quite simply expected to die where I was sitting, and accepted this as a fact. I said nothing to my colleagues, sensing that verbalising my experience would only make it worse.  I could have got up and run, but there was nowhere to run to. Somehow, I survived to the end of the performance, said good-night to Elizabeth and Barbara, and collapsed into my car, weak and trembling.

A few days later, I had to make a return visit to another Glasgow theatre, the Pavilion, taking a group of kids from our church Sunday School to the panto. I was dreading this, but whether because the Pavilion’s cheap, tawdry environment and the excruciating awfulness of the panto made for a less emotionally charged experience than Hamlet, or because I’d raided the emergency valium supply beforehand, I survived that particular challenge relatively unscathed.

This experience didn’t put me off attending the theatre, but nowadays I find something approaching the wonder I experienced in Carluke Primary School hall through music and words read and listened to in private rather than in drama.

When my daughters were young, Lorna and I took them to the panto at Eden Court Theatre in Inverness, and to performances by the Scottish children’s entertainers, The Singing Kettle whose imaginative songs I loved.

I don’t know if they found in these visits to Eden Court something of the magic which filled that school hall in the 1960s. But for me, that was a one-off – later we had the chance to go to another school to see a performance given by Bertha Waddell’s Children’s Theatre (formed in 1927.) Perhaps because the show featured a whole sequence of songs and mimes rather than one embracing drama it left me disappointed. It seems that that afternoon on the hard school floor at Carluke was a time of irrecoverable wonder.