A Backstage Panacea to Loneliness
For me, the theatre provided a panacea to loneliness at boarding school on many occasions, theatre provided me with a family.
Theatre and live performance have been terribly badly affected by the COVID pandemic. Around the world venues have been dark for months, many of the workers forced to leave the industry to find an income elsewhere.
An article in this week’s papers focusses on the return to rehearsals for the highly-regarded Melbourne Theatre Company. In March last year, they finished a performance and went home, as usual, leaving everything as is, only to wake the next morning to be told not to come to work that evening - nor any day since then. I’m sure there are many Marie Celeste stages around the world, everything for a performance left undisturbed for months, waiting for a next performance which never happened.
I was particularly struck by the comments from the MTC’s stage manager:
“I’m lucky to still be here, and MTC is kind of my family and they’ve always looked after me.“
I know exactly what she means. For me, the theatre provided a panacea to loneliness at boarding school on many occasions, theatre provided me with a family.
At boarding school in England as a young boy in the late 1970s, we all participated in the school plays. Although as an all-boys school, that meant some of us had to take on the female parts. Which explains how my stage debut was as Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The opening night did not go well, earlier that day I lost my voice, just before the start of the performance a teacher was ‘painting’ the back of my throat with some kind of oil, presumably some kind of home remedy solution. In my frock and blond wig, I was told to soldier on, which presumably I did although I have no clear memory of the actual performance or how I fared.
However this possibly explains why I rarely graced a stage again, rather I found myself working backstage on subsequent shows, and especially enthusiastically working the lights - which at the school consisted of using a metre rule to move fader knobs up and down long tracks to dim and raise the lighting.
Some years later at boarding school in Geelong again I found myself working backstage on shows, these were the absolute happiest times at that school. The bullies, the sports stars, the cool kids, they had no interest in performing arts except where they might find glory in front of an audience, backstage was a black hole to them.
But for me I found my tribe, a small group of kids who came together at every opportunity to build the sets, hang the lights, organise the sound, and sit hunched in the small dark control room, munching on Minties, controlling every aspect of the performance. Even our drama teacher saw this as another world - out of school hours, working backstage he made sure it was ok to call him by his first name - a sacrilege at any other time. It was a secret club, a cabal of equals, no one cared who you were, what school year you were in. We worked together to a common purpose putting aside the usual internecine dynamics that plague school-aged kids.
My absolute fondest memory was when we went on tour - we took a small theatre show on the road to a school in Hamilton, out west of the state. We packed everything on the school bus, set up and ran the show, and slept in the host school’s dormitories before loading up and heading back to Geelong. I still remember that weekend.
Arriving at Monash University I immediately signed up with multiple student theatre groups - and then having hung around backstage at the university’s main theatre wound up with a paid job running the lighting console for school holiday kids shows as well as designing lighting for at least one of the major student music theatre shows - Hello Dolly. By the end of my first year, I was working continuously, skipped most of my lessons and exams, and hence ended my tertiary education, and a 15-year career working backstage in theatre and music started.
That career was born solely from the community, of the family, you make working on a show. Late nights swigging cognac on the production desk in the auditorium while you plot lighting cues with the show’s director; the joy of cracking open a beer after a Saturday having run both a matinee and an evening show; working together to solve challenges, disasters and dramas - usually for minimal budget; being yelled at by a middling to famous rockstar during a concert because I’ve neglected to turn her guitar on. There’s a magic about live performance, and we were the magicians casting the spells.
There’s a rather fun web series Empty Spaces which satirises the dramas backstage during a production of Romeo and Juliet. The cast is at war, literally, with the crew - it degenerates into fisticuffs within the first five minutes of episode one. Yes I’ve known ‘difficult’ actors, and at times been on crews who’ve moaned about the neuroses of a particular cast member, but at the end of the day the mantra “the show must go on” is paramount.
The nineteenth-century politician Otto von Bismarck is credited with declaiming “If you like laws and sausages you should never watch either one being made”, the same could be said for theatre, live performance is about creating an illusion - the ‘brick’ walls of a room on stage are actually painted canvas. The sound of a storm is a wind machine. The blood is corn syrup and food colouring. It’s a conspiracy of light, sound, props and scenery to create make-believe that seems real to the audience. And as a crew member, you are a co-conspirator, privy to the innards, collaborating with others to produce a fully formed sausage for the paying audience.
Everything is wrapped in an extensive vocabulary of words and superstitions. Scrim, fresnel, bubble, beginners, apple box, flies, blacks, blues, legs - entry into this exclusive club requires you to master dozens and words and terms and understand, for example, why you should never whistle whilst walking across a stage. Plus of course plenty of ‘in-jokes’:
How many actors does it take to change a lightbulb?
Three. One to actually change it, and two to discuss how they would have done it better.
You work very long hours - 8 am to 11 pm is not unusual during a rehearsal week, you spend more time with your theatre family than your real one. You drink, eat, sleep, argue and laugh with them just as you would with your partner at home. It’s your family, and when a long show run comes to an end it can be excessively depressing, all you can think of is finding the next show, the next gig so you can experience that feeling of the family again.
I’ve previously written about the genesis of my loneliness, moving countries, attending boarding school.
“As humans, we are used to living in tribes and naturally seek meaningful interactions with other people. We may not only be looking for social interactions but also for a deep connection with supportive and kind individuals.” [Steve Mueller]
Eventually, my ego fooled me into thinking I could run the theatre better than someone else, and I moved into management and left the comradery behind. Sometimes I rue that decision, I left a family behind, and never really rediscovered that unique sense of connection, support and community.
Today’s Quote
“Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.”
D.H. Lawrence