HANDS ON and Palindrome Theatre

DON’T SHOOT YOURSELF IN THE FOOT

Texas-based Palindrome Theatre Company (which, incidentally, doesn’t read the same backwards as it does forwards) are performing a unique adaption of Hedda Gabler at the Hill Street Theatre in Edinburgh, as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival… with a little last-minute help from a Glasgow-based production company.

The team from Palindrome Theatre had been commissioned by ReMarkable Arts to stage their reworking of the Ibsen classic, and flew over to Scotland last Tuesday to begin their run. Nigel O’Hearn, the Artistic Director, was confident that the replica guns they were travelling with, integral to the script, would be arriving safely with them at Edinburgh Airport. But when they did not, he turned to Hands On Production Services in Glasgow for urgent assistance.

O’Hearn says, “Finding a firing replica gun, or starter pistol, in Texas is like finding an axe, or a handsaw – or anything marginally dangerous but practically useful. When Hedda Gabler was running in the States and I had to obtain a firing pistol for our production, it took me zero phone calls and twenty minutes. I walked into my neighbourhood gun store and asked for a firing cap pistol. They handed it to me, and I paid for it.” As O’Hearn was not a gun owner, he asked what he was to do when he travelled with it or took it anywhere. The response was “Well, it’s not real… So it’ll be no problem trying to take it with you wherever.”

O’Hearn accepted this answer (although he questioned the logic slightly), and the shop was content to send him on his way, after a few safety pointers, with a gun in a plastic carrier bag. “That is how assured gun-dude was that travelling with this thing would be absolutely no problem.”

While he recognises that he may be stereotyping Texans as cavalier with weapons, O’Hearn is keen to tell this story in order to explain “why I believed I wouldn't have any trouble locking a gun in a box, after showing it to some lady at an airport in Texas who put a piece of paper on it saying she checked it, and why I had full confidence that the gun would head with me to Scotland.

“For fellow international Fringers, let me enlighten you now: you CAN NOT take anything that looks like a gun into the UK, or continental Europe, with any sort of ease. Your gun laws are not their gun laws, and what you consider dangerous is not what others consider dangerous.”

Rather unsurprisingly, the replica weapon purchased by Nigel for Palindrome Theatre was taken away from them, in Amsterdam. He had a small, official-looking piece of paper taped to his luggage saying “confiscated materials." Nigel is not confident that he will see the gun again.

Palindrome Theatre’s production of “Hedda Gabler” ends with a gun shot, and there is a lot of action surrounding a gun. “As you might imagine, it tends to break the audiences' suspension of disbelief when someone has to pretend their finger is a gun, and someone else is reduced to shouting ‘BANG!’ at the end of a fairly dramatic play,” says O’Hearn.

He and the theatre group therefore landed in Edinburgh two days before their show opened without an essential prop. “Turns out, it is very difficult to procure a gun in the UK. Due to some laws passed a few years ago, they have become very hard to come by. For the most part, I think this is a positive thing. It does, however, become quite infuriating when one is producing an adaptation of a show written in the midst of the industrial revolution, when apparently guns were abundant and a playwright couldn't stand to end a show without a ‘BANG’.”

Fortunately, O’Hearn was pointed in the direction of Hands On Production Services in Glasgow. He called Hands On around 11am telling them that he needed a gun by 2pm the next day in time for the opening of the show. Although the company offered several delivery options, O’Hearn decided it would be less risky simply to come through to Glasgow and pick up the gun in person.

“When I arrived, my desperation and panic was soothed out of me completely. A selection of possible choices were laid out for me. Hands On has an arsenal of prop guns and weaponry from all eras, and they made sure we had guns that would fit our production's specific period. All appropriate paperwork was prepared, ready for me to read and sign. I was handled with great care and true interest in my production. I received a full tutorial from Perry, the armourer, on how to operate the gun. Suffice to say, when I left Hands On, I could breathe for the first time in 48 hours, because I knew my show would go on.

“That is, go on without my having to stand in the back of the house shouting, ‘Ka-blam!’”

On the Fly

Perry’s Blog

On The Fly

Hands On has a reputation for snow and ice effects, which are achieved in a variety of ways: plastic snow, paper snow, foam and cellulose-derived being some of the more familiar ones. Way back in the old days, before any of us had two green credentials to rub together, it was even acceptable to use sodium chloride scattered around the countryside. Nobody paid attention to potential environmental damage that could have been occurring, although of course nowadays we are all much more careful.

Today I was speaking to a colleague of mine, a well-known prop man, who relayed a story to me about his days in theatre.

It was a panto, and the snow effect was being very simplistically achieved by one of the fly-men, standing on the fly control platform and sprinkling shredded paper past the window of the set at the appropriate cue: five minutes before the finale.

Commonly, fly-men are very busy during pantomimes, but this particular show had very few flying cues. Therefore, during the run of the show, he got into the habit of turning up for the half-hour call, showing his face, and then disappearing to spend the rest of the show (including the interval) propping up the bar at a local tavern.

Every night, five minutes before his cue, he would head back to the theatre, climb to his control position, wait for the prompt and sprinkle the newspaper in as “snow-like” a fashion as he could.

But one evening, after one too many drinks in the pub, he looked at his watch rather belatedly and had to run back to the theatre very quickly to get there on time. On his arrival, out of breath, he went to the box that usually contained the snow, only to discover the newspaper (that was normally shredded into snowflakes by the assistant stage manager) was still in its newsprint form. In his inebriated state, and in a moment of stupidity, he ripped the paper apart as best he could – and threw the (still readable) newspaper on to the stage.

Needless to say, the theatre management was not pleased with these antics, and called for the theatre doctor to legally confirm the fly-man’s state of inebriation – whereupon he was promptly sacked.

Elvis, Elvis...

Perry’s Blog

Elvis, Elvis, let me be…

keep that pelvis far from me!

I was having a lengthy conversation the other day with my old mate Julie Graham, and we were reminiscing about our early careers in show-business.

Julie is now a well known film and TV actor, but was telling me she had just finished working on a theatre show. She explained how she would warm the cast up before rehearsals… using a particular song that meant a lot to us both.

Julie is probably best known for her television roles as Mary in “William and Mary”, and as Abby Grant in “Survivors.” But, like all great actors of her quality, she started her career in the theatre. This girl had theatre in the blood (her mother, Betty Gillin, had been a well known actress) and had immense natural talent which shone like a beacon, even then. Anyone who knew her knew she was going places.

We both got our Equity Cards (too many years ago to mention) on a schools theatre tour with Borderline Theatre Company. We were both pretty talented young people who thought we knew it all – but in those few weeks of hard graft, we learnt just about everything about our craft. We did have the benefit of working alongside the genius of Barbara Rafferty and Iain Andrew, who together taught us more about the theatre in particular, and of life in general, than one should expect to learn in a lifetime.

You can imagine the banter that went on within such a group of artists. Six actors and me (as stage manager), together with set, lighting and sound, toured all over Scotland in a minibus, presenting two shows a day for weeks on end. What fun we had, in those carefree days. I can’t remember much about the show itself, but the craic was out of this world.

To while away the hours of travelling, we got up to all manner of shenanigans. One day (and it came from a very distant memory) I introduced the team to what very quickly became the company song. And I’d like to thank the big man himself, Elvis Presley, for the gift! 

The song in question was “Didja’ Ever?”, and it makes me smile to this day… especially knowing that, nearly 25 years on, Julie still uses “our” song as part of her routine.