The Snake in The Matchbox

Post date: Jul 5, 2014 4:30:44 PM

(written by Jane Darnbrough and posted on her behalf)

For a little while, our “Forthcoming Events” has listed for 3rd-5th July – Surprise evening event in West Wickham.

I can now reveal that Citrine and I have been appearing in The Matchbox Theatre’s “Brush up Your Shakespeare”.

This was a full evening (including supper) of pieces by, concerning or inspired by .... erm .... William Shakespeare to celebrate the 450th anniversary of his birth. We appeared in a specially-written 15 minute item based around Antony & Cleopatra.

********************

Imagine the scene: BBC2 are filming Antony and Cleopatra, but filming has been delayed by Caesar’s “little problem”. Now we’re at the final scene; Antony is dead, and Cleopatra is to be taken to Rome and publicly displayed – but she would rather die, so arranges for a “rural fellow” to bring her a venomous asp hidden in a basket of figs.

BBC2 has gone to great expense to secure the great actress Gillian Henderson (with an H) for the role of Cleopatra, and all is going well with the scene until, having said her farewells to her two handmaidens (one of whom drops dead from grief), she removes the lid from the fig basket and …

“What the ..? “

“Brian – where’s the ruddy snake?”

So it’s down to the stage manager, Tristan (who has clearly been driven to his limits by previous happenings), to reassure her, get her back on track, and explain that there is a real snake, but they didn’t want him in the basket under the studio lights for too long in case he … well … cooked.

There IS a real snake; Tristan wrote the memo himself. He’s about 10-12 inches long and he’s called Romeo. Romeo the Asp.

“Can we have the snake now please!”

********************

At this stage, I should make it clear that The Matchbox Theatre had kept it secret that there was going to be a real snake on stage – in fact, even the girl playing Charmian, one of the handmaidens, hadn’t mentioned it to her parents before they came on first night – so no-one was expecting me to walk on stage with an albino Burmese python round my shoulders.

********************

The two handmaidens, chamberlain, rural fellow and make-up lady scattered. Tristan dived (literally) behind the chaise longue. And Miss Henderson, of course, fell completely in love with Romeo and asked to hold him.

The props department had made a slight mistake. Instead of requesting “one pale-coloured snake, 10 to 12 inches long” they wrote “10 to 12 feet” ….

Tristan – doing his best to sort things out on the last possible day of shooting (“There is no tomorrow. Downton Abbey is in here tomorrow”) – while keeping as far away from the snake as possible, ran through various options. Ever helpful, I suggested that they “jiggle the ending a bit, so that Cleopatra was constricted – squished – by a python rather than being poisoned”.

Tristan was clearly unimpressed by this idea; this production was, after all, for a discerning BBC2 audience. But he was over-ruled.

“We’re going to need a bigger basket”.

So after a short break, they restarted, but it didn’t go well from the start. The rural fellow left the basket - now a big 'Ali Baba' type - and stage as quickly as he could, cutting a fair bit of script and leaving the basket in the wrong place. This threw out the two handmaidens who weren’t prepared for their entrances and had great difficulty in moving the basket. Then when the one dropped dead she fell in the wrong place, so Cleopatra had to kick the chaise longue backwards before she could sit down.

The script had been “jiggled” to talk of “thy immortal squeezing”, but when Ms Henderson removed the lid from the basket she found … well, several rather strange objects .... but none of them was the snake! He’d escaped!

Cue one distraught handler searching the stage, calling out “Romeo, Romeo? Where are you Romeo?”

“CUT”

********************

It was tremendous fun, and we’ve been happy to work with The Matchbox Theatre on this. I rather hope we get the chance to so so again (although I'm not sure how we can follow this.

You can see their blog at http://matchboxtheatre.wordpress.com/ - it’s bound to have some photos now that the cat is out of the bag – or, rather, the snake is out of the basket.

My personal thanks to Victoria Pearce for writing a wonderful script and directing it brilliantly, to Gillian Challenger for being “electric – positively jolting” in the role of Gillian Henderson/Cleopatra, and to Will Rowlands for working patiently with a novice (most of my lines were to him), and especially for not making me laugh too much.

Citrine, of course, managed to upstage everybody.

********************

UPDATE: A film of part of the piece is linked from The Matchbox Theatre's Blog: http://matchboxtheatre.wordpress.com/2014/07/15/brush-up-your-snakespeare/