More from
THE GRASS IS BROWN ON BOTH SIDES OF THE FENCE

THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF DRAMATIC ART.

NIDA’S third year course was only available to students that had attended the two previous years. But for one year only - it was such a disaster that it never happened again - NIDA opened its third-year course to students who had trained elsewhere. Being from the Ensemble, I auditioned and was accepted to fill one of the available slots. Of the others selected I was acquainted with one. Her name was Maggie Kirkpatrick, who was also a barmaid at the actor’s pub The Strand, on William Street in Kings Cross. Maybe that’s where she trained, because listening to the drunken ravings of that pubs clientele would have been a great place to start. This was long before Maggie’s star-turn as the Freak in the TV Series ‘Prisoner’. The others I didn’t know, or from where they had sprung. But as an experiment to combine different schools of acting techniques, it failed. The end of year plays that we put on were disasters. Those of us who were part of this experiment were an odd bunch with little rapport. As a group, we didn’t meld well. There was one who, if we had been a happier bunch, might not have been so cruel to. Mind you, he didn’t seem to notice that he was irritating and that made it easier for us to single him out. He was very short and had an annoying walk, as if trying to attain maximum height with every step by rolling up onto the ball of his foot. This meant of course that his head bobbed up and down, drawing attention to the very thing he was trying to disguise.
An example of how insensitive we were towards him.
We were preparing to do an improvisation. The scenario being: what would the group’s collective reaction be if we were on a raft in the middle of an ocean surrounded by sharks. In unison, we all walked over, picked up he, of the bobbing head, and threw him overboard. Then we started the improvisation.
Not nice.

We were also a group who were up for grabs, should other productions be needing extras. After a hasty rehearsal, we were on stage that night playing the wind in an Opera. That’s right, the Wind. There was only one way we felt that that this could be done. After covering ourselves with a large piece of sky coloured cheese cloth, we shuffled on cue, across the stage, following a female singer who was belting out a song - probably a weather report - in Italian. One of the edges of the wind must have implied turbulence as I could feel the draft created by someone’s head bobbing up and down, and there were also the atmospheric thunderclaps caused by Maggie’s huge feet flapping across the stage. I spent most of the journey wondering if Gary Cooper had ever had to do anything like this when he’d started out.

On another occasion, one of our so-called teachers, wanted us all to return to NIDA at 7.30 at night. What this was about we didn’t know, but we went as asked, to find the buildings locked. Bewildered we waited on the grass forecourt for the tutor to arrive. He duly did, wearing a smile that was enjoying what it knew and we didn’t. Then in his affected theatrical tones he told us all to lie down on our backs on the grass. We obliged. We were then told to find a star in the heavens above us and to pin all of our concentration onto it.
We obliged.
Then with a voice that sounded as if it had arrived via a correspondence course, he waxed on lyrically about how the star that each of us had found, was to be our theatrical life and that we were now to watch it move slowly across the night sky.
Even if I hadn’t felt the moisture from the grass spreading across my back, I would’ve gone home and watched Ironside.

The incident that really made me realise that whatever NIDA had to offer, I didn’t want.
I had been excited to see that Jerry Lewis, the famous American comic, was going to give a seminar on Comedy at a University Theatre venue, that was 50 yards away from the adjoining NIDA complex. I just assumed that allowances would be put in place so that all of NIDA could attend. It was never mentioned and when I brought the topic up to the dipstick who had wanted us to get pneumonia gazing at stars, it was like I hadn’t said anything. I was totally ignored. I was dumbfounded.

Ok you didn’t have to be a Jerry Lewis fan, but for Christ sake he had paid his dues and knew a thing or two, and he was going to talk about what he did know, 50 yards away and it wouldn’t cost anyone a brass razoo.

I was the only one who didn’t go to the movement class that was deemed to be more important to our careers than some comedy wisdom from the legendary Jerry Lewis.

This happened a long time ago and I’m sure things have changed at The National Institute of Dramatic Art, but in my eyes, they will never be able to scrub that one out of their books.

Listening to Mr Lewis’s analysis of comedy being about a man in trouble, was the most insightful lesson I’ve ever had on the reasons that make us laugh.
“Comedy is about a man in trouble,” declared Mr Lewis.
“Example!” yelled someone from the audience.

Mr Lewis looked around and grabbed a chair from the wings. He then placed it down on the stage with one of its four legs suspended over the orchestra pit. He then sat in the chair as if unaware that there was nothing supporting that fourth leg. The longer he sat there looking at us, bewildered as to what we were laughing at, the funnier it got. The laughter built in proportion to Jerry’s mystification of what it was that was amusing us.

There is no such thing as a funny joke. Laughter is actually a form of gasp the stops the body from absorbing the information that it’s receiving. It’s a defence mechanism. For example. Take a pun. The pun is humour at its simplest. A slight play on words. Who laughs at a pun? Not someone who has had a simple education. But for an Academic whose forte is language, a pun can threaten everything he knows about the proper order and rules he has been indoctrinated with. That makes it funny to him, but not necessarily to others, who wonder why he is laughing at something simplistic that doesn’t fit his intelligence.

That is not Jerry Lewis talking. That is me having absorbed what he demonstrated, and the seeds that he planted on that wonderful afternoon when I and I alone ducked a NIDA movement class.

If I hadn’t gone to see Mr Lewis there would be a lot of blank pages in this book.
Bearing in mind that comedy is a man in trouble, I will close this NIDA section with what follows.

STRAVINSKY’S “THE SOLDIER’S TALE”

Click here to continue this chapter

 

 

This is a private page, so to go to the website click here.