Theatre – It was ever thus.
Theatre was a constant for me and my 3 siblings from an early age. With an actor-father and a theatre-polymath for a mother, performing was weaved into our lives from an early age. We dressed up and performed ‘Wind in the Willows’ before bed. We listened to dad doing his voice exercises before going into the West End. Mum took us to her drama classes every Saturday, and on several occasions we accompanied them on tour. Ok, you can stop reaching for the sick-bag….!
We were exposed to a range of theatre. It wasn’t constant – actors aren’t paid a lot, and the theatre is expensive – but they tried to give us a range of experiences. Shakespeare, Rep theatre, Panto, and obscure touring companies in the 70’s. Which is how I ended up at the Young Vic in London, 1977, to see the Moving Picture Mime Show. I was 17 and I was about to have my mind blown.
MPMS were the first company to form from the Lecoq theatre school in Paris. 2 Brits and an American created a company that performed both in masks and in ‘Pantomime Blanche’ or ‘noisy mime’ as it became called. Their mime work was fast, cartoon and hilarious, doing a full recreation of Kurosawa’s epic film ‘The Seven Samurai’ with just 3 bodies and creative use of noise. Their ability to jump from playing horsemen galloping down a hill, to then seeing the same horsemen off in the distance was fabulously creative and cinematic, and for someone brought up on Shakespeare, Rep theatre and LAMDA exams, it was an epiphany.
But the real magic was in the second half. ‘The Examination’ was a slow, silent mask piece about 3 boys and their teacher in an exam. The actors wore large white masks with indistinct features – what I now know as Larval or Basle masks. Each character entered with a strong physical depiction of their character – and then, magically, I started to hear their thought process and their conversations in my head! Though silent, I was instinctively interpreting their movement – which was subtle, precise and clear – into my own language.
Theatre Without Text Freed My Own Voice
Having spent so many years listening to long-dead playwrights or language I barely understood, here I was in the theatre with my imagination totally engaged. I was part of the process, no longer just an observer, a member of an audience required just to listen (Audire in Latin), but totally complicit in the spectacle. I was required to work rather than let words wash over me. I was totally engrossed, and by the end of the piece I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to work in masks.
As the audience cleared, I turned to Mum and said “I want to do that!”. “Go and talk to them” she counselled. So I did. I collared one of the actors – Toby Sedgewick, who went on later to be the physical mastermind behind ‘War Horse” – and asked him how I could go about doing that kind of theatre.
“Well, you’ll need some training, and it’s best if you can find people to work with” was his short reply. Mime up to that point had largely been a solo effort – I’d seen Marcel Marceau several times already – but here was a company creating and performing as a troupe, without a word spoken.
At this point I should add something. Having been brought up so enmeshed in performing, theatre was an obvious career move. I was crazy about music too, played bassoon in several orchestras, but by 17 was totally in thrall to being in a rock band. I played the drums. Badly.
But I didn’t want to be an actor, per se. I’d spent so much time creating theatre rather than just performing, that I couldn’t contemplate being just an actor. Anyway, I wasn’t very good! I had a slight speech impediment of speaking too fast and falling over my words (called cluttering) which, possibly erroneously, I blamed on a short period of deafness when I was 4. Masks immediately produced an answer. Create, perform, tour, be in charge of your own destiny – without speaking! Perfect.
In 1978, after a year out, working as a cleaner in a huge Psychiatric Hospital, and manning the tills at the local record shop, I embarked on a 3 year Performing Arts Degree at Middlesex Polytechnic. The course had lots of opportunity to create one’s own work, and more importantly had choices of paths to follow. John Wright was the Mime tutor, plus there was a dance school there.
In my first semester I took every mime and dance class going. Two fellow students, Alan Riley and Sally Cook were also Moving Picture Mime Show fans, and we quickly coalesced into a unit, creating mask sketches, and ‘noisy mime’ plays. We left in July 1981, and immediately set up Trestle Theatre Company, with a fourth actor (and a much better drummer) Peter Walsingham, and our tutor John Wright. We thought we’d be earning a living by Christmas. How wrong we were!
Click on to My Life in Masks with Toby Wilsher Part 2
Moving Picture Mime Show – Handle With Care
Solo version of The Seven Samurai by David Gaines from MPMS
