Christmas performance and Wordsworth

Tomorrow, for the 16th time, I shall be performing at the British Embassy in Oslo for the Anglo-Norse Society's Christmas party. This occasion is always something I look forward to, and over the years I have be fortunate enough to perform all sorts of things from short stories, sketches, songs, even pantomine, along with skilled musicians, singers and other performers from every area of show business. My role has usually been that of a master-of-ceremonies, a narrator to the events and general deliverer of entertainment. By far the most enjoyable thing though, is the chance to perform and share poetry about Christmas. It has become a Christmas tradition in itself, and my only concern is that it becomes harder and harder each year to find something that hasn't been done before. But earlier this year, to my joy, I came across a wonderful poem by William Wordsworth –a poet I have always admired, and this will be shared with the audience as part of my performance, along with pieces by George Wither, Thackeray, Mary Howitt and the one line of Shakespeare tat specifically deals with Christmas! The musical part of the evening will be provided by a Norwegian vocal group called "Uhørt". In the meantime, here's the Wordsworth poem.

Minstrels by William Wordsworth

The minstrels played their Christmas tune 

To-night beneath my cottage-eaves; 

While, smitten by a lofty moon, 

The encircling laurels, thick with leaves, 

Gave back a rich and dazzling sheen, 

That overpowered their natural green. 



Through hill and valley every breeze 

Had sunk to rest with folded wings: 

Keen was the air, but could not freeze, 

Nor check, the music of the strings; 

So stout and hardy were the band 

That scraped the chords with strenuous hand. 


And who but listened?—till was paid 

Respect to every inmate’s claim, 

The greeting given, the music played 

In honour of each household name, 

Duly pronounced with lusty call, 

And “Merry Christmas” wished to all.

Standing in for Steven Van Zandt

This week I have had a rather interesting acting assignment -standing in for the American actor/performer Steven Van Zandt in the casting sessions for a major Norwegian television series he will be starring in. As Mr Van Zandt is an exceptionally busy man –even more than me!– he can't make it for the casting sessions where actors for the other parts are being considered, so I have been brushing up my New York accent and dived into the task of doing his scenes –again and again, with a succesion of actors. It is a fascinating and rewarding process, a bit like an acting lab., with improvisations and tests and stretching of scenes. The great thing about it is that unlike just about every audition I have attended, there is no pressure on me at all, apart from myself, as I am not the one being tested out. But we do the scenes for real, on camera, and it is fascinating doing the same scenes with very different actors -some of whom are people I have admired for a long time. I know the scripts pretty much backwards, having also had the task of translating them all into English, and I cannot deny that it is rather fun being a mafia thug for a week. Capice?

A new challenge -opera, and Benjamin Britten!

The other day I was saying to myself, I would like something new and challenging to come along, something I haven't tried before. Well, one must be very careful about what one asks for, because in my experience, one frequently gets it. However I could not have been more surprised than I was when the Norwegian National Opera called and asked whether I was interested in doing English vocal coaching for the cast of their upcoming production of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes. As it will be sung in English they need somebody to work with the performers on correct pronunciation and understanding of the language in performance, and as it turns out I had been recommended by someone or other -and blessed indeed are those angels who recommend people for things!
So today I visited the vast white opera building that dips into the water by Oslo's harbour and instantly got lost in the maze of corridors, offices, performing spaces, rooms, stores and staircases, and met the artistic people and the head of the opera and the deputy head of the opera, and in a short time I had agreed to "meet the challenge" and laid a plan for how to go about it. A huge score was thrust into my hand, and the weekend will be spent listening to Britten, reading about Britten about Peter Grimes, and about opera in general. In many ways this very different from the theatre, but I am excited about the challenge because opera represents just about the only field of entertainment that I have not been involved in before; that and circus –though I am told that once things get underway this will be quite a circus too...

A wooden performance?

This week one of the things I have done has been recording the English version of a popular book for children about a rather curious character –a talking, walking piece of wood– called Block! (Block is pictured above). Block, along with a friend called Spruce, likes to collect things (a bit like me) and collects so many things in fact that he has no other choice but to make his own musuem –something I too have thought would be a good idea. To create the voice for Block I had to delve deep into the ideas behind method-acting and imagine myself to be a living, breathing piece of wood. Fortunately I have known one or two PEOPLE who fit that description, so I used tem as inspiration too! I think the book is rather fun, and it's certainly wonderfully illustrated by the writer. The book and audiobook will be accessible on Salaby later this autumn.

This Week’s Flashback -Sebastion in "Twelfth Night" 1992

I Have been going through old photographs the last few days –the wet weather has been perfect for that sort of thing– and came across this picture from a production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night I performed in way back in 1992 with The Oslo Players. This particular photograph is from a special performance at the British Embassy in Oslo. Unfortunately no one had told the ambassador that there was a sword fight in the play, and he went quite white during the performance -the reason being the stage's proximity to the portrait of Queen Elizabeth in the background. He afterwards told us that the Princess Royal (Princess Anne) was staying at the embassy a day or two later. I couldn't help but wonder what she would have thought if she had arrived to find the picture of her mother slashed! Fortunately my fencing skills proved adequate enough to avoid disgrace! I'm not quite sure about that wig though...

The World of Salaby

One of the projects I am working on this summer is translating and preparing the English version of the educational website "Salaby" for the Norwegian publisher Gyldendal. Salaby is a really fun interactive world for children, consisting of games, exercises, little stories and poems.. For instance; every letter of the alphabet has a little poem attached to it, and one of the exercises is trying to locate the various letters - this is my version of one of the poems. Can you guess for which letter?

"Dozy Dina dreamed of dancing

All day long out by the sea,

Dancing like a disco diva,

Dear oh dear, she worries me!"

Yes, my creative buds are not being wasted as you can see!

Also on or in Salaby you can listen to some of my recordings, and if you search the website a bit you can even be able to find me singing "I'm a Little Teapot" !

web2.gyldendal.no/salaby/bokmal/default.asp

Commercial for BioQ milk

The commercial I appeared in for a Norwegian dairy, advertising a new type of biological fibre milk has hit the screens. You can check it out on the link below. It was first shown while I was on holiday in Greece, and when I got back the first thing I did was to go out and buys some milk (after all, I am English and I must have milk in my tea). Unfortunately the shop I went to didn't have the new brand so I was forced to buy the milk of a rival. I felt rather guilty clutching the carton of this rival brand as I walked home with it, and surreptitiously tried to conceal it, lest I be spotted by some sharp-eyed viewer of commercials and shatter their illusions. Anyway, the commercial (shot in Romania and directed by a brilliant young guy called Kristoffer Borgli) is

now appearing with alarming regularity on television in Norway. Click on the link to see it:

http://bioq.no/

Voicing mice and dinosaurs!

This week I have had the pleasure of voicing some characters for the interactive version of a couple of English text books for schools here in Norway. These characters include a young dinosaur: Dino (pictured on the left of the book cover), a vague lizard character, a selection of monsters and a group of hysterical mice! There were one or two human characters too, but animals are always the most fun –and the most challenging too. Using both a very low register (for the monsters) and an extremely high register (for the mice) means that one has to be careful of one's voice, and proper warming up is essential. And -strange though it may seem- one has to imagine oneself being the character just as much with an imaginary or animal character as one does with a human one. Otherwise the freedom of creativity and imagination is wonderfully exhilerating ..for who really knows how a dinosaur would speak!

98th Annivesary of Titanic disaster, and project update

Today marks the 98th anniversary of the sinking of Titanic, so working on my labour of love (Project Titanic) has a special weight at this time. It's another two years before I plan to stage the play I am writing about Titanic, but I have been researching all aspects of the ship, the sinking, the people connected with it and the legacy of the whole disaster and started to set out the framework of the play. It started as being a one-man piece –with Bruce Ismay as the sole character. Then expanded to three, then to four characters, and now looks like ending up having five characters, one of whom I still have to determine the identity of. Apart from Ismay all the characters perished when the ship went down. The play will also include a sort of prequel that I am quite excited about ..this featuring Captain Smith and another famous captain from history!

So the business at the moment is jotting down ideas and trying out threads of storyline. The most important part of any playwriting is the construction, and the defining of the "shape" of the piece. This is progressing nicely, and I have a good idea now of what I want to say with my play. The rest is to follow.

On location in Bucharest

This week I am in Bucharest for five days in order to appear in a commercial for a Norwegian dairy! An exotic location indeed, and a city I have not visited before, so I look forward to seeing something of the place between shooting. Fortunately my schedule includes a whole "waiting" day, so I shall be able to explore some of the fine buildings and especially theatres that the city is famous for -such as The Odeon pictured above which is close to where I am staying. As for the acting I have to do: it involves me giving a speech to a crowd of people. For some odd reason I keep having visions of Nicolae Ceausescu's last attempt to give a speech to a crowd, and their reaction. I hope they treat me better!

This Week's Flashback -William Shakespeare in "Kings" 1997

It has been a good few years now since I last performed my one-man play about Shakespeare, but over Easter I have been looking through the scrapbook and remember this production with great affection, not least because I had total control of everything –the script, the direction, the production and not least the performance. Essentially it is a 70 minute monologue performed by Shakespeare a day or two before he dies. He sits going through his papers, and conjures up

vivid memories from his life and work, and the characters he created. I learned more from doing this piece than anything else I have done. I am rather tempted to revive it one day too.

Reflections on Green Screen

Green screen (sometimes blue screen or yellow screen) acting is something actors of the distant past would have excelled at, as it demands of the performer the same kind of disciplined imagination that turned the stage of a Greek amphitheatre into a heavenly kingdom, or the "wooden O" of the old Globe into the battlefield of Agincourt. The bare stage and the green screen studio share the wonderful, exhilarating vastness of creative possibility.

One is presented with a blank canvas on which to paint. The background will be determined by the script, and designed or generated on a computer. It is the actor's task to create a believable performance in the imagined setting. The possibilities are endless, determined by the requirements of the text of course, but with very few limitations of any kind. One can be inside or outside, in a huge castle or a tiny room, or swim in space or fly through the sea and not get wet. Usually it will just be you, your co-performers and the screen –so you have to create the dimensions, the feeling and the atmosphere of your surroundings. Some actors dislike this, preferring the firm realism of objects and surroundings that are actually there. I myself find the challenge of green screen acting to be hugely liberating. Your imagination is fired up and sharpened; you go back to using the inner eye of a child. You are told the vague limits of the space –there is a door here, in the background there will be a window etc– but you yourself have to create the sense of being in that space. You may have to react to something that isn't there –that will be generated on a computer afterwards, so you need to be disciplined and focused, and see the height, colour, texture of everything around you that isn't there. Your creation of the imaginary world around you is what will (hopefully) make the setting believable. Though technical wizards can do wonders with the backgrounds, your performance has to be utterly believable for the thing to work –and the hardest thing is: you just don't know if it's working. You just have to trust your instincts and your imagination. And THAT is really what makes acting exciting.

Heated over Climate Change

I have started the new decade by taking on the task of recording as an audiobook a new, and rather obscure and heavy academic volume about anthropology and climate change, and once again I have found myself fuming heatedly over the whole business of names (see my blog post on Romans further down). This time it is not only the challenge of finding the correct pronunciations of out-of-the-way villages in the Andes or Tanzania, but the simple realization that very few academics seem to have straightforward, ordinary names. I am sure each of them individually has no problem whatsoever with her or his name, but my renderings of them have often meant resorting to great creativity and even close editing individual syllables to get the name...correct?

Well, who knows? So apologies in advance to messrs. Rwamugira, Majugu, Ouattara and Xurong to mention but a few –I am sure your academic work is sterling, no matter how garbled I may have pronounced your names.

This Week’s Flashback -Player in "Hamlet" 1992/1993

"The players are come hither my lord..." and what a collection of ancient-looking ghostly figures we were. Almost like anaemic zombies in Renaissance garb, including the pictured ruff, which I remember itched constantly, as did the straggling (or struggling) moustache. In some of the scenes in which I appeared it was important to remain absolutely still, but the urge to scratch or sneeze made this a task of Hercules. I had a cold at one stage, and a runny nose, which was an absolute nightmare to try and contain –the moustache (and probably the audience) suffered as a consequence. Also all our costumes were covered with powder, adding to the impression of a dusty troupe of traveling players, and every move or gesture was accompanied by a little cloud. Despite all this it was a very successful production, running for over 100 performances, with a revival the following year, and it taught me a great deal about Shakespeare... and moustaches!