THE PREMIERE PERFORMANCE

I have made an executive decision. It is based on several complaints received, to the effect that our readers are confused by both of us calling ourselves Jonah. Well... he CALLS himself Jonah, but it really IS my name, so I'll tell him that from now on he can revert to his own proper name, which is Oscar. No other explanation is required.

When Oscar came back from Malcaster General Hospital last year (at about the time when our clutch of four was ready to hatch, so Penny was sitting on them most of the time), it was necessary for me to perch with him quite often, whispering thoughts of comfort and rationality. Something had gone seriously wrong with him all of a sudden. At first, he could not even work his computer, but slowly he learned how to do that again. Then he became increasingly irascible whenever he wanted to find something in one of his books. He would make Cara search up and down all the rows of books and through all those hundreds of plays on his shelves, at which times she was far more patient than anyone could be expected to be. If he clambered up on their chairs to search for something himself, she stood back and worried - kept hovering behind him, mewing little noises of fear and alarm, darting forward to catch him. Then, on the odd occasion that he found what he was looking for, he couldn't read it, held it close and sort of sideways, scowling at it, trying all his different spectacles and using caustic language which included words that I had never heard before.

Eventually, Cara and me sat him down and talked to him very seriously indeed. Reluctantly, he agreed to chuck out most of his books and to rearrange his study so that perhaps he wouldn't break his bloody neck in it. A man came in a car called Taxi (it had its name on its roof) and took a lot of the books away, most of them to a house called County Library, the rest to another house called Bookshop where someone gave Taxi's driver a handful of those paper things that quackers love so much.
After that, I saw Cara and Oscar (formerly known as Jonah The Elder) sitting on the floor of his study with lots of cardboard boxes full of papers, getting all the programmes and posters and photographs out and arguing about which bits should go into the black plastic bags that Cara was filling up. On several Monday mornings, those men in that noisy big Lawry chucked several bulging black bags into the back of Lawry, along with all the other rubbish, and Lawry chewed it all up and ate everything. Then Cara put all the papers that were left over into different coloured cardboard envelopes, wrote on their outsides and lined them up neatly in his cupboard. "Thank God for that," Cara whispered to me. "I've been dying to get rid of all that old junk for years," but Oscar didn't hear her say that, it was our secret, Cara and me... tsk tsk tsk...

So, when I was flying past last Thursday evening, I was surprised to see him with a pink cardboard envelope on his desk, pulling all the papers out from it and wincing at them from about an inch distance through his little half-glasses. I flitted down, perched on the windowsill and tuned into his thoughts. He was getting all sentimental.

The envelope had "FREEDOM" written on its outside and he was reading letters that people had written to him while he was in the desert and they were back home, rehearsing his new play. There were several little letters from Cara, telling him very little about what was going on. Cara was playing Pansy because she is small and knowing. That's the thing about telepathic communication: you don't only hear the words that a person is thinking, you see his pictures and feel his emotions. There was a very pretty young lady who played Alice. Her letters began "Dearest" and were twittery. Oscar was very fond of her because she was good at her job in his office, as well as having learned all about acting from him. The one who played Swanilda was tall, thin and very energetic, but Oscar thought the world of her because she had been to actors' school. Her letters began "My love," or "Darling love", because that's how luvvies talk to each other, but don't really mean it the way it sounds. There were some more letters, posters, programmes and snaps, but finally a big hand-written letter from the director Oscar had chosen. It was very serious and talked about casting, but, at its end, it described two ideas that the director had had. Many years had passed since Oscar last read these letters, so they brought back to him all sorts of images and memories. He remembered how he had woven the director's ideas into his play.

Then he tucked all the papers neatly back into the pink envelope, stood up, took the file to his cupboard and stowed it back in its place on the shelf. His brow furrowed as he remembered that some of the people in "Freedom" had behaved unkindly to each other when he had been too far away to put things right. Quackers can be like that.

He sat down in his big leather swivel-chair, leaned back with his hands behind his head and smiled broadly. At last, he was remembering the very first performance.

The director completely agreed with Oscar about something they called "total experience", which is a trick they don't do very often at the Granary Theatre, where I live, but, when they do, it's good fun. They take the situation and atmosphere of the play and, instead of keeping it on the stage, they spread it all out through the auditorium and the foyer, even outside the theatre sometimes, so that the Audience are involved in it from the moment they get out of their cars. With a play set in medieval England, there was plenty they could do to create this "total experience".

And Oscar hates doing plays in those places he calls "multi-purpose halls with cliff stages at one end." He prefers a beautifully raked auditorium, sloping down to a well-lit acting area. The director had chosen a large school hall with a flat floor.

As he approached the school's main entrance, Oscars despair dispelled. The whole team had studied how people lived in Plantagenet England, and every one of the performers had created a character who lived in 1381. It was market day in the town where they all lived and had their being, so they were all gathered around the market place to sell and buy things, to make entertainment and to be entertained. The peasants were rough and very smelly indeed (the smelliness was achieved by use of a nearby stagnant ditch, to which they all resorted well before each performance), but there were also soldiers and monks, everybody living their lives. And they had animals that had been brought to market, and all sorts of produce that they had brought to sell.

There were musicians who played home-made whistles and drums, so that people could join in and dance. Somewhere in the distance, we could hear monks about their devotions in the abbey, singing plain-chant very quietly, but there.

The nearer we got to the school-hall, the more people we saw and the more noise they made, until we entered the actual hall, where the atmosphere was a sort of orderly mayhem. All around the outside wall were arranged market stalls where people were selling things: honey, beeswax candles, bread and cakes, corn dollies, wooden toys, tools and implements, mead and milk and there were some with live chickens in them where (to my personal distaste, but I forgive quackers for many sins) they sold eggs. The piece de resistance was a stall that had several live piglets in a pen, contentedly grubbing at the floor and grunting. I watched the scene develop in Oscar's mind.

On the hall's stage, which was dimly lit for this period of the performance, we could see the Abbott sitting at his work-table, working at his documents of rolled vellum, reading documents and signing things as he quietly issued instructions to the monks who moved around him and assisted his work. A pretty cheeky little woman brought them refreshments and we could tell by their behaviour that she was deaf.

The Abbott was of course the monarch's appointed ruler of this area and the several others that made up his domain. On the stage, he was symbolically higher than and separated from the rabble in the market-place, on the floor of the hall. The area where he worked was backed by three gothic "stone" arches that sored gracefully up high and through which was an illusion of distance. The centre arch - slightly higher than the others - was surmounted by a stone crucifix that was matched by another crucifix on top of the market cross in the middle of the hall floor, rooted into an earthwork mound on which someone could stand to command the attention of the mob while he made a speech.

It was essential that the Audience identified with The Mob and felt part of it, oppressed by The State... The Church. Instead of placing the Audience's chairs in orderly rows, our director had them arranged in many groups of twenty or thirty chairs each, scattered throughout the hall with paths between all of the groups of chairs.

There came a time when the houselights started to dim, the stage-lights warmed, the musicians played louder, the plainchant hushed to silence and all of the peasants formed into a dancing column that pranced behind the musicians. Amusingly, however, a score of Audience-members had joined in the dancing, so they carried on capering with the jolly column of costumed peasants as they jigged around and between the groups of chairs, their grins and whoops clearly demonstrating their enjoyment.

With all of the Audience still laughing and clapping in time with the music, the dancing Audience-members were restored to their seats, we became aware of a slow, insistent drumbeat as the peasants danced off to the diminishing sound of fifes. Finally, in a silence but for the drumbeat, with the Abbott alone working away on the stage in minimal light, the hall/FOH lights dimmed down to a focus around the market-cross and we became aware of Alice scurrying in to address the Audience, in a hurry to say her piece before Pansy and Swanilda arrive to undermine her hoped-for gravitas.

The play was under way. The production team had achieved "total atmosphere".

Oscar was beaming smugly into the distance. still lolling back with his hands clasped behind his head as he remembered that first performance. He remembered - all those months before it - his anguish at listening to friends sight-reading from copies of the earlier drafts, when he was listening to cadences and climaxes, always aware for stumbles over his chosen words. There remained several sections about which he was nervous. If they were mishandled by insensitive practitioners, they could reinstate disbelief in an instant. He was acutely conscious of the metrical sequences, where he had consciously opted for primitive, simple rhythms. These could so easily sound like crude doggerel. In front of one he had inserted a stage-direction "'ware Hiawatha". Then there was the execution of Leofric Thurkill, the friar who robbed pilgrims...

As the moments came and went, he became reassured that the entire team had addressed its work - individually and collectively - with love and commitment. True, he was surprised when climaxes over which he had laboured meticulously came amd went without stress, while moments that he had dismissed as sequential trivia were built into heights of dramatic tension. He would have preferred to hear the drums used more forcefully: the light tattoo of side-drums that denoted the irresistibility of The Mob, and the slow heavy heartbeat to threaten the inevitability of eventual defeat by The State. He watched The Mob naively ascend to victory, democracy and fair treatment for all, then their collapse under the weight of established power and united leadership.

Of the individual performances, Oscar expected the Greek Chorus of medieval ladies to be magnificent, and they were. But his highest hopes were reserved for the battle between Grindcobbe, the dynamic rabble-rousing hedge-priest, and the Abbott, Thomas de la Mare, who stayed at his post, meek, noble and resolute, strong in peace. In his various workrooms, Oscar had set these two imaginary men at each other and made them fight their arguments over and over, changing a jot here, a dot there, then cutting or replacing whole sections until all of their scenes were chiselled into vital components of the play. Now he heard them played out under the expertise of a master director and two accomplished actors who understood life and love and respect and the agony of frustration as they struck sparks off of each other's flinty resolve.

Then there was The Mob, oh The Mob, the rampaging reality of the stinking mob, each member not only an individual clearly created, but also an essential component. The men had been dragooned off to march, grapple and survive as tough bowman-swordsmen in England's French, Castillian and Scottish campaigns. The women had worked the fields and waited; with grit but not bitterness they knew their worth. The lads came back from London town and told their stories while the hordes of people settled and listened, their attentions focussed on the storyteller.

Oscar watched the performance unfold to its conclusion. Then he felt tired.

Jonah was a very experience director, teacher and writer who sadly passed away in February 2006. He was also the author of the highly successful "Playmaker - The Craft of Directing Plays (The Way I Seen It)".