Episode 4 - En pointe

I join a ballet company and prang a van.

Photo by Haley Parson on Unsplash

Previously on THIS WRITER’S JOURNEY…

I’ve written a play. A man from the BBC has trashed it. I’ve given up all dreams of writing and have decided to become an actor. To get acting work, I need to join Actors’ Equity. But Equity cards are scarcer than hen’s teeth.

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My usher friends at the National Theatre tell me there’s a back door to scoring that elusive Equity card. Other entertainment professionals are also eligible to join the actors’ union. They warn me that there will be thousands of other wannabes trying the same route, but if I want to give it a go, I should buy The Stage newspaper every Thursday and scour the job ads at the back. 

Next Thursday morning I’m waiting on the newsagent’s doorstep when he opens up. I turn straight to the job pages. I reject the calls for fire-eaters and lion-tamers, stand-up comedians and strippers.  After a few weeks of this, I wonder if I’m being a little too choosy. Just in time, I spot, in the tiniest print possible, an extremely small ad for an Assistant Stage Manager (ASM) with a travelling ballet company. Driving licence essential.  I am invited for an interview at the company base in Wembley.

Wembley is about as far as you can get from Brixton while staying within the boundaries of Greater London.  Buses, tubes, buses. It takes a very long time to get there. 

I’m interviewed by a panel of four people, all well advanced into middle age: two women, very blonde, and two men. One of the men is on the plump side, with unfeasibly dark hair brylcreemed off his forehead; the other is very thin, bald and grizzled.  I assume these four are the management committee.  They glow as they happily recount stories of a grand history. Large theatres. Standing ovations. Fragrant bouquets from adoring fans.

Finally, they turn to me and ask what experience I have of stage management.  Not a lot, I admit.  Though I did do a bit at college, I add quickly.  Have I ever used a lighting rig?  Not as such, no.  A sound desk?  I tell them that I’m a quick learner.  They ask if my driving licence is clean.  Yes, I say, not a blemish.  I get the job.

I was right: the people on the interview panel are indeed the management committee. They are also the core of the dancing company. The two blondes are the principal ballerinas. The plumpish chap is the male romantic lead. The grizzled guy is the occasional choreographer and stage manager. He is my immediate boss. 

I know very little about ballet, but I do know what en pointe means, and quickly realise that neither of the principal ballerinas can get up there. The male lead has trouble lifting his female leads into the air, and I’m told that the choreography has been adapted to take this into account.  The choreographer/stage manager sighs a lot.

It doesn’t take long to work out that the company is held together by the collective dreams of these four people.

Alongside the principal dancers, there’s a small corps de ballet of three very witty young women. In their early twenties, they’re recent graduates from ballet school, all of them beautiful, all excellent dancers.  And there’s me.  My job is to drive the Ford Transit, hump scenery in and out of sticky stage doors, operate the lighting and sound desks and press the buttons that send the proscenium curtain up and down. 

They pay me Equity minimum: thirty quid a week.  Even in the late seventies, this is not a lot. 

But I’ve applied for my Equity card, and been accepted.  All I have to do now is wait for the paperwork to come through.

Ballets Minerva tours up and down the length of Britain.  The theatres it visits, like the company itself, live on dreams of grand pasts and packed houses.  The dressing rooms smell of stale chips. 

I spend the performances locked in the lighting box, at the back of the stalls. To add to my inexperience, the lighting rigs are temperamental, the sound cuts out at crucial moments, and the fraying red curtains can be a bit jerky on the up and down.

Photo by DJ Paine on Unsplash

The corps and I were billeted in grotty theatrical digs. Those young women were some of the funniest people I’ve ever met.  One was a wicked mimic, who kept a completely straight face as she gave us her turn as the plump male lead attempting a lift.  Another had a line in unrepeatable bawdy humour.  The third liked a drink, and in a grimy room in Manchester introduced me to the joy that is Bailey’s Irish Cream. 

While we were laughing ourselves silly in our shabby boarding houses, the bosses spent their nights in elegant hotels with lavish dining rooms and feather pillows.  That’s what they told us. But audiences were thin, the company was not rich, and I wonder now if they were making it up and were actually bedding down in the back of the van.  

The weeks pass. I’m enjoying the ballet company. I have an easy understanding with my boss, the stage manager. I like him. He’s a good teacher and a decent man. Another thing: after years and years of dredging my brain to write essays and make up stories, it’s a pleasure to get up in the morning, do my job, have a laugh with the corps, go to bed, sleep, repeat.

Summer becomes autumn.   As the weather deteriorates, so do the spirits of the principals. Their tempers fray, sometimes with each other, mostly with us, the riff-raff.

One afternoon in late November in a fading municipal theatre in Lancashire, we play a matinee to the usual thin audience of pensioners. The company take their curtain call. I hit the button to bring down the curtain. It hiccups a few times on its descent before coming to a final halt a few inches above the stage floor. I jab at the button again. And again. But no matter how many times I try, the curtain won’t fall any further.

I am trapped in my box at the back of the stalls, torn between despair and hysteria, while I watch the three principals, still visible below the knee, do a flat-footed stomp off into the wings.

Photo by Melissa Castillo on Unsplash

I wait to be shouted at. The stage manager doesn’t shout. He just looks a little sad.

The following day, in Macclesfield, when parking the transit van, I scrape it against a bollard. 

The stage manager looks a little sadder.

At the end of the week, at the company base in Wembley, the corps and I queue, as usual, for our wages. I go in first.

The male lead hands me my thirty quid, as usual, in a sealed brown envelope. I thank him, as usual, and turn for the door. No, he says, he’s not finished. I turn back. He purses his lips and informs me that I am a disruptive element. I am to leave. I am never to return. 

The stage manager sighs and looks sadly at the floor.

I turn again for the door. Not that way, says the male lead. Use the back door.

But I’d like to say goodbye, I say, to my friends in the corps.

Not permitted, he says.

As I walk through the drizzle to the tube, my spirits are low.  A failure as a writer. A failure as an ASM.  Plus, I’ve discovered that the man I’ve been seeing is also seeing someone else. 

The trip across London, back to Brixton, is long and slow and dismal.  But as I come above ground at the Oval, it comes to me there that there are upsides to getting the sack.  No more bad-tempered ballerinas. No more motorway traffic jams.  No more humping sets in and out of vans.  No more battling with ancient lighting rigs and dodgy sound desks.  No more stage curtains.

I’m free.

It’s time for me and my lovely new Equity card to find work as an actor.

If you’re enjoying my story, please leave a comment and/or click on the heart. It would make my heart beat a little faster.