Adjudication

What it is to be judged, both on stage and off

They were not all like Charles Cattanach. He was merely the worst of them. A colossus on the stage, however big it happened to be. Whether it was Totton or Woking or any one of the vast number of venues that played host to annual south of England “Drama Festivals” and, let’s face it, to the likes of me.

If you haven’t committed yourself and your creative endeavours to the drama festival circuit — because it was a rare company that only performed at the one festival — then you might perhaps have escaped the attentions of a Cattanach in your life. Or you might think you have.

It was the price to be paid for daring to put on a one-act play, but it was worth it if this was your chance to have the venue paid for. There were entry fees, of course, I’m sure, although still less than hiring a venue to try out a new production.

It was how I got my writing in front of people before the internet came along, and it was worth it for a captive audience and the opportunity to tour when touring was otherwise so very expensive.

Some actors and directors, of course, wanted to be judged. Some even wanted to win. I always felt that was a bit cheap. That theatre shouldn’t be competitive, and there shouldn’t be winners and losers. Particularly if I was going to end up in the latter camp.

I’m sure I thought that even before my first Cattanach experience.

So, here he comes. The night’s three performances have played out. The new plays and the rehashes of old plays. The competent and the disastrous. I remember vividly a show in Andover (I think it was). A church hall with raked seating looking down onto a stage area. The sets, therefore, had to be free-standing, which was one reason why I avoided flats in anything I did. There was less to put up, bearing in mind that the succession of very different venues would mean new solutions would have to be devised for every one. There was less to strike, too, bearing in mind that you’d get fifteen minutes between performances and a minute over that time would result in penalties.

One production that night at “Andover”, though — it was one of Neil Simon’s many “suites”, as so often performed at festival time by the desperately unimaginative — had gone with a full-on box set. To mark a change of scene and time from evening to night, off went the cast and on came a stagehand dressed as a maid.

She pulled the curtains.

And down came the set.

Buster Keaton-style, all three free-standing flats came down on top of her.

I think she was standing in the window frame with the curtains over her head.

I know that the director and crew were sitting at a table behind the now collapsed flats.

I remember their expressions.

And yet, I still didn’t feel confident when Cattanach came out to give his judgement.

He was a giant of a man in the theatre. In any theatre. He was dressed like a rotund Rupert the Bear in yellow checked trousers and red waistcoat with bow tie snuggled under the fifth of his many chins. A florid man, with cheeks that burned like braziers and breath that could curdle the paintwork at the back of the stalls. Every time I saw him up there with his clipboard, leaning this way and that against the usually imagined rake of the stage, he would appear more than three quarters cut. I believe he may have brought a glass on with him on one occasion. Or perhaps we all saw it there in his hand, regardless.

He was — and I’ll say this gently — a very particular type of English gent.

Cattanach, of course, did not notice the set calamity.

Cattanach did not comment on the set calamity.

Cattanach commented — and I remember this very well — on my socks.

I was performing in a piece called “Out of the Flying Pan”, a two-hander in which I played the part of an idiot ambassador or politician who spoke only nonsense. My fellow performer, Pete, did much the same. It was, ultimately, an award-winning play, without wishing to big it up too much. I got “Best Actor” at least twice. There was a picture in the local paper.

Hooray for me, etc.

But what I remember is Cattanach wishing to take me to task for my socks.

I think we’re talking cartoon socks, here. I think we’re talking “desperately flailing around for something to wear because part of the costume has got lost en route” here.

Whatever.

It’s a minor point.

But not to someone like Charles Cattanach.

Not to the theatrical colossus, Charles Cattanach.

Yes, yes, this is terrifically thin-skinned of me, but — and I will repeat — the production before ours had seen their entire set fall down. And our red-faced friend with the clipboard sloping from side to side on the stage had entirely failed to notice it.

Perhaps it would have been easier if he hadn’t been drunk.

Eccentric, I could handle. Rupert the Bear fetishist, I could handle.

Drunk, though?

When it came to being judged by the soused, I’d had quite a bit of it from the Tartan Blanket that resided on the sofa at home. The stentorian voice that would emit from said Tartan Blanket, criticising my hair, my weight, my choice of television channel, my very presence in the living room or the sound of my stockinged feed on the floor.

Ah, there we go with socks again.

The Tartan Blanket was perpetually five eighths of the way down a vodka bottle, and very often not her first.

I’d had that level of judgement every night since she had divorced my father.

And I knew, even if father didn’t, that the drinking had been going on long before that.

Funny how many bottles you can hide in a toilet cistern, isn’t it?

So, no, it did not help that Cattanach was drunk, or that he has allowed the stage, seemingly by everyone else in authority (was there anyone else in authority?), even whilst drunk.

They were not all like Charles Cattanach, those adjudicators of old, back in the day when I’d do the festivals.

But that doesn’t mean to say that I didn’t look at all of them that way.

And that I don’t expect to be judged like that, even now.

161 Medium pieces in now, I think I’m getting the hang of this. If you’d like more of the same, here’s a piece about a very…peculiar childhood ambition of mine, and here’s another about my glorious juvenilia!