Unconfirmed Reports

We are back in deepest winter now, and the Christmas period fully upon us. It is two years now since, one glum winter in London, I began to realise how Christmas traditions are connected with the cold, dark, northern winter.

We haven’t had any snow to speak of, but today the world was comprehensively frozen. I went down to the allotment, and the water in the water butt had a cap of ice three centimetres thick on top. I had a karate-kid like desire to break the thick ice by punching it, and did so, which was satisfying but a bit painful as well. The spider-web cracks I made in the ice were beautiful. I tried to do some actual work in the allotment, but the ground was frozen solid, so there wasn’t any point.

All last week, I was involved for a second time in the Christmas Show at work - a sort of zany musical pantomime that somehow turns out to be very good entertainment in the end. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy it this year as much as last. I still got a kick out of the acting - trying to get my teeth into the character (even a silly pantomime character), then express that to the crowd. I played a monk-detective; in pantomime tradition, our sketch was mostly just a series of silly gags - but great fun nonetheless, and we got a lot of laughs when we did it well.

But I felt a kind of tension with the directors (there were three) throughout the rehearsals and the show. I had a strange, paranoid feeling of being “outside the main circle”, marginalised - I definitely felt that there was a core group of people preferred by the directors, and that some others, such as me, were subtly excluded from this.

By the end of the final show on Friday night, I had almost washed away my bitter feeling, as the show went stupendously well on its last night, I felt I got it right in both my scenes, and the crowd gave us a standing ovation. But at the after-show party, the directors announced that there were to be awards. I was immediately worried that something ill was afoot. It turned out that there was an award pronunced for every actor in the play - I do not doubt that this was done with the intention of being generous and inclusive. But still a subtle sort of social hierarchy crept in: most of the awards were very flattering, such as “Best comic timing” for someone who had a funny line, or “Most helpful handyman” for someone who had fixed some broken props. But just three of us were given rather unflattering awards, sort of double-edged, supposedly “jokey” prizes that really weren’t very nice at all. Mine wasn’t particularly mean, but it wasn’t flattering either, which gave me the feeling that the directors either couldn’t think of anything nice to say, or didn’t want to. A couple of other guys were given awards that were really quite mean, such as “Most likely to get the dance moves wrong”. All in good humour, of course. Or not?

I wish I could resist being bothered by that kind of thing, but in a theatre situation it does matter to me - the group dynamics are one of the most important aspects. I wasn’t looking forward to hearing awards decided upon unilaterally by the directors, since I think that such a thing should be decided by the group. And when it turned out that - as I saw it - they used it to reinforce the sense of “insiders” and “outsiders” in the group, it renewed all my bitterness. Other people (even those who got the less-flattering awards) seemed to think it was all in good humour, so maybe I’m just over-sensitive. But I still can’t get the bad taste out of my mouth.