Cartoon de Salvo: playing against type
Sunday, April 20th, 2008The Continuing Chronicle of ‘Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories’ on tour… www.cartoondesalvo.com
I just found myself texting Cecile, a colleague who is organising our website, about some work I have to do next week. And the text ended: ‘Last night we were transported convicts. I married a bare-breasted native queen’. The show was in rural Worcestershire. I played both the convict and the native queen. (The costume, or the nudity, is left to the imagination, by the way.)
Over the course of this amazing adventure – and I mean the whole tour of this show, not just last night – here are a few of the characters I’ve played: a cockney hit man, a Southern American preacher (black), a Nepalese sherpa, a steely-eyed Russian double agent, a talking minah bird, an insanely violent psychopath ex-con, an elderly Rockabilly chain smoker, some Vikings, a very cute Texan ladies man, an Edwardian bounty hunter, any number of love-interest females, a giant angel. And I recently received dubious praise from one audience member as ‘the best sheep I’ve seen in the theatre’. (I like the idea of ‘sheep studies’ going onto the accredited drama school curriculum. I think there’s a real need)
In regular acting land, there’s not a great chance that I’d get such casting opportunities. But the expression ‘hopelessly miscast’ is somewhat redundant in this kind of work. Of course, as a director, it’s fun to find the right person for the part – and some good casting directors can practically do the whole job for you. Maybe it’s because so much of theatre operates on the principles of casting correctly that it feels so gleefully punk as an actor to run headlong into your dream and nightmare casting every night.
Our musical director, Paul Kissaun, said when he first came into rehearsals, ‘you guys are taking on the whole world.’ Last night, it was Brian who improvised that we were in the world of transported convicts. He’s brought along on the road a fabulous tome called ‘Look and Learn,’ an anthology of the old children’s books of the same name: no less than an entire potted history of everything, aimed at young boys who like facts. (And improvisers who need to know about everything). For four seconds on stage last night I thought, ‘erk, have I “looked and learnt” anything about transported convicts?’ But it’s all there in the jumbly bottom drawer of the memory.
One of the things we work on is collecting the ‘joint imagination’ of the company. By that I mean, the images, stories, movies and most of all music that has inspired each of us, and that we can collectively draw (albeit subconsciously) when improvising a play. I think initially we wanted to contain this so that it was uniquely a something called Hard Hearted Hannah. But contain it into what? Eras we know about, regions where we can do the accents, characters we’re comfortable with? Since then, the joint imagination work has organically become more open and trusting. We put no limits on what goes in that pot now, and it’s a ride to discover what comes out.