Guest Blog: John Rayment- Currently playing Thomas Briggs in Mullered by Clifford Oliver

Now this is a departure. Two blog posts before 8.30 am! Must be on a roll. In

John Rayment - Actor

fact as I was posting earlier I was thinking about John Rayment, currently on tour as Thomas Briggs in Mullered by Clifford Oliver. When I dropped into the show at St Bon's last week I asked John if he would write about his experiences of working with Arc for the first time last September. I had a hunch he would write well and tell it as it is for him from the funny little mini-blogs he puts on Twitter which always make me roar.  I have asked a few people to write guest blogs for me and some come back immediately whilst others still drag their feet! (you know who you are), but I do also appreciate that some people would rather stick needles in their eyes than put fingers to keyboards. I let you off... for the moment.

So I am really pleased that my hunch about John's ability and willingness to write has landed in my in-tray this morning. Here it is:

I'll begin with a provocative statement:  "I don't like children"

That perhaps demands some explanation and context.  As a plain statement, it's quite true:  I don't particularly like kids, never have. I don't actively dislike

Is this why John?

them, but for some reason I've never been blessed with any parental instincts, so my reactions to them tend to be coloured by my own recollections of school, and by the somewhat loud and ill-behaved specimens that inhabit my local Tesco.

Harsh, yes.  Doubly so for someone coming from a family populated heavily with teachers.  My mother, her sister, my  grandmother, two further aunts, a cousin; all with the dedication, patience, passion even, to educate.  Somehow though, the "teaching gene" passed me by.

I tell you all this by way of context.  When, a few years back, I took the ridiculous step of attempting to make my living by acting, a lot of the other people just starting out in the business were doing this mysterious thing called "TIE", which apparently was sometimes quite well-paid.  Having ascertained that this was Theatre In Education (as opposed to some improbable Star Wars reference), and therefore would involve working in schools, with kids, I mentally backed away from the idea quite quickly.  "I'll never do TIE", I remember saying. Often. To anybody who would listen.  Probably to the annoyance of many.  It became a sort of mantra that I trotted out to protect me from the idea.  I even remember saying it quite clearly and firmly to my current agent when I first signed up with her a couple of years ago…

Forward to July 2012. My agent emails me a casting.   A play called "Mullered", for Arc Theatre, based in Barking.  Sounds like a nice part, the brief synopsis of the play sounds interesting, and it's paying above Equity rates.  I read further, and found the line, "…tour to Secondary Schools in Barking & Dagenham and Havering".  It was a TIE job.

I'll admit it, my first thought was "nooooooooo!" Then my second thought was that I couldn't really afford not to do it.  Money was very tight (when is it not?), and this would be good pay.  I resolved to at least go to the audition.  My agent had put the effort into getting me seen, the least I could do was to show up.  If I didn't like the setup, I could always choose not to do it (quite apart from the fact that they might very well not pick me!)  In any case, my irrational fear of TIE was  just that - irrational.  I should go for it.

Well, if I was going to audition, I would have to make the best stab at it I could.  I may not be a fan of kids, but I'd rather not make an arse of myself at an audition.  Besides, auditioning is a worthwhile thing in itself:  You meet people, you stretch yourself.

I didn't have an audition piece handy that really suited, and there was a week before the casting, so it seemed like high time I prepared a new piece.  For some reason, finding a new audition speech is always much, much scarier than actually auditioning, but eventually I picked a piece that seemed to fit the Victorian gent I was auditioning for, and had bits of gravitas and bits of out and out comedy.  Good.  Got it learnt, and, unusually, felt I'd made a decent choice.  Good.

Audition day.  Arrived far too early - bad habit of mine.  However, smiles all round from Carole and Natalie, and into the audition room.  Did my piece, not as well as I might have done, a lot of paraphrasing, but managed to keep in character.  Then a long chat about the play, about the company, about my interest in the part, whether I was interested in educational theatre.  Made me look quite hard at myself, at why I do what I do, why I was there at the time.  I found myself liking the company, in spite of all my irrational prejudice against TIE.  Came away feeling happy I'd done it - which, most of the time is all you can really expect from an audition:  Any casting you walk away from with your dignity intact is a good one, I reckon!

Then it all got a bit scary.  My agent rang and said that Arc had offered me the part.

There were three things that made me decide to accept.  First of all, I'd warmed to Carole and Natalie during the audition.  They were clearly people I would enjoy working with.  Secondly, as my agent said, if I didn't like it, the tour was only for two weeks, and that would be that.  Thirdly, another little mantra:  "If in doubt, do the scary thing" - which usually works out

John as Thomas Briggs with Jordan Barrett in Mullered by Clifford Oliver

quite well when I can't make my mind up.Ok, yes, can't deny it, the fact of being paid decent money for acting, when I was thoroughly skint did have some influence.

So I said yes.

Rehearsals.  First rehearsal day began with some stress - front door was shut, and the doorbell seemed to be missing.  First meeting with Karl and Jordan (the two cast members I'd not previously met) occurred on the fire escape, trying to get into the building.  Little did we know the stresses going on within - Arc had been burgled the night before, and there was a great deal of running around and sorting stuff out happening behind that door!

The rehearsals themselves were pretty enjoyable.  A nice balance between workshoppery, text, and getting up and walking about.  I tend, by default, to be one of those lazy actors who, given the choice between working on the text and doing an exercise or drama game, would probably choose the text…  but having done the exercise, can't avoid the obvious fact that it's helped enormously.  Odd though, I can't actually recall any of the games or exercises we did.  Interesting thing, the memory. 

I do, however, recall being very struck by the emphasis on the quality of the work.  I'd never seen a TIE show when I was at school (not sure they even existed then), so my view of what such shows might be like was heavily influenced by friends' less-than-encouraging anecdotes, and, if I'm honest, by a certain fictitious TIE group featured in the League of Gentlemen.   It was, therefore, very refreshing, and a nice surprise, to find that this company at least, treated their work as seriously as anyone putting a major production into a conventional theatre.  More seriously, compared to some, actually.

The rest of the cast all knew each other already.  Natalie and Jordan had worked with Carole for many years, and Karl too had done several Arc shows.  Always an odd experience, diving into the midst of a group of actors who've worked together a lot before.  There's a tendency to feel like an interloper.  Not that I was given any reason to feel anything of the kind though. Or indeed any chance - partly because everybody couldn't have been more welcoming, and partly because there was a lot of work to be done, which everybody just got on with.  It's a one of the best things in this job, to suddenly discover yourself partway into rehearsals, getting on well with (and working well with) people you'd not even met two days previously.

Six days of rehearsals.  Probably about right.  It always feels like you could do with a couple more days, no matter how long the rehearsal period actually is, but in practice, until you can get the thing out in front of an audience, and see what works and what doesn't, extra rehearsal is sometimes just going through the motions.  You become more confident in the lines, certainly, but there's nothing quite like not being able to ask for a line to focus the mind!

So to the first performance - and this is where I get to refer back to all that rambling context at the beginning, and to point my metaphorical finger at myself, and to laugh.  Theatre In Education.  Well it certainly was educational - for me.  The show itself went fairly well, and was enjoyable, if a little terrifying, being the first, and was well received by the 150 or so Year 10s… but the Q&A session afterwards was a revelation.  The kids had listened, had laughed, had thought about the issues, and come up with a whole stack of intelligent questions.  Of course, it says far more about me than about them, that this should seem remarkable.  I won't deny, it changed me.  No, I haven't suddenly acquired a desire to teach, or to be a parent, but the reflex of ingrained, automatic, unthinking "I don't like kids" seems to be unravelling.

That was last September, and there have been plenty of performances since then.  There have been the favourite schools, those that Arc has a long association with, or who've been particularly taken with Mullered the first time they see it, and who've kept asking us back (hello Alperton!).  There have been the ones where the teachers were terribly worried about the content, with concerns that their little innocents would be marred by our coarse worldliness… the children themselves almost always simply taking it in their collective stride, being far more worldy than the teachers perhaps give them credit for.  And then there are those few schools where the teachers couldn't be nicer to us, offering refreshments, eager to help… but whose hordes of rampaging Year 7s then almost demolish the set on their way in, and barely pause in their conversations while the play is on.

There have been the schools where there's a parking space right by the door to the hall; those where friendly teachers and caretakers have lugged stools and floorcloth and hatstand; but also those where people are surprised that we might need to park at all, or who seem to think that the minute or so between the end of Assembly and the scheduled start of our show will be more than enough time to get ready.  That said, as we found from experience early on in this leg of the tour on the occasion when the van was stuck in dreadful traffic for hours - we actually can do it in a couple of minutes if we have to… though I'm not sure it made for our very best performance!

I'm writing this in the Easter break, after four weeks of the 2013 tour.  When we come back, there are another three weeks still to go. 

I'm enjoying it.  Yes, me - the chap who said he'd never do TIE.  Enjoying working with a bunch of talented people, in a friendly company and seeing the reactions of hundreds of children - even those whose "audience skills" might need a little attention!

Roll on the final three weeks!

Editor's note:

I will now let you into a long guarded secret John et al. 

The TIE company created by League of Gentlemen is a somewhat dubious hommage to Arc. Reese Shearsmith worked with us as an actor at the beginning of his career - and his take on the company has always smarted just a little, not least his reference to Olly Plimsole! But I guess we could also see it as flattering in some odd way - You can put the rest together!