Mansfield Park & Ride Week 3: The Lily Of Lacuna Or An Actor Pops One In.

The Lily of Lacuna or An Actor Pops One In.

The days may grow shorter and colder but new jokes are busting out all over, as if Spring had sprung betimes down Funnington Avenue.  But how can this be?  The play is writ: it is untouchable, the hallowed text shall not be interfered with, and each night the High Priest, Ivan, locks it away in the Holy of Holies, the Eastern Angles office safe.But this dear reader is not so, for by both night and day the Tinker Monkeys and Gagsmiths will whip it out, dance upon it, kick it around in the dirt and ADD STUFF. ‘The Lily of Lacuna' is at it again.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that in the whole cosmos there exist only 3.2 discrete jokes and all else is jiggery pokery with setting, participants and delivery.  We are all familiar with the following scenario: just as you sit back after an humongous Christmas dinner, safe in the belief that your Great Uncle Ned has finished his ‘set' by telling his largely mimed joke about the spider monkey, the go-go dancer and the sink plunger, you find he is ploughing on doggedly with an energetic Mozambican folk dance, building to a bizarrely esoteric finale, a recital of the complete haiku of Basho.  Who knew he once served on a merchantman sailing under a flag of convenience out of Maputo, calling in at Okinawa often?  Thing is, everyone, from babes-in-arms to infirm octogenarians will spout forth some species of ‘festive entertainment' given half an opportunity; it's what Cowell has done to us. Everyone's a bloody entertainer.  Somehow we must beat and best Uncle Ned at his own hideous game! You need a bag of assorted chortles in a decent Christmas show, visceral groans, unwarranted anachronisms and innuendo by the ladleful, Shirley?

I've been attempting to shoe-horn ‘jokes' into Xmas romps since I was knee high to Dougal Lee. Of course, nobody likes a smart arse and this is a delicate balancing act for the smart arse actor who imagines himself a wit.  Does he throw out corking lines during rehearsals as they strike him or does he just sit on them until the glorious day when he finally gets his own backside into gear, and writes his own rib-tickling Mahabarata.  No; he chips in, gently at first.  Of course gently, for often, dear reader, the author walks among us.

A word about writers. Now the playwright will have sat and wrestled with the text, the beast, sometimes I'm told for whole days, hammering into shape the broad outlines of plot and character.  At the end of this ‘process' he (or she) will find himself (or herself) bereft of inspiration, having visited the well so often; now the bucket only comes up dry.  So, on the second or third day of rehearsal I'll start muttering things like: "What about saying, ‘It's so big you've got to grin to get it in.' Yeah? I think that works".  People turn slowly and stare at me as if I've lost the plot.  "No," I splutter, "it's really funny.  People of my generation will know it as the jingle for Burton's iconic, toothsome, but ever diminishing confection, with the soft mallow layer, the Wagon Wheel.  But even better than that it's quite suggestive".  "No, no," they querulously reply. "It's suggestive only to someone with the mind of a black-balled member of the Hellfire Club."  Back to the drawing board.  Something milder then, more family friendly.

And so it goes.  By the end of rehearsals, I am usually forced into making my offerings in the most self-deprecatory way possible, announcing that they are ‘poor', that I am unfit to finger the author's thesaurus.  And the truth, dear reader, is that some of my ‘humour' is unfit to be writ on the wall of cubicle 3 in the ‘ladies' at a truck stop in Zeebrugge, much more of it is just not funny, but here persistence is key, for occasionally my darts of jollity strike the Bullseye of EA acceptability, and carry off the metaphorical prize speedboat and then, of course, I'm hoisted up onto the shoulders of the other delighted ‘turns' only to be paraded around the Records Office Quad, like Caesar returning from the wars.  No, actually it's not quite like this. It's more, ‘Okay. We'll try it. We can always take it out again.'  But like the little Dutch boy and the dyke, it's often best left in.

But who will quickly forget the line ‘A Citroen Berlingo'?  Not me, certainly.  And who, in the audience of ‘Mansfield Park & Ride', keenly panning for mirth in this trickling comedy Klondike, shall ever descry what is the prodigiously entertaining silt of Mr Murray and what the delightful and sparkling ‘Blood Diamond' of Mr Wagland. 

But then I awoke and it had been an enchanting but, of course, impossible dream.  Ivan did but pull the string and I was a mannequin again.