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- And Not a Chair to Sit!

There can be few areas in Amateur Dramatics that are so demanding with respect to the application of vivid imagination as Props – especially in the preparatory stages of pantomime. And, strangely enough, the humble Village Hall, usually grubby, nothing but metal-tubes-and-bits-of-plastic Chair, is often pressed into service, in its very demanding role as the most imaginative object of them all. Once the AGM is over, no mere parking bay for membership bottoms, the Village Hall Chair. Not counting indicating all manner of entrances, exits and steps, stairs or window sills, any kind of object at all, provided it needs to have things put on top of it, will be epitomised in the shape of the humble Village Hall Chair, at the drop of a wardrobe hat. Personally I have sat, stood, kneeled (ouch!), reclined, lain, fainted and even died on the Village Hall Chair. In fact it might have been more comfortable to have died on the deep pile carpet instead, but knowing that eventually the ‘real actor chair’ would be an upholstered chaise longue, I opted for the more bruising collapse during the rehearsals. Believe me, it requires some acting to ‘relax’ into a dead faint on 3 Village Hall Chairs, shoved together (but never quite meeting) to form an imaginary couch, especially when you’ve forgotten to bring the cushions that were going to pretend being the upholstery and soft head end, where you could lay your head without cultivating a migraine for the rest of the evening. Not to mention when a combination of inflamed intervertebral disc and a touch of sciatica dictate Strictly No Lying Flat On Your Back On Hard Surfaces!

Actually I find manufacturing props quite a fascinating process in the production of a pantomime as well as a straight play. I’ve done my share of the ‘serious’ prop production in the past 14 years, and some of them have been quite amusing to quote out of context: casually mention that in your time you’ve made part of a sofa, bottles of poison and a family bible fit to hide a gun, and you’ll be guaranteed some very Interesting Looks. That last item turned out to be deceptively difficult. Picture this: I spent days on trying to figure out the means through which to provide the profiled, sufficiently deep cavity to hide a real stage revolver. Many more hours went into designing the body of the book around it. I hunted down the boxes to provide the covers, discovered that a glue gun is quite lethal to blocks of polystyrene but PVA won’t actually hold leatherette and cardboard together, done that painting-with-tea to give a suitably aged look to the outside edges, and assembled the whole thing into a very credible and realistic-looking venerable tome, complete with gold tooling (thank goodness I still had a working gold pen from previous Christmases at home!). I then found out the hard way that I should also have provided the sturdiness said venerable tome needed in order to withstand the numerous assaults on the part of the actor whose task it was to pounce on the book, whip out the gun without showing its bowels to the audience, and who not only insisted on throwing it around with gusto, but whose outsize (of course!) feet managed to find the thing without fail, and would trample over it (and my heart) during every single rehearsal and performance. To say that it was never the same again would be a serious understatement.

That bible was quite a challenge, I’ll admit, but Mr. Stage Manager tops that one easily, and regularly. His starry sky (with real twinkling stars) in Cinderella was a gasp-drawing sight to behold, and our (of necessity) travelling production of Puss in Boots needed the only folding coach-&-4 I’ve seen so far. This panto was no exception to the topping rule. How does one convey a cave full of sparkling, glittering jewels – within the production budget? Convincingly, if the audience’s reaction was anything to go by. Handy, that panto season happens to coincide with the shops stocking vast quantities of cheap, various-scaled baubles…! You’d be surprised what the combined efforts of a handy Props Mistress and an imaginative Lighting Effects chappie can achieve. How does one embody a living snake slithering out of its basket? You’d be surprised what can be crafted with doweling, leatherette and a wicker former plant holder that doesn’t mind a bottomectopy! The flying carpet was my favourite; especially the fact that it was – just – a two-seater. No boot room for luggage, though.

It’s amazing what a competent Props Person has to, and can come up with, in the course of any production, when they put their minds to it. It’s also amazing how regularly a serious production requires the use of a chaise longue (a dying breed or endangered species, if you ask me), which simply has to be located and usually is, and equally astonishing how the same piece of furniture can be successfully hinted at via the use of a bench, hastily constructed out of surplus timber and the much-vaunted MDF, with an artfully draped piece of crushed velvet curtain thrown over it during the lightning-speed scene change in a panto.

The most satisfying props, I believe, are those you produce at great investment of brain and muscle power, then fear you’re not going to be able to use, but still manage to employ with great effect at the very last minute. I’m thinking in this instance of the mangle that was used in our production of Aladdin. I can still see Mr. Stage Manager’s dejected look, after having spent several hours designing the thing, then – with the assistance of 2 capable chaps – building it, and concluding it could not be used, the way rehearsals were going. Equally intense was his look of satisfaction when it turned out that not only could it be used, and as a mangle, but pushing a small child through it in a very smoothly-running bit of choreography turned out to be a hit (no children were harmed in the making of this production!).

And yet, the most Interesting Prop of all must be the Invisible Chair. Not familiar with that one? It’s the chair you were going to use, in whatever capacity, that gets whipped away from under your hands at the last minute by a frantic Stage Crew member trying to provide extra sitting opportunities for a sold-out matinee …