Not what the playwright wrote, right?

Your Humble Blogger has talked about learning lines for plays, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned the fine entertainment value that comes from getting the lines wrong. Well, entertaining for us in the cast. Sometimes.

We are five performances into a run of thirteen, and already there have been some doozies. Our Mrs. Graves has had the most trouble with her lines generally, but tends to get through the show, paraphrasing and muddling through just fine. However, one night… She has been demanding references before entering into this arrangement with women she doesn’t know, and ends the discussion with a magnificently magnanimous “I shall waive references”. She blanked on the key word one evening and delivered the immortal line “I shall waive, er, what were we talking about?&#8221 Since Mrs. Graves is an elderly woman, this came off as a perhaps obvious bit of character writing, rather than an actor’s nightmare. That sort of thing—blanking on a word or a line altogether—isn’t as frequent or as entertaining as when an actor says something that isn’t… quite…

Our Mr. Wilton has a line to deliver that is convoluted and bizarre, and serves to exemplify what a pompous stick he is rather than to convey information of any kind. That’s always a tougher sort to remember, but he actually hadn’t had any problem with it until… Mrs. Wilton mentions that holidays abroad (vacations, in the American terminology of course) must be nice, and he replies “I’m certain they are. Although I have heard some shocking stories to the contrary. There is an element of risk in holidays that tends to color quite nicely the sureties of home.” On one night, he said… well, I have no idea what he said, and neither does anybody else, the poor fellow who said it least of all. It was rambling, it made no sense whatsoever, didn’t match up verbs with subjects or objects, dependent clauses with independent clauses. He got off the path early on, and wound up saying something like “Well, you’d be surprised. Sometimes a holiday, can, due to its being overseas, I’ve heard, while at home, on the other hand, there really can be more certainty at home.” I’m getting it wrong, it was a good deal more nonsensical than that.

The problem, of course, is how to proceed from there. Always assuming the other actor or actors don’t just burst into laughter and collapse, they have to find a path back to the script. In this instance, it was comparatively easy: Mrs. Wilton responds to his actual line by abruptly changing the subject (“The piano needs tuning”) so that’s what she did. The actress was faced with a choice when a few lines later she was to semi-jocularly repeat a bit out of the original speech (“the sureties of home”), but she went right ahead and said it, and if the audience thought it was an odd thing to say, well, Mrs. Wilton says a lot of odd things.

In an earlier scene, she tells a joke on herself, actually, saying that her husband, Mrs. Wilton, tells her that her mind is like a hummingbird, one seldom sees it land. That’s to Mrs. Arnott, who she hustles into going to Italy with her, and when they are on the train and she has second thoughts, she turns on her traveling companion and says “You are not a hummingbird at all, Lotty Wilton. You are a hawk!” Only last night… Last night she began the line “You are not a hawk at all, Lotty Wilton.”

Now, that’s where I would have absolutely frozen. Oh, crap, I would have thought. You are not a hawk, you are a hummingbird! No, can’t say that. You are an owl! No. You are, er, you, Lotty Wilton, are a cuckoo! A finch! A gull! A stormy petrel! A cat! A wolverine! You are a bitch, Lotty Wilton, and I am going backstage to cry!

Our Mrs. Arnott, who I adore, simply said “You are not a hawk at all, Lotty Wilton. You are a hawk!”

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.