Performance Security

No, I don’t mean large men in dark suits talking in to discreetly positioned microphones. Stage Two Downham’s audience are a well behaved bunch, and crowd control is rarely necessary.

Instead, I’m talking about making sure that your performance can go ahead as planned.

There are a huge number of reasons why a performance needs to be postponed or even cancelled. I suspect every amateur society has faced this at some point. Back in 2022, we had already produced The Winslow Boy post-covid, and were getting ready to put on Pygmalion when disaster struck I the form of covid cases among the cast with less than two weeks to go. Faced with no real alternative, we postponed the run from November to February, transferred all the ticket sales, and it was a very successful run. Fortunately, no-one was seriously ill.

My own personal experience of this came in 2014. I was in the chorus of a musical, and started to feel ill during the first half. By in the interval it was clear I would not be able to continue, and the reast of the cast calmly adjusted their positions to adapt.

There will always be the risk of something happening. Most activities we pursue have some level of risk attached, but we accept that risk, especially were we can take action to reduce it. When we go out in our cars, wear our seatbelts to reduce the risk of injury if an accident happens, and we drive carefully to reduce our chances of being in an accident in the first place.

Remember that if just one team member is missing, the whole team is affected. It might just be a dance line needing to close up, but it might also mean the whole production run can’t go ahead.

So, here are my thoughts on what can go wrong, and how you can slightly adjust your habits in the run up to a show to try to keep things on track.

During rehearsal

This is the least risky period of the whole process, but that doesn’t mean nothing can go wrong here. A bad injury or serious illness could cause an actor to withdraw from the show completely. That’s the extreme, but even missing a few weeks’ rehearsal could be difficult to manage. The further down the rehearsal schedule and the closer the performances, the worse the problem becomes.

Here are some things to consider;

Illness

Remember the recovery time, which could be a few weeks.

• Try to keep yourself out of situations where an infection would spread to you.
• Get stricter with your isolation levels as the show run approaches, your friends, family, and colleagues will understand

This isn’t limited to serious illnesses like covid, if you catch a heavy cold, you risk spreading that the rest of the cats and crew. If you are ill for the shows, you will compromise your own performance.

Injury

Remember the recovery time. A small cut or pulled muscle might only take a couple of days to heal, but recovery form a broken bone, or a serious sprain, can take 8 to 12 weeks.

Elective Treatment

Whether this is health based or cosmetic there will be a recovery time to consider, which your medical team can advise you on. For example, orthodontics, like implants, need a couple of weeks before you can perform. There is also the (hopefully low) risk that the procedure doesn’t go to plan, thus lengthening the recovery time. Make sure you talk to your healthcare team about what you can do, and when, after your procedure.

On the day

Illness and accident can happen on show day, and keep you from performing. There are other things too though.

• Be careful about what you eat, food poisoning might not last long, but it is debilitating (that was the cause of my 2014 incident)
• Avoid long distance travel by any method. Small delays can easily snow ball.
• Even for short distances, avoid train travel. A closed line can easily ad an hour or two to your journey.
• The same applies to motorway driving. A major incident on a motorway tends to result in the police closing the road, and keeping anyone already on it in place until it’s safe to release them. 2 or 3 hours stranded on a motorway because of an incident is not unheard of.
• Perhaps avoid cycling to the theatre on show days. Just this once, the hit on your carbon footprint is justified.
• Even the short drive to the theatre carries risk. Maybe just drive that little bit more carefully than usual for this one.

Highlights

• I’m not sure if I mentioned this, but remember the recovery time for any illness or injury
• Keep the need for travel on performance days to a minimum, especially by train or motorway, and take extra care over the journeys you do make
• Take extra care about what you eat on show days
• Balance the risk of any activity you undertake during your show’s rehearsal run. You don’t need to avoid risk entirely, or even to make big adjustments to manage risk, but do remember it, and consider the effects on the whole show

Just One More Thing…

Have a plan. You cannot guarantee nothing will happen that adversely affects your production. Sometimes there will be no alternative, so have at least the seed of a plan for dealing with it.

• A good actor can stand in at the last minute “book in hand” for a missing cast member
• Understand how you might go about cancelling or postponing a show. Stage Two Downham uses TicketSource as our ticketing provider, and their systems and support are excellent. When we had no alternative but to post postpone Pygmalion, they made it easy to administer, and proactively gave us sound advice on what to do.
• Understand the financial and administrative costs of postponement or cancellation
• Consider some sort of insurance for your production. There are may providers out there for this. Stage Two are members of Noda who offer a range of products tailored to amateur theatre.

One of my favourite aspects of being involved in amateur dramatics is that the audience is on your side. A “book in hand” actor will receive praise, not criticism, from an amdram audience. Going back to our postponement of Pygmalion, the only booking that cancelled apologised to us, for the inconvenience.