FullReads

If the audience applauds, wait till the noise of the clapping is over to finish your speech.

Rehearse without your book in the last rehearsals, so as to get into the way of hearing the prompter, and catching the word from him when your memory fails you.

Practise your part before a looking-glass, and say it out aloud. A part may be pat in your head, and very stiff on your tongue.

The Green-room is generally a scene of great confusion in private theatricals. Besides getting everything belonging to your dress together yourself and in good time, I advise you to have a little hand-basket, such as you may have used at the seaside or in the garden, and into this to put pins, hair-pins, a burnt cork, needles and thread, a pair of scissors, a pencil, your part, and any small things you may require. It is easy to drop them into the basket again. Small things get mislaid under bigger ones when one is dressing in a hurry; and a hero who is flustered by his moustache having fallen under the washstand well out of sight is apt to forget his part when he has found the moustache.

Remember that Right and Left in stage directions mean the right and left hand of the actor as he faces the audience.

I will not burden you with any further advice for yourself, and I will reserve a few hints as to rough and ready scenery, properties, etc., for another letter.

Meanwhile–whatever else you omit–get your parts well by rote; and if you cannot find or spare a stage-manager, you must find good-humour and common agreement in proportion; prompt by turns, and each look strictly after his own “properties.”

Yours, etc.,

BURNT CORK.

HINTS FOR PRIVATE THEATRICALS.–II.

MY DEAR ROUGE POT,–I promised to say a few words about rough and ready properties.

The most indispensable of all is the curtain, which can be made (at small expense) to roll up and come down in orthodox fashion. Even better are two curtains, with the rings and strings so arranged that the curtains can be pulled apart or together by some one in the wings. Any upholsterer will do this. A double drawing-room with folding doors is of course “made for theatricals.” The difficulty of having only one exit from the stage–the door of the room–may be met by having a screen on the other side. But then the actors who go out behind the screen, must be those who will not have to come in again till the curtain has been drawn.

If, however, the room, or part of a room, devoted to the stage is large enough for an amateur proscenium, with “wings” at the sides, and space behind the “scenes” to conceal the actors, and enable them to go round, of course there can be as many exits as are needed.

A proscenium is quite a possibility. The framework in which the curtain falls need not be an expensive or complicated concern. Two wooden uprights, firmly fastened to the floor by bolt and socket, each upright being four or five feet from the wall on either side; a cross-bar resting on the top, but the whole width of the room, to which (if it draws up) the curtain is to be nailed; a curtain, with a wooden pole in the hem at the bottom to steady it (like a window-blind); long, narrow, fixed curtains to fall from the cross-bar at each end where it projects beyond the uprights, so as to fill the space between each upright and the wall of the room, and hide the wings; some bright wall-paper border to fasten on to the uprights and cross-bar, as decoration;–these are not expensive matters, and the little carpentry needed could be done in a very short time by a village carpenter.

And here, my dear Rouge Pot, I feel inclined to say a word to “Parents and Guardians.” I wish that a small annual outlay on little pleasures were oftener reckoned among legitimate expenses in middle-class British families. But little pleasures and alms are apt to be left till they are asked for, and then grudged. Though, if the annual expenses under these two heads were summed up at the end of the year, we should perhaps be more inclined to blush than to bewail our extravagances. As to little pleasures, I am not speaking of toys and books and presents, of which children have commonly six times as many now-a-days as they can learn to love; nor do I mean such pleasures as the month at the seaside, which I should be sorry to describe as a light matter for papa’s purse. But I mean little pleasures of the children’s own devising, for which some trifling help from the elders will make all the difference between failure and success. In short, my dear Rouge Pot, at the present moment I mean the children’s theatricals; and papa himself will confess that, whereas two or three pounds, “up or down,” in the seaside move, would hardly be considered, and fifteen shillings “more or less” in the price of a new dining-room fender would upset nobody’s nerves in the household–if “the children” asked for a day’s work of the village carpenter, and seven and sixpence worth of wood, to carry out a project of their own, it would be considered a great waste of money. However, it is only fair to add that the young people themselves will do wisely to establish a “theatrical fund” box, which will not open, and to put in a fixed percentage of everybody’s pocket-money to accumulate for some genuine properties when the theatrical season begins.