Top Hole 2

In my previous post I explained how I originally had the idea of performing Top Hole! and how I prepared the script.

Now I will try to lead you through the production and rehearsal minefield…..

In the past, when I have written a new script, I have been used to writing, rehearsing and performing it. My only worries being ‘is it any good?’ and ‘will anybody come to see it?’

When first preparing the Wodehouse script it suddenly struck me that of course there may well be an issue with performing rights this time. That is an area that I have never had to consider before and had no idea how to approach it.

I put my ‘Dickens’ hat on and tried to work out who a stranger would approach if they had an inquiry to make. They would, I guessed, make an online search and come up with the contact details for The Dickens Fellowship.

I did the same and came up with contact details for The Wodehouse Society. I sent an email to them and very quickly got a wonderfully positive response, saying how exciting the project sounded, how they would publicise it for me via their newsletters and giving me an email address that I should use to get further details about the performing rights.

The new contact led me to: The Agency. It all sounded very mysterious but soon I was in contact with the gentlemen who looked after the arrangements on behalf of The Wodehouse Estate and so there began a series of email exchanges. What was the show? Where would it be performed? How much would I be making from it? How large would the audience be? And so on and so on.

I was asked to supply a script for The Estate to review and this was my first test. If they didn’t think that I was creating a show that honoured Wodehouse, then that would be the end. The first script that I sent was the dull, uninspiring one story-after-the-other version and it was the fear of them rejecting it that led me to starting on the idea of intertwining the four stories in a more creative and complicated way.

Fortunately, as I mentioned in my previous post, that version came together relatively quickly and I was able to email it to The Agency before the estate themselves had a chance to comment on draft 1.

There was a nervous wait, although I was actually touring in America, so the time passed quickly and then, one day, the answer came through…I had been granted the rights to perform the piece! It was so exciting and again a positive confirmation that this idea really could work.

I didn’t do a great deal of work on the script when I was in the USA and almost as soon as I was home I had to work hard on learning and rehearsing Great Expectations, so Top Hole took a bit of a back seat for a while. What I did have to do, however, was make arrangements for actually performing it.

The very first idea for the show had come to me via my golf club’s weekly newsletter so I thought the best thing would be to give Top Hole its premiere performance at the club itself. I contacted the Manager at Oxford Golf Club and soon the wheels were in motion.

I decided to make Oxford a try out for the script and therefore would not charge them for my performance. Soon a small committee had been formed consisting of me, Ray Davies, an ex captain who arranges the social events, current Club Captain, Alan Davey and the Club Manager Alan Butler. Between Alans and Davey/Davies this promised to get very confusing!

Back to The Agency I went with further details of my first show. Back they came to me with the same list of questions: What, Where, How Much? I told them my plans, that I would not be making any profit from the show. How could that be, They asked, how would I finance the show? I replied that it would be a loss leader, that I would fund the show myself, that the Golf Club would donate the space and charge the guests only for the dinner they would serve. Yes, they replied, but how will you be paid? I won’t, I replied, I’m doing it for free! It was a tricky concept to grasp – for me as well as The Agency but eventually they got it and we drafted an initial agreement for the first performance of Top Hole.

At the golf club the committee meetings started, ably chaired and controlled by Ray. Here is a man who likes to know that everything is under control, that everything is minuted, that everyone knows what they have to do.

After our first planning meeting one of my jobs was to prepare a poster and this was a project already in hand. Last autumn, when Liz and I were in Scotland for my birthday celebrations, she took the most magnificent picture of me on the links at Fortrose and Rosemarkie Golf Course. The scenery was spectacular and the sky wild but clear.

Fortrose and Rosemarkie

I decided that the poster (and my marketing leaflet) would be based on a similar pose lifted straight from the text of ‘The Letter of the Law’:

‘He finished his stroke with a nice, workmanlike follow through, but this did him no good, for he had omitted to hit the ball.’

The first job was to get a costume together and that took me to a fantastic vintage clothes shop in Oxford, via a golfing website with pictures of 1920s golf fashion. Plus fours, tweed jacket, woolly sweater, diamond long socks and flat cap: I was ready to go.

Over the previous week or so I had been looking at various views across the golf course, trying to find a suitable backdrop. Fortunately my standard of play is such that I get to see the course from some very unconventional angles. The view had to shout GOLF!, preferably with a hill involved and a green in the distance. There could be no houses, towers, pylons or anything modern in the background. It being March the trees were not in leaf, which was a shame but that couldn’t be helped. Eventually I found a perspective taken from the seventh fairway looking towards to eleventh green, which seemed to fit the bill.

On a sunny afternoon I arrived at the club, changed into my costume (which is very hot indeed), and with the manager Alan walked out to the 7^th. The day was bright and, as a bonus, a willow tree was coming into leaf giving us a burst of fresh spring green.

For twenty minutes or so we posed, clicked, ducked as errant tee shots sailed around our heads and eventually got a collection from which I could build the marketing campaign.

Oxford Golf Club

And before I knew it posters were up in the clubhouse, the e-newsletter had announced the show and, if I didn’t want to make myself look extremely foolish I had better get down to some serious rehearsing.

I took you through the process of line learning in my Great Expectations blog and basically the routine was the same for Top Hole! Repetition, repetition repetition, add a bit, learn that. Go back, refer to script, try again. Over and over again.

Interestingly at first I found Top Hole! much more difficult to learn than anything else. Over the years I have become so familiar with the way that Charles Dickens wrote, that the sentences almost form themselves in my mind. Wodehouse was a different matter altogether. I really had to concentrate on capturing the exact phrasing and structure if I were to do him justice and not just recite a few stories about golf. I realised, quickly, that my rate of learning was nowhere near fast enough, that I would possibly have the first act learned and no more come the first night.

I had wanted to challenge myself and now I discovered that I had really succeeded!  Every waking moment, and indeed a few sleeping ones too, I found myself muttering lines. I would wake at 5.30 with my head spinning desperately trying to remember the order of the passages, if George Mackintosh came after Wilmot Byng. Did the script go back to Oom or did it move to the dogleg fourth hole? Is this the passage in which Mitchell Holmes loses his temper in the grass? When DID Celia Tennant lead me back to the ravine where George lay…..the house had pages of script all over the place as I picked up the page I was struggling with, walked around the house muttering and then put it down again.

Little by little it began to find a shape and I was managing to run the whole first act easily and the slightly more complicated second more accurately with each rehearsal.

On the production side things were also moving along. Press releases were sent to the local newspapers, radio interviews sorted for the week of the show, invitations sent out, via The Agency, to the members of the Wodehouse Estate.

At one of our regular committee meetings Ray, Alan, Alan and I met in the clubhouse itself and I began to visualise the performing space. It would be a fairly large rectangular area which gave me plenty of room to set the show as I’d begun to visualise it during my rehearsals.

The first thing in the staging of the show was that I would be in clubhouses, not theatres, so I could not make the performance space complicated in anyway. However I did want to make it very clear to the audience when I was in each of the four stories. In a theatre I would rely on pools of light but that would not be an option for me with this script.

The large rectangular space gave me four distinct corners and I numbered them in my mind. 1 (bottom right) is where the whole thing starts, an armchair, a table a large history book and The Oldest Member can begin his telling of ‘The Coming of Gowf’. Area 2 diagonally opposite (top left), where a single golf club (a niblick if you must know) will stand. Area 3 (top right) is the setting for Mitchell Holmes, with a small book and lastly, bottom left (4) is the setting for Wilmot Byng and the great President’s Cup playoff, assisted by a driver and a book of rules.

For rehearsal purposes our living room rug became very useful, with the props set out at each corner and actually the movement between them assisted with the line learning as well.

So, here we are, just over a week until tee off time (did you see what I did there?). I am pleased with where the show is but of course there is still more work to be done: plenty more run throughs, plenty more referrals to the script just to check the EXACT phrasing, plenty more experimenting with different voices and accents.

There will be some more meetings to go over final arrangements and there will be more emails to The Agency. I need to create a programme for the evening and of course I need to play golf (all in the interests of research. )

All of this leads inexorably on to Thursday and Friday the 3^rd and 4^th of April and 8pm. Getting into my costume, waiting on the edge of the room. Watching the guests finishing their dinner, sipping their coffee, getting another drink from the bar. Looking again to see if the props are where they should be, in each corner of ‘the stage’. Yes. Ray checking with me to see if I am ready. Short nod, ‘yes’. And then he is there, in the middle of the room calling for quiet, making his opening remarks. At the side of the room I’m listening to him but also to the words in my head: ‘On the broad terrace, outside his palace……’. Laughter from the guests at one of Ray’s remarks. Am aware of people looking over towards me, people with whom I play golf. Concentrate now. ‘Please welcome our Oldest Member!’. Applause and I am on……..

I don’t know if you’re nervous having read that, but I am! Only one thing for it, I had better run through it one more time.

Top Hole! is to be performed on 3&4 April at Oxford Golf Club, Oxford.

Tickets, although limited in numbers, are available from: manager@oxfordgolfclub.net

 

 

 

 

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Top Hole 1

Top Hole!

 

‘Isn’t that a bit disloyal?’  That was the reply I received at a recent show of mine when I answered a question about my next project.

Yes. For the first time in 20 years I am preparing a non Dickens show and it is one that I am excited about and nervous about in equal measures.

As I enter my last 2 weeks of rehearsal let me try to tell you how it has all come about.

2 years ago I received the weekly e-newsletter from my golf club in Oxford and it had details of a forthcoming social event:  a tribute act to Abba or Queen or some such, if I recall.  The Oxford Golf Club has a constant programme of social events for the membership and as well as tribute acts there are quiz evenings, after dinner speeches, celebrations for Burns Night, Valentine’s Day and so on.

As I read, a thought suddenly came to me, why don’t I offer one of my shows?  The idea rolled around for a while and I came to the conclusion that instead of suggesting one of my regular theatre scripts, why not prepare something specifically for golf clubs that I can then market across the country?

Charles Dickens was not known for his work on golf.  A little bit of cricket, yes, but no golf that I could think of, so I began to think about who HAS written about golf and the answer came to me faster than my golf ball disappears into the left rough at the first: PG Wodehouse.

In 1922 Wodehouse started to write a series of short stories set in a golf club.  He was a member in le Touquet and although not a terribly good player, he was certainly an expert observer and soon realised that every human trait was laid bare on the links.

The majority of his tales were written from the perspective of ‘The Oldest Member’, sitting quietly in the clubhouse and regaling anyone who was there with his memories of life at the club.  The fact that Wodehouse’s plots were based in a golf clubhouse and that I wanted to perform in a golf clubhouse seemed to make this the natural path to follow.

As with any new project my first action was to announce to Liz my eureka moment and get completely carried away with the idea:  generally planning world domination, long theatre tours, no doubt a  television series followed by the movie version.  As the idea took hold more firmly I began to plan where we would moor our luxury yacht, which great cities we would have apartments in and which classic cars I would buy – all purchased with the takings.  That moment past, I let the project slip away into the depths of my mind and there it lay dormant, almost forgotten.

In this case Liz gave me the necessary prod by buying a small collection of old golf clubs to use as props in the yet to be created show.  Although the clubs didn’t have an instant effect, they nagged away at my conscience for months.  There they were mocking me from their corner in the shed.

About a year after first having the idea, I came back to it.  I analysed it again and once more came to the conclusion that it was an interesting plan and that it would be a good challenge for me to adapt and learn the work of a different author.

Of course the first thing to do was to read the full collection, firstly in a small volume called ‘The Clicking of Cuthbert and Other Golfing tales’ and then in the larger ‘Golfing Omnibus’.  Wodehouse is always a delight to read, his use of language is brilliant and there are phrases at which you shake your head in disbelief and revel in their wit and conciseness.

Although each story features a different approach, they all follow a fairly similar path: a young, successful golfer, his character usually flawed in some way, inevitably in love with a young beauty, plays a round of golf which not only cures his flaw but wins him the girl.  There are many brilliant variations on this theme, but it is the recurring one.

Having read the stories a few times I narrowed them down to 6: ‘The Clicking of Cuthbert’ , ‘The Long Hole’, ‘The Coming of Gowf’, ‘Ordeal by Golf’, ‘The Letter or the Law’ and ‘The Salvation of George Mackintosh’.  This collection I felt gave me a good spread of golfing characteristics and situations which would appeal to my target audience: golfers.

Having settled on my short list, then next thing to do was to learn more about Pelham Grenville Wodehouse himself.  I purchased a recent biography and began immersing myself into his world.  Any life story is fascinating, of course, but in this case it wasn’t the anecdotes and the factual accounts of his movements between Britain, America, France and Germany that interested me.  It was his method of writing that became important.

Wodehouse simply lived to write.  He wasn’t a gregarious outgoing party animal, enjoying lavish parties the like of which Bertie Wooster might attend;   he was a somewhat withdrawn fellow and was at his happiest in his study with his typewriter.  He took huge care with his art, which is belied by the carefree and flowing language of his novels.  He wrote quickly but revised and improved constantly.

His attention to detail, the need to craft the perfect sentence, became very important to me, and I realised that I could not ‘play’ with his work, I couldn’t make my show a pastiche, it had to be an honest, respectful performance of Wodehouse’s own words.

With all of this information in my head it was now time to start working on the script itself.  How to present the stories?  It quickly became apparent that 6 stories were going to be too many.  Each one has a fairly detailed scenario running through it, so to do them justice I wouldn’t be able to edit too much.  I decided to use only four of the stories but which two to drop?

Rather than thinking about what not to include I decided it was better to decide what I definitely did want to include and see where that left me.  ‘The Coming of Gowf’ was a shoe-in.  It is in the form of an ancient tale told from the pages of history as to how the game of golf came to the mystical land of Oom.   How a stranger – a bearded Scotsman, captured from an inhospitable coast near to the spot known to the natives as Snandrews – shows the King how to play ‘gowf’.  King Merolchazzar sees this strange ceremony as a religious rite and adopts the new God Gowf for his land.

Because ‘The Coming of Gowf’ is presented as a story from history it sets up a good way of starting the show.  The Oldest Member has been asked by the club committee to give a lecture on the history of golf and he begins by reading the account from the land of Oom.  By taking this stance it means that Tom (as I have christened him from the initials of The Oldest Member) has a perfect excuse to talk directly to the audience and begin his recital.

From the other stories I wanted to depict the characters and situations that will be instantly recognisable to those who play the game.

All golfers know the danger of losing their temper on the course and all will have winced as a player screams obscenities and hurls his clubs about.  Every course will have a litter bin next to a tee with a bent or broken club angrily discarded in it.  ‘Ordeal by Golf’ deals exactly with this as Mitchell Holmes is to play a round of golf as a test of his character to see if he can control his passions enough to be considered as the Treasurer for his company. Holmes, however, has only one fault: he loses his temper on the golf course.  I have met Mitchell Holmes many times.  He has to be in.

Another major irritant on the golf course is someone who constantly offers unsolicited advice.  You have made a complete hash of a shot and all you hear is: ‘Ah, what you did there is…..’ and so a soliloquy on the theories of golf, not to mention your own shortcomings, follows.  In ‘The Salvation of George Mackintosh’ the main character discovers the art of eloquence and becomes a ‘tee talker, a green gabbler, a prattler on the links’.  He certainly needs to be part of the script.

‘Those for whom the rules are the best club in the bag.’  Ah.  We play this game (or at least I do), for fun.  So when some studious know-it-all points out that I have played out of order or from the wrong place or have said the wrong thing or have not said the right thing…….well, a story about someone who lives by the rule book is a necessity and it is here where I must make a decision.

Two of the stories that I have selected cover the rules issue: ‘The Long Hole’ and ‘The Letter of the Law’ and it will be pointless to include both of them.  ‘The Long Hole’ is a very funny story dealing with a grudge match played from the first tee of a course all the way to the front door of a hotel in the centre of town.  Much underhand play takes place as the two players hack their way towards the wining post.  The match is resolved when one player casually asks an errand boy what club he should use for his final shot, his opponent leaps on the indiscretion ‘Seeking advice from one who is not your caddy!’

The other possibility is ‘The Letter of the Law’ in which Wilmot Byng drives his ball into four geriatric golfers, known as The Wrecking Crew, hitting Joseph Poskitt (the father of the girl he wishes to marry), on the leg thereby causing him to halve The President’s Cup, rather than win it.  The bulk of the story concerns the playoff for the cup and especially the rule book shenanigans of Poskitt’s rival, Wadsworth Hemingway.

Which to chose?  Well, ‘The Long Hole’ was my first choice but on closer inspection it rambles a bit and actually there is no solid resolution to the tale, whereas ‘The Letter of the Law’ is neatly structured by the geography of the golf course and has a perfect denouement.  It also features a description of Joseph Poskitt’s swing:

‘He brought to the tee the tactics which in his youth had won him such fame as a hammer thrower.  His plan was to clench his teeth, shut his eyes, whirl the club round his head and bring it down with sickening violence in the general direction of the sphere.’  Which, as it happens, is a perfectly accurate description of one of the members’ swing at Oxford Golf Club, which is where I shall be perform for the first time.

And there were my four stories.  A bit unfair on ‘The Clicking of Cuthbert’ but I can always use that in the future.

So. To write.  Blank page.  The best thing, I have found, when faced with a blank page is to do something else and it suddenly became vitally important to me to have a title, I couldn’t possibly write an untitled script.  ‘The Golfing Stories of PG Wodehouse’ was accurate if not exciting.  ‘The Oldest Member’ didn’t capture the spirit and feel of Wodehouse’s work.  ‘Right Ho, Jeeves!’ is one of the most famous and memorable book  titles, while one of Bertie Wooster’s favourite sayings is ‘Top Ho!’ could I use that?  Not really for although Wodehouseian, it says nothing about golf.  And then all of a sudden, there it was, at the forefront of my mind: ‘Top Hole!’

I had now no excuse but to write the script.

The first draft was very ordinary indeed.  The Oldest Member enters and recites the story of ‘The Coming of Gowf’.  When he has finished he starts to tell the story of ‘The Salvation of George Mackintosh’.  When he has finished that there is an interval.  In the second half he tells the story of ‘Ordeal by Golf’ followed by ‘The Letter or the Law’.  Very uninspiring, very ordinary, very dull.  Actually, that takes some doing: to make Wodehouse dull, but I had succeeded.  A rethink was definitely necessary.

For a while I pondered just telling one of the stories, but I felt that there would not be enough variety, nothing for the audience to do and an audience will never enjoy a script if they are not thinking about it and involved with it.

The solution came from my main character, the oldest member.  Surely this elderly man sat in the clubhouse will be a little confused, a little befuddled.  Why not, then, have him mixing up his favourite stories?  That way the audience will never have the chance to settle down into a single narrative, there will be different characters, different situations and different outcomes.

Suddenly the script began to fall into place easily.  Starting with ‘The Coming of Gowf’, I found a natural moment in the narrative to drop straight into ‘The Salvation of George Mackintosh’ then another natural spot for the poor old boy to remember that  he should be talking about King Merolchazzar  before drifting into ‘Ordeal by Golf’ .

Sometimes a script only works because of sheer hard work and more work, then reworking and starting again.  However, Act 1 of Top Hole! just arranged itself in front of me.  By the time I reached the point where I wanted the interval to be I discovered that, purely by a happy accident, each of the four stories had arrived at the point where their respective golf matches were just starting out at the first tee, giving me a perfect point to break and ensuring two acts of very different styles.

In Act 2 all of the action takes place on the links and, with the exception of ‘The Coming of Gowf’, Wodehouse uses the same course for each match and so, as the stories continue to intertwine with each other, the audience will get a feel for the course itself.  They will recognise the short second over a lake.  They will fear the drive across the ravine to the par 5 third.  The dogleg fourth, the ninth back over the water again, the tricky eleventh and the objectionable freak hole that is the eighteenth.

I continued to work my way through each of the  plots winding them up one by one until the only one unfinished is back where we started, in the kingdom of Oom and the end of ‘The Coming of Gowf’, which wraps up the whole affair very neatly.

And that is where I shall wrap this up too.  In my next blog I shall tell you how I am approaching this project as a performer, as opposed to as a script writer and also some of the production challenges that have arisen out of it.

In the meantime, Top Hole!

 

Top Hole! is to be performed on 3&4 April at Oxford Golf Club, Oxford.

Tickets, although limited in numbers, are available from: manager@oxfordgolfclub.net

01865 242158