Last weekend I was in Cambridge playing Ratty in Toad of Toad Hall at the illustrious Trinity College as part of an alumni event the college was holding. The event took place on Sunday and involved carrying out workshops with the children in the morning to prepare them to take part (yes, take part) in a performance after lunch
Just after 10am on Saturday I met director Barry and the seven other performers and group leaders who would somehow in 24 hours manage to make this thing work. My friend John was going to be the ‘storyteller’ so at least I knew someone in the room.
As a cast we immediately bonded – which was fantastic given what was facing us on Sunday – and throughout the day it was like working with old friends rather than just people I had met that morning.
With such little time we dived straight into working out how we would run our workshops in the morning – mine being to teach them all a song entitled ‘Friendship’ (which has somewhat depressingly stuck with me ever since). This done and lunch consumed we stumbled our way through the performance. The sequences where we had a script went well, it was just when we came to the bits where we would have children involved that things got a little woolier.
So, with our day’s rehearsal in the bag we prepared for the following day when we would get to meet the 100 or so children that would make up the rest of the cast.
Sunday morning arrived and at 10am the gates opened and the families streamed in. After a short meet-and-greet we were into the workshops which went well – although teaching under 5s a song in 25mins is something of a challenge.
Lunchtime arrived and, unfortunately, so did the traditional British summer weather. We huddled around a large table under an equally sized umbrella to eat our lunch and work out how we needed to adapt the performance based on what had (and hadn’t) been achieved in the morning. I also had to deal with a PR issue over lunch in full costume, which was somewhat surreal – see previous post about worlds colliding!
Fortunately, almost as soon as the guests started to return from lunch the rain stopped.
And so the performance began….
I think it is fair to say what proceeded was surprisingly organised chaos!! Somehow though, through ad-libbing, physically manoeuvring children, thinking on our feet and frankly just making it up we got through the entire show with no injuries, loss of life or crying children.
Our success was, I think, in part down to sheer dumb luck but mainly to Barry’s leadership and the group of people he and John got together and who all pulled together to make it through.
They say never work with children or animals – having survived this weekend, I say bring on the animals?!
William Baylis 
