The Stage

Chit Chat - Reciting lines

Published Tuesday 13 November 2007 at 12:20 by Tabard

It’s interesting to note that both culture secretary James Purnell and his number two Margaret Hodge have cottoned on to how to work a theatre crowd.

Both appeared at conferences last week - Purnell at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, Hodge at the Almeida - and proceeded to reveal how they were both, in fact, failed actors (no cliche there).

Purnell explained at Equity’s diversity conference: “I actually spent most of my youth theoretically trying to join Equity and never managed it. That’s because I was a really terrible actor. I realised this after three weeks of playing in The Man Outside at the Edinburgh festival. It’s a pretty hard core German play about a Nazi soldier coming back from the war and nobody liking him. Unfortunately, nobody liked our play very much either. We had a cast of seven or eight and it was pretty rare for there to be more people in the audience than in the cast.

“There was this awful game of chicken that the audience used to play when, if you’d have four people in the audience - two couples - they’d be looking at each other thinking, ‘Well, we can’t leave straight away, but if we don’t leave first then we’re not going to be able to leave at all’. After three weeks of that I thought I should try something easier - like being a politician.”

Hodge, meanwhile, speaking only a day later at the TMA conference, remarked: “I’ve got to start with a confession - when I was at school, my ambition was to act. So I did dream of treading on the boards of great theatres like this one…”

Tabard is delighted to learn that those running theatre funding at government level had theatrical aspirations when younger. Unfortunately, one can’t help but wonder, though, whether it’s more the case of them both having the same speech writer.