The Fishwhacker Swindle?

Last week a more-than-usually wasted Brewski suggested that amateur dramatics companies were little more than seething cesspits of adulterous carnality, veritable modern-day Sodoms and Gomorrahs. That’s not my experience at all. To protect the identities of my fellow members, I’d better use a pseudonym for the group I belong to – let’s call it something like, oh, I don’t know, the Chipping-under-Norton Thespian Society.

The CUNTS has its fair share of the usual annoyances you find with this sort of endeavour, but rampant rogering is not one of them. The rehearsals are in a draughty town hall which gets hellishly cold of a winter’s evening. There’s a bit of bitchiness and backbiting, though not too much. The women mostly look like the back end of a bus, or are over 70, or both, and the few 20-year-olds who appear from time to time are just passing through. And, of course, there’s a resident prima donna, in this case a man, who throws shrieking tantrums when he doesn’t get his way but whom we have to treat nicely because he’s far and away the best actor in the society and if he left, CUNTS would be fucked.

None of that really bothers me, however. The worst thing about amateur dramatics is the audience. They’re old, and I mean really old, on average, because our group has been going for 90 years and many of them have been coming since they were babies. I suppose I should be grateful for their support, but it means that we can’t put on really deviant plays with lots of swearing and shagging. Plus, they’re deaf, and start muttering during quiet bits even when you’ve whispered a line at the top of your voice. They seldom laugh at the really funny lines which have been rehearsed over and over again, night after night, the ungrateful sods. You’d think that forking out a measly six quid to come and support a community activity like the CUNTS would lower expectations and that they’d realise they weren’t going to see Ian McKellen doing King Lear, but oh no, they purse their lips primly whenever a line is fluffed or someone trips over a bit of loose carpeting the fucking stage manager hasn’t bothered to tack down properly.

A couple of shows ago I was operating the sound and lighting console at the back of the hall and had a chance to watch the audience on all three nights of the performance. One old git was nodding off in the second row and his wife had to keep elbowing him in the kidneys. A couple of fucking teenagers were having mobile phone conversations, for Christ sakes. I mean, what were the little bastards doing there anyway? They should have been off drinking meths and spreading the pox among themselves like normal kids. One woman ate her way through a three-foot long baguette all through the first act, feeding it into her fat grotesque face as if she were passing a stool in reverse and at the wrong end. My thoughts turned to a beautiful picture I have in a book of a Heckler & Koch SG1, one of the best sniper’s rifles in the world.