So the day after the worst audition in the world(!) I sat alone in my bedroom, watching the beautiful John Barrowman strutting his stuff in Torchwood, and drinking a nice bottle of Rose wine which I received back in May for my birthday! I know what you’re thinking, but I was too busy to drink it before!!
I was feeling slightly tipsy but had that quiet confidence that people seem to get after drinking, and I thought it would be a good idea to look for some acting jobs. I logged in to my casting website of choice and scrolled through all the rubbish until I found something of interest. And I found this...
‘Professional actors [m/f] of the highest calibre are required for an inter-active murder mystery event on Saturday 30th July 2011 in the Northamptonshire area. Actors must be:
-aged 25-45
-must be able to demonstrate skills and experience in Murder Mystery events
-have own transport
-reside in any of the following areas: Northampton, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire, Coventry.’
Well, the job was clearly for me! I’m a professional actor, I was free on that day, I live in Northamptonshire, have been in a few murder mysteries and have my own car! Sorted! At approximately 11pm, off went my application.
I awoke the next morning bright and breezy, and not long after my wake up alarm had gone off, I received an email. It thanked me for my application, could I please fill in the attached application form for the company and return it ASAP, casting will be done tonight. Fair enough, application form filled in and sent off. About an hour later another email arrived. Thank you for your application, here is your contract. Please fill it in and return it before 6pm tonight. Further details will be sent to you via email next week. Now, I know that things move fast in the acting world but that was ridiculous! There was no audition (which I was immensely grateful for!), the money was good and it was local, what more could I want?
Over the next few days I received several emails, each one revealing a bit more of what the evening would entail but it still seemed like a bit of a mystery, and I wasn’t even trying to work out whodunit!
Saturday rolled around, and I realised that I hadn’t properly looked at the script that I’d been sent! I’d been to see Adam in one of his plays again on the Friday and had stayed over in Travelodge Nuneaton(!) with him, so drove my car home as fast as I dared in its tired state, and spent the afternoon going over the information I had been sent. I did try my best to learn most of the lines but as with any murder mystery, there’s a lot of improvisation so I didn’t think it would matter too much.
The title of the evening was called ‘Murder at the Moulin Rouge’. I would be playing a character called Mossy Cleft. Yes, it was going to be one of those evenings! I read through all of the information I was given to do with my character’s background, skimmed over the lines a few more times and made my way to the venue. Naturally I got lost trying to find it, until I looked at the building straight in front of my nose and realised I’d been circling it for ten minutes.
I arrived first, early as always , so I sat in the car park and looked over the plan for the evening again whilst watching out for the man in charge. I had no idea what he looked like but when I saw a man entering the hotel on his own, I took a chance and followed him in. It was him. Again, he was nothing like what I was expecting, perhaps I should stop judging people by their emails! We were shown to the room where we would be performing, and I think we were both disappointed with what we saw. It was just the most plain white room you’ve ever seen, with 4 round tables in it, each seating around 7 people. It really did look like they’d forgotten we were coming and had just shoved a few tables in there. The only ‘feature’ in the room was a white board on which someone (I’m presuming a manager) had written “Assume makes an ass of u and me”. I’m guessing it was meant to be a device to motivate their staff to ask questions to their guests but they all looked as if they’d rather be at home and that we were wasting their time.
While we were waiting for the receptionist to find us a room to get changed in, the next actor arrived. A lovely girl called Emma. She was playing the world’s only talking mime. Told you it was one of those nights! Just after she arrived, one of the managers came over to us and told us that the hotel was full and that we would be in an out-of-order room. She handed over 2 keys and showed us to room 101. And what a room it was. It was basically being used as a storage room. On top of the bed were several items of furniture, there were about 50 chairs stacked up in piles of 4 all over the room, and of course there was a fridge and a lawnmower. My car was looking like a more appropriate dressing room at that point. Just as we were settling in, the final actor arrived, Rachel. And she was bonkers! Imagine a drama teacher, multiply the eccentricity by about 100, and that’s who we got! She was so excited to be there, she was bouncing of the walls, asking about 20 questions a minute, mad! She plunged straight into moving things around so that we had space to get changed, throwing hairs left and right and climbing all over the furniture!
Tony had gone to his car while we were moving things to get the costumes from his car. He’d taken a key to get back in so we were surprised when he knocked the door. His key didn’t work- he took them back to reception. And then they told us... that they had shown us to the wrong room. We had to move all of the furniture back where we had found it and made our way down the corridor to room 104. Which was lovely! There wasn’t anything wrong with the room so the hotel had clearly lied to us when they said that the hotel was full. We made ourselves at home and put our costumes on ready for action.
The evening had been planned out so that the action would take place at certain intervals of the night between the guests meal courses, with our first scene being played just before the starters were served. And so we began. Tony went into the room, introduced the evening and brought each of us in as our characters to meet the crowd. I decided for some bizarre reason to be extremely flirty, and headed straight for the first man I laid my eyes on. His name was Alf. Alf was lovely! I asked him if he wanted to be part of the show at the Moulin Rouge but he was having none of it. I’d been given a whip as a decoy prop so I used it to amuse Alf, much to his delight and his wife’s amusement. After we were all introduced, we made our way back to the room and waited for Tony to return. He burst into the room with a big smile on his face (although he was the type of man who seems to be constantly happy- I don’t think he’s ever frowned in his life!), and said that it was a good start, but the guests food orders hadn’t even been taken yet! Our schedule was already thrown out of the window. We sat down to plan out which scenes we could change about so that we didn’t have to leave the guests waiting for too long.
The evening was going well, and then we arrived at the part of the evening that I was a little nervous about. The interrogations! We all went to a table each and the guests were able to question us for 3 minutes before we had to move to the next table. It turned out that I needn’t have worried too much. As the guests hadn’t seen much to deduce what was going on so far, their questions were quite easy to answer and it went by quite quickly. We were back in our room before I knew it. We were all in an excitable mood by this point as we told each other some of the bizarre questions we had received and the lies we had been telling to send the guests off in the wrong direction. It was working, I was the murderer but I had convinced everyone that it was Rachel’s character Vanessa. It seemed I was good at lying! A few more structured scenes passed and then it was on to round two of the interrogations.
The guests were getting quite suspicious of me by this point and were throwing increasingly difficult questions at me. The other characters had been making up wild stories about me and hadn’t told me so I was trying to deflect all the lies away to other people. And then I reached my third table...
In a previous scene, I had had a conversation with my half-sister Arsou about some accounts not adding up. I hadn’t seen the account sheet which was fine, but I didn’t know what was ahead. A man asked me if I’d ever been to the address on the accounts sheet. I didn’t know what the address was so I walked over to him to have a look and there it was. He asked me again, “Have you ever been to Barebutt Mansion?” Well that was it! Character meltdown. Absolute failure! I burst out laughing, so hard that tears were rolling down my face. I was at the table for 3 minutes but was laughing so much that I couldn’t answer any questions for about 2 and a half minutes. We made our way back to the room and I tried to compose myself before the big reveal- the murder itself!
We huddled outside the room and listened to the guests thoughts of who had committed the crime, and only two out of the four tables had guessed that it was me, and only the table that had made me laugh had guessed correctly how and why I had done it. Every detail, spot on. We then showed the murder scene before revealing the winners of the night. I loved the murder scene, everyone was in the scene so the guests were watching everything, and listening to the gasps and ‘ooh’s as I poured poison into a drink for the victim was priceless! I stormed out of the room after my final line “You’re fired!” with a menacing laugh a la Cruella De Ville. And it felt good! I love being the villain!
We all went back to the room and had a chat about how good an evening it had been, and then we were off. The evening had flown by, but it hadn’t finished there! I was off out! No rest for the talented! I drove home in a very jolly mood, with thoughts of murder floating around my head. But don’t worry, I wouldn’t dare do it for real! I’m too nice... and I’m scared of prison!
And that was that. Another job in the bag and another credit on the cv. Lovely!
I’ve got a panto audition tomorrow, oh yes I have! I wonder what stories I’ll have to tell after that...
Nxxx
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