Saturday 19 December 2009

Sleeping Beauty

My first Equity contract for actual proper paid acting work was in a panto. I was playing the roles of Carabosse and the Prince in a school's tour of Sleeping Beauty for the Globe Players. Four weeks in a van crammed full of actors and set travelling from school to school to school in December.

In the first half I played the evil fairy Carabosse scarily cursing spindles and making small puddles under small children. In the second half I played the handsome prince liberating a beautiful sleeping young lady with his lips. Within the narrative of the play one hundred years separate these two characters, in actual fact I only had the distance between stage right and left to change backstage from one costume to the other. So instead of course I found myself wearing one costume on top of the other and the reveal of the handsome prince would have been more accurately described as the reveal of the hot sweaty prince. The children were often more repulsed by the hero of the piece than the villain.

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