The Trial of Mr Punch: The Performance
newsletter: Sept. 2008
Sept. 2, 2008 - It’s an amazing moment, a surreal swivel of time, when a play finally opens. Suddenly all the rehearsals are behind you, the costumes made, the makeup applied, and the actors ready to strut their stuff…I make little mention here of myself, as author and director, sitting in a high place at the back of the theatre, frazzled, worried, suspended in a zone of hope, concerned that gags will not fall flat, that the lighting will be just so, and the actors totally prepared for performance. You cease to exist as anyone with an iota of control over your own creation – it’s all, so to speak, in the unpredictable lap of Gods.
But from the first moment when the stage is lit, and the senile judge rises to take his seat, and the Police Constable declares All Rise – meaning the audience which, surprised to be cast as participants, gets to its feet – and the prosecutor utters her case against Mr Punch, some strange magic bedazzles, and suddenly you are neither writer nor director, but a certain kind of spectator who knows what is coming next, and what comes afters that, and who listens as much to the antic speeches of Mr Punch as he listens for audience response. Will the ticket-buyers miss something? will a gag turn out truly badly? and if so, why didn’t I know beforehand?
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Too late to worry over those things now – the play is running, the humpbacked Mr Punch is explaining the intimate ‘raw’ elements of a glove puppet’s life to a Judge who is uncertain if his court has any jurisdiction over a puppet in the first place. Indeed, he’s uncertain about most things. And then Judy enters the witness stand, pale and white, a victim in a neckbrace, and a certain brief stillness, a sympathy for her, descends. It doesn’t last for long – because yes, by now, most of the jokes and absurdities are getting the response the actors and the writer longed for.
All right, so some of the lines could have been stronger, sure, some of the jokes sharper – but I can’t fault the interplay between the characters, between Crocodile the defence lawyer and Pluvius the prosecutor (who have a history of deep passion about to be revived). And the interaction between the Judge and Judy is carried off so well by the two actors. And the Judge’s spacy monologues, relevant only to himself, bring a laughter I hadn’t anticipated. And I can’t find a single flaw in the portrayal of Punch, his rampant ego, his wickedness, his constant motion, and his offended surprise at learning he needs psychiatric examination from a shrink who is probably the least sane character on stage. And when Judy plays the role of Punch, and vice-versa, through the medium of glove-puppets, the play goes berserk.
And the final scene, the dark-sweet waltz between Punch and Judy – which might have been one of love and tenderness and reconciliation – is inevitably, and cruelly, the opposite.
I don’t hear the applause at the end. I really don’t. I’m more interested in getting backstage to thank the actors for bringing what I wrote to life. What trickery they weave, what spells. They take off their costumes, their makeup, and suddenly they are no longer the characters they were only minutes before. They’re people with other obligations, commitments to keep, people to see, lives to lead. As for me, I go home feeling good – yet knowing that a nervousnessness will afflict me ahead of the next day’s performance.
The Trial of Mr Punch; A one-act play.
For information on the play contact:
MBA,
62 Grafton Way,
London W1T, 5DW.
Or call: 207 387 2076
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contents©2006 Campbell Armstrong
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