An odd old week

Well what a strange week.

Rehearsals on “Spring Awakening” are going well. Firstly because I cut a few pages of script. Not many. Six I think. German literature can be so tricky when it’s translated.

Imagine Shakespeare. The language is beautiful. Really beautiful. Much more so than the stories, and that is where there real genius of Shakespeare lies. As a story teller he is a bit crap. Just about all his stories could be summed up in a three-line synopsis of the type one would normally write to sum up an episode of “EastEnders” for the Radio Times. But the language. The language is beautiful, inspirational, sexy (Christ, yes!)... “Oh that this too too solid flesh should melt, weep and resolve itself into a dew”. I have just misquoted, I know. The word “thaw” is in there. But I don’t care. So bollocks to you. What was the point I was making?

Oh yes, the point is this. Translate Shakespeare into German and it won’t work. Not just because I can’t speak German. It’s because they are fundamentally different language, and it isn’t just the words, it is the order of the words, the poetry, the rhythm etc etc etc.

Anyway, this is the issue with “Spring Awakening”. The original Germanic text by Wedekind flows beautifully. Rewrite it into English and it CAN feel repressed, as though everything should be coming out of the mouths of two characters in a World War Two British movie. “Brief Encounter”, that sort of thing.

Anyway, cutting just a few pages of text has created the magic that I had hoped for. The piece has a running time of 75 minutes and 65 minutes per act. More than acceptable. And the style of the piece in this last week has grown, formed and...well it’s become a beautiful piece. Classical yet contemporary. Brechtian yet could be performed at The Globe. A piece that flows, has a beautiful feeling of innocence and yet impending doom, and which I have fallen in love with.

So, why have I spent so long crying this week?

Elisabeth Sladen was a wonderful actor. My favourite. Just watch her perform. She never stops acting. And so many actors do. They don’t consider their surroundings and situation, and when they do they are listening to other performers but simply for their cue line. Then they jump in and say their bit. Lis Sladen listened to EVERYTHING and reacted to EVERYTHING. She also played the most ridiculous situation for real. Working on a low-budget 1970’s kids sci-fi show the effects could be, shall we say, “ropey”. And yet she went for it. She believed that that shitty costume was the most terrifying thing in the universe. A simple idea- if she didn’t believe it, the audience wouldn’t believe it. There is a short (50 second) extra on the DVD “Dr.Who-Planet of Evil”. She is on the studio floor with Tom Baker in 1975, and they need a reaction shot. It will last two seconds in the final piece. And she reacts. My God she reacts. Her face, her breathing, her eyes...all terrified. And what is she looking at? Nothing. There’s a bloody great big camera in her face. And yet she plays it beautifully.

In 2006 in the ‘nuWho’ story “School Reunion” just watch her with David Tennant in her final scene, and then the TARDIS leaves her behind, but there is K9, rebuilt. K9 was a prop that was crap in the 1970’s. It is still crap now. Wonky, wobbly, loud...and yet when she sees that metal Dog and says “K9”, she says it with excitement, love...it’s just perfect. And now I’m crying again.

I first met Lis in 1997. I was (have you guessed this?) a huge fan. I managed to burble something excitedly about the fact that we went to the same school, Mosspits Lane County Primary. We had a chat, a photo was taken (since lost in a flood) and that was that.

Two years later I had the chance to meet her again at a signing.

“Didn’t we go to the same school?” she asked.

She was brilliant. A lovely person and a wonderful, believable actor, the sort of actor that anyone could learn from.

I miss her.

Fuck cancer.