I hate fortune-tellers.  I lay blame entirely on a fortune-teller for getting me into this business in the first place.  We have a family tape-recording of him examining my seven-year old hands, exclaiming how weathered they looked:

“Cheers!” pre-pubescent self replies.

He then tells me that, indubitably, my future lay in the armed forces.

“Oh no.  I’m a pafficist.” I squeak.

He says he sees a suit of armour, and presumes it means the military is my destiny.  But maybe…maybe it’s a costume.  Maybe I was destined to be —flourish— an actor.

“Oh.  Right.” I reply sadly. 

And here I am.  Apologies.  Blame him.

Last week I mentioned my mum’s 50^th birthday.  Before our quixotic voyage to Norfolk, I got a late night taxi with a few presents in tow.  What followed was the brightest, eeriest ride of my life.

Wallace, as he introduced himself, was a hero.  Not only did he instantly make me feel better about my tremulous career, he also told me woeful stories of city executives he’d chauffeured to country palaces, and how utterly miserable they’d been with their lives and kong-sized bonuses.  Wallace took his every joy from his children, his partner and his job.  Grand. 

Now, I must stress:  At no point did I mention the imminent birthday of said mum, nor her age.  Neither was I accompanied by a big balloon with a ‘50’ emblazoned on it.  But as he dropped me off and I crossed his palm with purple, he swerved the car around, rolled down the window, and yelled out:

“Half a century, eh?  Hope she has a good one!”

And drove off.  I stood there in silent suspicion and maze-faced befuddlement for a good five minutes.

The thing is this:  He gave me some very, ahem, interesting advice concerning my career.  And now I have no idea whether to follow it.  One bad experience with a fortune-teller is enough.

That being said, I’m all for fortune-telling in the theatre.  It’s lazy to describe plays set in a possible future as ‘sci-fi’ — mayblays sound better.  And mayblays are enjoying a vogue.  Whipping It Up, set in a Cameronian-governed Westminster, had a roaring success at the Bush and West End.  A Number by Caryl Churchill took an incisive stab at the moral and emotional hurdles cloning might throw our way.  Even Bluebeard used ambiguity about the audience’s assumption of timeline as a key plot-point.  Many other theatres are welcoming this futuristic renaissance.

But these plays aren’t just flights of fancy.  In the same way that newspaper columnists weigh up possible political and social evolution, so must theatre.  Mayblays might even find cult format with evenings of plays set a week, a month, a year and a decade into the future, and we could rein in our brightest talents to provide a sound fortune-telling for the world.  And then all the world’s fortune-tellers could just leave me alone.

Not bad for the price of a taxi.

–>

It’s mum’s 50^th and we’re on an optimistic jaunt to Norfolk to pick up her present: an antique roll-top desk I unwittingly bought on ebay.  I cover up this small-print mishap with an ebuillient:

“Guess what!  I’m taking you to Cromer for your birthday!”

But the weather is so disappointingly brilliant that there’s nowhere to stay.  We scoot from village to village being categorically denied room at each inn despite mum’s best attempts to emphasize her new status as a semi-centarian.  Eventually we arrive at Sheringham, the radio cruelly mocking us through song (“There’s a place for us…somewhere, a place for us…”). 

But something’s not quite right with Sheringham.  There’s a rusty train billowing out pillows of steam.  There are little Churchillian jalopies tinkering around the streets, and everywhere people are dressed in tweed skirts, V-day fatigues and a general malaise of blightyishness. 

We spot a ‘vacancies’ sign but we’re beaten to the room by a couple that look suspiciously like the rejected screen-test for Atonement.  The lady’s hair is infirmary-slick, and she croons in a put-on accent:

“Ew you purr things!  Imagine stumbling into Shering-him during the 1940’s theme weekend and not even being local ec-tors!”

She says actor, we say themist.

I had difficulty titling this week’s column.  My esteemed friend Sweepsy thinks the term ‘themist’ is derogatory, implying a lack of professionalism.  So for argument’s sake anyone that finds the term themist offensive can mentally replace it with the word ‘re-enactor’ (which sounds rubbish).

Themists are actors cut free from the nagging confines of play or auditorium; the mercenaries of the acting world, soldiers of fortune, unpredictable and unnerving to your average board-treader.  Exhibit A: the Mad Hatter at the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ theme park, who, harbouring a blatant crush on Alice, swiped his over-sized teapot at a small child who was trying politely to look up her dress.  See also the London Dungeon ghoul who, jumping out on a patron and being whacked with a handbag, proceeded to bite her.  “I was reacting in character”, he shrugged.

What commitment.  And how deeply in need of being committed some say they are.  How do we convince people that themistry is a worthwhile pursuit?  Idea:  Set up an awards ceremony to rebuff the naysayers and galvanize the themist movement.  Call the awards The Archies in honour of Osbourne’s Entertainer, and whenever some snooty actor guffaws at a valiant Hampton Court themist she can wave her Archie in his face and say ‘chew on this, rada-boy’.

We need actors for museums, dungeons, stately homes and theme parks – why not make them the very best?  For my part I’d rather see the great actors of our generation giving a moving rendition of the Cheshire Cat or Jack the Ripper than advertising the latest American Express slogan.

As for mum, she got her roll-top desk, and I got treated to a top-notch lobster lunch.  Which is a fair trade for having to stay in Travelodge Norwich, I think.

–>

On the faithful 171 bus back to Camberwell, a citizen of certain gravitas sits next to me (for ‘certain gravitas’ read a bodyweight of orbital proportions). I’m happily smeared up against the bus window when I realise there’s a hold-up. A youth by the door motions and says:

‘Mind yourself, mate’

A vicious pixie of a girl, with an equivalently goblinish baby in a pram, wait behind us. Our hefty friend is of such a girth that he’s blocking up the bus walkway, congesting the smooth orchestra of bleeping Oyster cards. Angrily, he looks up at the youth and says:

‘Whaddya want me to do abaht it?’

There is the small suction of many breaths being taken. A stand-off. The youth hesitates, looks down at his shoes, and turns back:

‘Well, you could lose some weight.’

Another sharp intake, particularly from me, as being the one sitting next to him I’ll no doubt be the first one through the window in the advent of an incredible hulk-style rampage. However, our rotund friend simply slumps sadly and says:

‘Yeah. ‘Spose you’re right.’

He shifts, lifts the pram up and over his belly’s perimeter, and we continue merrily on our way to the fair realm of Peckham.

Cruel, perhaps, but for all intents and purposes, it worked. Why don’t we heckle more? Why is heckling kept to the sodden confines of the comedy set? Writing a play, they say, is the most respectable means of having an argument with oneself, but what does the playwright do when a member of the audience joins in with the argument?

I’ve never really heckled, to my endless disappointment. The closest I’ve come is an involuntary expletive towards a trustifarian comic who made some particularly foul African-baby jokes. With surprise I realised that I had become a reactionary. I made an instantaneous decision that my distaste was more viable than his set. Perhaps he was leading up to a very clever point about 21^st century ironic racism. Perhaps not. The question is: Is it ever alright to speak up in the theatre?

Terry Hands recalled performances of Othello where, in the Moor’s final scene with Desdemona, members of the audience cried out “she’s innocent!” Conversely, Michael Sheen dealt with a persistent phone-ringer in the audience of Frost/Nixon by cleverly incorporating it into the play:

‘It’s been brought to our attention that someone’ phone is on in the studio – before we commence the interview, could that person please turn off their mobile.’

To which the phenomenally unimaginative phone-ringer, dead to Sheen’s brilliant improvisation, yelled back:

‘It’s not a studio, it’s a theatre.’ Sigh.

Actors deserve protection on stage, but if something really touches a nerve with the audience, why shouldn’t they react? And in turn, what I wouldn’t give to see a Stanley Kowalski fling himself into the stalls, or a Hamlet challenge a yawner with improvised wit. It wouldn’t be easy. But I bet my Oyster card the audience would absolutely love it.

–>

And so our friend, the fringe, has stumbled home to its nine-to-five rigmarole in London, after a saturating summer on the Escher-esque streets of Edinburgh, with a monumental hangover and the taste of deep-fried haggis in its mouth.

It’s reassuring that even the poor old fringe gets a holiday, even if it’s to the same old place every year and the kids keep multiplying (two and a half thousand shows this year; an impressive display of virility). We ask the fringe how its holiday was, and glumly it replies “oh, you know, keeps getting better and better”, and we wonder if perhaps the Edinburgh fringe festival might soon collapse under its own weight, like the Roman Empire, or a reality TV franchise.

So what did we see that sticks in our teeth? Polish Macbeth on stilts? Argentine carnality in a big-top tent? Norwich University’s meditation on the rise and rise of the rampant rabbit?

We saw…well, to be honest, we saw a lot of comedy. There’s a conspiracy theory doing the rounds that the Edinburgh fringe is slowly being colonized by comedy and that eventually all the theatre acts will be covertly ‘disappeared’ - extradited, perhaps, to the little-known but highly patronized Penzance theatre festival.

Let’s hold those laughing horses. Yes, with the advent of BBC12 and its posse, more and more comics are gagging their way onto television, so the exposure is greater and they’re selling out quicker. But the Edinburgh fringe theatre scene you won’t hear so much about. Which is the best thing about it. There’s a deep satisfaction in discovering a little nookful of theatrical invention in a breadbox somewhere off the Royal Mile. So why not take a leaf from the Edinburgh festival and make the London fringe an arena for rare experimentation?

I’m not suggesting deploying brigades of flyer-laden theatre-muggers —thuggers, surely— stomping up and down the South Bank advertising the latest coup at the Rosemary Branch (though perhaps there’s a virtue in numbering our fringe venues like Edinburgh, if only to help out those Dutch tourists desperately trying to hunt down the Brockley Jack. ‘Venue 4’, we would purr, and politely point them in the direction of the 171 bus). We’ve got to offer up something that the big theatres can’t afford to: Big Risks.

But bearing in mind the word ‘risk’ is bandied around like a copy of The Stage in an open audition, how? Well, that’s for next week’s heckle. Along with world peace and the definitive lie to get out of work for an audition.

As for our friend the fringe, it’s pulling a few sick days before it gets back to work. But as it slopes off towards the lesser known theatres of Londinium, we can just about make out its benevolent grumblings:

“Ahh…it’s good to be back.”

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