By the time you read this, my new play, Welcome to Bannockburn, will have opened at Glasgow’s Oran Mor, played for almost a week, and be heading to Macrobert Arts Centre in Stirling for another week’s performances.
Glasgow audiences will have given their verdict, some critics too, and we will all be on the other side of a thing called, ‘S***-a-Brick Monday’.
To avoid swearing all the way through this column (and triggering my own anxiety by repeating the phrase at this point), let’s acronymise the phenomenon to ‘SAB Monday’.
So-called because, as part of the A Play, A Pie and A Pint programme, you have to open your show on a Monday at 1pm with only a few hours in the morning to do a technical rehearsal, dress rehearsal, and familiarise yourself with a set you’ve never seen before let alone walked on.
It’s like a combination of cliff diving and standing naked in front of people having their lunch (the latter of which I have literally done on SAB Monday, but I’ll come to that later).
As I write this, SAB Monday is looming, and soon I will be in the audience defecating building blocks like everyone else in the company.
Not literally, but you never know. It is a terrifying experience.
This will be my sixth SAB Monday as writer. I’ve had nine as an actor. Three as a director. And, let me tell you, it never gets less scary.
‘Cliff dive’ performance is always worth the stress
There are two ways of experiencing SAB Monday – and theatre openings in general: as a terrible tyranny of performance anxiety, risk and scrutiny with potentially far-reaching career consequences; or a total buzz.
For most of us, it’s a heady cocktail of both, violently oscillating between extremes of buzz and anxiety.
Some have described – measured even – the stress of opening a show as equivalent to that of being in a small car crash.
The good thing about SAB Monday is that, unlike a small car crash, it is highly unlikely to kill you, give you whiplash, or get you points on your license.
Plus, it really is a buzz. After all, we’re just pretending.
It might feel like a cliff dive, but there’s no cliff, and because it’s not the kind of gig where you hurl yourself off the stage or crowd surf, there’s no diving either. Even if you fell off stage it’s only a few feet’s drop.
Being on stage naked was ‘a buzz’
However, when I said it feels like being naked in front of people having their lunch, that can be literally true. Ten years ago, I became the first actor to appear naked on stage at the Oran Mor.
I strode in, bold as brass – I had to, I was naked – and jumped off the proverbial cliff…
On SAB Monday, you’d imagine this lack of garment protection might have amplified the SAB-factor, and indeed some of the audience seemed to SAB when I appeared, stark naked in front of them.
Some gasped, some swore, some even slightly choked on their pies.
I absolutely loved it. The buzz of that live performance, in front of that live audience. I thought, this is what we SAB for, this buzz.
So, for all the S-ing of Bs, I’m buzzing for this Welcome to Bannockburn SAB Monday. Bring it on.
Welcome to Bannockburn by Lesley Hart will play at MacRobert Arts Centre in Stirling from Monday April 24. For tickets and more information, check the A Play, A Pie And A Pint website.
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