MOON & BIRDBOOT

We had the two loudest voices in the school. No doubt we'd have made the worst spies, blowing our cover with every foghorn utterance we bellowed as if we assumed everyone we spoke to around us was stone deaf.

We still do to this day.

Nevertheless, for a brief while we were considered 'hot shit' in the drama department and perhaps, if we'd just finessed our unrefined approach to method, we might have even become future stars of stage and screen.

Alas, it was not to be. We were put quickly back in our box, like two disused sock puppets that became quickly forgotten in the long history of our school's drama department, like so many before us who enjoyed a brief moment in the limelight with their debuts that simultaneously became their swan songs.

Still, for those privileged to see our performances back then in the mid 90s, they knew they were witnessing history in the making (as in we were instantly consigned to the past) and appeared to applaud heartily. We could only assume at the time this meant we had convinced in our star turns in both Tom Stoppard's 'The Real Inspector Hound' as well as the old Arthur Miller warhorse 'The Crucible'.

It would have been understandable for those who'd never seen us on stage before to wonder how we displayed such obvious and natural talent in our roles. What our audiences weren't to know is that we'd honed our craft at primary school in the playground many years before, acting out scenes from 'The Lord Of The Rings' where I would almost always play the role of Frodo Baggins whilst my friend Roly would assume the role of Strider otherwise known as Aragon (The King).

Somewhat oblivious to the theatrical nuances of Stoppard's meta play-within-a-play, we portrayed the roles of competing critics Moon (me) and Birdboot (Roly) as if they were extensions of ourselves. Luckily for us, we effortlessly connected with the duo's pretentious jousting as we, too, had spent many years arguing about all the books we'd read (that we hadn't) but had been too lazy to check either way.

Only one blip/error caused me to force a meta moment too far when the overzealous prompt (our English teacher and director of the play) cut in too quick when I was simply enjoying a dramatic pause, prompting me to exclaim 'pardon?' very loudly which got the biggest laugh of the night.

It seemed I had a knack for blundering my way through my roles as was the case when I managed to hastily accelerate the action of act 3 of 'The Crucible' by jumping ahead to a line much later in the play that, in turn, omitted a good deal of the developing plot. Searching for a cue from my fellow actors, I found none and a dramatic tension hung in the air as thick as a well smoked ham.

"Do that again tomorrow!" our director insisted, "but perhaps don't leave out quite so much of the play next time."

Genius is hard to replicate when it is born out of spontaneity, nevertheless I attempted a second, more contrived attempt at creating dramatic tension which simply made my character of Judge Danforth look wholly incompetent instead of authoritative.

Roly's portrayal of John Proctor, however, proved to be full of Charlton Heston-like conviction with a granite, Old Testament tone established in Act One that rarely faltered through to the end of Act 4 (even when the play asked for it to) and left one in no doubt that he would have been quickly recruited by the local Pentecostal community to perform sermons as a street pastor on the streets of our local town every Friday and Saturday morning.

Well, there were no curtain calls (metaphorically) for us to continue our thespian journey and so we slunk back into the shadows behind the red stage curtains and resumed our more natural roles of lifelong friends to which we've given our most natural and authentic performances to date.

And on that note, happy birthday Roly (Birdboot)!

Love ya!

Digital Renegade

13th January, 2024