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By Diana Simmonds
What are you up to Reg? Is it true you're gearing up for another 3946 performances of Gilbert & Sullivan?
I'm calling this my G&S year - two appearances with Opera Australia, The Pirates of Penzance in Melbourne recently, and now in Sydney The Gondoliers. As a teenager G&S is where I saw myself, I'd have thought all my Christmases had come at once if I'd been given these opportunities back then. I still do as a matter of fact. Each time I get to play one these iconic comic roles I find heaps more to bring to them. So, in response to your concern about yet another Major-General Stanley or Duke of Plaza Toro, "I'm loving it!" Any opportunity that comes my way to work with the good people of Opera Australia I'll seize. It is the best of workplaces and provides the best of colleagues.
Can you tell us about the show you'll be doing at the Ensemble next year?
That's The Thank You Dinner, (A Feast to Remember), I wrote and performed it at the Clarendon [in the Blue Mountains] during 2001. Since I was one of the original group of the Ensemble Theatre actors and indeed appeared in its very first public performance, in-the-round (at the Cammeray Children's Library on Sunday Evening May 11th 1958) it is not surprising that the theatre's present director Sandra Bates has asked me to appear during 2008, the season next year celebrating the Theatre's fiftieth anniversary. (Holy Moly!)
And what about the show itself?The Thank You Dinner was a departure from previous one man shows I've presented. At the time I described the piece as an "all-talking, no-singing, no-dancing one act play". The "darkly comic" narrative is full or surprises, not least that as it unfolds I play all the characters.
The eccentric business executive yet otherwise solitary, Roger Lovely, who lives with his three children in a heritage listed block of flats in the Sydney suburb of Rose Bay is called interstate for a month-long conference. In a bit of a bind as a consequence, Roger enlists the assistance of three neighbours from his apartment block, requesting that while he's away they mind his children: Birdy, Nicholas and Dorothy.
He assures the group of elderly residents his children will cause them no trouble; secure in the knowledge they are in the best of hands Roger heads off to Melbourne. When he returns his gratitude knows no bounds, and in line with the social propriety he so reveres he decides to host a dinner to appropriately thank the neighbours for their trouble.
And that's all I have to say about it, other than to quote one line out of context - "whatever you might think about the imagination, friends, the strangest fiction of all is the truth."
So, G&S this year and The Thank You Dinner in October, next. Inbetween times, during May and June-July 2008 I'm doing My Fair Lady with Opera Australia, absolutely over the moon that I have at long last been asked to play Henry Higgins!
There you are HRH, I hope this'll do. I quite enjoy an interview this way. As they say about masturbation: "you don't have to look your best".
love,
Reginald
