Time has flown this October, so that I’m only just sitting down now to think of the production of Marlowe’s ‘Edward II’ I was in during the first week of October. I played the Oxford scholar Baldock. I love her (for she was a she in that production) and although relish is an overused word, I really did relish my moments on stage in a rare opportunity to play that male role. I played Baldock with a seething hatred of blue-blooded nobility, crater-sized chip on her shoulder and sharp intelligence, hidden beneath her ‘curate-like… attire’. It was a great listening part - some of my favourite moments were those when I had nothing to say, just watching, listening and constantly analysing. The constantly twitching mind of someone cerebrally working hard to grasp her place, as one of the very few characters in the play without the easy advantage of noble birth. In Baldock’s view, and my own performing her, Baldock was the centre of Marlowe’s medieval world. Social climbing in an unstable regime is a fairly spontaneous affair, and it forced me to be very present in the role – I didn’t realise that there was no escape until my final few lines – which was great practice and experience for me. It was a lot of fun and finding burning resentment a great change from my usual roles.

What I’ve found in general with plays is that the more serious the subject matter, the more laughter in rehearsal and backstage to balance it out. The famous hot poker was, in our production, a metal flashlight with no batteries. We sniggered a lot backstage about the practicalities of killing someone with something that just wouldn’t go very far up. We queried the size of the pig that would fit on such a tiny ‘spit’, and it has even been suggested that it had light-sabre properties and that as Edward screams you should see glowing blue protruding from his mouth. Nonetheless, there was some consternation when, on night two, Lightborne announced, with an edge of panic, that the torch was nowhere to be found. Whilst the audience absorbedly watched, we hunted high and low, before searching for alternatives. I found myself off stage during Act 4 (getting shipwrecked as it would happen) failing to bend a wire coat hanger into a straight pole. Eventually a replacement torch was found, but the incident reminds me of why I love theatre so much: part of its magic is not just the wonderment created onstage, but that it is born out of true chaos, and often much stifled laughter, offstage. And the audience would, and should, never guess.

Equally unglamourous, but a favourite sight of mine, was the absurd accumulation of ‘the dead’ backstage as the play progressed, lined up on sofas and chairs with their paperbacks, waiting for the final bows. There’s a contrasting serenity to that quite corner, compared to the focused listeners by the curtain waiting for cues, or the conflict of the onstage action. Heaven, apparently, looks like a theatre.