The Mermaid Theatre
There used to be a dock beside the theatre and when the tide was right, Bernard Miles’ friends could visit him, tying up Thames barges or other boats alongside. Bernard fell into that category of imaginative, energetic people who are superb at building things and hopeless at running them. His theatre cycled between packing people in whenever someone competent or talented was directing and the other times when one member or another of his family was in charge.
We had a smash hit, for example, with Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday directed by David William (jammed for both the 6-15 and 8-40 performances) and then I was still in the company when Bernard decided he would do both Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus on the same night, playing both young and old Oedipus himself. He must have been pushing sixty, by then, and he went round the company saying he intended to play Oedipus and Jocasta as a mature couple. (“If I don’t play it now, I never will” he kept saying).
He was costumed in a vast black, sheep’s wool dressing gown. Late in rehearsals, I remember, he was rolling around on some steps in agony when Sonia Dresdel (playing Jocasta) and watching out front, called out to him, “Bernard; you’re showing your underpants”.
It was so bad – Rex, I mean – that another member of the cast, Denise Coffey, and I discovered that we’d both acquired the same obsession, quite independently. As chorus members we were often stuck, absolutely still in frozen positions for several minutes and we began to feel convinced that if we didn’t move at once, this minute someone at the back of the stalls levelling a gun NOW would be bound to hit us.We felt it would be a legitimate form of criticism for such a terrible show. We had been playing it for some time before we learned, over a cup of tea in a break, that we’d acquired the same fixation and we shared the problem of how to resist moving at least half a line before instructed to, so as – if not completely to dodge the bullet - at least move enough to get away with just a flesh wound or a winging blow which would remove the heart from the marksman’s sights and merely break an arm.
This Oedipus Rex was one of the worst shows I've ever been in (Colonus was much better because Bernard was more the age) and it does stir one’s conscience at times as to whether there should be a method of offering an audience their money back - mind you, there never were all that many of them there to benefit.