Toby the Tenor

I never enjoyed sport at school, the most exercise I got then was climbing the stairs to matron’s surgery to ask for an off-games slip so I didn’t have to go to PE. Then, in 1998, I spent a balmy summer in Salzburg for which I had over-spent on a beautiful apartment in the historic centre of the city, the terrace of which backed onto the Salzach river with a stunning view of the Untersberg. My concern about my accommodation overspend brought about a strict tightening of the purse strings for my daily food and drink allowance.

The venue for the month of rehearsals was a considerable distance from my apartment. The commute was about five miles or so for which I had transported my bicycle from London. The combination of my daily bike ride, regular walks in the hills and mountains and the cost saving crash diet resulted in my hair turning blond in the sunshine and a radical drop in weight. Before I knew it, I was no longer the chubby, ginger, PE dodger and starting to read a difference in the way some people related to me. 

My clothes began to hang off me and, on returning to London, I set about revamping my wardrobe as I continued my new gym regime. Before long, I had reinvented myself. It wasn’t long before my new look had an effect on the way I was being cast. At the time, opera was going through its own version of a reinvention and there was a trend for casting away from operatic stereotypes. Directors were looking for cinematic realism and imagery for their productions which extended to their casts. My change in appearance hit the spot for their new demands. 

I noticed that many of the roles for which I was subsequently being cast required me to bare my torso. I doubled down on my trips to the gym and soon I became accustomed to arriving at the first day of rehearsals for a new production and discovering that I was to be half naked. 

In 2005, I was cast to play the Mad Woman in Benjamin Britten’s Curlew River at Edinburgh Festival. After the initial meet and greet with the performers and production team, the director, Olivier Py, asked if he could have a private conversation. We moved to the side of the room and he respectfully asked if I would mind being naked for some of the production. 

“Do you have a good reason for me to be nude?”

Olivier had a look on his face that told me his request was much more than an indulgence for him. “My thinking is that your transformation from one of a group of monks to the Mad Woman can be a meaningful ritual played out for everyone to witness. As the accompanying monks prepare you for the re-enactment of the Mad Woman’s story, they remove your habit, revealing you fully as man. They then paint the stigmata of Christ in red paint on your feet, hands and side. They then robe you in a black dress, concealing the signs of sacrifice and your manhood that will always be there for the performance.”

“I hope it will.” I said glibly. 

“Will you do it? Please, it will mean so much for me.”

The respect with which he made his request and the beauty of the conceit had already convinced me. I also got a feeling Olivier’s vision for Britten’s chamber opera was framed by his own deep Christian faith. 

“I will.” I said without having to think. 

“Thank you. Thank you so much.”

Olivier then turned to his team of designer and assistants and gave a thumbs up. 

As rehearsals progressed, there came a day when we worked on the Mad Woman’s centrepiece, a mournful duet with unaccompanied flute in which I depict my character’s unceasing search for her lost son and her descent into destitution. As the intensity of the scene climbed with the despair in the music and text we worked on me clutching the silk of my long black dress and gathering it up as some sort of security blanket which eventually became cradled in my arms as an infant might be. In doing so, the gesture would reveal my stigmata again, as well as my manhood. To this point, I was convinced of Olivier’s ideas for the telling of Curlew River and happily went along with the new developments. 

In passing, I had a conversation with the same good friend who had paid a compliment to Dame Judy Dench (see previous post Taking a Compliment) and asked him to give me the pass-notes for appearing naked on stage. 

“The first mistake some people make is to try to bless themselves with more equipment than is their natural gift.”

“You’ll have to translate that for me.”

“Sure, don’t try to todge yourself up so you seem bigger than you actually are.”

“Ohhh… It hadn’t occurred to me. Do people do that?”

“And how?!”

“What’s the problem with that?”

“The second you are exposed, the audience will be gripped by the spectacle of the incredible shrinking penis. They won’t hear or see anything else and all the talk at the end will be about ‘Did you see his…?’ Don’t do it.”

“Anything else? Yes, the truth about getting the old chap out on stage is that you’re the only person in the room who doesn’t have to look it so it’s easier for you to deal with than it is everyone else in the room.”

And with these two elements of stage wisdom I felt I was now equipped (pun intended) to appear in my birthday suit to a theatre filled with a festival audience. 

The production was tight, we had a nice cast and the ensemble of instrumentalists that had been assembled and placed on the set with us was star-studded. The rehearsals had gone smoothly and we all felt confident with the material in hand (not intended this time).

So it eventually came to the last performance of five, having been well received by audiences and critics. I went through the ritual of the removal of the monk’s habit, the painting of the stigmata and the enrobing as the Mad Woman. I played and sang the role as if I would never get to play her ever again. As I walked down to the front of the stage for the duet with the flute, the front row of the audience not three feet from my toes, I started to gather up my dress for the last time. 

Through the fog of my stage awareness and the pitch darkness of the auditorium, I got a sense of a man in a rugby shirt on the front row right in front of me. As the hem of my dress rose, I felt the man below me brace in his seat. The hem got to my knees, I was giving everything I could to the despair of my broken Mad Woman. My thighs were now visible and the dress continued its journey upwards. As it got to the top of my leg, the man in the rugby shirt shouted “OH NO! NOT AGAIN!!” in a broad Glaswegian accent and jammed his hands over his eyes as if he might turn to stone on seeing my you-know-what again. 

It was everything I could do not to stop in my tracks but I managed to knuckle down (it’s a minefield of innuendo) and carry on. His outburst somewhat altered the mood I had been aiming for as giggles rippled out on stage and in the auditorium. I’m happy to report it is some years since I was last seen on stage in the altogether.