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School plays

1. Androcles & the Lion
2. From Pillar to Post
3. A Man For All Seasons
4. The Importance of Being Earnest
5. A Comedy of Errors
6. Murder in the
   Cathedral
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Bristol Old Vic
Theatre School

1. Dracula
2. The Beaux Strategem
3. The Sea
4. Spring Awakening
5. Polly
6. The Government Inspector
7. Major Barbara
8. Shoemakers' Holiday
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Others

1. A Respectable Family

 

 

There are some tongue in cheek 'publicity' photos that we took for this production below. these were intended to recall the classic Hammer films in their look. Selecting any of the small thumbnail images will show a larger version of the picture in the main part of the page. »

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Murder in the Cathedral by T.S.Eliott - Thomas Beckett

- Rendcomb College senior play. Directed by David Sells.

Back to the small stage, and back to David Sells as the director, in T.S.Eliot's poetic, complex and difficult play about the murder of Thomas Becket. I loved this play - it is a wonderfully poetic and evocative piece anyway and, with the aid of David Sells, I started for the first time to understand what acting really was and how powerful it could be when the performer really did 'inhabit the moment'. Doing this play was a key event in my life, I think.

In one performance of this play I had my first real 'transcendent' moment. In every actor's career there are one or two occasions where, for a moment, everything comes together - the part, the performer, the audience - and you have a 'perfect moment'. You feel every distraction fade away, the theatrical instant takes over and you have total control of the audience in an all-embracing shared experience. That may sound pretentious, and it doesn't happen very often, but when it does you know it! I had such a moment one night in this play, during Becket's long, second-act sermon, and it cemented my need to be an actor. I knew, right there and then, that 'actor' is not just something that you do, but something that you are. Even now, five or more years after I left the profession, I still think of myself as an actor, in the same way that I think of myself as 'human' or 'male'...

More prosaically, a word of explanation is probably required about my appearance in these photos. Normally in theatre, the actor does his or her own make-up (where needed), but in the case of the school play, rather like in TV, you had your make-up done for you by the 'make-up department'. I have no idea why they chose to make me a sort of corpse-like grey. I think it was probably an 'old age' make-up but it comes across as if the intention was that Becket should be a George Romero zombie! Looking at the photos I think I should probably have had my hair cut too, but as the fashion at the time was long hair for guys, there was a great battle to grow your hair as long as possible before the school clamped down and made you have it cut...so I wasn't about to have that trim, thank you! It wasn't until later that I realised that altering your appearance for the part was not only fun but actually pretty useful in character development. Oh well...

I also painted the triptych behind the altar, visible in a couple of the photos.

"Jon Dixon, as Becket, dominated the play and never failed to hold the attention of the audience."