Seven Fruit Cakes & Life.

So an all day Saturday Playback Theatre rehearsal with seven variations on a fruit cake recipe. One of the joys of rehearsal is we have to provide our own stories to enact: In a performance we’d use stories from the audience. Mouse A tells of her holiday with her three-year-old son and eighty year old mother. Fraught with possibilities before they start Mouse A finds at the Luton check-in that her passport is still in Sheffield. She realises her only option is to return home with child, which in itself is an echo of the upcoming frustrations of the festive season almost upon us. Mother, the proud survivor of eighty Christmas dinners, a war and the commonwealth, is less daunted. She bristles to the front and demands that their party, part octogenarian part baby, be allowed on as ‘speedy boarders’ in the hope a hearty run up will overcome this minor diplomatic problem. The check in lady offers up a friendly paw for her to speak to. Mouse A confirms firmly, “We’re not speedy boarders mother, we’ll just have to go home, you get on the plane.” Baby, as babies do, responds personally to the emotion and begins to cry. Mother responding to the crushing realisation that Winston Churchill and several million others died in vane if English people can’t even leave their own country is incensed to the core and begins shouting, “I’m senile, I’m senile.” “No you’re not mother, just get on the plane.” “Well only if she lets me be a speedy boarder!” “Oh please let her be a speedy boarder!!” Mouse B then tells of a walking holiday with a friend who needed to pee often, a frequent curse of the small bladdered as Mouthermouse will attest. Unfortunately friend mouse’s mobile was in her back pocket and must have blipped out like a bar of soap from a firm grasp somewhere along their first day’s walk. At her insistence the second and third days walks were spent revisiting all the possible first day’s pee stop venues in the hope of finding it. To no avail. Mouse B explains this and other factors did not endear her to her slow walking, slightly stupid, overly demanding and cloyingly gushy companion. A few weeks later she gets a phone call. “I got my phone back! You were such lovely company how about a walking holiday in India next year?” Noooooooooooo!! So re-enacting these and other stories was the joyous five-hour traffic of our stage. Twas a fiine time.