Test Drive

Today has been about test-driving my new cast. And my top speed has dropped considerably, now that my ankle joint is rigidly entombed in day-glo green fibreglass. But I can wear long trousers, and am not stopped every five minutes by curious passers-by, so my average speed is probably about the same.

It was my Glyndebourne audition today. An occasion of mixed feelings. It was great to feel back in the loop, and singing properly, which I haven’t been able to do since July. By the same token, I knew that the audition was as much about checking that I would be physically capable of doing the job as it was about how I performed. The point was incidentally made by the fact that I had to tackle several steps down to the platform with no handrail, and looked distinctly shaky. I was offered the possibility of performing sitting down, but I felt that Donizetti in the style of Daniel O’Donnelly was probably not the way forward. And it did feel like a step back. Last year I was asking about the roles I could cover. This year, I will be grateful if they believe that I can get onto stage without any visible means of support. And they definitely didn’t have day-glo casts in Nineteenth-Century Italy.

I think I acquitted myself okay. It is always difficult to tell, and the fact that I hadn’t practised with a pianist since the summer definitely showed. Still, I sang lots of loud top notes, which generally does the trick for us tenors. Slightly more disconcertingly, the first thing that my boss commented on was the scar on my forehead. If it’s so obvious in a shadowy hall, I suspect it will look as if you could unzip my scalp once I’m under stage lighting. I guess it’s a career of playing baddies and pirates then.

On the way home, I was congratulating myself on my cast-impaired mobility, and how smug I felt that I had walked to the audition venue from Waterloo. I should have spotted my hubris as I struggled with the basic camber of the pavement outside Lambeth North. However, it took a rainstorm to really bring me down to earth. As I tottered back from the tram stop, the heavens opened, my crutches started slipping in every direction, and I began to resemble Bambi on ice. Except I doubt Bambi swore quite so comprehensively. I did stay upright. Just. But I was very nearly undone on several occasions by the ‘wrong sort of leaf’, and the antediluvial layer of dog poo that coats every Croydon pavement. I guess I still have a little way to go, frameless or not. But Sarah is quite insistent that I join the family at a ‘tea dance’ tomorrow. So I’d better start practising some moves…