I was Trinculo (“A murrain on your monster, and the devil take your fingers!”), I think Dan was Ferdinand, getting the girl even in those days! This was much to our chagrin, you understand, because we all felt cheated by the drama teacher hogging the plum role of Prospero. He played with the
deus ex machina elements by running the lighting board (the dimmer controls) from on-stage in plain view, which us mere goblins could never quite decide was really cool or rather tacky. Great fun though.
In another production, Dan and I shared the role of Jack in a dramatisation of
Lord of the Flies – that got very confusing for the audience, since we swapped roles part way through each performance and did not have significant costuming or other clues to offer signposts! And especially one night when we ‘looped’ the dialogue into what threatened to form an endless spiel, whilst simultaneously rendering the plot incomprehensible by cutting 2 key scenes. I made a suitably gruesome pig’s head on a stick over many weeks in the art department. Otherwise it was a black box experimental kind of production: I can remember exclaiming crossly to my dad around then that “I wished we sometimes did an
ordinary play!”. It evidently didn’t cause any problems for Dan, though, and he has been anything but ordinary ever since
