Whose Cue Is It Anyway? A 'Bard' weekend of improvisation at Wilderness festival

If you go to Wilderness Festival this weekend, you’ll stumble on a motley crew of Shakespeare players doing walkabout.

We can easily be confused with Hamlet’s players, wondering why the big gig at Elsinore went so spectacularly wrong, or the Mechanicals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream on an especially chaotic day. Look out for a dazed and confused actor/manager, a ditsy grande dame who needs her nips of ‘cordial’ to get on stage, a tall and willowy actress sick to death of being cast as a boy, and the long-suffering book-holders who keep the potentially shambolic show on the road.

On Sunday we’ll be in the new 200-seat Playhouse tent, performing Shakespeare scenes from plays we haven’t read or rehearsed with our fellow actors. We hope the audience of Whose Cue Is It Anyway? will be like the crowds who piled into the pit for the first performances of the plays: game for a laugh, ready for real spontaneous moments and eager to see what can possibly go wrong, because the answer is everything.

We’ve been working on our parts for months individually, but haven’t had any group rehearsals and will find out who else is in our scene at the same time as the audience. We are all forbidden to reveal what roles we’re playing to each other (if anyone talks in their sleep it’s a problem — we’re probably all sharing a tent).

Cue script Shakespeare, as practised by Shakespeare’s own players, keeps us modern actors on our toes. There’s no director and very little post-Stanislavski stuff about examining your feelings. The emphasis is on getting everything you need from the text, where Shakespeare left lots of clues for his actors (slow down if you’re talking in monosyllables, get physically closer if you use ‘thou’ but further away for ‘you’, and so on).

Shakespeare’s own players carried up to 40 different roles in their heads, and were expected to perform them sometimes at only an hour’s notice. As well as being word perfect they had to discover and craft their character in isolation, using Shakespeare’s in-built directions.

In cue script work you must go on stage with only a minimal a plan and rely on listening carefully to your fellow actors, as you have no idea what they’re going to say or do.

Another tip: if your character is required to fall asleep on stage, don’t nod off (face away from the audience if you can) because the script won’t tell you if you are asleep for two lines or six pages and and something important will happen before the cue that wakes you up.

The salon:collective players have spent the last two and a half years exploring this work led by Shakespeare specialist and dramaturge Lizzie Conrad Hughes. Does anyone know what happens in The Two Gentlemen of Verona? No? Neither did our actors, but the Independent called it ‘Shakespeare that feels new and fresh’.

Our last gig was celebrating Shakespeare’s 400th deathday in April at The Rose Playhouse, son London's Bankside, where Love’s Labours Lost and Henry VI were first performed.

We find this seat-of-the-pants approach combines with the hard graft of text work to produce exhilarating and inspiring theatre full of discoveries.

We are convinced the Wilderness audience will love it, and will shun the temptations of cricket, river swimming, bands and drinking cider in the sun (we hope) to pile into the Playhouse.

Remember, each first performance can only happen once.

Whose Cue is it Anyway? with The salon:collective is at The Playhouse, Wilderness Festival, Cornbury Park at 1pm on Sunday.

If you’re not going to Wilderness, check out thesaloncollective.org and follow @collectivesalon (Twitter) and @thesaloncollective (Instagram) to find out where to see them