Here be more dragons

My family and friends are somewhat scattered; of course I do have quite a number of friends locally, but the Three Musketeers don't live anywhere near (and, of those three, d'Artagnan is quite likely to be out of the country at any given time - he's in Canada right now, about to do a St John Passion, by which I mean pretty much all of it, since he's singing all the tenor parts as well as the Evangelist) and neither does any of my family. So, for ages, I didn't bother with birthday parties at all, until last year, when I was wondering what to do for my 60th and inspiration hit me.

I'd have a readthrough party. On Zoom.

I originally got the idea of a readthrough party from the excellent Porthos, who used to host them regularly; but, although he's well capable of writing his own scripts, he's also quite busy (he has a full-time job, plus on top of that he's a semi-professional countertenor), and so we used to do all sorts of bits and pieces from elsewhere. There'd be snippets from things like Round the Horne and Blackadder, occasional crossover scripts of which the strangest was certainly the mashup between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Goon Show (I have fond memories of singing the Ying-Tong Song as Willow, who was using it as some kind of incantation!), and we would pretty much invariably have The Old Grey Barn at some point, a 1920s sketch which took a good-humoured poke at miserable Russian literature. He also always used to put on an impressive buffet, with which I'd help, because I was coming from a distance so I'd generally get there the day before. And I have to say that I'm not normally a party animal, but those were a whole lot of fun.

I did have the time, so it seemed logical to write my own script; and here it is.

Now, I did make a few mistakes here. While I was, and still am, very happy with the script in general, it is too long, which meant that we didn't get much time to chat afterwards. Also, I wrote the script and then started thinking about who'd be playing the parts (allowing for some doubling up, since this script has quite a lot of minor parts that can be put together to give someone about the same number of lines as one of the major parts). There were just one or two people who obviously had to play a certain part from the word go, but mostly it was a matter of writing first and then shuffling around. Nonetheless, we had so much fun that I decided I was going to do it again this year, even though Athos (who was going to play Lord Mountpleasant, a part he'd have relished) got cold feet and dropped out at the last minute. Thankfully, my brother-in-law stepped into the breach, which I very much appreciated as he's not really a natural at this kind of thing.

So this year, the first requirement was that the script should be shorter; and that meant I went about writing it in a different way. Usually, when I write anything at all, I will start at the beginning and just let the story unfold at its own pace, which was what I did with Applied Draconics. But the next one had to come in at under an hour and a half (in fact it was about an hour and twenty minutes in the end, even with the pauses between scenes which I'll come to in a moment), so it made sense to do it differently. There was one key scene which was, as it were, the pivot point, so I wrote that first. Then I started from the beginning and wrote in such a way as to get from there to the key scene as fast as possible without actually appearing rushed, and then I just let it all roll out from there. That meant I wasn't tempted to do a lot of over-establishing at the beginning; it did help that this was a sequel to Applied Draconics, so we already knew who most of the characters were. (Though, to be fair, two of them had changed a little since the first play. Princess Amethyst, who was only fourteen in the first play, had matured quite a lot, and Alphonse, now no longer under the influence of his less-than-ideal father, had gone from being a nervous browbeaten young man to a responsible, but somewhat stress-prone, court official.) I needed it to be ready well in advance, so I finished this in February.

This time, too, I was writing much more with the cast in mind. Several people now had established characters. The person playing Sir Galahad Blakeley-Norris in the first play had lost his, because Sir Galahad isn't in the sequel, but that was fine; I had someone else in mind for him. I also made all the main roles pretty much equal and had fewer of them, so, for instance, I managed to lose the King and Queen altogether in order to concentrate on the younger royals. I have one particular church friend who is a magnificent actor, and does especially well on the more unusual parts; so in the first play he was Glxpnx the Demon (performed with enormous relish!), plus one of the knights errant. This time I had him earmarked for the new main character, Prince Sebastian, and he did not disappoint. His Sebastian was overdone to the point of pure farce, and it worked brilliantly.

This was all fine and dandy till I started actually trying to arrange a date for the party. The thing is, everyone is pretty busy, but more than anything else I have to work round d'Artagnan, just because his hours are so irregular. (He, naturally, plays Oscar the Bard.) Last year he attended from a hotel in Stockholm, as he was on his way to sing in Finland at the time; being very environmentally conscious, he doesn't fly unless there's really no sane alternative, and in this particular case he considered a three-day journey by train, boat, and folding bicycle to be within the bounds of sanity. But at least, being in transit, he didn't have to think about rehearsals; whereas so far this year he hasn't had any journeys quite like that one, and the thing with concert organisers is they tend to assume that if a musician is physically present, they're available. So they are really not very good at handing out rehearsal schedules in advance, which means poor d'Artagnan doesn't have a clue what he's doing until, very often, the last minute. Finally, however, after several false starts elsewhere, he did manage to get one out of the friendly Canadians he's working with at the moment.

Great, I thought. And then Porthos dropped out, so we were down one Prince Percival. Turned out he was off on holiday somewhere. I was so disappointed that I was very tempted to try to rearrange it yet again; but I'd been trying to do it for three months, pretty nearly, and it was already embarrassingly late for a birthday party. So I thought, rats, we'll just have to reshuffle a bit, but I'm going ahead.

Then we lost our Alphonse a few days before the party. He thought he'd e-mailed me to let me know he'd be in Glasgow playing Warhammer for the whole of half-term (he's a teacher). Nope. That had slipped his mind... though I can hardly blame him, as he's chronically over-busy. Except when there's a school holiday, of course, when he catches up like crazy on his other interests.

Then, the morning of the party, we also lost Lady Gillian. Since the previous party she'd got married and had a baby, and said baby was likely to require the attention of both parents for the evening. We were down to seven people. This was going to take... some ingenuity.

But it worked! I realised that Angus and Alphonse never meet, so I had the person playing Angus take Alphonse as well. We had to take stock at the beginning of each scene, resulting in a brief pause. Some of the other parts got shuffled round according to whose character wasn't in that scene (in particular Prince Percival, who went round all the men present, including at one point my brother-in-law, who was really only there to watch), and we only once ended up with someone playing two different characters in the same scene... and even then they didn't have to talk directly to each other, so that was all right.

Once again, a great time was had by all, and I got several congratulations on the script. I'm just delighted they all enjoyed it. I already have some plans for a sequel... but next year, if I'm still here, I plan to start trying to organise the event from January onwards.

That may, of course, mean it all just slots neatly into place, d'Artagnan attends from a nice hotel in London because he's singing at the Wigmore rather than any further-flung location, and I end up having the party in February.

Maybe. But I'll take that risk!