Plot  Now the obvious choice for any amateur group wishing to tackle Elizabethan drama is William Shakespeare. But that’s the problem with Shakey – he’s just too obvious and not exactly underexposed. There is rewarding work – make that MORE rewarding work - to be done with the Bard’s barely known and barely performed contemporaries. So roll over Bill Shakespeare and tell Thomas  Middleton the news.
“Thomas who?”, you’ll probably be asking yourselves. Born in 1580, Thomas Middleton was the author, or co-author, of over thirty plays. Mad World, written in 1605 (so, strictly speaking, Jacobean) is one of the earliest examples of his ‘City Comedies’, satirical reflections of the vitality and venality of then-contemporary London. It concerns the roguish Dick Follywit who hatches a series of daring and absurd plots to acquire the fortune of his rich and foolish grandsire, Sir Bounteous Progress, while Mistress Harebrain attempts to evade the jealous attentions of her husband and consummate her affair with the equally desperate Penitent Brothel. (Great name!) She is aided in this endeavour by the Courtesan who is also Sir Bounteous’ mistress and ends up married to Follywit! Middleton may not possess Shakespeare’s poetic gifts but had a knack for plot construction and cynical, witty dialogue. Not only is the play bitingly funny but also a manageable two hours long – a little under after we trimmed the longer speeches and cut the obscure jokes about scabs and Putney.

Casting  There are twenty-one parts in A Mad World, My Masters but with the removal of some minor characters and judicious doubling it can be played by twelve people. As all but four of the parts are male we knew we would have to cross-cast some of these with women. But we decided to turn this into a virtue by adopting a gender neutral approach to casting – not only could women play the male parts but men could play the female ones! Disappointingly none of our men proved sufficiently feminine so all the women’s parts ended up being played by women.
We had also had a sudden influx of new members so, after the reading, we ended up with a final cast of sixteen – nine women, seven men - with only some minor parts being doubled. Now before we’re accused of simply fobbing off our newcomers with the spear-carrying roles, out of the six major parts – Follywit, Sir Bounteous, Harebrain, Mistress Harebrain, Penitent Brothel and the Courtesan – four were played by people who had been with the group less than a year, two of whom had just joined and never been on stage before. There’s none of this 'doing stage management for ten years before you’re allowed in the spotlight' with the Chameleon Players – we simply chuck ‘em straight in at the deep end. But they’re given plenty of encouragement to stay afloat! However the leading man, Follywit, disguises himself as an effete nobleman, a robber, an actor and the Courtesan during the course of the play, so could do with being played by a strong, versatile and experienced actor. We've got some of those too.

Rehearsals  “Serious fun” is the watchword (or words) – by which we mean enjoy yourselves but remember we’re putting on a performance for paying customers and they deserve the best we can give them. The Chameleon Players rehearse on Monday and Thursday evenings and, during the last month of rehearsals, all day Sunday too. As we have several members of the group who work shifts it was fortunate that the play is divided into five acts of between two and five scenes each so we could schedule rehearsals around people’s availability and rehearse on a scene by scene basis. In fact we didn’t have a full run through of the play – in scene order – until the penultimate Sunday rehearsal.
The first thing we had to address was the Jacobean language. The play is mainly written in prose but slips occasionally into verse, which we didn’t want to hear chanted in the manner of a particularly nervous primary school pupil. So we stressed in the strongest possible terms, with the use of pointed objects, that anyone who didn’t have a clue what they were talking about should tell us! If you can’t understand what you’re saying then the audience don’t stand a chance either. This would be particularly obvious during the first scenes which consisted mainly of plot exposition – characters coming on stage and confiding in the audience exactly what they’re up to. Penitent Brothel’s first speech basically boils down to “Mistress Harebrain. Phwoaaar! I’m gagging for it” But in verse. For a whole page. We had to strike a balance between setting a brisk pace and keeping the audience with us. Too brisk and they would be baffled, too sluggish and they’d be bored (and probably still baffled). Most audiences will know the basic plots of Hamlet or Macbeth before anyone opens their mouth. We didn’t have that advantage. We were also concerned that the language difficulty would inhibit the "size" of the performances. We needn’t have worried, although a couple had to be dragged kicking and screaming back from Pantoland.
The majority of the scenes – Penitent Brothel and the Courtesan plotting, Follywit and his comrades robbing Sir Bounteous (four times) and the Courtesan teaching Mistress Harebrain how to deceive her husband - were between, at the most, four people and came together without too much difficulty. The cast were encouraged to find their own way into the characters - some we could direct in broad strokes and they would give us exactly what was needed, some we had to micro-direct down to the last gesture.
But two scenes – at the end of each half – required lots more hard work, particularly the final scene of Act One. With Penitent Brothel as her doctor, the Courtesan has feigned illness to provide Mistress Harebrain with an excuse to visit her. Penitent and Mistress Harebrain nip backstage for a quick bit of how’s your father and the Courtesan must keep up a one sided conversation to deceive the eavesdropping Harebrain, who believes the Courtesan to be a demure virgin. But she has to desperately cover the sounds of frantic fornication from backstage convincing Harebrain that she is suffering agonies, so much so that he almost bursts in! We had to carefully choreograph all the moans and groans for maximum comic effect – fortunately our actors weren’t shy about providing them. At the end of the scene we had Mistress Harebrain enter prim and proper and oh-so-pleased with herself followed by Penitent half dressed and completely exhausted. Corny but it worked.
In the very final scene Follywit, disguised as an actor, gulls Sir Bounteous one final time, as his comrades are arrested by the Constable. Convincing Sir Bounteous that this is all part of the play they are presenting, Follywit and his gang make their escape leaving the dizzy Constable gagged and bound to a chair and Sir Bounteous and his guests wetting themselves. In presenting the "play within a play" and to indicate when Follywit and his comrades were ‘acting’ pantomime acting was positively encouraged with extravagant gestures matching the dialogue. Someone even slapped their thigh! We worked rigorously on the reactions of Sir Bounteous’ audience so they would laugh in the right places. Hopefully the real audience would find it as funny. And after twelve weeks of rehearsal we were about to find out!

Scenery  Northern Theatre, where we put on all our productions, is a friendly studio theatre with the audience seated in close proximity to the cast on two sides of the auditorium – so don’t act ‘til you see the whites of their eyes! The entrance to the dressing room is between the two blocks of seats. There is a curved wall running round the back of the stage with a cramped "backstage" area behind it. There is no dressing room access from here so when you’re stuck backstage you’re really stuck! This challenges the director to ensure that the action can be seen from both sides and to take extra care with his entrances and exits! We kept the set as simple as possible – two platforms, one used as a balcony with a banister and the other, standing on it’s side, as a sideboard/dresser but changing to the Courtesan’s bed for the scene in her bedchamber. A couple of chairs and a bench were brought on and moved around by the cast as necessary. For Harebrain’s eavesdropping scenes we imagined a corridor and room and had the cast mimed opening a door between the two.

Music  We are fortunate in having a tame composer who writes original music for all our plays. So we simply told him where we needed music to cover scene changes and how long these pieces should be. Then we let him loose. As usual he didn’t disappoint.

Lighting & Sound  On and off, basically. To keep up the pace we dispensed with blackouts between some of the scenes, simply running them together, unless cast members had to get ‘backstage’ or we had a scene change. The night time scenes with lower lighting levels were augmented by the cast carrying candles or lanterns.
We did let ourselves go with one scene, however. After getting his end away with Mistress Harebrain, the guilt-ridden Penitent Brothel is visited by a demon who assumes her form and, as she “woos him with wanton and effeminate rhymes” we had the lights turn to a hellish red and gradually faded up the sounds of the burning fiery furnace, cutting both off suddenly when Penitent banishes the cunning succubus with a cross formed from two candlesticks. (Our homage to Hammer’s Dracula films). At the very end of the play Follywit’s schemes are all undone by Sir Bounteous’ stolen watch chiming in his pocket. We didn’t have a chiming watch but we did have a stage manager with a triangle offstage.

Costumes  We decided to set the play in the Victorian era as the themes of financial and sexual hypocrisy fitted that time as just well as Middleton’s own. And, more importantly, frocks and frockcoats are a lot easier on the actors than doublet and hose, And in an age when skirts were still ankle length, Follywit’s masquerade as the Courtesan would still be believable. Then we matched costumes to the characters status – Harebrain, as a city gentleman, would dress more fashionably than Penitent Brothel, a country gentleman, who was rather more tweedy. 
Luckily we had one or two members who were a dab hand with a needle and thread and produced a footman’s costume, servant’s jackets and other items. We borrowed a Victorian Police Constable’s uniform from The Humberside Police Museum. Mistress Harebrain and the succubus were played by different actresses wearing the same dress and wig. We asked the actress playing the succubus to black out the bottom corners of her teeth to make them appear pointed. We’re not sure if the audience saw them properly but they certainly scared us!

Performances  The proof of the pudding is in the performance. Although we received many comments about how witty and clever the play was, how well the action moved along and how relaxed the cast appeared with the dialogue, the first two audiences were not very vocal during the performances. 
We got plenty of giggles and titters but not much actual laughter (unless someone said “Organ”, “Cock” or “Fart”) leaving one of the directors to wonder if we’d actually got it right. Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said, "The play was a success but the audience was a failure"? However, the third audience laughed like drains, so that was a big relief. But what was really pleasing was that the new members performed as if they’d been with us for years. So we’ll leave the last word to Sir Bounteous – “Cuds me, I am deceived if this prove not a merry comedy and a witty, and excellently well acted, i’faith”