Bazooka that verruca today!
Name: John Schumacher
Role within Company:
I am playing the part of Tom in the production of SKIN TIGHT 2013.
Your Background:
Liverpool born, working class rapscallion, I trained as an actor at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. I also perform as a stand-up comedian and recently moved to London to pursue that avenue.
How did you get involved with Skin Tight?
I was cast in 2010 as Raul in Epsilons award nominated production of EXTREMITIES. During the run I built a fantastic relationship with the cast and producers who enjoyed my work and what I brought to rehearsals, so when the time came to cast SKIN TIGHT, my name was firmly in the hat.
Favourite memory of rehearsals/show?
Whilst rehearsing the show for our Exeter run in 2012, we didn’t quite know what we had, because there were only a few of us in rehearsals, we hadn’t had an outside eye on it. So opening night could have went either way, we ran the show, giving our all completely immersed ourselves in Tom and Elizabeth…show finished…black out…music down… and the chorus of sniffles and weeps from the audience as we sat in the dark was glorious. Sadistically, I grinned and thought, job done.
What are you up to at the moment?
At the moment, I’m writing a sitcom, which I’ve been labouring on for years but boosted recently by funding for a pilot, so after SKINTIGHT, my energies are going into that.
Tom and Elizabeth share a lot of their own memories in the play what’s your favourite childhood memory?
Growing up on a working class estate, just on the cusp of the computer game revolution we made up our fun on the streets and wastelands, playing army or chasing girls with sticks… my brother and I convinced ourselves that if we tied bait to string (bait in this instance being a frozen fish finger) and held it down a sewer grate for long enough we’d catch a fish, I think we sat there all day until it was dark, my mother eventually calling us in for supper. Defeated, we left our sticks at the sewer grate and went in for… you guessed it, fish finger butties. My dreams that night were filled with me wrestling rods on a tug boat, tackling great whites, having my photo graph taken by the local news for catching an alligator with my bare hands. Grainy scratchy super 8 footage of me on a dock hands on hips foot ‘pon gator, chin to the sky…sigh. The next morning we awoke as most often do, got dressed (thank god) and headed for school. On the way we noticed our sticks… what if… I picked mine up, slowly raising it higher and higher before exposing nothing but a knot were my breaded finger of fish once hung. I ran to school and stood in the playground telling my friends if the giant fish finger eating reptiles that lived on my street, I was a hero, I kept the stick, I drew my newspaper article all week in class until I’d vanquished every green pencil at St Margaret Marys… I don’t go home often, but when I do I can’t help but lean of that sewer grate… just in case.
looking Moody
JEMMA GROSS 