The Scarlet Pimpernel – Day 1 of Fight Club

Day 1 of Fight Club: Sunday morning 9.30am and I did not expect to heading to rehearsals but off I went in my comfortable clothing with a packed lunch in tow to meet Chauvelin (Richard Bainbridge) and the Bounders and…Raph. Raph being the trainined instructor leading our ‘fight club’ session and to be honest, I though he’d be bigger (but what that man can’t do with a sword……)

Anyway, we began the session with the old favourites, stage punches, hair pulls, ear pulls, upper-cuts and strangulations….believe me its harder than it sounds and certainly than it looks…..to create the effect of impact/reaction when the majority of the time this is actually happening in reverse from the actors perspective???!!!! Confused…so was I….the last stage combat session I attended was about 13 years ago. But it all came flooding back to me????!!!!

Handy as all these moves were, this is the French Revolution and bending someone’s ear is not the name of the game………duelling and in this case sword fighting is what we were building up to! So packed lunches demolished and swords laid across the front of the hall we were all full of 12 year old glee at the thought of wielding a real sword…only to find that the start of the afternoon session was position and footwork…WHAT no sword…this was gonna be harder than I thought??!!!

As the afternoon progressed the arms and inparticularly the wrists (no jokes!!!) began to ache, only to find Raph’s sword weighed a lot less than ours???? He justified it with some technical reasoning but I wasn’t convinced ha ha ha (only messing Raph) But we mastered it…..well nearly….we had at least five moves that convinced us, if no one else, that we were on our way to becoming fine swordsmen….or at least attempt to  look something like that