Festival blog: My Diva Chair by Rob Benson

Published on Thursday 14 August 2008 15:10

IT WAS our biggest performance to date; we had nearly 40 in the audience, the Scotsman, The List and Three Weeks all in there too, brilliant!

And I was very happy with the show, couldn't have been better. So the next morning I open the Scotsman to find my chair has won an award (in our Random Awards column - Ed). Now, as my chair and I are the only two things on stage, this is a little galling. My chair does play a mental health ward, a toilet and a nightclub, but he is now stealing my limelight. I had been sensing this coming for a while. At both our preview venues, the chair had been causing problems. Every time we tried to light anything other than said chair, he somehow managed to find that light, as if to say "look at me", but we thought he'd got over it. When it got its first bit of press, though, well, unbelievable is the word. I arrived in the dressing room to find the chair lauding it over all the other furniture in the room. I did the gracious thing, I congratulated him on his review, even though I was damp and soggy after a day's very wet flyering. Time for performance came, and the chair was having a diva strop because there were two buckets just off stage - the buckets were making more noise than him and he wasn't happy.

Halfway through the show the rain started getting heavier, the buckets louder, the noise from next door more invasive and he was getting wobbly. I gave him a pat on the back but he wasn't having any of it. I was worried. As we came into the last section of the show I moved the chair - and his leg fell off. I removed him from the stage and carried on. At the end the performance I picked him up - he was in bits. The moral of this story - don't believe your own press to much. After all, the show must go on, good or bad.

Rob Benson's show Borderline is at the Underbelly, 9pm, until 24 August