Corpsing: 01 (Singapore)

To corpse

(from googling)

Quote

verb THEATRICAL SLANG

spoil a piece of acting by forgetting one's lines or laughing uncontrollably.

"Peter just can't stop himself corpsing when he is on stage"

cause (an actor) to forget their lines and start laughing.

"one singer ad libbed and corpsed his colleagues on stage"

British English uses a slang term, corpsing, to specifically describe one of the most common ways of breaking character—when an actor loses their composure and laughs or giggles inappropriately during a scene. The British slang term is derived from an actor laughing when their character is supposed to be a corpse.

Unquote

In Pre-U 1 at RI (Raffles Institution), I was in a Chekhov play The Bear for RI’s annual Drama Festival (with awards handed out).

    I played Widow Popova who was being visited by Smirnov wanting a debt settled.

    (My summary)  When Popova said she couldn't pay him there and then, Smirnov started to get very angry, shouting at her.  At some point, she called him a bear.  Feeling insulted, he called for a duel, and two guns were produced.  During the arguments, Smirnov had started to fall in love with Popova, so he threw the gun onto the floor, feeling that the row was getting to a silly level. (End of my summary)

    After being thrown onto the floor many times during the rehearsals, the aluminium toy gun that the director Utaman had bought for the performance broke, so the next time it was used for a rehearsal, the front half of the toy gun swung open (downwards at the hinge) just as Smirnov and Popova were supposed to be angry and shouting at each other.  Kwok Chow Thim and I collapsed into a fit of corpsing.  

    (In hindsight, I don’t know why we couldn’t have used a wooden spoon or fork for the rehearsals, or just mimed.)

    The director Utaman took it home and tied a wire around the middle section to hold the two halves together.

    At the next rehearsal, the sight of that crude home DIY got us corpsing again.  Every single time after that, rehearsals had to be called off because we kept corpsing.

    The thing about corpsing (in my case anyway) is that even after the cause of the corpsing has been visually removed, the memory would set it off again -- for a long time afterwards.

(Singapore, 1971)