By Steve Krutzler / 15:01, 26 July 2004 / People

Patrick Stewart ('Picard') appeared at the Buxton Opera House in the United Kingdom this weekend, and TrekWeb has received the following report from a visitor who attended the event.

It was a very entertaining talk, entitled TO HOLLYWOOD AND BACK, even though Stewart crammed so much into his allotted time that he barely got halfway through the material he'd prepared. The chief point of interest re: STAR TREK were Stewart's comments in answer to an audience question about John Logan's script idea for the now-never-to-happen NEMESIS sequel.

According to Stewart, Logan's idea was to have ALL the STAR TREK captains - Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway and Archer - joining forces to fight "the final battle". Stewart added: "But you'll just have to imagine it in your heads because it's never going to happen."

He described his working week on TNG as basically learning and relearning lines all the time, working between 12 and 17-and-a-half hour days, rising at 5am and only having a little time off on Saturdays, when he did his own laundry to "keep a hold on reality", went to the local market, had lunch and went out in the evenings. Sunday was entirely spent learning lines for the following week. He wasn't complaining about this, just describing it, and he emphasised how well he was compensated for the work.

He told a couple of more familiar stories, about how Bob Justman spotted him and landed him his Trek audition, about how the Enterprise bridge reminded him of a stage, etc etc. He said that Jonathan Frakes' father was an East Coast English professor and that Frakes was always nervous in the early days of TNG that all the dialogue would have to be grammtically correct, witty and original or else he'd be getting some major criticism.

Stewart also said that he'd been "blessed" that the TNG producers had allowed him some input into the scripts - they evidently let him write, or at least rewrite, some of his lines.

He said again that he couldn't see a return to Trek for the TNG cast because of what the studio called the "franchise fatigue" that greeted NEMESIS. Someone asked him if the TNG cast could work together on a different project but Stewart repled that that would be "contrived - a gimmick". Some of the cast had worked together on Stewart's stage production of Tom Stoppard's EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOUR, but that had been more "appropriate" because the show was still in production at that time.

However, the TNG actors were still in social contact - they had reunited in Los Angeles three months ago, he added - and were in regular touch through e-mail.

During the one-man show, Stewart (suffering from a slight cold) produced stunning performances as characters in extracts from stage plays, including Othello, Shylock, Leontes and the title chacacter in Peter Schaffer's play Yonadab as well as Captain Ahab from Moby Dick.

There was a bit of evidence that the TREK experience is fading from his memory a little, too. He thought NEMESIS was called INSURRECTION and when he was listing the captains in his answer about the NEMESIS sequel, he could only remember the names of Picard, Kirk and Janeway. Sisko was "Captain whatever-his-name-is" and when he got to Archer, he just called him "the capain from ENTERPRISE whose name I've never known...."