Resurrection and Deformity

Well, things are looking up again! After the explosive, multi-tiered, Hindenburgian disappointment of The Country Wife getting cancelled, I've been very fortunate. Troops have rallied, pities rained down, and I've been kindly offered two further May Week shows to satiate the acting void. On Monday and Tuesday then, I'm embroiled in Love's Labour's Lost, conveniently located a squashed and mangled cat away* in the confines of Selwyn College. It's wonderfully freeing to know that you can tumble out of your bedroom window a mere thirty seconds before performance, half-dressed and grunting wolfishly, and rest assured that everything will probably be okay. I also get to deliver a pleasingly irreverent Epilogue, which I believe to have been tailored by the enviable genius of Kieran Corcoran (general poetry-booster and future Cambridge academic):

The joy which oft-times closes such a play,
Is denied our lovers, and just as they,
Do we, your doubtful players, in Selwyn's gardens stand
Awaiting the release of your fair hands:
As patently as May Week falls in June,
Must your applause conclude this afternoon.

Yes, I like it very much! I just hope the audience claps long enough to suppress their collective urge to pelt me in waste until I resemble a candlestick hewn from the life's flesh of a mouldering, foetid turnip. There's a curious moment earlier on when my character explains their protracted silence (a few of these now Pinchwife's laid to rest!) with: 'Nor understood one word neither!' The kind of slightly awkward moment where you hope your Cambridge audience isn't going to cheer out and celebrate their ignorance of what these Renaissance-type word-thingamajiggers mean.

I also have the chance to play one of the butlers in The Importance of Being Earnest. At one time I thought I'd like to do nothing better. Back in secondary school, when theatrical opporunities were really rather limited and Scrooge was a Christmas dream away, I recall speculating that I could quit acting on a high if permitted to be some shifty butler in the murder mystery. I'm not exactly sure where this complex originates, but it might have something to do with the proliferation of splendid butler actors in old films... Brandon Hurst in White Zombie... Halliwell Hobbes in Sherlock Holmes Faces Death... Bela Lugosi in seemingly every Poverty Row picture of the 1940s... Edgar Norton warrants particular acclaim. My goodness. A splendid career in the butlering trade. The man was a constant screen presence for thirty years and seemed to do nothing else! He made a wonderful, touching Poole in Fredric March's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - a role he had earlier played opposite the great Richard Mansfield, who became a suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders for enacting Hyde a little too convincingly in Victorian Whitechapel. Norton also crops up in Dracula's Daughter, supplied with an almost painfully facetious ad-lib, responding to his master's deranged exclamation that 'I'm going out after vampires!' - 'But I always understand that you went after them with cheque-books, sir!' Hmm. Must have brought the house down in 1936. Questionable Universal Pictures humour for a brighter Great Depression. And who can forget Norton's splendid turn in Son of Frankenstein? What a death! Strangled (off-screen, sadly enough) by that most epic of screen titans: Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein Monster. My butler connection runs very deep. And it is terrifically fun... I believe I even get to pull a facial expression at one point! So, yes. I'm being utilised - and I consider that more important than anything else.

After a costume fitting for The Importance of Being Earnest, my absolute failure to reorientate myself for my supervision at Downing forced me to sprint haphazardly up and down a series of winding alleys for a while, spitting in panic at the ever-patient Martha and her navigation-savvy accomplice by the magic of wireless telephone. The run has proven to me beyond all doubt that I am in no way fit enough to play twenty Charles Dickens characters. I may be as thin as a rake, but I suppose by extension that my arterial blood flow is too - it seems that I get terribly out of breath at the least provocation. Maybe it's time to contemplate the illimitable indignity of taking up running or something. Or I could just do a few push-ups in my room. Whilst eating crumbs engrained in the carpet. We shall see.

John Haidar spoke rapturously of the Charles Dance version of Nicholas Nickleby when I saw him a few days ago. This reminded me of a very odd thing - the shared belief among actors of the heresy in watching someone else's performance of the same character. Now, Alun Armstrong is a bit of a hero of mine. Where Les Miserables is concerned, he is the ultimate Thenardier and true master of the house. He also delivered a towering Wackford Squeers in the RSC's marathon adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, to which only a few monolithic adjectives can be securely applied... Slimy. Fawning. Ghoulish. Picaresque (cor, that be a good word). Satanic. He very rarely goes in for interviews, but here's an interesting and applicable nugget from his promotion of the British Library's sound archive:

If I am asked to do a play where the language is particularly dense, hearing a performance can give a better idea of what it means. A specific case was Beckett's Endgame. It's a very esoteric play which is difficult to understand even though the language is fairly straightforward, and I listened to the Royal Court production with Patrick Magee and Jack MacGowran to see if I could decipher what it was about. The performance was richly spoken, though I am not sure if they understood it either! ... There is a view among actors that it is sacreligious to listen to somebody else's work, but I don't feel that myself. After all, we go to see other actors performing in the theatre. When I have listened to recordings at the NSA, I have often come to the conclusion that now I know how I don't want to play the role. It's simply a case of widening one's view by hearing different interpretations. One day I am going to pluck up the courage and listen to one of my own recordings!

Modesty? Perhaps. Most likely, yes. It strikes me that the crucial distinction between surveying actors in a theatre rather than a recording is the ephemeral quality of live performance. Where theatre's concerned, there's no fixed and objective standard to which an inspired imitation can be compared and (one would assume) derided outside the faulty field of memory. And of course, ephemeral performances are an increasing rarity as we slide ever further into this scary media age...

Yes, modesty seems a fair description. For few actors give such miraculously visual 'concept' performances as Armstrong: his Leontes in The Winter's Tale was a gigantic, bird-like creature, whilst his Thersites in Troilus and Cressida was a droll Geordie waiter. These choices are bold, striking, and deviate from the text just enough to pigeonhole a bit of individuality without doing it a crucial disservice. Antony Sher does this a lot too, and to what seems universal acclaim, with his Puritan-Priest-Malvolio and Duke-of-Gloucester-on-crutches. And let's not forget Alan Rickman, whose endlessly flamboyant hand movements and veneer of contrite disdain are virtually the only things that make the Harry Potter series worth a second viewing. I wonder whether it's anything to do with these three men being so heavily involved in art and design before spurring it in favour of acting. Their style seems much closer to the theatre of the imagination endorsed by Michael Chekhov (and later perpetuated with infectious enthusiasm by Simon Callow in Being an Actor). Charles Laughton was another key exponent of this school of acting, and responsible for one of my favourite quotations on the subject:

Method actors give you a photograph. Real actors give you an oil painting.

There's an extended version where he discusses the Great Masters in drawn-out, voluptuous depth, but the sentiment is the same. Laughton gave a spellbinding Quasimodo in the 1939 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and it truly deserves to be seen - one of the greatest film performances of all time. There's definitely a magic to such a transformation as comprehensive as Laughton endured, sweltering beneath the merciless Californian sun in a virtual prison of prosthetics, the director ordering take after take of Quasimodo's humiliation on the wheel. Cathartic moments like this may be at the root of my obsession with the classic horror actors. Fantastic men. Lon Chaney, for instance: a whole career spent as an extended study in deformity. And such a wide breadth within that banner interest! An almost limitless gallery of subtraction and distortion. In one film, he'll have no nose, all too prominent cheekbones and a swollen bald head. Then, all at once, there's a change: a shock of black hair, shark-like teeth and the dead, staring eyes of a fish. In one film he has no legs, in the next he has no arms. Then a switch in gender - race - above all, in character, from the outside in. This magician's disappearing cabinet of the macabre resulted in a pleasingly jingoistic expression, apparently quite widespread in the 1920s: 'don't step on that spider - it might be Lon Chaney!'

Bring me your Jews of Malta and your Richard the Thirds, your Calibans and Tamburlaines! None of this aspiring to play Hamlet bollocks. I've no interest in such a thing. Now, that bias is undeniably conditioned by my own self being absolutely and abysmally wrong for the pretty boy matinee idols. But self-deprecating personal scrutiny aside, it's a bias that remains. Because it's not enough to love 'acting'. It's like when people suggest to me that, as an English student, I indiscriminately 'love' books. Hell, no! I can't imagine I've read more than one percent of the potential 'classics' available in our mother tongue, and I suppose that the same sort of statistic could be applied (entriely hypothetically, might I add) to the degree to which actors unlock their full potential. There are many books that I outright hate as well. Take Ulysses. Read it once and it didn't make any sense. Read it again last year to find confusion blossom into resentment. A truly horrible book - for me, that is. Such an emintently reasonable foregrounding of personal opinion doesn't seem to figure in acting. For some mad reason, acting clings to the neo-romantic notion of a 'canon' - the idea that the actor equipped to play the greatest range of parts and cover all the classics is somehow the victor. I don't know about you, but it always reminds me a bit of that insufferable 'all-rounder' encountered at school - the tiresome brat who's good at everything, seemingly without apparent effort, and is singularly boring because of it. Sticking with the education theme, it must be noted that academics get nowhere without specialising, and I often wonder whether the same can be said for acting. Yes, the actor who can do it all is probably the better man. But is he set to make an enduring and valuable contribution to the heritage of acting? It's all very well being an idiot savant actor, a Kim Peek who's capable of producing anything, but can this have any real or lasting value? Self-justification biases me, but I would say not. It's the Edgar Nortons of acting I remember - you may not know the name, but you recognise the face - whether it stays the same, a constant companion, or changes with the schizophrenic flexibility of Lon Chaney. Masks remain integral to my view of acting. Norton and Chaney, as dissimilar as can be, were really playing the same game.

This seems to me precisely the approach required in Dickens, if only for the necessity of character differentiation. As an author, Dickens is often generically deemed 'theatrical' (one of those strange generalisations I'm finding it increasingly hard to agree with). It'll be interesting to see how far I can stretch it. I have a reasonably flexible face, and that'll be the central battleground. Vocal change will prove important too. And wigs, hats, costume and attendent props to subsidise... But they're very much the window-dressing. Another difficulty is having to balance all of this out against the recurring figure of the narrator. It would be a nightmare situation to have people think I'm trying to play Dickens, always a ghastly spectacle when actors have attempted it in the past... An attempt to pin down the spirit of the man should be quite sufficient: the same flamboyance and self-importance and exalted enthusiasm for just about everything. Such may be released naturally in such an intensive 'go' at acting (although I'm also starting to doubt whether such a show can be classified as 'acting' at all), but the results will be interesting all the same.

Incidentally, sorry for the long gap between posts! I want to regularly update my blodgings as a comprehensive guide to the show, so these silences will be avoided whenever possible in future. I've had a hearty share of Dickens-related shenanigans over the last few days, and I'll be sure to go into some detail about them next time.

*New coinage for 'just over the road'. But based on recent experiences with George Potts, that should perhaps be altered to 'a squashed and mangled pigeon, with loose guts a-dragging o'er the hallowed steps of Sanctuary and the unseemly whiff of cannibalistic priests ever hovering in the air'.