Instead of launching on another directionless waffle, I've resolved to stay securely on topic with this entry. This be serious business, this be: a dry, clipped and unerringly prudish report on the very first week of rehearsal. After braving immersion in the bottomless legal quagmire of 'Bardell and Pickwick' for five solid days, I've emerged relatively unscathed. It's the celebrated trial scene from The Pickwick Papers, and, with the sole exception of A Christmas Carol (what else?), the most popular and beloved of the public readings in Dickens's own lifetime. Although it's not the word-for-word text I'll be using in performance, Chapter 34 from the novel will give any curious parties a clear insight into what I'm up against.
Unlike 'Nicholas Nickleby at the Yorkshire School', the reading that follows it, 'Bardell and Pickwick' promotes no instant sense of connection. 'Nickleby' is in some ways simple by contrast. Almost everyone has an instinctive response to classroom injustice and the cruel authority figures who perpetrate it. Our indoctrination in this notion covers a very wide cultural field: Jane Eyre, A Little Princess, How Green Was My Valley, Dead Poet's Society, Matilda, the Harry Potter books - even Dickens's own David Copperfield and the loathsome, cane-wielding Mr Murdstone. I'm confident that audiences will be repelled by the nastiness of Wackford Squeers without the least previous experience of Nicholas Nickleby. But with 'Pickwick' I get the unsettling feeling that much of its impact rests on an audience's prior familiarity with the characters. In a piece where contained disorientation is in so many ways the central comic point, narrative goes out of the window with surprising suddenness, all coherence dissolving into a Dickensian greatest hits parade: PICKWICK! STARELEIGH! BUZFUZ! CLUPPINS! SKIMPIN! WINKLE! WELLER! The names wouldn't look out of place on a nineteenth century playbill. Actually, the names frequently did appear on nineteenth century playbills after unscrupulous writers took to illegally adapting Dickens's novel for the stage - and this before its serialisation had even finished! Lord knows what solution the dramatists concocted to the insane plot rammificatons of 'Bardell and Pickwick', because it's as convoluted a stretch of pettifogging obfuscation as I've ever encountered. The challenge then lies in devising a theatrical short-hand sufficiently bold and vivid to save these characters from becoming a cavalcade of cardboard cut-outs.
One particularly great terror has sprung from the rehearsals. It doesn't strike me as all that funny yet, which stands to be a bit of a killer. However, I'm basing this purely on the audio recording, which opens up even more problems. Does the language of the piece depend entirely on physical comedy to liberate it? Despite all efforts to the contrary, I still find it easier to pull an outlandish face than extract the required venom from a particularly acidic put-down. But should language and physicality be separated out like this? Surely it is their union that will provide the most delicious dramatic frission! I don't want to lose the integrity of the text, but I do start to feel that gags will have to be pasted on to it as though with a trowel to restore a little of the comic genius acknowledged in Dickens's age. On a brighter note, the recording is slightly under the predicted half hour length, which grants a bit of safety time with regards to dramatic pauses, physical routines and any number of fluffs. It also allows for an 'interval' of a few minutes at least - a short break in which I can cleanse myself of sweat, change my shirt, have a quick drink, lay out the required bits and pieces for part two, and then venture, wearier than ever, into the more sombre dramatics of 'Nickleby'.
Certain characters have emerged quite distinctly, whilst others are still paddling hopelessly about in the search for substance. Buzfuz is coming across fairly well I think. It's an unexpected godsend that the first half is dominated by this shouty, belligerent, semi-operatic monster, for anyone with the faintest idea of my acting knows how completely at home I am with characters of that nature. The Judge is also good fun. On a personal level, I feel like I'm unseating the demented justice in residence at The York Dungeon from his original context in favour of an energetic new scenario. Wild improvisation aside, there's a certain forlorn loneliness to the characters in the Dungeon; you're always dictating to the public rather than interacting with your fellow ghouls. It's as though the walking dead have fled the crypt and you've been left behind as their unwilling ambassador. So in spite of the other characters being played by myself, it's nice to give the Judge a few other rehearsed personalities to bounce off against.
These two are in many ways the principal grotesques - the most ostentatious and showboating of the 'Pickwick' crowd, at any rate - so it's reassuring to feel at least vaguely comfortable with them. I don't think that the other characters have quite gelled yet, but with any luck this will only be a matter of time. There's a certain hierarchy of character in the piece that might excuse this unsatisfactorily patchy result. There is no way that Serjeant Snubbin, who has about three lines of note, either can or should be realised with the colour of Buzfuz, who contrives by turns to eat up over a third of the segment's dialogue. The minor characters are to some extent doomed by the very state of being marginal - but then there's the counter-argument that the bit players must be even more vivid than the principals to have any impact at all. Mrs Cluppins is a good example. There is no way in hell that I'm going to be equipped to offer a sensitive and nuanced portrayal of the coquettish charwoman during her perfunctory one-page appearance. It has to be gimmicky, it has to be ridiculous, and this should be a cause for joy rather than guilt.
Sidetracked in my merry jaunt into York to celebrate Tim Elsy's birthday, I got hold of some of the last few props for the show. (A profitable day, that - I had no idea that 'I've Got a Luvverly Bunch of Coconuts' had such a generous number of verses!) I'm now besotted with a fetching felt stovepipe rather than the top hat I'd first planned on purchasing. Let's face it - the vast majority of joke shop top hats are ridiculously overpriced, paradoxically look very cheap, and, most heinous of all, stubbornly refuse to fit on my head. Yet for some pernicious reason, the same manufacturers are capable of knocking out a decent quality stovepipe. I'm hopeful that the length of a stovepipe will make it all the more absurd onstage - and since it's not in use for terribly long, this is an entirely desirable effect! Another acquisition was a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, which should make Mr Pickwick look suitably bemused and owl-eyed. The frames came without lenses, so I'm fortunately in no danger of tripping off the perilous raised level of the Larkum stage and plummeting into the orchestra pit. More challenging is the Judge's wig. As much as I champion full bodily transformation in theatre, I'm not the world's biggest fan of the practical experience of wig-wearing. I had a horrendous experience with Coupler's wig in The Relapse (when you can't see the audience half the time, overacting skyrockets), and this one is at least equally irritating where the little matter of living and breathing is concerned. There's also a fecundity of hairy horrors in The York Dungeon - though all a little pinkened for being so ruthlessly flecked with stage blood. One of the eternal delights of working there in sweltering summer temperatures is inheriting the previous actor's wig upon changing shifts. You find yourself instantly festooned with a coronet of sweat, a rime of saliva gilding the wisps hovering at your mouth. Lovely. Charles Laughton developed a lifelong phobia of hair from weeks of interaction with his bewhiskered and feral 'manimal' co-stars on the set of Island of Lost Souls - to such an extent that Laughton could never again visit a zoo, and persisted in the belief that great gobs of the stuff were hidden in his food. I hope I'm not headed in the same direction. I've also got hold of a copy of The Pickwick Papers with pleasingly yellowed pages. Breaking from my continued battle with OCD, I've been engaged in the serious task of ripping out every last page in order to provide thematically appropriate set dressing. At the very least, it'll be something else to fill that cursed clothes line straddling the back of the stage, which I worry more and more might appear outstandingly empty.
I'm going to have to return to 'Bardell and Pickwick' next week. Constant run-throughs are the only way to get a text like this into your bones, and now that I have the props to hand, the intensive stage of rehearsal can begin (physically, at least - the tough mental work is mostly over). I've got the internal geography of the performance pretty well realised in my own head by now thanks to some ruthless annotation of the script, but I've been more than a little backward about putting my instructions into practice. Lines aren't quite as secure as I'd hoped either. As with so many of these things, I was pretty uptight to start with, chastising myself pitilessly if I'd failed to learn the prescribed two pages by the end of the day. Things have slipped quite a bit now. In short, this stands to be the most tedious part of the rehearsals - the pestering re-centric bit. Redoing, reiterating, reinterpreting, revising, rereading, reviewing, redrafting, rethinking, rediscovering, reassessing - oh, a most terrible situation, winding further and further in yourself in these regressive (argh!) mental circles. No wonder that this is the stage where you feel utterly worthless - where you feel you'll never progress with anything again!
Wednesday 30 June 2010
Sunday 27 June 2010
Close Encounters of the Callow Kind
As I was saying last time, I travelled back to Cambridge on Saturday to catch the matinee performance of Shakespeare: The Man From Stratford. This pilgrimage wasn't due to any vital new surge of passion for Shakey (a term lavished on Paper Five has put paid to such uncomplicated illusions), but my altogether more heartfelt dedication to its sole performer, the wonderful Simon Callow. I need pontificate no further about my passion for the man; the infamous Facebook group speaks for itself. I got a bit more than I bargained for from my inaugural trip to the Cambridge Arts Theatre - if it's anywhere near this good all the year round, I might have to fold myself into one of the seats, fuse with it by turns across the hot summer months and remain in perpetuity.
So, as I promised, on with the reviewer's hat. It's a splendidly tall thing, pitched somewhere between a bishop's mitre and a dunce's cap, and instantly puts me in mind of the tapered sock of a gremlin in an Arthur Rackham fantasy. Seems to have been designed for people whose heads come up to a peak, which must put damnsome pressure on the brain and its attendant critical faculties. Or, in other words, I'm not that great or experienced a reviewer, and have very mixed feelings about the practise in general. Consider this more of a reverie or wallow through the multifarious snickleways of the Swantonesque cranium. The odd bit of structure may come from my staying alert to clever little bits and pieces to steal for my own one-man show. But we'll see.
Callow's performance was a surprise in many respects. The presence that can seem so overpowering and ostentatious in film and television was actually a perfect fit for the auditorium. Callow never once lapsed into bellowing, something he's repeatedly accused of doing by a generation who seem intent on confusing him with Brian Blessed (another skillful actor you're hard-pressed to find scalping his lungs outside the welcome context of Have I Got News For You). Vocally, this was a very controlled performance, well-modulated throughout and brimming with quiet intensity. Surprisingly informal as well. No hint of swagger or posturing - just an audience and an actor, one who had no qualms about hitching up his trousers every so often or getting a bit tongue-tied. Always generous too, the trait that I admire most in Callow's acting. 'This is such a brilliant approach,' I remember thinking, 'and there's no way in hell I'll be able to match it'. I comforted myself a few seconds later with 'Aha! But this approach is unsuited to Dickens'. Is it really though? After all, there's got to be solid foundation on which to construct Dickens's multitude of comic grotesques, if only to afford the audience a little light relief. Callow has come into his own over the years. He's at ease with himself as a person and performer now more than ever, and it shows itself very clearly. What ease! I have more personal hang-ups than hangers to put 'em on, but I don't think that their systematic elimination would result in my inheritance of a performance style even distantly similar to that of Callow. It strikes me that such mastery is the preserve of two kinds of actor: the exceptionally experienced and the exceptionally arrogant. What a pity that those who can't abide Callow insist on confusing the two. Callow's a man of experience, and his stage presence is overwhelming in its compassion. I don't think that's the result of all of my extra baggage with Callow either. It's a heightened solidarity and openness that's very rare indeed, and really rather enviable.
Not that Callow shied from the grotesques when the opportunity arose. After enjoying his rhapsodic criticism of Falstaff for the last few years, it was a treat to finally see him perform such substantial chunks of the character. The 'honour' speech was fantastic in that respect, the soaring banality of his deadpan, petulant 'no' a happy confirmation that even the critically acclaimed resort to gimmicky voices when the moment calls for it. Callow has a fascinating approach to character that I've never quite got my head round either, and this is especially clear where voice is concerned. He never seems to dissolve into the twisted, perspiring overreacher that I periodically do in rehearsals, in which the search for the 'perfect' voice inevitably starts to eat away at and dissolve the character (or at least, it doesn't show). Macbeth's 'she should have died hereafter' was slightly slurred, an intonation worlds removed from the unadventurously clipped tones of the RSC. I made out a few titters in the audience. Interesting reaction. Was this because this was 'bad' acting? I suppose that the possibility can't be ruled out, but I'm inclined to think not. Distinctive, definitely, but it would be a very cruel audience who'd recognise something as dreadful and instinctively think to laugh. Why must laughter be the hallmark of a bad performance? It might well hint at something very different. We live in an age where people are so bloody resistant to anything the least bit unusual or peculiar. I can't see that there'd have been a great improvement had Callow used his natural voice (which is still superhuman by mortal standards). Equally, I can't see the virtue in going for a thick Scottish brogue to promote maximum virtuoso realism. Enacted with conviction and skill, two such 'extreme' choices would never incite laughter. With a truly bold performance (is it that inscrutable dramatic 'arrogance' coming through again?) there can be no room for ambiguity. The audience knows precisely where they stand and is engulfed by the actor's self-confidence. This is fair enough I suppose, but I'm not entirely convinced it makes for good acting. Surely there should be some depth, confusion, murkiness... And surely this should be even more pronounced in a speech so famous and so ruthlessly overacted. It's that sense of picking up a gauntlet, I think. Actors nearly always feel inclined to make a meal of the lines that Providence has smiled upon. (Unlike every other actor I've seen perform it, it was very telling that Callow didn't ham up the word 'and' when he arrived at 'tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...') The slurred voice seemed an instinctive choice, and in a way, it's a pity it flashed by so quickly. Although perhaps that's the secret. It hinted at an undiscovered world, something deeply personal and even uncomfortable in its rawness; uncontrolled while still bound in by the theatrical; an impulsive choice that conveyed enormous complexity at a stroke. Confusing indeed - valuable too, I reckon. No wonder people feel inclined to laugh. Perhaps it's that the theatre is a public forum, and very few of us are any good at confronting the uncanny in public.
Technical elements were handled very tastefully throughout. I was prepared for something in line with the minimalism of The Mystery of Charles Dickens, but ten years on, this show incorporated technology to unobtrusive and elegant effect. The projection screen and sliding black panels, which every so often opened out onto a tree branch or a writhing bed of shadows, put me in mind of nothing so much as an outdated museum exhibit. I'm sure that many will deride them on this basis, but personally speaking, my sense of the past was developed from visiting such fascinating, runic places in my earliest years, and the slight creakiness of the stagecraft only aided the nostalgic effect for me. Elizabethan music is one of the few things that never fails to get me misty-eyed (I blame my sister's unmitigated love for this sort of thing), so it was splendidly atmospheric when it was piped in to complement Callow's evocation of a country house. Under-lighting fed into one of the most memorable moments of the show when Callow read a particularly bloodthirsty speech from The Spanish Tragedy in the persona of Edward Alleyn. Gone was the jolly, red-faced reveller of Four Weddings and a Funeral. It cast some surprisingly disturbing shadows and reminded me of nothing so much as Henry Hull in Werewolf of London (anyone who's got an eyeful of that surprisingly intense bedroom invasion will understand what I mean). I wonder whether there's a place for such a thing in the Dickens show. My mind's still immersed in the Pickwick section, where characters do seem to spend an inordinate amount of time glued to various bits of courtroom paraphernalia. Although it'd probably be too ghoulish for protracted use (except where the Judge is concerned), it certainly imparts that shapeshifting quality I'm after. My centuries-old ultraviolet strip lamp has been entombed in a drawer for some time now, but it still works, and may be scheduled for a trip to Cambridge soon. Callow had the benefit of a trapdoor to conceal his lighting trickery, but I'm sure that something could be devised for Dickens. On a related note, a cascade of sand from the ceiling has reminded me to root out my smoke machine. There ain't nothing more Dickensian than a room brimming with smog.
One other thing that's stuck with me is Callow's rendition of Mark Antony's memorable 'honourable man' litany from Julius Caesar. Callow has a beautiful voice at the best of times - ripe, resonant and pleasingly fruity - but a hidden microphone added the extra element of an echo effect. It made it stunning to listen to, one of my favourite sections of the show, and I suppose for some it might reopen that age-old debate of sound versus sense. How dare this man resort to an electronic aid to, to... improve his acting! cry a belligerent stream of philistines bemused by showmanship and obviously blessed with the tonal range of Paul Scofield. Personally speaking, I think it's cracking when you can have both. The heady voluptuousness of revelling in vowels and consonants shouldn't be sacrificed in a mad hunt for dramatic truth. This is the best I've ever heard the speech. That's right - even better than Vincent Price in Theatre of Blood. Callow's version was far preferable to listening to some upstart method actor shriek and screech in an effort to tap into some futile vein of edginess and emotional exposure. Mind you, if Dustin Hoffman were to do such a thing, it would be acclaimed as genius. If Simon Callow were to do likewise, it would no doubt be scorned as another example of his unacceptably outdated and florid approach to acting. Critical hypocrisy never dies. Different techniques for different actors - a trite maxim, perhaps, but there's often truth in triteness.
Just before the play started, it was announced that Callow would be signing copies of his latest book in the foyer. I had a pressing engagement with Will Seaward just after the performance, so I assumed I wouldn't have time, contented myself with the thought of going to see the other loudest man in Britain and hummed merrily along to myself. Development however. The play finished considerably earlier than expected, so I was able to hang about for a bit. I joined a preposterously long queue, and about ten minutes later, I had my brief encounter with Callow. The theatre was offering copies of the book for purchase (My Life in Pieces, incidentally - take a look at it), but they'd all sold out by the time I reached the foyer. Fortunately, it didn't seem that Callow was bound by any fierce contractual obligations set by tyrannical publishing companies, because he was gracious enough to sign my considerably cheaper programme. Then I worked up my courage and asked him the question I'd plotted in the queue.
DISCLAIMER: Please forgive the completely unwarranted yet entirely sincere drippiness of the below. I'm not one to fetishise memories in the common way of things, but my admiration for Callow is long-standing and multi-layered. If it was anybody but him, they'd have got a sprig of holly, a box on the ear and thanked me thrice for the privilege. Well, maybe not, but the drippiness stands.
I: Simon, can I ask you a question?
SI: Yes.
Aha, success! Now. Focus. It's only Simon Callow. Favourite living actor. Admirable writer. Very enormous role model, very. My precarious mental state wasn't helped by marvelling at his ability to recite an entire Sonnet at the drop of a hat when prompted by the group in front of me.
I: In November I'm going to be performing two of Charles Dickens's Public Readings...
SI: Ah, which ones are you doing?
Blimey, he's quick off the mark... Blast, blast, what were they called now? Think quicker, damn you!
I: Err, 'Bardell and Pickwick' and 'Nicholas Nickleby at the Yorkshire School'...
SI: Ah.
What does this 'ah' betoken? Disdain? Amusement? Contempt? Approval?
I: Do you have any particular advice? I'm a little terrified at the prospect.
Yes. Actually said 'prospect'. What a twerp. Perhaps Callow has that arcane linguistic effect on people. Another exciting moment: he's doing the famous Callow thinking face. Oh, this is splendid! He's leaning back in the chair and furrowing his brow and going all intense like! Wowee! At this interesting moment, Callow launched into one of his celebrated non-sequiturs. It was the most personal interview I could have hoped for.
SI: The most important thing, I would say... is to throw yourself into it, because Dickens, in these two pieces, more than anything else, really presents us with cartoons... So, do everything you possibly can with your voice - make them distinct, exaggerate facial expressions - and go into it with all the energy you can. And good luck.
That's my year made.
I: Thank you very much.
SI: Thank you.
What the hell. I probably won't get another chance. I impulsively stick out my hand. There's a bit of pause. Then Simon Callow assents to a handshake. I'm probably being more than a bit irritating by forcing him to drop the pen he's holding, but this is all to the man's credit.
SI: Goodbye!
God bless him.
Well, there you have it. It may have occurred in a very informal context, and my recollections may come across as little more than garbled nonsense, but I'd like to think that I got a minor insight into the Callow acting philosophy, unsullied by the need to impress anyone in a position to criticise. In truth, it's the common sense approach to acting that I'm falling slowly more in love with - if it feels right, just get on and do it. Do the voices, do the faces, make the characters different - if only for the sake of it. Do it with conviction, and have a bit of bloody fun with it. I still remember my one sad attempt at writing a novel. It collapsed almost instantly because, with incredible, revolting self-importance, I devised a subtext in advance. Failure! Instant failure! Characters and events were concocted to slide unobtrusively over the top of my priggishness, and became exasperating as a direct result. Acting should likewise be uncomplicated. A complex character can't be created. It is always incidental, the result of good acting rather than the catalyst - and it is always at its most potent in the minds of the audience. Sure, I can play Richard III with a Napoleon complex, a Freudian mother fixation and Adolf Hitler's legendary missing testicle - but what use is that if the audience doesn't have the faintest clue? Let the people in the dark engage in this romantic process of incessantly reading into this and that. That is their privilege.
The actor's task is both deeply mechanical and deeply childish - a seemingly contradictory mixture that I'm confident can be reconciled. Alfred Hitchcock is often misquoted as saying that 'actors are like cattle' (what he really meant, as he would drolly correct interviewers, is that 'actors should be treated like cattle'). There is no reason to dignify this practice of affecting stupid walks and voices - equally, there is no reason to denigrate it. There's just got to be that acknowledgement (miraculously freeing, I think) that that's all there really is to it. 'Subtext' and 'depth' and 'psychological realism' and 'motivation' and all the other wanky buzzwords that serve as self-congratulatory signposts for thespian intellect are perfectly alright - but only so long as it makes you happy in what you're doing and isn't set loose to irritate anyone else. What these dangerous terms most certainly should not be permitted to do is break free from an actor's sequestered imaginings and run rampant in the intolerable forums of master-classes and drama schools and theatre text books and every other off-putting thing adrift in the modern endeavour to rationalise acting. Go into a performance with the carefree mechanics of childhood. Don't question why the Wicked Witch of the West absolutely has to have a high-pitched cackle by investigating her relationship with her recently crushed sister or the percentage of highly flammable silver paint in the Ozian air. Just get on and do it. The assumption is there for a deeply ingrained reason that's beyond your enfeebled powers of analysis. A desire to avoid a stereotype is really no more than a cry for attention, and will more often than not wind up disappointing the audience: the one truly unforgivable crime. If the audience for a medieval mystery play didn't get a Satan covered in red paint and cackling like a loon, the poor actor would have been pelted in rotten vegetables as a singularly unworthy destroyer of mankind. Trust to simplicity, and I believe that little can go wrong with acting. Cattle don't compose a dissertation on the consumption of grass - they bend their redoubtable necks and get down to grass-roots, in a manner of speaking. Suffice it to say that my admiration for Callow and all of the complicated things he's done to my brain over the years continues to grow and grow.
I'll part with an image from when I ambushed Callow after Waiting for Godot last year. I was at the height of my Callow mania then, so I blurted out some muddy and indecipherable profundities about Love is Where it Falls that probably alarmed him a fair bit. Maybe I was mistaken for one of the truly insane celebrity stalkers scattered about - the creepy, obsessive individuals who would buy a programme, skip the play, scamper to the stage door and announce things like 'it's my sixth time!' in hushed and reverent tones. (Most amusing to hear their collective groan when it was announced that Ian McKellen had already left the building.) Weirdness of the West End circus aside, it's a photo that I treasure.
Next time I really better focus on my own show again. I rounded off the first spate of preparations for the 'Bardell and Pickwick' segment by recording myself doing it. There are few things I hate more than listening to myself, but it's a necessary evil here. With such massive reserves of time and the available technology, it would be a criminal waste not to record the cringe-worthy snippets of failure so that they can be expurgated and cleansed ahead of the performance. Reading back, I'm aware just how horribly negative that sounds, so rest assured that I'm a bit more pleased than disgusted with the results of my experiment. Provided the audio file wings its way over to Wales intact, it'll be interesting to see what observations James has as to what's ticking over nicely - and what still needs adjusting before it can really hum.
So, as I promised, on with the reviewer's hat. It's a splendidly tall thing, pitched somewhere between a bishop's mitre and a dunce's cap, and instantly puts me in mind of the tapered sock of a gremlin in an Arthur Rackham fantasy. Seems to have been designed for people whose heads come up to a peak, which must put damnsome pressure on the brain and its attendant critical faculties. Or, in other words, I'm not that great or experienced a reviewer, and have very mixed feelings about the practise in general. Consider this more of a reverie or wallow through the multifarious snickleways of the Swantonesque cranium. The odd bit of structure may come from my staying alert to clever little bits and pieces to steal for my own one-man show. But we'll see.
Callow's performance was a surprise in many respects. The presence that can seem so overpowering and ostentatious in film and television was actually a perfect fit for the auditorium. Callow never once lapsed into bellowing, something he's repeatedly accused of doing by a generation who seem intent on confusing him with Brian Blessed (another skillful actor you're hard-pressed to find scalping his lungs outside the welcome context of Have I Got News For You). Vocally, this was a very controlled performance, well-modulated throughout and brimming with quiet intensity. Surprisingly informal as well. No hint of swagger or posturing - just an audience and an actor, one who had no qualms about hitching up his trousers every so often or getting a bit tongue-tied. Always generous too, the trait that I admire most in Callow's acting. 'This is such a brilliant approach,' I remember thinking, 'and there's no way in hell I'll be able to match it'. I comforted myself a few seconds later with 'Aha! But this approach is unsuited to Dickens'. Is it really though? After all, there's got to be solid foundation on which to construct Dickens's multitude of comic grotesques, if only to afford the audience a little light relief. Callow has come into his own over the years. He's at ease with himself as a person and performer now more than ever, and it shows itself very clearly. What ease! I have more personal hang-ups than hangers to put 'em on, but I don't think that their systematic elimination would result in my inheritance of a performance style even distantly similar to that of Callow. It strikes me that such mastery is the preserve of two kinds of actor: the exceptionally experienced and the exceptionally arrogant. What a pity that those who can't abide Callow insist on confusing the two. Callow's a man of experience, and his stage presence is overwhelming in its compassion. I don't think that's the result of all of my extra baggage with Callow either. It's a heightened solidarity and openness that's very rare indeed, and really rather enviable.
Not that Callow shied from the grotesques when the opportunity arose. After enjoying his rhapsodic criticism of Falstaff for the last few years, it was a treat to finally see him perform such substantial chunks of the character. The 'honour' speech was fantastic in that respect, the soaring banality of his deadpan, petulant 'no' a happy confirmation that even the critically acclaimed resort to gimmicky voices when the moment calls for it. Callow has a fascinating approach to character that I've never quite got my head round either, and this is especially clear where voice is concerned. He never seems to dissolve into the twisted, perspiring overreacher that I periodically do in rehearsals, in which the search for the 'perfect' voice inevitably starts to eat away at and dissolve the character (or at least, it doesn't show). Macbeth's 'she should have died hereafter' was slightly slurred, an intonation worlds removed from the unadventurously clipped tones of the RSC. I made out a few titters in the audience. Interesting reaction. Was this because this was 'bad' acting? I suppose that the possibility can't be ruled out, but I'm inclined to think not. Distinctive, definitely, but it would be a very cruel audience who'd recognise something as dreadful and instinctively think to laugh. Why must laughter be the hallmark of a bad performance? It might well hint at something very different. We live in an age where people are so bloody resistant to anything the least bit unusual or peculiar. I can't see that there'd have been a great improvement had Callow used his natural voice (which is still superhuman by mortal standards). Equally, I can't see the virtue in going for a thick Scottish brogue to promote maximum virtuoso realism. Enacted with conviction and skill, two such 'extreme' choices would never incite laughter. With a truly bold performance (is it that inscrutable dramatic 'arrogance' coming through again?) there can be no room for ambiguity. The audience knows precisely where they stand and is engulfed by the actor's self-confidence. This is fair enough I suppose, but I'm not entirely convinced it makes for good acting. Surely there should be some depth, confusion, murkiness... And surely this should be even more pronounced in a speech so famous and so ruthlessly overacted. It's that sense of picking up a gauntlet, I think. Actors nearly always feel inclined to make a meal of the lines that Providence has smiled upon. (Unlike every other actor I've seen perform it, it was very telling that Callow didn't ham up the word 'and' when he arrived at 'tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...') The slurred voice seemed an instinctive choice, and in a way, it's a pity it flashed by so quickly. Although perhaps that's the secret. It hinted at an undiscovered world, something deeply personal and even uncomfortable in its rawness; uncontrolled while still bound in by the theatrical; an impulsive choice that conveyed enormous complexity at a stroke. Confusing indeed - valuable too, I reckon. No wonder people feel inclined to laugh. Perhaps it's that the theatre is a public forum, and very few of us are any good at confronting the uncanny in public.
Technical elements were handled very tastefully throughout. I was prepared for something in line with the minimalism of The Mystery of Charles Dickens, but ten years on, this show incorporated technology to unobtrusive and elegant effect. The projection screen and sliding black panels, which every so often opened out onto a tree branch or a writhing bed of shadows, put me in mind of nothing so much as an outdated museum exhibit. I'm sure that many will deride them on this basis, but personally speaking, my sense of the past was developed from visiting such fascinating, runic places in my earliest years, and the slight creakiness of the stagecraft only aided the nostalgic effect for me. Elizabethan music is one of the few things that never fails to get me misty-eyed (I blame my sister's unmitigated love for this sort of thing), so it was splendidly atmospheric when it was piped in to complement Callow's evocation of a country house. Under-lighting fed into one of the most memorable moments of the show when Callow read a particularly bloodthirsty speech from The Spanish Tragedy in the persona of Edward Alleyn. Gone was the jolly, red-faced reveller of Four Weddings and a Funeral. It cast some surprisingly disturbing shadows and reminded me of nothing so much as Henry Hull in Werewolf of London (anyone who's got an eyeful of that surprisingly intense bedroom invasion will understand what I mean). I wonder whether there's a place for such a thing in the Dickens show. My mind's still immersed in the Pickwick section, where characters do seem to spend an inordinate amount of time glued to various bits of courtroom paraphernalia. Although it'd probably be too ghoulish for protracted use (except where the Judge is concerned), it certainly imparts that shapeshifting quality I'm after. My centuries-old ultraviolet strip lamp has been entombed in a drawer for some time now, but it still works, and may be scheduled for a trip to Cambridge soon. Callow had the benefit of a trapdoor to conceal his lighting trickery, but I'm sure that something could be devised for Dickens. On a related note, a cascade of sand from the ceiling has reminded me to root out my smoke machine. There ain't nothing more Dickensian than a room brimming with smog.
One other thing that's stuck with me is Callow's rendition of Mark Antony's memorable 'honourable man' litany from Julius Caesar. Callow has a beautiful voice at the best of times - ripe, resonant and pleasingly fruity - but a hidden microphone added the extra element of an echo effect. It made it stunning to listen to, one of my favourite sections of the show, and I suppose for some it might reopen that age-old debate of sound versus sense. How dare this man resort to an electronic aid to, to... improve his acting! cry a belligerent stream of philistines bemused by showmanship and obviously blessed with the tonal range of Paul Scofield. Personally speaking, I think it's cracking when you can have both. The heady voluptuousness of revelling in vowels and consonants shouldn't be sacrificed in a mad hunt for dramatic truth. This is the best I've ever heard the speech. That's right - even better than Vincent Price in Theatre of Blood. Callow's version was far preferable to listening to some upstart method actor shriek and screech in an effort to tap into some futile vein of edginess and emotional exposure. Mind you, if Dustin Hoffman were to do such a thing, it would be acclaimed as genius. If Simon Callow were to do likewise, it would no doubt be scorned as another example of his unacceptably outdated and florid approach to acting. Critical hypocrisy never dies. Different techniques for different actors - a trite maxim, perhaps, but there's often truth in triteness.
Just before the play started, it was announced that Callow would be signing copies of his latest book in the foyer. I had a pressing engagement with Will Seaward just after the performance, so I assumed I wouldn't have time, contented myself with the thought of going to see the other loudest man in Britain and hummed merrily along to myself. Development however. The play finished considerably earlier than expected, so I was able to hang about for a bit. I joined a preposterously long queue, and about ten minutes later, I had my brief encounter with Callow. The theatre was offering copies of the book for purchase (My Life in Pieces, incidentally - take a look at it), but they'd all sold out by the time I reached the foyer. Fortunately, it didn't seem that Callow was bound by any fierce contractual obligations set by tyrannical publishing companies, because he was gracious enough to sign my considerably cheaper programme. Then I worked up my courage and asked him the question I'd plotted in the queue.
DISCLAIMER: Please forgive the completely unwarranted yet entirely sincere drippiness of the below. I'm not one to fetishise memories in the common way of things, but my admiration for Callow is long-standing and multi-layered. If it was anybody but him, they'd have got a sprig of holly, a box on the ear and thanked me thrice for the privilege. Well, maybe not, but the drippiness stands.
I: Simon, can I ask you a question?
SI: Yes.
Aha, success! Now. Focus. It's only Simon Callow. Favourite living actor. Admirable writer. Very enormous role model, very. My precarious mental state wasn't helped by marvelling at his ability to recite an entire Sonnet at the drop of a hat when prompted by the group in front of me.
I: In November I'm going to be performing two of Charles Dickens's Public Readings...
SI: Ah, which ones are you doing?
Blimey, he's quick off the mark... Blast, blast, what were they called now? Think quicker, damn you!
I: Err, 'Bardell and Pickwick' and 'Nicholas Nickleby at the Yorkshire School'...
SI: Ah.
What does this 'ah' betoken? Disdain? Amusement? Contempt? Approval?
I: Do you have any particular advice? I'm a little terrified at the prospect.
Yes. Actually said 'prospect'. What a twerp. Perhaps Callow has that arcane linguistic effect on people. Another exciting moment: he's doing the famous Callow thinking face. Oh, this is splendid! He's leaning back in the chair and furrowing his brow and going all intense like! Wowee! At this interesting moment, Callow launched into one of his celebrated non-sequiturs. It was the most personal interview I could have hoped for.
SI: The most important thing, I would say... is to throw yourself into it, because Dickens, in these two pieces, more than anything else, really presents us with cartoons... So, do everything you possibly can with your voice - make them distinct, exaggerate facial expressions - and go into it with all the energy you can. And good luck.
That's my year made.
I: Thank you very much.
SI: Thank you.
What the hell. I probably won't get another chance. I impulsively stick out my hand. There's a bit of pause. Then Simon Callow assents to a handshake. I'm probably being more than a bit irritating by forcing him to drop the pen he's holding, but this is all to the man's credit.
SI: Goodbye!
God bless him.
Well, there you have it. It may have occurred in a very informal context, and my recollections may come across as little more than garbled nonsense, but I'd like to think that I got a minor insight into the Callow acting philosophy, unsullied by the need to impress anyone in a position to criticise. In truth, it's the common sense approach to acting that I'm falling slowly more in love with - if it feels right, just get on and do it. Do the voices, do the faces, make the characters different - if only for the sake of it. Do it with conviction, and have a bit of bloody fun with it. I still remember my one sad attempt at writing a novel. It collapsed almost instantly because, with incredible, revolting self-importance, I devised a subtext in advance. Failure! Instant failure! Characters and events were concocted to slide unobtrusively over the top of my priggishness, and became exasperating as a direct result. Acting should likewise be uncomplicated. A complex character can't be created. It is always incidental, the result of good acting rather than the catalyst - and it is always at its most potent in the minds of the audience. Sure, I can play Richard III with a Napoleon complex, a Freudian mother fixation and Adolf Hitler's legendary missing testicle - but what use is that if the audience doesn't have the faintest clue? Let the people in the dark engage in this romantic process of incessantly reading into this and that. That is their privilege.
The actor's task is both deeply mechanical and deeply childish - a seemingly contradictory mixture that I'm confident can be reconciled. Alfred Hitchcock is often misquoted as saying that 'actors are like cattle' (what he really meant, as he would drolly correct interviewers, is that 'actors should be treated like cattle'). There is no reason to dignify this practice of affecting stupid walks and voices - equally, there is no reason to denigrate it. There's just got to be that acknowledgement (miraculously freeing, I think) that that's all there really is to it. 'Subtext' and 'depth' and 'psychological realism' and 'motivation' and all the other wanky buzzwords that serve as self-congratulatory signposts for thespian intellect are perfectly alright - but only so long as it makes you happy in what you're doing and isn't set loose to irritate anyone else. What these dangerous terms most certainly should not be permitted to do is break free from an actor's sequestered imaginings and run rampant in the intolerable forums of master-classes and drama schools and theatre text books and every other off-putting thing adrift in the modern endeavour to rationalise acting. Go into a performance with the carefree mechanics of childhood. Don't question why the Wicked Witch of the West absolutely has to have a high-pitched cackle by investigating her relationship with her recently crushed sister or the percentage of highly flammable silver paint in the Ozian air. Just get on and do it. The assumption is there for a deeply ingrained reason that's beyond your enfeebled powers of analysis. A desire to avoid a stereotype is really no more than a cry for attention, and will more often than not wind up disappointing the audience: the one truly unforgivable crime. If the audience for a medieval mystery play didn't get a Satan covered in red paint and cackling like a loon, the poor actor would have been pelted in rotten vegetables as a singularly unworthy destroyer of mankind. Trust to simplicity, and I believe that little can go wrong with acting. Cattle don't compose a dissertation on the consumption of grass - they bend their redoubtable necks and get down to grass-roots, in a manner of speaking. Suffice it to say that my admiration for Callow and all of the complicated things he's done to my brain over the years continues to grow and grow.
I'll part with an image from when I ambushed Callow after Waiting for Godot last year. I was at the height of my Callow mania then, so I blurted out some muddy and indecipherable profundities about Love is Where it Falls that probably alarmed him a fair bit. Maybe I was mistaken for one of the truly insane celebrity stalkers scattered about - the creepy, obsessive individuals who would buy a programme, skip the play, scamper to the stage door and announce things like 'it's my sixth time!' in hushed and reverent tones. (Most amusing to hear their collective groan when it was announced that Ian McKellen had already left the building.) Weirdness of the West End circus aside, it's a photo that I treasure.
Next time I really better focus on my own show again. I rounded off the first spate of preparations for the 'Bardell and Pickwick' segment by recording myself doing it. There are few things I hate more than listening to myself, but it's a necessary evil here. With such massive reserves of time and the available technology, it would be a criminal waste not to record the cringe-worthy snippets of failure so that they can be expurgated and cleansed ahead of the performance. Reading back, I'm aware just how horribly negative that sounds, so rest assured that I'm a bit more pleased than disgusted with the results of my experiment. Provided the audio file wings its way over to Wales intact, it'll be interesting to see what observations James has as to what's ticking over nicely - and what still needs adjusting before it can really hum.
Saturday 26 June 2010
Guest Speaker #2: John Haidar
John Haidar looked set to be a terrific Surly in The Alchemist. Moody, acerbic, asexual - all that good stuff. Then tragedy struck. The play was disbanded due to mumpish rumblings, and the company left to imbibe an unseemly cocktail of disappointment, mild relief... but mostly disappointment. This Michaelmas though, John will ascend to the director's chair to wrestle with the unique challenge of remounting The Alchemist for an early ADC run. John's also played one half of the Sal and Sol double act in The Merchant of Venice (always safer to share the anti-Semitism about) and a well-received Macduff in Macbeth, as well as appearing in Brian Friel's Translations at Queens. More recently, I acted opposite John in Selwyn's Love's Labour's Lost, in which John had his fair share of the good speeches whilst I mugged and grimaced from afar. He'll also be getting piratical with his fellow rogues and cut-purses for the Edinburgh run of Silent Cannonfire. John's always been a friendly and interesting sort of chap when I've run into him, particularly given that he shares my same insane passion for all things Phantom of the Opera - to the direct exclusion of Love Never Dies! Hurrah! I'm also told that he flirted outrageously with Anne Robinson on The Weakest Link. I rigidly maintain that this should be his specialist subject if he ever gets round to doing Mastermind.
I’ve always found fantasy easier to live with. Reality’s all well and good but eventually it’s all just a bit monotonous, isn’t it? Whilst this immediately sounds like the prologue to a pretentious rant worthy of Blanche Dubois, I’m not saying that we’re all in it for the “magic” of Cambridge drama, whatever that is. The point here is that I came into the wonderful world of acting in the vain hope that through it I might be able to escape myself, to become something bigger and better than I had been up to that moment in time. And, to be honest, the biggest and best lesson that I’ve had to learn in the past year is to forget all that. Whilst it’s easier to live in another place, time and circumstance, if only in your head, it won’t help you become a better actor. At least, I don’t think it will.
Now, let’s get this straight: I am no expert. I’ve only been around for a mere nineteen and a half years, so what right have I to be preaching (preaching!) to you, Dear Reader, about my unfulfilled passions or (get this) my Promethean ambitions, inspirations, motivations or desires. Well, none at all, really. Blame my friend, James Swanton. Anyway, here goes.
Anybody can act. I’m not one to subscribe to the belief that only a few, ‘sensitive types’ have what it takes, that it’s some sort of God-given ‘gift’ only handed down to the elite few. Theatre, in its purest form, should incorporate all aspects of the society in which we live, and, as a result of that inclusivism, should incorporate all types of people from all walks of life. In my opinion, this happens to be one of the many reasons why that Shakespeare guy’s done quite well in recent years. For me, the greatest writers have always dealt with everyday life, ‘from the gutter to the gods’, and this is why acting has always represented one of the most insightful and meaningful ways through which we have an opportunity to explore other people, people who may be entirely different from ourselves in character, place and time, or, on the other hand, with whom we may share many trademark characteristics.
I once heard someone describe the first drumbeat of Bob Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone as “kicking open the door to your mind.” Maybe this is what I’m getting at – that acting, as a living art form, is about constantly challenging the preconceptions we create for both ourselves and others and shattering them if necessary. There’s always a new direction to take a character in and, for me, the kaleidoscopic nature of dramatic interpretation is what gets me excited about rehearsing a scene, whether it involves a monologue from The Crucible or a fight scene from Hamlet or just messing around and improvising a comedy sketch. I want to play Mercutio as a sufferer of bipolar disorder, so who’s going to stop me?
Soooooo, without getting all autobiographical I think I’ll put on my director’s cap now and talk about that for a bit, now that we’ve solved the infinite complexities of the dramatic art form, from an actor’s perspective at least…
The thing is, you see, I’m about to direct The Alchemist for The Marlowe Society at the ADC and, I can tell you, it’s a tall order. Not impossible but very, very tall…giraffe-like, one might say (but not me). It’s a play, written by Ben Jonson, celebrating its 400th birthday this year. Considering this, it must be at least a 7/10 to have stayed around for that long, I suppose. Apparently, along with Sophocles’ Oedipus and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, it represents one of the most perfect plots in all literature. Thanks for that, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. No pressure then.
I tend to like comedy with a dark edge to it and so, since this is both the greatest farce in the English language and the most vicious satire, it is right up my street. Whilst the play’s themes of greed, credulity and fraud are universal and timeless, they are probably funnier, in my opinion, when set in a more familiar period, which means that, in collaboration with my set, sound and lighting designers, we’re likely to give it a modern, but, at the same time, deliberately ambiguous context. For example, the music of a certain Sheffield-based indie rock band will make a special appearance in the opening scene… A further obstacle to consider is Jonson’s language, which can be a bit opaque at times, and for this reason, we’ll be working on some judicious cutting (and even re-wording!) in rehearsals to make sure it is accessible to our audience. A necessary evil of directing, which, in the case of this gargantuan, intellectually-hardcore-full-of-classical-allusions-and-Latin script, is o so very necessary.
I suppose that, in spite of all the technical stuff and creative artistry though, being a competent director is about staying true to the writer’s intention whilst not only keeping but capturing an audience’s interest, whether this is achieved via a new interpretation of the text or simply a technically masterful rendering of its original performance style. To my mind, all great art should evoke a reaction in us, and whether that’s love or hate, sorrow or joy, it should grab us by the throat, wrestle us to the ground and rearrange our reality. Furthermore, in the case of directing a theatrical production, it should serve as an excuse to have a good laugh with some great people and put on a bloody good show. Dates for your diaries are the 12th-16th October. Was that a plug, James? I think it was.
Before I retreat back to my summer reading list, then, I would just like to re-iterate the words of another of my friends, George Potts, who has both written a brilliant blog entry and brought your attention to Mr. Swanton’s one-man extravaganza, which I have no doubt will be a really great piece of theatre for our viewing pleasure next term. Go and see it.
My thanks go to James for allowing me to muse so freely and to you, Dear Reader, for reading. It’s been a pleasure, this one-way conversation malarkey. See you again soon. Same time, same place, yeah? Otherwise, in the ADC Bar. That’s where us actors live.
I’ve always found fantasy easier to live with. Reality’s all well and good but eventually it’s all just a bit monotonous, isn’t it? Whilst this immediately sounds like the prologue to a pretentious rant worthy of Blanche Dubois, I’m not saying that we’re all in it for the “magic” of Cambridge drama, whatever that is. The point here is that I came into the wonderful world of acting in the vain hope that through it I might be able to escape myself, to become something bigger and better than I had been up to that moment in time. And, to be honest, the biggest and best lesson that I’ve had to learn in the past year is to forget all that. Whilst it’s easier to live in another place, time and circumstance, if only in your head, it won’t help you become a better actor. At least, I don’t think it will.
Now, let’s get this straight: I am no expert. I’ve only been around for a mere nineteen and a half years, so what right have I to be preaching (preaching!) to you, Dear Reader, about my unfulfilled passions or (get this) my Promethean ambitions, inspirations, motivations or desires. Well, none at all, really. Blame my friend, James Swanton. Anyway, here goes.
Anybody can act. I’m not one to subscribe to the belief that only a few, ‘sensitive types’ have what it takes, that it’s some sort of God-given ‘gift’ only handed down to the elite few. Theatre, in its purest form, should incorporate all aspects of the society in which we live, and, as a result of that inclusivism, should incorporate all types of people from all walks of life. In my opinion, this happens to be one of the many reasons why that Shakespeare guy’s done quite well in recent years. For me, the greatest writers have always dealt with everyday life, ‘from the gutter to the gods’, and this is why acting has always represented one of the most insightful and meaningful ways through which we have an opportunity to explore other people, people who may be entirely different from ourselves in character, place and time, or, on the other hand, with whom we may share many trademark characteristics.
I once heard someone describe the first drumbeat of Bob Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone as “kicking open the door to your mind.” Maybe this is what I’m getting at – that acting, as a living art form, is about constantly challenging the preconceptions we create for both ourselves and others and shattering them if necessary. There’s always a new direction to take a character in and, for me, the kaleidoscopic nature of dramatic interpretation is what gets me excited about rehearsing a scene, whether it involves a monologue from The Crucible or a fight scene from Hamlet or just messing around and improvising a comedy sketch. I want to play Mercutio as a sufferer of bipolar disorder, so who’s going to stop me?
Soooooo, without getting all autobiographical I think I’ll put on my director’s cap now and talk about that for a bit, now that we’ve solved the infinite complexities of the dramatic art form, from an actor’s perspective at least…
The thing is, you see, I’m about to direct The Alchemist for The Marlowe Society at the ADC and, I can tell you, it’s a tall order. Not impossible but very, very tall…giraffe-like, one might say (but not me). It’s a play, written by Ben Jonson, celebrating its 400th birthday this year. Considering this, it must be at least a 7/10 to have stayed around for that long, I suppose. Apparently, along with Sophocles’ Oedipus and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, it represents one of the most perfect plots in all literature. Thanks for that, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. No pressure then.
I tend to like comedy with a dark edge to it and so, since this is both the greatest farce in the English language and the most vicious satire, it is right up my street. Whilst the play’s themes of greed, credulity and fraud are universal and timeless, they are probably funnier, in my opinion, when set in a more familiar period, which means that, in collaboration with my set, sound and lighting designers, we’re likely to give it a modern, but, at the same time, deliberately ambiguous context. For example, the music of a certain Sheffield-based indie rock band will make a special appearance in the opening scene… A further obstacle to consider is Jonson’s language, which can be a bit opaque at times, and for this reason, we’ll be working on some judicious cutting (and even re-wording!) in rehearsals to make sure it is accessible to our audience. A necessary evil of directing, which, in the case of this gargantuan, intellectually-hardcore-full-of-classical-allusions-and-Latin script, is o so very necessary.
I suppose that, in spite of all the technical stuff and creative artistry though, being a competent director is about staying true to the writer’s intention whilst not only keeping but capturing an audience’s interest, whether this is achieved via a new interpretation of the text or simply a technically masterful rendering of its original performance style. To my mind, all great art should evoke a reaction in us, and whether that’s love or hate, sorrow or joy, it should grab us by the throat, wrestle us to the ground and rearrange our reality. Furthermore, in the case of directing a theatrical production, it should serve as an excuse to have a good laugh with some great people and put on a bloody good show. Dates for your diaries are the 12th-16th October. Was that a plug, James? I think it was.
Before I retreat back to my summer reading list, then, I would just like to re-iterate the words of another of my friends, George Potts, who has both written a brilliant blog entry and brought your attention to Mr. Swanton’s one-man extravaganza, which I have no doubt will be a really great piece of theatre for our viewing pleasure next term. Go and see it.
My thanks go to James for allowing me to muse so freely and to you, Dear Reader, for reading. It’s been a pleasure, this one-way conversation malarkey. See you again soon. Same time, same place, yeah? Otherwise, in the ADC Bar. That’s where us actors live.
Return to Darkest Yorkshire
My goodness, I miss the people. And the architectural type stuff. Quite enough weather vanes to dispatch eighty Patrick Troughtons. And the endless supply of Garibaldi biscuits, seasoned with black coffee because I could never be bothered to walk that extra few metres to get at the fridge. And the happy, playful silverfish, always a welcome guest as it lapped at my heel and absconded with my big toe. But the people, on the whole. Not to mention the mad, capersome freedom. I used to be able to open my bedroom door and find myself at once in public. Now, venturing outside is an effort that requires premeditation and purpose. But enough tiresome grumbling. Come the cold light of morning (bit of time to go yet then), I'll be steamrolling back to Cambridge to see Simon Callow. Tremendously exciting! Callow remains the supreme master and exponent of the one-man show, and as far as I'm aware he's performed in six in the past: on Wilde (The Importance of Being Oscar), Shakespeare (a one-off performance of the entire Sonnet sequence at the National Theatre, and, more recently, There Reigns Love in Canada) and, of course, Dickens (The Mystery of Charles Dickens and last Christmas's Marigold and Chops). No mean track record, and now he's on to his seventh, and a somersault back in the general direction of the Bard for Shakespeare: The Man From Stratford. I'm particularly interested to see how he takes command of the stage during all the awkward in-betweeny moments when he's not impersonating Prospero or Jachimo or Desdemona or whoever else it might be. Whether there's a clean-cut distinction or a murky overlap between character and narrator - and whether this narrator is going to be the boldly delineated 'SIMON CALLOW' discussed in Being an Actor, or a somewhat less parodic strain, or something else again, entirely different and quite unexpected. It would be a nightmare situation for me if audiences thought that I was playing Dickens in the narrative sections of Pickwick & Nickleby. Such an effort is doomed to fail, and seems crucially out-of-step with bringing an author to life through his creations.
At any rate, I'll try to report back with my findings. It won't be a review as such, because by this stage in life I find it pretty much impossible to give an unbiased judgement of anything Callow does. 'Renaissance man' is a term affixed to Callow with the same catchpenny irreverence that Stephen Fry is labelled a 'national treasure' or David Cameron 'that weed-smoking, Bullingdon-bred, floppy-haired twerp'. Whilst none of these labels are completely untrue (there's a grain of truth in every stereotype), Callow's Renaissance connection usually seems to be relegated to his doing a bit of acting, a bit of directing, knocking out the odd book, and then appearing on a chat-show to envelop the furniture and scarf down all the chocolate bourbons like the Ghost of Christmas Present. But 'Renaissance' also conjures up the spirit of a particular historical moment, and for me at least, this conveys an altogether more favourable idea of the generous and benevolent feeling with which Callow infuses his acolytes. 'Renaissance man' can point to Callow the man - the hopelessly lovable individual who wore the loudest waistcoats in creation and vanquished himself with Highland dancing in Four Weddings and a Funeral; who shared some of the most harrowing personal anguish conceivable in Love is Where it Falls (read it or die painfully); who, long before Ian McKellen railed against Section 28, kept trying to out himself to the British press only to find that nobody was really that interested. I shall go and see Callow, enjoy myself thoroughly, and then dedicate some sort of Ode to his majesty.
I decided to order myself a small gift hamper for my return; various oddments to inspire and serenade me at the outset of this lonely rehearsal period. So, here I sit in my bedroom in Acomb, handling the soundtrack to The Muppet Christmas Carol with gnarled and swollen hands. It's a point made so often now that it hardly bears repeating, but yes, it probably is the best all-round version of A Christmas Carol. And the Muppets are solely to its benefit. Deal with it. I've also come into DVD versions of the creaky old film versions of Nicholas Nickleby and The Pickwick Papers. They're generally considered to be a cut below the seminal David Lean adaptations that inspired them - the 1946 Great Expectations and (even better to my way of thinking) the 1948 Oliver Twist, both of which you are strongly encouraged to track down, pronto! - so it'll be interesting to see what makes these particular novels so resistant to cinema. I have my theories, but I'll reserve judgement until I've taken in the films and reviewed them for you here. I'm a little worried about hitting Dickens saturation point this summer, so I better be sensible and remind myself that next term will be more than counterbalanced by the dark and terrible pressures of the Medieval Paper. Or I could scuttle off to watch a bunch of old horror films instead. Does Olivier's Richard III count as horror? The silent version of The Lost World? Arthur Wontner's Holmes films? Until such time as the American majors see fit to unleash their back catalogue of cinemacabre to Region 2 DVD, these semi-sinister substitutes shall suffice (such sibilance... the pretentious git).
I'm reading Nicholas Nickleby at the moment. It's a rollicking good entertainment. It's also refreshing to visit the nightmare of the Yorkshire school from a more developed perspective than the one advanced in the Readings script - a little like discovering a set of fascinating new rooms in a familiar old house. I'm also reading with one eye squarely locked on the Vincent Crummles sections. I have a crackpot scheme to work fragments of his theatrically-charged patter into a framing device for the show, but I need to check on its suitability (and malleability!) for adaptation first. The Dickens works relevant to my dissertation are The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, two of the Christmas Books and numerous short stories. Critics may shun Dickens's earlier works in favour of later fare such as Bleak House (justifiably acclaimed), Little Dorrit (the eternal snooze-fest) and Great Expectations (alas - now ruined for a generation of A-Level students!), but I'll certainly be going round the block a bit this summer where sheer volume and density of paper consumption is concerned.
I'll probably feel the need to round off the first rehearsal week in a more formal fashion later on. For the moment though, it's enough to say that it's gone alright. Proceedings have ticked by at the rate of two pages a day, but when you're dealing with a fifteen page script, close-typed and A4 in size though it may be, it's a work rate not to be sniffed at. Props are slowly coming together (the fake candles are looking utterly fantastic - to me, at any rate), though I feel a trip to York's charity shops and costume boutiques will be needed at some point next week. As ever, the line-learning is the unpleasant business. I remember a lot of the last-minute tensions on Black Comedy stemming from the company's collective trauma at being unable to get the bloody words out intact - always a killer where farce is concerned. George Potts got off easy on that show (I believe he improvised himself three times the dialogue that Peter Shaffer intended on the final night...), but I later watched him lose a good few pints in terror-sweat when trying to learn meaningless chunks of dialogue before The Relapse (not to single him out or anything - it's just there's only so long that you can pretend there's some degree of logic to whether brass candlesticks and the best china precede wicker chairs or not... and the contrasting void of memorisation in the following week's Silent Canonfire will also have magnified the incident beyond proportion). I fouled up monstrously in Michaelmas with my inability to remember any of the lines in As You Desire Me. That was doubtless the product of my absolute disinterest in the production as a whole, but it was exacerbated by some lazy translation of the Pirandello original (it is most certainly not acceptable to start a character's every line with the word 'what') and my sustained failure to understand the plot (which has blossomed from 'failure' to a sort of lofty, battle-scarred pride recently). No wonder I was laughed off the stage. Nightmare situation. And as for The Alchemist, everyone's lines went madly and anarchically awry throughout, from the first rehearsal balanced on precarious wooden chairs to the last mumpish hiccup that finished it off. I can't imagine how the first night would have panned out had the production gone ahead. It looked set to be a fantastic show... it would just have needed some similarly fantastic ad-libbing to keep the ship afloat.
How then does Dickens stand up to these precedents? Not too badly, actually. Time is on my side. I'm safely out of Cambridge too, which is a big help where this is concerned. One of the perennial failures of Cambridge theatre is the line-learning process. It always seems to be the last priority... Then, all of a sudden, it's too late, and the first performances of a very short run flash by in a haze of panic and stricture. It's possible to argue for the benefits of a shaky grasp of dialogue as tapping into some wild and unpredictable core of spontaneity and energy, but personally speaking, I find that an insult to the playwright (no matter how bad you might consider Luigi Pirandello), dangerously close to expressing contempt for the audience, and deeply difficult to perform through. The text becomes a brick wall in which you search for a crack of meaning by braining yourself against it. Rhythm is the most helpful component in my learning process. I think that explains why I tend to find the 'right' intonation (from my point-of-view anyway) and then cling to it doggedly - and why speed-runs cause the dratted words to become completely unloosed from my mind. With an extended bit of prose, those rhythms have more time to develop, take hold and carry me across an extra few paragraphs. Over half of the lines are entering my head by osmosis, and this is an immediate sign that the absence of university pressure is seeing my brain return to its former efficiency. Line-learning wasn't like revision - like cramming! Oh, not in the golden age! When I used to be able to learn an entire script in the rehearsal room! Although the parts were then a good deal smaller, and when you're playing the Black Imp in gorilla mitts and tight silk trousers for the Poppleton Methodist Players in a Christmas pantomime located in February, who really cares in the first place?
Bit of a tangent there, but an important issue that I think should be addressed more often. Remembering the words is one of an actor's most basic obligations - yet we consistently come so close to compromising this simple requirement at the risk of the audience. I pray that Dickens won't see me repeating the mistakes of the past and eating my words (a bit counterproductive when you're meant to be saying 'em).
At any rate, I'll try to report back with my findings. It won't be a review as such, because by this stage in life I find it pretty much impossible to give an unbiased judgement of anything Callow does. 'Renaissance man' is a term affixed to Callow with the same catchpenny irreverence that Stephen Fry is labelled a 'national treasure' or David Cameron 'that weed-smoking, Bullingdon-bred, floppy-haired twerp'. Whilst none of these labels are completely untrue (there's a grain of truth in every stereotype), Callow's Renaissance connection usually seems to be relegated to his doing a bit of acting, a bit of directing, knocking out the odd book, and then appearing on a chat-show to envelop the furniture and scarf down all the chocolate bourbons like the Ghost of Christmas Present. But 'Renaissance' also conjures up the spirit of a particular historical moment, and for me at least, this conveys an altogether more favourable idea of the generous and benevolent feeling with which Callow infuses his acolytes. 'Renaissance man' can point to Callow the man - the hopelessly lovable individual who wore the loudest waistcoats in creation and vanquished himself with Highland dancing in Four Weddings and a Funeral; who shared some of the most harrowing personal anguish conceivable in Love is Where it Falls (read it or die painfully); who, long before Ian McKellen railed against Section 28, kept trying to out himself to the British press only to find that nobody was really that interested. I shall go and see Callow, enjoy myself thoroughly, and then dedicate some sort of Ode to his majesty.
I decided to order myself a small gift hamper for my return; various oddments to inspire and serenade me at the outset of this lonely rehearsal period. So, here I sit in my bedroom in Acomb, handling the soundtrack to The Muppet Christmas Carol with gnarled and swollen hands. It's a point made so often now that it hardly bears repeating, but yes, it probably is the best all-round version of A Christmas Carol. And the Muppets are solely to its benefit. Deal with it. I've also come into DVD versions of the creaky old film versions of Nicholas Nickleby and The Pickwick Papers. They're generally considered to be a cut below the seminal David Lean adaptations that inspired them - the 1946 Great Expectations and (even better to my way of thinking) the 1948 Oliver Twist, both of which you are strongly encouraged to track down, pronto! - so it'll be interesting to see what makes these particular novels so resistant to cinema. I have my theories, but I'll reserve judgement until I've taken in the films and reviewed them for you here. I'm a little worried about hitting Dickens saturation point this summer, so I better be sensible and remind myself that next term will be more than counterbalanced by the dark and terrible pressures of the Medieval Paper. Or I could scuttle off to watch a bunch of old horror films instead. Does Olivier's Richard III count as horror? The silent version of The Lost World? Arthur Wontner's Holmes films? Until such time as the American majors see fit to unleash their back catalogue of cinemacabre to Region 2 DVD, these semi-sinister substitutes shall suffice (such sibilance... the pretentious git).
I'm reading Nicholas Nickleby at the moment. It's a rollicking good entertainment. It's also refreshing to visit the nightmare of the Yorkshire school from a more developed perspective than the one advanced in the Readings script - a little like discovering a set of fascinating new rooms in a familiar old house. I'm also reading with one eye squarely locked on the Vincent Crummles sections. I have a crackpot scheme to work fragments of his theatrically-charged patter into a framing device for the show, but I need to check on its suitability (and malleability!) for adaptation first. The Dickens works relevant to my dissertation are The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, two of the Christmas Books and numerous short stories. Critics may shun Dickens's earlier works in favour of later fare such as Bleak House (justifiably acclaimed), Little Dorrit (the eternal snooze-fest) and Great Expectations (alas - now ruined for a generation of A-Level students!), but I'll certainly be going round the block a bit this summer where sheer volume and density of paper consumption is concerned.
I'll probably feel the need to round off the first rehearsal week in a more formal fashion later on. For the moment though, it's enough to say that it's gone alright. Proceedings have ticked by at the rate of two pages a day, but when you're dealing with a fifteen page script, close-typed and A4 in size though it may be, it's a work rate not to be sniffed at. Props are slowly coming together (the fake candles are looking utterly fantastic - to me, at any rate), though I feel a trip to York's charity shops and costume boutiques will be needed at some point next week. As ever, the line-learning is the unpleasant business. I remember a lot of the last-minute tensions on Black Comedy stemming from the company's collective trauma at being unable to get the bloody words out intact - always a killer where farce is concerned. George Potts got off easy on that show (I believe he improvised himself three times the dialogue that Peter Shaffer intended on the final night...), but I later watched him lose a good few pints in terror-sweat when trying to learn meaningless chunks of dialogue before The Relapse (not to single him out or anything - it's just there's only so long that you can pretend there's some degree of logic to whether brass candlesticks and the best china precede wicker chairs or not... and the contrasting void of memorisation in the following week's Silent Canonfire will also have magnified the incident beyond proportion). I fouled up monstrously in Michaelmas with my inability to remember any of the lines in As You Desire Me. That was doubtless the product of my absolute disinterest in the production as a whole, but it was exacerbated by some lazy translation of the Pirandello original (it is most certainly not acceptable to start a character's every line with the word 'what') and my sustained failure to understand the plot (which has blossomed from 'failure' to a sort of lofty, battle-scarred pride recently). No wonder I was laughed off the stage. Nightmare situation. And as for The Alchemist, everyone's lines went madly and anarchically awry throughout, from the first rehearsal balanced on precarious wooden chairs to the last mumpish hiccup that finished it off. I can't imagine how the first night would have panned out had the production gone ahead. It looked set to be a fantastic show... it would just have needed some similarly fantastic ad-libbing to keep the ship afloat.
How then does Dickens stand up to these precedents? Not too badly, actually. Time is on my side. I'm safely out of Cambridge too, which is a big help where this is concerned. One of the perennial failures of Cambridge theatre is the line-learning process. It always seems to be the last priority... Then, all of a sudden, it's too late, and the first performances of a very short run flash by in a haze of panic and stricture. It's possible to argue for the benefits of a shaky grasp of dialogue as tapping into some wild and unpredictable core of spontaneity and energy, but personally speaking, I find that an insult to the playwright (no matter how bad you might consider Luigi Pirandello), dangerously close to expressing contempt for the audience, and deeply difficult to perform through. The text becomes a brick wall in which you search for a crack of meaning by braining yourself against it. Rhythm is the most helpful component in my learning process. I think that explains why I tend to find the 'right' intonation (from my point-of-view anyway) and then cling to it doggedly - and why speed-runs cause the dratted words to become completely unloosed from my mind. With an extended bit of prose, those rhythms have more time to develop, take hold and carry me across an extra few paragraphs. Over half of the lines are entering my head by osmosis, and this is an immediate sign that the absence of university pressure is seeing my brain return to its former efficiency. Line-learning wasn't like revision - like cramming! Oh, not in the golden age! When I used to be able to learn an entire script in the rehearsal room! Although the parts were then a good deal smaller, and when you're playing the Black Imp in gorilla mitts and tight silk trousers for the Poppleton Methodist Players in a Christmas pantomime located in February, who really cares in the first place?
Bit of a tangent there, but an important issue that I think should be addressed more often. Remembering the words is one of an actor's most basic obligations - yet we consistently come so close to compromising this simple requirement at the risk of the audience. I pray that Dickens won't see me repeating the mistakes of the past and eating my words (a bit counterproductive when you're meant to be saying 'em).
Thursday 24 June 2010
Guest Speaker #1: George Potts
It would be all too easy to identify George Potts as a character actor. After his first year in Cambridge theatre, he’s no less than a bonafide character star. The chances I’ve had to perform with him account for some of my happiest memories in Cambridge drama – his glorious, mole-like Bamberger in Black Comedy, his slobbering Falstaffian turn as Sir Tunbelly Clumsey in The Relapse (ad-libs… such ad-libs!) and the truly majestic figure of Admiral Bumburstings in Silent Canonfire. George also appeared in The Red Shoes to great acclaim, and will be bestriding the Edinburgh Festival in two shows this August: as Monsieur Richards in The Cure, and the revival of Silent Cannonfire (now sporting an extra ‘n’ for grammar pedants!), which sees the welcome return of the Admiral. Come Michaelmas, he’s going to be Ananias in The Alchemist (what could be more fitting for the Catholic Rep of Homerton?) and give his comedic flair another well-deserved airing in The Life Doctor. Outside of dramatically skewed shenanigans, he's one of the nicest folk imaginable, numbers among the more ridiculously clever people I've met in Cambridge and remains notoriously and inexcusably modest about his talents. He also spreads a number of lies about myself and the Dickens show in this entry. Graargh – naughty fellow, this Potts!
I can’t say as I’m entirely sure why James has asked me to do this blog jobby. My acting credits are far more modest than his, and, in comparison to his glorious purple prose, my writing will look like that of a GSCE Geographer. No offence, if any of those very chaps are reading this. Keep up the good work guys, the world of cartography needs you.
What’s more, I always find this sort of thing heavily embarrassing when it’s written by someone else, let alone me. Actors, actors, all them actor actors, going on about their inspirations, their stories, their history, their passions, like people are really terribly interested in all that blather any more than they’re interested in their genetic makeup. And at least the old hands, or the real life golden starry actors, have got owt interesting to say, or an old anecdote to spin. I’ve not been very alive for very long, relative to, say, an oak tree, or one of those really old giant tortoises you hear about, the ones that supposedly live for a hundred years, or two hundred years I think, I can’t really remember, but it’a definitely very old, but then again they do actually basically just look really old from birth, what with the wrinkled necks and gumless mouths, so it’s a wonder anyone can tell how old they are if you look at it from that perspective, and my alive life hasn’t been especially actorry thus far. Nevertheless, I will endeavour to do what James told me: write about my experiences, what I like about acting, what’s my favourite thing about acting, why do I think acting’s good, and all of those.
So I shall begin at the beginning. Unfortunately, I don’t have a great deal of information on my theatrical beginnings, so instead of documenting them earnestly, I will embellish the details to scramble past this bit. I was born in 1990, an unhappy Piedmontese, growing up in the Trastevere suburbs of Rome, the capital city of the Roman Empire of Rome. Growing up, our resources were scant, and as a child I was forced to survive on a gruelling mixture of ciabattas, tagliatelle, light salads, fresh seafood, cured meats and real coffee. Thankfully, this all changed when my father, Mario Luigi, got a promotion from his job as a plumber/wise-cracking-cafe-owner-with-rolled-up-sleeves-and-a-white-apron, to become a librarian in England. He moved the family over when I was 7, the age of manhood and marriage in Italy, changed the family name from ‘Pizza’ to its English equivalent, ‘Potts’, and soon we had wiped the thought of the old country from our minds and were experiencing everything this great country had to offer, pork scratchings, white vans, semi-industrial localities, pigeon flying, the real Hollywood lifestyle we’d always dreamed of. But my memories of my youth stuck with me always; the first time I’d ever seen a waxed moustache, the smell of Vespa fumes in the evening, how I’d learned to gesture frantically in order to avoid using words, my first confessional (aged 4, I’d robbed a ‘Superdrug’ - Italian for Super Drug - in order to feed my pet mosquito), the lingering sense of neo-fascism in certain wealthy Northern parts of what was once South Tirol where I had never visited. Oh yes, this non-existent up-bringing formed the basis of what soon would become my flourishing theatrical career.
Erm, nothing really happens now until I’m eleven. Sooooooooo let’s just say that for four years I found myself fighting for my country in the jungles of Vietnam, and after being awarded a medal by President O’America, I returned to Wolverhampton to play a vital role in Perry Hall Primary School’s Christmas production, the role of a magician called ‘The Great Gondolfo’, Gondolfo completely coincidentally being my name before it was changed to George. Now, playing Gondolfo was, and remains, the most fun activity I’ve ever experienced. There is nothing, *nothing* that makes a child feel more accepted and accomplished than the ability to make his fellow children laugh or applaud, and believe me, being an immigrant, war veteran and former aquarium owner (that’s a chapter of my life I don’t want to go over here, the memories are still sore, let’s just say ‘squid virus’ and leave it at that), I was absolutely and unequivocally elated. The whole performance was an untrammeled joy for me; prat falls, magic tricks, silly hats, silly voices, whacking people over the head, ludicrous costumes, daft characters, it had it *all* (not down to me mind, down to the script-writing genius of a Mr I. Horton of 6IH). And of course, that is how all this acting malarkey started. By the realisation, nay, revelation, that I could muck about on a raised platform, and rather than telling me off, or sending me to confession, or taking the keys to my orca enclosure, people would enjoy it, or at least seem to do so. I couldn’t believe my luck. Seriously. I mean, I know a lot of actors talk about it being a gift, or a skill, to make people laugh or cry, or people who aren’t actors say that actors give them something by their performance, that they move them, but here is a little secret I am going to let you in on. There is no gift. There is no skill. There’s nowt like that. Anybody can act. Everybody can act. In fact, everybody does act, day in day out, doing stuff, pootling about, mannerisms, chattering, face twitching, all that jazz. ‘Acting’, it has to be said, is a very vague term. It literally just means ‘doing’. Doing summat. I suppose the difference with ‘acting’ in its proper sense, is that you’re doing summat where everyone can see you, on a stage, on the telly, naked on a roof or whatever. Performing, now *there’s* something. Performing takes a real old knack. Why? Because it’s a very hard thing to pull off. One tiny footstep wrong and you could look like a hack-handed ham. Believe me, I know, I’m a dreadful old ham myself, I love a good bellow, or a cheap ad lib, or a grotesque voice, or a frighteningly mobile wig. All the old greats, Olivier, Attenborough, Jacobi, Chuckle, they were brilliant, skillful, measured, tried and tested performers. But why were they good performers?
Because they could ACT. But ho, what a swizz, I hear you cry, just a moment there George, a second ago, you said *anybody* could act! Yeah! cries another! Sod off home you skidmark! cries yet another! He’s rude. Can we get him out please? Yep. Is he gone? OK thanks. Well, original question-putter-to-er, I did say that, anybody can act. But oo, who can act *well*? What even constitutes ‘good’ acting? Clever acting? Impressive acting? Understated acting? Intense acting? Naturalistic acting? *Proper* acting? Is there even such a thing as *proper* acting? What could that even mean? Well whatever it is, these chaps could do it (especially Chuckle, what a phenomenon), and this we know from the responses their work has elicited. This is the marvelous thing about acting, the fact is, *all* of those previous factors have to be incorporated to go some way to defining ‘good’ acting, so many facets and aspects and dimensions and celery and everything. BUT! What am I doing?! I’m rambling and philosophising a load of garbled trash, which isn’t really my bag, especially as I can’t really philosophise, and I don’t really know very much about acting. I can ramble though, I allow myself that at least. I don’t think I’m really one of those Olympic ramblers, who can ramble for days on end and come up with endearing musings on the quaint nature of life, the Universe and everything, but I can blither and blather as well as the next man. I hope. Else this whole article/bloggy-thing will just look like a big old prose effluence. Oh-oh.....
Anyways, what else can I say or talk about to flesh this thing out a bit? Erm. Pffft. I’m struggling, genuinely. It also occurs to me that I shouldn’t write things as I’m thinking them in my head, because that’s quite a daft way to go about it. Still, more words on the page I suppose.
What have I really done with acting? More to the point, what has acting let me be? No, better, *who* has acting let me be? It’s let me be, chronologically, George Harrison, the Great Gondolfo, an Underworld Judge, Man #4, the Pardoner from the Canterbury Tales, Nick Bottom, Mr Scoblowski the Geography teacher, the millionaire Percival Browne, the melancholy Jaques, Ebenezer Scrooge, a bludgeoned German, a fat, farting Lord who *wasn’t* Falstaff, a sexually deviant member of the Royal Navy and a storytelling rockstar cardinal shoemaker. It always feels like so much, but sticking it all down in a list makes me feel woefully unqualified to treat upon acting and its ins and outs. But I don’t mind saying it, I feel very proud to have been all those people at one point or another. Because that’s what acting is, it’s just being other people. I love all that. Excellent fun. A good actor, I think, is an actor with integrity. And by that, I don’t mean ‘oooh he suffers for his art darling, oooh he has his rituals and he sticks to them, oooh he swears by the Stanislavski school, oooh he won’t do a part with less than such and such an amount of lines (or, if I were to be facetious, ‘oooh he respects his elders’, much growling, much growling...)’, by integrity I mean integrity of performance, and integrity of character. An actor, I reckons, in me humble opinion like guv’nor, shouldn’t just believe in what he (or she, or is that actress, or is it sexist to say actress, so are they both called actor? I don’t know, somebody tell me at some point, I’m ignorant) is doing, he should believe he is doing what he’s doing. Literally. Cor, tall order says you. Nope. Actually, it’s far easier than overthinking a role or a performance. It’s all got to be believable see, and if you strip away the self-consciousness of performance, or ‘Acting’ with a capital A, it can go a long way to making it all a bit more believable. Not that I can do this myself mind! I don’t pretend to know how to do all this gumbo, in all honesty, my job onstage usually involves me going on and having a bit of fun, or indeed a lot of fun, depending on how much I can annoy the poor director by adding bits in that shouldn’t really be there, often purely to amuse myself, which is *horribly* selfish but *immensely* entertaining. To me, rarely the audience! Still, there’s me musings on the matter, take ‘em or leave ‘em squire.
This is why I’m a-looking forward to seeing Pickwick and Nickleby. James Swanton is a far more ingenious individual than he’d allow himself to believe (ai questi protestanti inglesi colla loro umilita’!), and although he sometimes reckons he’s just a manic old gurner, his manner of acting is very very lovely. Generous, open, a little agitated and, of course, entirely crazed, it’s a grand old spectacle to behold, and I know he’ll work damnsome hard at this whole thing, and inject it with his usual exquisite concoction of expressiveness, enthusiasm, sensitivity and, as I say, integrity. Having, as he does, the intelligent and imaginative mind of an English student (again, I re-iterate how bizarre it seems to me to be chatting breeze about all this stuff, I study Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, and none of this has anything whatsoever to do with King Alfred, the bishopric of Hamburg-Bremen, the Hauksbok manuscript, the Irish Otherworld or hagiographies), we can be sure that we’re in for a heck of a show, and not just a circus act, I mean a good, solid, juicy bit o’ theatre that we can all enjoy. There y’are James, plugging for yer, FREE plugging. IN YOUR OWN BLOG. Shameful, truly shameful.
I don’t really know how to end this, so I’ll just say goodbye. Or as we say in fictional Italy, ‘vaffanculo’. Or ‘moynd aa yer goo’ in Black Country dialect. Cheers for having a read of this, if you’ve had one. Come and see the show, it is good and it is nice.
So.
Bye then.
Tadda.
I can’t say as I’m entirely sure why James has asked me to do this blog jobby. My acting credits are far more modest than his, and, in comparison to his glorious purple prose, my writing will look like that of a GSCE Geographer. No offence, if any of those very chaps are reading this. Keep up the good work guys, the world of cartography needs you.
What’s more, I always find this sort of thing heavily embarrassing when it’s written by someone else, let alone me. Actors, actors, all them actor actors, going on about their inspirations, their stories, their history, their passions, like people are really terribly interested in all that blather any more than they’re interested in their genetic makeup. And at least the old hands, or the real life golden starry actors, have got owt interesting to say, or an old anecdote to spin. I’ve not been very alive for very long, relative to, say, an oak tree, or one of those really old giant tortoises you hear about, the ones that supposedly live for a hundred years, or two hundred years I think, I can’t really remember, but it’a definitely very old, but then again they do actually basically just look really old from birth, what with the wrinkled necks and gumless mouths, so it’s a wonder anyone can tell how old they are if you look at it from that perspective, and my alive life hasn’t been especially actorry thus far. Nevertheless, I will endeavour to do what James told me: write about my experiences, what I like about acting, what’s my favourite thing about acting, why do I think acting’s good, and all of those.
So I shall begin at the beginning. Unfortunately, I don’t have a great deal of information on my theatrical beginnings, so instead of documenting them earnestly, I will embellish the details to scramble past this bit. I was born in 1990, an unhappy Piedmontese, growing up in the Trastevere suburbs of Rome, the capital city of the Roman Empire of Rome. Growing up, our resources were scant, and as a child I was forced to survive on a gruelling mixture of ciabattas, tagliatelle, light salads, fresh seafood, cured meats and real coffee. Thankfully, this all changed when my father, Mario Luigi, got a promotion from his job as a plumber/wise-cracking-cafe-owner-with-rolled-up-sleeves-and-a-white-apron, to become a librarian in England. He moved the family over when I was 7, the age of manhood and marriage in Italy, changed the family name from ‘Pizza’ to its English equivalent, ‘Potts’, and soon we had wiped the thought of the old country from our minds and were experiencing everything this great country had to offer, pork scratchings, white vans, semi-industrial localities, pigeon flying, the real Hollywood lifestyle we’d always dreamed of. But my memories of my youth stuck with me always; the first time I’d ever seen a waxed moustache, the smell of Vespa fumes in the evening, how I’d learned to gesture frantically in order to avoid using words, my first confessional (aged 4, I’d robbed a ‘Superdrug’ - Italian for Super Drug - in order to feed my pet mosquito), the lingering sense of neo-fascism in certain wealthy Northern parts of what was once South Tirol where I had never visited. Oh yes, this non-existent up-bringing formed the basis of what soon would become my flourishing theatrical career.
Erm, nothing really happens now until I’m eleven. Sooooooooo let’s just say that for four years I found myself fighting for my country in the jungles of Vietnam, and after being awarded a medal by President O’America, I returned to Wolverhampton to play a vital role in Perry Hall Primary School’s Christmas production, the role of a magician called ‘The Great Gondolfo’, Gondolfo completely coincidentally being my name before it was changed to George. Now, playing Gondolfo was, and remains, the most fun activity I’ve ever experienced. There is nothing, *nothing* that makes a child feel more accepted and accomplished than the ability to make his fellow children laugh or applaud, and believe me, being an immigrant, war veteran and former aquarium owner (that’s a chapter of my life I don’t want to go over here, the memories are still sore, let’s just say ‘squid virus’ and leave it at that), I was absolutely and unequivocally elated. The whole performance was an untrammeled joy for me; prat falls, magic tricks, silly hats, silly voices, whacking people over the head, ludicrous costumes, daft characters, it had it *all* (not down to me mind, down to the script-writing genius of a Mr I. Horton of 6IH). And of course, that is how all this acting malarkey started. By the realisation, nay, revelation, that I could muck about on a raised platform, and rather than telling me off, or sending me to confession, or taking the keys to my orca enclosure, people would enjoy it, or at least seem to do so. I couldn’t believe my luck. Seriously. I mean, I know a lot of actors talk about it being a gift, or a skill, to make people laugh or cry, or people who aren’t actors say that actors give them something by their performance, that they move them, but here is a little secret I am going to let you in on. There is no gift. There is no skill. There’s nowt like that. Anybody can act. Everybody can act. In fact, everybody does act, day in day out, doing stuff, pootling about, mannerisms, chattering, face twitching, all that jazz. ‘Acting’, it has to be said, is a very vague term. It literally just means ‘doing’. Doing summat. I suppose the difference with ‘acting’ in its proper sense, is that you’re doing summat where everyone can see you, on a stage, on the telly, naked on a roof or whatever. Performing, now *there’s* something. Performing takes a real old knack. Why? Because it’s a very hard thing to pull off. One tiny footstep wrong and you could look like a hack-handed ham. Believe me, I know, I’m a dreadful old ham myself, I love a good bellow, or a cheap ad lib, or a grotesque voice, or a frighteningly mobile wig. All the old greats, Olivier, Attenborough, Jacobi, Chuckle, they were brilliant, skillful, measured, tried and tested performers. But why were they good performers?
Because they could ACT. But ho, what a swizz, I hear you cry, just a moment there George, a second ago, you said *anybody* could act! Yeah! cries another! Sod off home you skidmark! cries yet another! He’s rude. Can we get him out please? Yep. Is he gone? OK thanks. Well, original question-putter-to-er, I did say that, anybody can act. But oo, who can act *well*? What even constitutes ‘good’ acting? Clever acting? Impressive acting? Understated acting? Intense acting? Naturalistic acting? *Proper* acting? Is there even such a thing as *proper* acting? What could that even mean? Well whatever it is, these chaps could do it (especially Chuckle, what a phenomenon), and this we know from the responses their work has elicited. This is the marvelous thing about acting, the fact is, *all* of those previous factors have to be incorporated to go some way to defining ‘good’ acting, so many facets and aspects and dimensions and celery and everything. BUT! What am I doing?! I’m rambling and philosophising a load of garbled trash, which isn’t really my bag, especially as I can’t really philosophise, and I don’t really know very much about acting. I can ramble though, I allow myself that at least. I don’t think I’m really one of those Olympic ramblers, who can ramble for days on end and come up with endearing musings on the quaint nature of life, the Universe and everything, but I can blither and blather as well as the next man. I hope. Else this whole article/bloggy-thing will just look like a big old prose effluence. Oh-oh.....
Anyways, what else can I say or talk about to flesh this thing out a bit? Erm. Pffft. I’m struggling, genuinely. It also occurs to me that I shouldn’t write things as I’m thinking them in my head, because that’s quite a daft way to go about it. Still, more words on the page I suppose.
What have I really done with acting? More to the point, what has acting let me be? No, better, *who* has acting let me be? It’s let me be, chronologically, George Harrison, the Great Gondolfo, an Underworld Judge, Man #4, the Pardoner from the Canterbury Tales, Nick Bottom, Mr Scoblowski the Geography teacher, the millionaire Percival Browne, the melancholy Jaques, Ebenezer Scrooge, a bludgeoned German, a fat, farting Lord who *wasn’t* Falstaff, a sexually deviant member of the Royal Navy and a storytelling rockstar cardinal shoemaker. It always feels like so much, but sticking it all down in a list makes me feel woefully unqualified to treat upon acting and its ins and outs. But I don’t mind saying it, I feel very proud to have been all those people at one point or another. Because that’s what acting is, it’s just being other people. I love all that. Excellent fun. A good actor, I think, is an actor with integrity. And by that, I don’t mean ‘oooh he suffers for his art darling, oooh he has his rituals and he sticks to them, oooh he swears by the Stanislavski school, oooh he won’t do a part with less than such and such an amount of lines (or, if I were to be facetious, ‘oooh he respects his elders’, much growling, much growling...)’, by integrity I mean integrity of performance, and integrity of character. An actor, I reckons, in me humble opinion like guv’nor, shouldn’t just believe in what he (or she, or is that actress, or is it sexist to say actress, so are they both called actor? I don’t know, somebody tell me at some point, I’m ignorant) is doing, he should believe he is doing what he’s doing. Literally. Cor, tall order says you. Nope. Actually, it’s far easier than overthinking a role or a performance. It’s all got to be believable see, and if you strip away the self-consciousness of performance, or ‘Acting’ with a capital A, it can go a long way to making it all a bit more believable. Not that I can do this myself mind! I don’t pretend to know how to do all this gumbo, in all honesty, my job onstage usually involves me going on and having a bit of fun, or indeed a lot of fun, depending on how much I can annoy the poor director by adding bits in that shouldn’t really be there, often purely to amuse myself, which is *horribly* selfish but *immensely* entertaining. To me, rarely the audience! Still, there’s me musings on the matter, take ‘em or leave ‘em squire.
This is why I’m a-looking forward to seeing Pickwick and Nickleby. James Swanton is a far more ingenious individual than he’d allow himself to believe (ai questi protestanti inglesi colla loro umilita’!), and although he sometimes reckons he’s just a manic old gurner, his manner of acting is very very lovely. Generous, open, a little agitated and, of course, entirely crazed, it’s a grand old spectacle to behold, and I know he’ll work damnsome hard at this whole thing, and inject it with his usual exquisite concoction of expressiveness, enthusiasm, sensitivity and, as I say, integrity. Having, as he does, the intelligent and imaginative mind of an English student (again, I re-iterate how bizarre it seems to me to be chatting breeze about all this stuff, I study Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, and none of this has anything whatsoever to do with King Alfred, the bishopric of Hamburg-Bremen, the Hauksbok manuscript, the Irish Otherworld or hagiographies), we can be sure that we’re in for a heck of a show, and not just a circus act, I mean a good, solid, juicy bit o’ theatre that we can all enjoy. There y’are James, plugging for yer, FREE plugging. IN YOUR OWN BLOG. Shameful, truly shameful.
I don’t really know how to end this, so I’ll just say goodbye. Or as we say in fictional Italy, ‘vaffanculo’. Or ‘moynd aa yer goo’ in Black Country dialect. Cheers for having a read of this, if you’ve had one. Come and see the show, it is good and it is nice.
So.
Bye then.
Tadda.
Thursday 17 June 2010
A Dickens of a Time!
I promised I'd go into some of the preparations being made for Pickwick & Nickleby this time round. All manner of doings have been afoot - I've behaved just as manically as the papers would have you believe. Hell has broken loose, reassembled itself via an ingenious compound of glue and elastic, broken even looser and tossed itself into an incinerator so as never to endure such patronising overtures again. The next time I meet with my devoted creatives will be six weeks before the show starts - normally a luxury in Cambridge theatre, but well under a third of my projected rehearsal schedule. As Gielgud used to say (somewhat prissily, but with a ring of absolute authority), 'the preparation is the all!' Although I type this from the fuzzy domestic comfort of York, where life unravels in a half-conscious blur of preliminary rehearsals, Dickens novels and antiquated episodes of Chance in a Million, I'll be focusing on that last round of mad days in Cambridge for the present.
I've rhapsodised about Chrystal's general aura of splendour before, but this time the gushing is warranted more than ever. Quite simply, she deserves some sort of canonisation for her limitless reserves of patience and resourcefulness in shooting the poster image. Several strokes of good luck were whipped into shape in an extended fit of creative haste. Our striking red polyester napkins (remember them?) were miraculously photoshopped into some semblance of background despite their stubborn refusal to cover up the wall as fully as we'd have liked. Thanks to Jack's well-timed assistance, we came into a beautiful black top hat at precisely the right moment - a vital visual flourish that had proved amazingly difficult to source amongst one of the most pretentious gatherings of people on earth. (A less than proud memory is my fleeting scheme to purloin this holy grail of headwear from a King's chorister, push the young scamp into the dust and scamper off into the distance, pausing intermittently to bay at the moon). In a slight moment of horror, I realised that the golden picture frame I was wielding recalled the set of The Mystery of Charles Dickens perhaps a little too distinctly. Despite my limitless admiration for Simon Callow and the show he filled so supremely - or, to be more accurate, because of it - I remain desperate to avoid any cross-overs or comparisons between the two - accidental or otherwise! They must be completely different animals, and I say this with full knowledge that Peter Ackroyd interpolated severely shortened versions of both the Pickwick and Nickleby readings within the earlier show, which Callow performed with expected bombast and aplomb. At least the poster design doesn't mimic Callow's - as with the images for his current Shakespeare show, the Dickens design was dominated by his lined and characterful mug. I want no such thing. If the show's a disaster - and such things can't be ruled out, particularly with a performance format that hinges on total personal exposure - the last thing I want is instant facial recognition. The setting sun meant another dilemma and another change. To be more precise, a change of some ninety-odd (none odder) degrees, swivelling to a recumbent posture beneath a bedroom window to better catch the light, my scrawny neck propped up with a makeshift tangle of cloth, the top hat needing to be deftly punched back onto my head at set intervals, the looming, Peeping Tom style tripod getting gradually more tangled in my attenuated legs. In the end, we went with one of the earlier pictures, and it's sure to make for an elegant and entirely appropriate design.
Chrystal seems set to take over the ADC with her latest splurge of artistic wizardry. As well as Pickwick & Nickleby (which we both agree to be the least of her concerns), she's going to be tinkering away on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Rent and Passing By. She's also heading up to Edinburgh to perform publicity duties for The Cure, the script of which she's already spoken about with great enthusiasm. I'm becoming steadily more envious of anyone travelling up to Edinburgh by this point in time, now it's finally dawned that a great amount of people that I care about will be cut out of my life for a good three months. I'll resolve to stick with the familiar and preserve my cocoon of social awkwardness at The York Dungeon instead. The thought of returning always buoyed me up through a somewhat tempestuous Michaelmas, and the added thrill of getting to burn witches this time round made the opportunity of returning too good to pass up. There's also the minor fiduciary issue of getting paid to shout and bump into the furniture at home rather than travelling to Scotland to be fleeced for the privilege. It's money that I just don't have right now. Despite such arguments and defences, I still think of it as a bit of a pity. I will go to Edinburgh someday, but now is not the time.
The very first read-through of Pickwick & Nickleby also warrants a mention. An unconventional Saturday, to say the least. For a cluster of reasons I'll go into later, we'd gone and pencilled in an almost perilously early morning slot for the reading. Despite the joys of pivoting my frame into for the benefit of Chrystal's camera lens, reversing this simple operation after an extended rest has recently started to verge on the impossible, and it was with bleary eyes and muttered curses that I stumbled into vague animation. I listened to Ravel's Bolero on the way to Christ's College, which fortunately got my blood rushing and instilled me with an inflated sense of purpose. James (the other one, the directorish fellow) and myself perched on a bench in one of the more desolate and sequestered corners of Christ's. All things considered, it went quite well. I'll detail a few fragmentary nuggets that occurred to me in the eye of the theatrically-charged storm:
Character voices: A decidedly mixed bag. Some go well, some go badly, some flicker in and out of focus like spirits at a seance. Among the victors are Justice Stareleigh (The York Dungeon offers a crash course in poisonous, venom-spitting ministers of law), Serjeant Buzfuz (a Will Seaward parody is always good grounding), Mrs Cluppins (surprisingly, given that's it's no more than a well-weathered impression of my secondary school librarian), Mr Skimpin (thank you, Kenneth Williams), Wackford Squeers (a voice that seems to occupy three separate channels, but it'll get there) and Mrs Squeers (it's not only joyful to make her as masculine as possible, but surprisingly easy). Struggling in limbo are Mr Pickwick (breathiness seems right for this chap, but it always sounds forced, camp and deliberate to me when professional actors try it), Mr Winkle (too many voices in the upper register flying about in his vignette - and that'll be the first thing to go when my voice is under strain) and Sam Weller (I honestly can do pseudo-cockney - it's just that it precipitates a Tommy Cooper scale confusion here, with Buzfuz's accent becoming fogged and besmirched with H-dropping and L-glottalisation). Positively bad are Nicholas Nickleby and Smike, for a sinewy set of reasons I'll delve into below.
Liquid refreshment: With typical resourceful stupidity, I'd gone to the back-breaking trouble of filling a bottle of water before absent-mindedly leaving it in my room at Selwyn. That I managed to maintain full shouting power despite a fatal lack of hydration was very encouraging, and bodes well for the future.
Breath and saliva: The messy business that you tend to overlook. Over the course of the reading, I generate a whopping great quantity of both. I'm reasonably confident that heavy breathing and assorted gaspings can be regulated. Past experience of those mercifully rare but hyper-intensive four hour shifts at The York Dungeon has taught me that such things can always be covered - no matter how much physical discomfort you're experiencing, there tends to be a way of hiding it. Saliva is an unprecedented and unappealing embarrassment. It mars pronunication by bunching up around the tongue in rabid bubble clusters or else gathers at the corners of the mouth to form deep and slimy crevasses. While we're on the subject of assorted drippings and leakings, I'm guessing that sweat will also become a problem once unseated from the pastoral tranquility of Cambridge's scenic gardens and stuffed into the sixty-seater electric-powered oven of the Larkum. A handkerchief will be required. And, my goodness, we have handkerchiefs already... Another piece of the puzzle!
Sincerity: Nicholas and Smike look set to kill me. They have the only moments of sincere emotion in the show, and reining in the comic mania is almost ridiculously difficult after some forty minutes of ranting and raving. I think I originally conceived of performing their sections in an exaggerated and deliberately stylised manner, falling back on the conventions of Victorian stage melodrama as justification for an inexcusable lack of self-exposure. My faith in that approach has died now, although I suppose it remains a back-up plan if all else fails. There's a great danger of Smike going the way of the Elephant Man with that showy approach, and degenerating into a dissonant, incoherent heap of hisses and moans. It's an approach that I strongly resisted when I played John Merrick a few years ago, in line with Bernard Pomerance's stern injunction that 'any attempt to reproduce his appearance and his speech naturalistically - if it were possible - would seem to me not only counterproductive, but, the more remarkably successful, the more distracting from the play'. Smike has to have some touch of strangeness, of weirdness, of the 'other', but perhaps that should come from within rather than without. My ongoing hatred of my own voice makes Nicholas particularly irritating. There's no hope of embellishment when a character shares your age (like the Nicholas of the novel, I'll still be nineteen when I take to the stage). You have to make do with what's already there. Forcing my pompous, self-satisfied drawl into the locutions of this callow youth will demand all the subtlety and understatement I'm hardly renowned for delivering. We'll see what happens.
Hermit instinct: Whenever someone appeared on the horizon, I found myself freezing up, unable to continue until they'd trotted off again. Probably not a cause for major concern - the wish to guard yourself against accusations of schizophrenia in public is markedly different to imitating the condition for a paying audience - but I do hope that the nakedness of the one-person format isn't going to ramp up the stage fright to an unreasonable fever pitch. I know that I'm kidding myself. No matter how well prepared I am, I'm going to be absolutely bloody terrified, and this hermit predilection is no more than an early symptom of that.
Severe discomfort: A sudden lack of faith in the material. Acute awareness of the words as a spidery black jumble impressed on blinding white instead of a clear communication of meaning. This is a phenomenon of read-throughs in general, I find. Forget your artistic integrity - the true art of the read-through is how well you can act on autopilot. I can sight-read with the best of them, but I'm not one of the prodigious few who takes in the sense along with the sound - not first time, at any rate. Read-throughs mean instant recourse to bad habits, which perhaps accounts for nearly all of the character voices detailed above springing from impressions or rehashes over unsullied and allegedly 'pure' interpretations. This is a necessary evil though. Get the read-through out of the way, learn the lines as soon as you ever can, and allow the piece to grow from there.
I complain a lot in the above, but this is all healthy. It shows that the piece is developing, and on the whole I was amazed at how smoothly the process went. With this hurdle jumped, I trundled off (late) to rehearsals for Love's Labour's Lost and The Importance of Being Earnest. 'Twas the day of three rehearsals. An exceptional circumstance, the fatigue of which could be relieved only with a hearty feast of Fox's Viennese biscuits.
I also had the great pleasure of meeting up with Will Seaward again. Few people in life are so refreshingly or dependably consistent in their behaviour. Will was his usual ebullient self - a Falstaff for all seasons. Will kindly agreed to read over a copy of the script, and it was brilliant to get a bit of insight from an individual experienced in staging various different modulations of insanity. This resulted in a few very pertinent observations about internal geography, drop-boxes, the angular limitations of metra-deck, and other exquisitely runic, hush-hush matters that will be kept up under wraps to keep the show's blossoming looniness a passable secret. Andy Brock was also hugely encouraging when I ran into him in that most disquietingly networky of places, the ADC Bar. Like Will, he's a fantastic ally so far as he's had enough outside experience to be able to keep his ingenuity free of the Cambridge bubble and the conventional ways of creating theatre. My discussion with him became the foundation for a complete turnover of my fairly lame design concept. Panicked into whipping my blank document into some semblance of substance ahead of the application, I'd invented some underhand, self-satisfied scenario centered on making the Larkum's simplicity into a virtue by endowing it with the deft elegance of a magician's stage show. Fatuous nonsense to be honest, very A-Level Theatre Studies so far as ticking the boxes went, but just about good enough for that stage in the process I reckon. Now things are on the up and up, and my burgeoning financial breakdown at the purchase of a small mountain of fake candles is testament to that I hope.
As a postscript, I'm pleased to say that Love's Labour's Lost surpassed all expectations. I felt a little trepidation about getting involved in it at first, particularly in light of a couple of apocryphal stories about the Herculean difficulties behind dragging Caesar's corpse into the gardens last year. Despite the positive things I'd heard about the final production, trauma is always to be avoided. In the end though, it was wonderfully diverting, and exemplified the wanton frivolity upheld by May Week tradition. The laugh quota was pleasingly high, which is rarely the case in Shakespeare, particularly at an amateur level. We had an entirely unexpected four-star review in Varsity too, which efficiently removed the common dampener of the generic student reviewer's twisted and capricious sense of superiority to the material. Reviewing, as with acting, should be grounded on compassion - not contempt - and compassion we received in spades. I got a disproportionately long mention for what was little more than a walk-on role as Dull (after all, I was the only member of a rather large cast playing more than one character) and that was fairly gratifying. As with getting these parts in the first place, it's disarmingly gracious when people go out of their way to be charitable, even in the context of a throwaway May Week jaunt. It wasn't a great performance by any measure, just a heap of bad habits congealed into one monstrous, ungainly lump of Dull. Where it did prove useful was as a dry run for Serjeant Buzfuz. If the blustering bass voice can be achieved and sustained sufficiently to override lorries and planes, aural security is assured in the cosy confines of the Larkum. The Importance of Being Earnest went swimmingly as well, so I'll try to catalogue a few of that production's highlights when I get the time.
As ever, theatrical dabblings remain a fine antidote to reality. And avoiding reality is the supreme virtue and accomplishment of Cambridge life in general.
I've rhapsodised about Chrystal's general aura of splendour before, but this time the gushing is warranted more than ever. Quite simply, she deserves some sort of canonisation for her limitless reserves of patience and resourcefulness in shooting the poster image. Several strokes of good luck were whipped into shape in an extended fit of creative haste. Our striking red polyester napkins (remember them?) were miraculously photoshopped into some semblance of background despite their stubborn refusal to cover up the wall as fully as we'd have liked. Thanks to Jack's well-timed assistance, we came into a beautiful black top hat at precisely the right moment - a vital visual flourish that had proved amazingly difficult to source amongst one of the most pretentious gatherings of people on earth. (A less than proud memory is my fleeting scheme to purloin this holy grail of headwear from a King's chorister, push the young scamp into the dust and scamper off into the distance, pausing intermittently to bay at the moon). In a slight moment of horror, I realised that the golden picture frame I was wielding recalled the set of The Mystery of Charles Dickens perhaps a little too distinctly. Despite my limitless admiration for Simon Callow and the show he filled so supremely - or, to be more accurate, because of it - I remain desperate to avoid any cross-overs or comparisons between the two - accidental or otherwise! They must be completely different animals, and I say this with full knowledge that Peter Ackroyd interpolated severely shortened versions of both the Pickwick and Nickleby readings within the earlier show, which Callow performed with expected bombast and aplomb. At least the poster design doesn't mimic Callow's - as with the images for his current Shakespeare show, the Dickens design was dominated by his lined and characterful mug. I want no such thing. If the show's a disaster - and such things can't be ruled out, particularly with a performance format that hinges on total personal exposure - the last thing I want is instant facial recognition. The setting sun meant another dilemma and another change. To be more precise, a change of some ninety-odd (none odder) degrees, swivelling to a recumbent posture beneath a bedroom window to better catch the light, my scrawny neck propped up with a makeshift tangle of cloth, the top hat needing to be deftly punched back onto my head at set intervals, the looming, Peeping Tom style tripod getting gradually more tangled in my attenuated legs. In the end, we went with one of the earlier pictures, and it's sure to make for an elegant and entirely appropriate design.
Chrystal seems set to take over the ADC with her latest splurge of artistic wizardry. As well as Pickwick & Nickleby (which we both agree to be the least of her concerns), she's going to be tinkering away on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Rent and Passing By. She's also heading up to Edinburgh to perform publicity duties for The Cure, the script of which she's already spoken about with great enthusiasm. I'm becoming steadily more envious of anyone travelling up to Edinburgh by this point in time, now it's finally dawned that a great amount of people that I care about will be cut out of my life for a good three months. I'll resolve to stick with the familiar and preserve my cocoon of social awkwardness at The York Dungeon instead. The thought of returning always buoyed me up through a somewhat tempestuous Michaelmas, and the added thrill of getting to burn witches this time round made the opportunity of returning too good to pass up. There's also the minor fiduciary issue of getting paid to shout and bump into the furniture at home rather than travelling to Scotland to be fleeced for the privilege. It's money that I just don't have right now. Despite such arguments and defences, I still think of it as a bit of a pity. I will go to Edinburgh someday, but now is not the time.
The very first read-through of Pickwick & Nickleby also warrants a mention. An unconventional Saturday, to say the least. For a cluster of reasons I'll go into later, we'd gone and pencilled in an almost perilously early morning slot for the reading. Despite the joys of pivoting my frame into for the benefit of Chrystal's camera lens, reversing this simple operation after an extended rest has recently started to verge on the impossible, and it was with bleary eyes and muttered curses that I stumbled into vague animation. I listened to Ravel's Bolero on the way to Christ's College, which fortunately got my blood rushing and instilled me with an inflated sense of purpose. James (the other one, the directorish fellow) and myself perched on a bench in one of the more desolate and sequestered corners of Christ's. All things considered, it went quite well. I'll detail a few fragmentary nuggets that occurred to me in the eye of the theatrically-charged storm:
Character voices: A decidedly mixed bag. Some go well, some go badly, some flicker in and out of focus like spirits at a seance. Among the victors are Justice Stareleigh (The York Dungeon offers a crash course in poisonous, venom-spitting ministers of law), Serjeant Buzfuz (a Will Seaward parody is always good grounding), Mrs Cluppins (surprisingly, given that's it's no more than a well-weathered impression of my secondary school librarian), Mr Skimpin (thank you, Kenneth Williams), Wackford Squeers (a voice that seems to occupy three separate channels, but it'll get there) and Mrs Squeers (it's not only joyful to make her as masculine as possible, but surprisingly easy). Struggling in limbo are Mr Pickwick (breathiness seems right for this chap, but it always sounds forced, camp and deliberate to me when professional actors try it), Mr Winkle (too many voices in the upper register flying about in his vignette - and that'll be the first thing to go when my voice is under strain) and Sam Weller (I honestly can do pseudo-cockney - it's just that it precipitates a Tommy Cooper scale confusion here, with Buzfuz's accent becoming fogged and besmirched with H-dropping and L-glottalisation). Positively bad are Nicholas Nickleby and Smike, for a sinewy set of reasons I'll delve into below.
Liquid refreshment: With typical resourceful stupidity, I'd gone to the back-breaking trouble of filling a bottle of water before absent-mindedly leaving it in my room at Selwyn. That I managed to maintain full shouting power despite a fatal lack of hydration was very encouraging, and bodes well for the future.
Breath and saliva: The messy business that you tend to overlook. Over the course of the reading, I generate a whopping great quantity of both. I'm reasonably confident that heavy breathing and assorted gaspings can be regulated. Past experience of those mercifully rare but hyper-intensive four hour shifts at The York Dungeon has taught me that such things can always be covered - no matter how much physical discomfort you're experiencing, there tends to be a way of hiding it. Saliva is an unprecedented and unappealing embarrassment. It mars pronunication by bunching up around the tongue in rabid bubble clusters or else gathers at the corners of the mouth to form deep and slimy crevasses. While we're on the subject of assorted drippings and leakings, I'm guessing that sweat will also become a problem once unseated from the pastoral tranquility of Cambridge's scenic gardens and stuffed into the sixty-seater electric-powered oven of the Larkum. A handkerchief will be required. And, my goodness, we have handkerchiefs already... Another piece of the puzzle!
Sincerity: Nicholas and Smike look set to kill me. They have the only moments of sincere emotion in the show, and reining in the comic mania is almost ridiculously difficult after some forty minutes of ranting and raving. I think I originally conceived of performing their sections in an exaggerated and deliberately stylised manner, falling back on the conventions of Victorian stage melodrama as justification for an inexcusable lack of self-exposure. My faith in that approach has died now, although I suppose it remains a back-up plan if all else fails. There's a great danger of Smike going the way of the Elephant Man with that showy approach, and degenerating into a dissonant, incoherent heap of hisses and moans. It's an approach that I strongly resisted when I played John Merrick a few years ago, in line with Bernard Pomerance's stern injunction that 'any attempt to reproduce his appearance and his speech naturalistically - if it were possible - would seem to me not only counterproductive, but, the more remarkably successful, the more distracting from the play'. Smike has to have some touch of strangeness, of weirdness, of the 'other', but perhaps that should come from within rather than without. My ongoing hatred of my own voice makes Nicholas particularly irritating. There's no hope of embellishment when a character shares your age (like the Nicholas of the novel, I'll still be nineteen when I take to the stage). You have to make do with what's already there. Forcing my pompous, self-satisfied drawl into the locutions of this callow youth will demand all the subtlety and understatement I'm hardly renowned for delivering. We'll see what happens.
Hermit instinct: Whenever someone appeared on the horizon, I found myself freezing up, unable to continue until they'd trotted off again. Probably not a cause for major concern - the wish to guard yourself against accusations of schizophrenia in public is markedly different to imitating the condition for a paying audience - but I do hope that the nakedness of the one-person format isn't going to ramp up the stage fright to an unreasonable fever pitch. I know that I'm kidding myself. No matter how well prepared I am, I'm going to be absolutely bloody terrified, and this hermit predilection is no more than an early symptom of that.
Severe discomfort: A sudden lack of faith in the material. Acute awareness of the words as a spidery black jumble impressed on blinding white instead of a clear communication of meaning. This is a phenomenon of read-throughs in general, I find. Forget your artistic integrity - the true art of the read-through is how well you can act on autopilot. I can sight-read with the best of them, but I'm not one of the prodigious few who takes in the sense along with the sound - not first time, at any rate. Read-throughs mean instant recourse to bad habits, which perhaps accounts for nearly all of the character voices detailed above springing from impressions or rehashes over unsullied and allegedly 'pure' interpretations. This is a necessary evil though. Get the read-through out of the way, learn the lines as soon as you ever can, and allow the piece to grow from there.
I complain a lot in the above, but this is all healthy. It shows that the piece is developing, and on the whole I was amazed at how smoothly the process went. With this hurdle jumped, I trundled off (late) to rehearsals for Love's Labour's Lost and The Importance of Being Earnest. 'Twas the day of three rehearsals. An exceptional circumstance, the fatigue of which could be relieved only with a hearty feast of Fox's Viennese biscuits.
I also had the great pleasure of meeting up with Will Seaward again. Few people in life are so refreshingly or dependably consistent in their behaviour. Will was his usual ebullient self - a Falstaff for all seasons. Will kindly agreed to read over a copy of the script, and it was brilliant to get a bit of insight from an individual experienced in staging various different modulations of insanity. This resulted in a few very pertinent observations about internal geography, drop-boxes, the angular limitations of metra-deck, and other exquisitely runic, hush-hush matters that will be kept up under wraps to keep the show's blossoming looniness a passable secret. Andy Brock was also hugely encouraging when I ran into him in that most disquietingly networky of places, the ADC Bar. Like Will, he's a fantastic ally so far as he's had enough outside experience to be able to keep his ingenuity free of the Cambridge bubble and the conventional ways of creating theatre. My discussion with him became the foundation for a complete turnover of my fairly lame design concept. Panicked into whipping my blank document into some semblance of substance ahead of the application, I'd invented some underhand, self-satisfied scenario centered on making the Larkum's simplicity into a virtue by endowing it with the deft elegance of a magician's stage show. Fatuous nonsense to be honest, very A-Level Theatre Studies so far as ticking the boxes went, but just about good enough for that stage in the process I reckon. Now things are on the up and up, and my burgeoning financial breakdown at the purchase of a small mountain of fake candles is testament to that I hope.
As a postscript, I'm pleased to say that Love's Labour's Lost surpassed all expectations. I felt a little trepidation about getting involved in it at first, particularly in light of a couple of apocryphal stories about the Herculean difficulties behind dragging Caesar's corpse into the gardens last year. Despite the positive things I'd heard about the final production, trauma is always to be avoided. In the end though, it was wonderfully diverting, and exemplified the wanton frivolity upheld by May Week tradition. The laugh quota was pleasingly high, which is rarely the case in Shakespeare, particularly at an amateur level. We had an entirely unexpected four-star review in Varsity too, which efficiently removed the common dampener of the generic student reviewer's twisted and capricious sense of superiority to the material. Reviewing, as with acting, should be grounded on compassion - not contempt - and compassion we received in spades. I got a disproportionately long mention for what was little more than a walk-on role as Dull (after all, I was the only member of a rather large cast playing more than one character) and that was fairly gratifying. As with getting these parts in the first place, it's disarmingly gracious when people go out of their way to be charitable, even in the context of a throwaway May Week jaunt. It wasn't a great performance by any measure, just a heap of bad habits congealed into one monstrous, ungainly lump of Dull. Where it did prove useful was as a dry run for Serjeant Buzfuz. If the blustering bass voice can be achieved and sustained sufficiently to override lorries and planes, aural security is assured in the cosy confines of the Larkum. The Importance of Being Earnest went swimmingly as well, so I'll try to catalogue a few of that production's highlights when I get the time.
As ever, theatrical dabblings remain a fine antidote to reality. And avoiding reality is the supreme virtue and accomplishment of Cambridge life in general.
Wednesday 9 June 2010
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'.
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'.
Sunday 6 June 2010
Disappointment
Bloody hell. This is a bit much to take. The Country Wife has been cancelled. No, I wasn't properly prepared for it. No, we hadn't had a great deal of rehearsals. But bloody hell! This is intolerable. Every production I've touched this term has withered away into nothingness. Hindsight is a beautiful thing. I know now that I should have accepted Measure for Measure when the part was there. Now I'll just be all bitter and acerbic and begrudgingly trundle from play to play, feeling a general envy for everyone else having a grand old time making theatre. Very sad, very depressing. Not the end of the world, of course. But a bitter pill to take. I'm only here for two more years! cries the panicky voice in my head. And those years are going to be so much busier than this one! With exams thrown in for good measure! So, just as I bid goodbye to the spirit of Abel Drugger, immortal in his purple bow-tie and Holmes-esque pipe, so too must I take leave of Mr Pinchwife, resplendent in tweed and now perpetually doomed to worry whether his wife is cuckolding him. There's a great sadness when these characters aren't allowed to get out. Sounds like a load of romantically-charged codswallop, but the despair is heartfelt.
Not really sure what to do now. Probably the best to come from this will be some genuine rehearsals for the Dickens show. I was going to be saving my voice for the week of the production. No point in that now. I can roar until my lungs are bloody and red and it won't make the faintest lick of difference. At least Pickwick & Nickleby will be sacrosanct. One of the early motives for the show was the glorious freedom it offered. A sort of pure acting, without the need for an infrastructure. But can it be possible to stoke enthusiasm for such a time without an audience? Theatre can't ever exist without one. Not really.
What a way to ring down the curtain on my first year of Cambridge drama. An allegedly exam-free, worry-lite Summer term in which I would act to my heart's content - sullied and spoiled by cancellations! Ah, well. Must count my blessings and move on. I've done some other stuff - it just seems so long ago now... Haven't done anything in a theatre since February. February! Ridiculous... Where the devil is it leading? This may be the nub of my theatrical obsession. I don't much care where acting takes me - but it must not end. That is imperative. Seeing so many promising projects collapse into the dust around me reawakens that primal terror. I think the best I can say is that I've encountered some entirely lovely, splendid people at work on these graveyard productions. Theatre is too often a supplement for my woefully inadequate social life, so at least it has served me on that basis.
Not really sure what to do now. Probably the best to come from this will be some genuine rehearsals for the Dickens show. I was going to be saving my voice for the week of the production. No point in that now. I can roar until my lungs are bloody and red and it won't make the faintest lick of difference. At least Pickwick & Nickleby will be sacrosanct. One of the early motives for the show was the glorious freedom it offered. A sort of pure acting, without the need for an infrastructure. But can it be possible to stoke enthusiasm for such a time without an audience? Theatre can't ever exist without one. Not really.
What a way to ring down the curtain on my first year of Cambridge drama. An allegedly exam-free, worry-lite Summer term in which I would act to my heart's content - sullied and spoiled by cancellations! Ah, well. Must count my blessings and move on. I've done some other stuff - it just seems so long ago now... Haven't done anything in a theatre since February. February! Ridiculous... Where the devil is it leading? This may be the nub of my theatrical obsession. I don't much care where acting takes me - but it must not end. That is imperative. Seeing so many promising projects collapse into the dust around me reawakens that primal terror. I think the best I can say is that I've encountered some entirely lovely, splendid people at work on these graveyard productions. Theatre is too often a supplement for my woefully inadequate social life, so at least it has served me on that basis.
Saturday 5 June 2010
The Shadow of Parkinson
Much of the last few days has been lived beneath the shuddering, fearful bulk of what my Engling friend Martha cheerfully termed 'Parkinson's Law' - basically, that everything you have to do will take precisely the amount of time you have to do it in. My goodness, is that the truth. The simplest business is consuming a life-age round about now. I have a grand total of two academic tasks left to do, and bloody hell, they're incurring more energy and procrastination than even in a week saturated with eight times the workload.
All things considered, we had a fairly productive time on Saturday. Having bemoaned the lack of gold picture frames lying in and around the hallowed halls of Cambridge for a solid month, Chrystal and I made tracks around the local charity shops in search of this elusive publicity component. Whenever I was involved in some dramatic activity whilst growing up (often - but not always - to do with vampires) the efforts of my grandma would run down to just such places, so they always stir strange emotions in me. Regardless of time, regardless of location, these establishments court a touching universality. They're always done out in a selection of Hospice-style white and creams, always festooned with the most indifferent carpets imaginable and always littered with the underused and unwanted relics of the dead. They're always a fertile stomping ground for theatrical oddities too, so perhaps I should quit carping and get down to business.
Our excursion brought a few minor successes. We found a small chalkboard that may or may not prove useful for the schoolroom of Wackford Squeers, but was in any case so cheap that it seemed worth the small fiduciary sacrifice. The same goes for a remarkable collection of red polyester napkins. Chrystal, being the inscrutable artistic variety that she is, wants some larger theatrical backdrop for the poster image, which I only hope these paltry scraps can deliver. However, they shall be of definite usefulness for the grand, weepy courtroom entrance of Mrs Bardell, the addition of a rotating scarlet handkerchief a properly melodramatic touch. We also had the sort of seminal brainwave reserved solely for Cambridge students when we discovered we needn't buy a gold picture frame - we could paint one that colour instead! Glory of glories! Chrystal has a preserve of toxic spray-paint left over from the brochure image for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (for which she employed an exquisitely sinister cat-mask), so with a little battering and blasting of our present picture frame, all should be well where antiquarian finish is concerned. An entirely off-topic victory came when I discovered an ancient cassette tape of Christopher Lee narrating 'Peter and the Wolf' and 'The Soldier's Tale'. Haven't the foggiest idea whether it's been issued on CD or not, but I can't wait to get home and play it. You can tell it's old because it's still difficult to spot where Lee's toupee join is on the cover.
These successes were overshadowed by our problems in finding a top hat for the photography session that we know full well is coming up next week... A visit to the joke shop revealed that the felt variety, which looked so amiable and appropriate through the distorting window of an Amazon product-hunt, is (perhaps unsurprisingly) really quite inferior. I think it was the moment that Chrystal noticed the hat's unsporting decision to sit on top of my head rather than fits securely that the penny dropped. Still, I'm optimistic that something will happen. Be warned though - it's a very, very bad idea to cheerfully propose photoshopping missing items in afterwards to a true exponent of the craft. Such will provoke nothing but black stares and muttered curses.
And then there are the lines! The lines for The Country Wife! I can't have had this many to learn since I played Scrooge all those years ago - and that came at a time when I was still young and sinless enough to devote the proper time to learning the bloody things. And, as I'm rapidly coming to realise, there's something infectiously memorable about the verbal peaks and troughs that Dickens weaves into his many eccentric idiolects. The anarchic modulation of tone and emotion, as well as the inexplicable feel of 'rightness' imbued in a character's every turn of phrase, makes it (almost) a doddle to learn. I've had the pleasure of working with some wonderful directors in Cambridge, but none have been quite so keen or diligent as Sarah in securing precisely what she wants from the actors of The Country Wife. We do a read-through and then the way we should be behaving from line to line, and occasionally even word to word, is worked out in the most minute detail. I can see this rubbing some people up the wrong way. For anyone seeking to preserve their 'artistic temperament' (whatever that might mean), it must be a stranglehold to tolerate this Hitchcock-style stream of 'walk here' - 'stand here' - 'shout here' - 'quietness there' - 'raving here' - 'brood on the death of the youngest son of the acropolis and shed a tear there'. Alright, that caricatures things a bit. It's certainly forcing my brain to pick up and animate at a stage in term where (exam-lite as it has been) I simply want to switch off and gape a bit. Given the general hostility of Restoration dialogue to memorisation (the evergreen trauma for just about everyone involved in The Relapse), it's an approach I have nothing but respect for. I only hope that this technique can be sustained under the rapidly diminishing timescales we have to work with. And who knows, maybe I'll have time to devise a characterisation at some point. Mr Pinchwife may be heading towards the school of James Swanton 'point and scream at the top of your lungs rather than carve out a niche of subtlety and nuance' performances, but I'm rapidly coming round to the idea that the time never exists in Cambridge to do much more than fall back on bad habits. Working on the character from the outside in is no more than an extrication of what normally goes on here - at least in my experience.
I also find myself in a state of mild intoxication and bewilderment after attending Mass at George's invitation at the St. John's College chapel. A confirmed Methodist (and a lapsed one at that), never did I contemplate dipping my toe in the ornate waters of Catholicism. A conglomeration of things I quite like actually. Traditionalism. Medievalism. Gothicism. Atmosphere that seemed evenly pitched between Hammer's Dracula Has Risen From the Grave and Taste the Blood of Dracula (an abundantly positive factor). Apart from the brief delight of George emitting 'Cor! Free biscuit!' with attendant Tunbelly-style fat noises before I engaged in the unparalleled criminal campaign of an anti-denominational wafer, thoughts of a more sombre strain prevailed. My spirituality is indecisive to say the least. This was no doubt a splendid venue, redolent with beauty and history. But faced with the the athletically-charged gesticulations of the fellow directing the choir, I instinctively thought of some lines that I cut from the play what I wroted last year:
The church is a sort of theatre too, is it not? Extravagant costumes that distract from the text. Many-coloured lights and paintings that mean something to the audience but represent only a day's pay to the craftsman... Magic tricks. Virgin births, water into wine. The sons of ghosts...
On closer review, I can see why it went. Pretentious, self-clever codswallop. Too many words and all too neat to sound anything but stupid. But if you can get past that basic horror, perhaps it isn't so far from the truth - or at least the 'truth' as far as I perceived it in Mass. I found myself visually tumbling ever deeper into the stained glass window ahead of me, assuming some sort of kinship with the depiction of one cringing, repentant sinner, who I presumed was experiencing the same frustrating failure to tap into a vein of sincerely felt spirituality. It all felt a bit of a sad put-on. Still, I am not scarred by the experience, and will be attending another Mass fairly soon. The immortal Will Seaward will be there (Falstaff in under two weeks - the theatrical event of the new millennium), so I will enjoy myself whether I make any breakthroughs or not.
All things considered, we had a fairly productive time on Saturday. Having bemoaned the lack of gold picture frames lying in and around the hallowed halls of Cambridge for a solid month, Chrystal and I made tracks around the local charity shops in search of this elusive publicity component. Whenever I was involved in some dramatic activity whilst growing up (often - but not always - to do with vampires) the efforts of my grandma would run down to just such places, so they always stir strange emotions in me. Regardless of time, regardless of location, these establishments court a touching universality. They're always done out in a selection of Hospice-style white and creams, always festooned with the most indifferent carpets imaginable and always littered with the underused and unwanted relics of the dead. They're always a fertile stomping ground for theatrical oddities too, so perhaps I should quit carping and get down to business.
Our excursion brought a few minor successes. We found a small chalkboard that may or may not prove useful for the schoolroom of Wackford Squeers, but was in any case so cheap that it seemed worth the small fiduciary sacrifice. The same goes for a remarkable collection of red polyester napkins. Chrystal, being the inscrutable artistic variety that she is, wants some larger theatrical backdrop for the poster image, which I only hope these paltry scraps can deliver. However, they shall be of definite usefulness for the grand, weepy courtroom entrance of Mrs Bardell, the addition of a rotating scarlet handkerchief a properly melodramatic touch. We also had the sort of seminal brainwave reserved solely for Cambridge students when we discovered we needn't buy a gold picture frame - we could paint one that colour instead! Glory of glories! Chrystal has a preserve of toxic spray-paint left over from the brochure image for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (for which she employed an exquisitely sinister cat-mask), so with a little battering and blasting of our present picture frame, all should be well where antiquarian finish is concerned. An entirely off-topic victory came when I discovered an ancient cassette tape of Christopher Lee narrating 'Peter and the Wolf' and 'The Soldier's Tale'. Haven't the foggiest idea whether it's been issued on CD or not, but I can't wait to get home and play it. You can tell it's old because it's still difficult to spot where Lee's toupee join is on the cover.
These successes were overshadowed by our problems in finding a top hat for the photography session that we know full well is coming up next week... A visit to the joke shop revealed that the felt variety, which looked so amiable and appropriate through the distorting window of an Amazon product-hunt, is (perhaps unsurprisingly) really quite inferior. I think it was the moment that Chrystal noticed the hat's unsporting decision to sit on top of my head rather than fits securely that the penny dropped. Still, I'm optimistic that something will happen. Be warned though - it's a very, very bad idea to cheerfully propose photoshopping missing items in afterwards to a true exponent of the craft. Such will provoke nothing but black stares and muttered curses.
And then there are the lines! The lines for The Country Wife! I can't have had this many to learn since I played Scrooge all those years ago - and that came at a time when I was still young and sinless enough to devote the proper time to learning the bloody things. And, as I'm rapidly coming to realise, there's something infectiously memorable about the verbal peaks and troughs that Dickens weaves into his many eccentric idiolects. The anarchic modulation of tone and emotion, as well as the inexplicable feel of 'rightness' imbued in a character's every turn of phrase, makes it (almost) a doddle to learn. I've had the pleasure of working with some wonderful directors in Cambridge, but none have been quite so keen or diligent as Sarah in securing precisely what she wants from the actors of The Country Wife. We do a read-through and then the way we should be behaving from line to line, and occasionally even word to word, is worked out in the most minute detail. I can see this rubbing some people up the wrong way. For anyone seeking to preserve their 'artistic temperament' (whatever that might mean), it must be a stranglehold to tolerate this Hitchcock-style stream of 'walk here' - 'stand here' - 'shout here' - 'quietness there' - 'raving here' - 'brood on the death of the youngest son of the acropolis and shed a tear there'. Alright, that caricatures things a bit. It's certainly forcing my brain to pick up and animate at a stage in term where (exam-lite as it has been) I simply want to switch off and gape a bit. Given the general hostility of Restoration dialogue to memorisation (the evergreen trauma for just about everyone involved in The Relapse), it's an approach I have nothing but respect for. I only hope that this technique can be sustained under the rapidly diminishing timescales we have to work with. And who knows, maybe I'll have time to devise a characterisation at some point. Mr Pinchwife may be heading towards the school of James Swanton 'point and scream at the top of your lungs rather than carve out a niche of subtlety and nuance' performances, but I'm rapidly coming round to the idea that the time never exists in Cambridge to do much more than fall back on bad habits. Working on the character from the outside in is no more than an extrication of what normally goes on here - at least in my experience.
I also find myself in a state of mild intoxication and bewilderment after attending Mass at George's invitation at the St. John's College chapel. A confirmed Methodist (and a lapsed one at that), never did I contemplate dipping my toe in the ornate waters of Catholicism. A conglomeration of things I quite like actually. Traditionalism. Medievalism. Gothicism. Atmosphere that seemed evenly pitched between Hammer's Dracula Has Risen From the Grave and Taste the Blood of Dracula (an abundantly positive factor). Apart from the brief delight of George emitting 'Cor! Free biscuit!' with attendant Tunbelly-style fat noises before I engaged in the unparalleled criminal campaign of an anti-denominational wafer, thoughts of a more sombre strain prevailed. My spirituality is indecisive to say the least. This was no doubt a splendid venue, redolent with beauty and history. But faced with the the athletically-charged gesticulations of the fellow directing the choir, I instinctively thought of some lines that I cut from the play what I wroted last year:
The church is a sort of theatre too, is it not? Extravagant costumes that distract from the text. Many-coloured lights and paintings that mean something to the audience but represent only a day's pay to the craftsman... Magic tricks. Virgin births, water into wine. The sons of ghosts...
On closer review, I can see why it went. Pretentious, self-clever codswallop. Too many words and all too neat to sound anything but stupid. But if you can get past that basic horror, perhaps it isn't so far from the truth - or at least the 'truth' as far as I perceived it in Mass. I found myself visually tumbling ever deeper into the stained glass window ahead of me, assuming some sort of kinship with the depiction of one cringing, repentant sinner, who I presumed was experiencing the same frustrating failure to tap into a vein of sincerely felt spirituality. It all felt a bit of a sad put-on. Still, I am not scarred by the experience, and will be attending another Mass fairly soon. The immortal Will Seaward will be there (Falstaff in under two weeks - the theatrical event of the new millennium), so I will enjoy myself whether I make any breakthroughs or not.
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