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.

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