A Hearty Welcome!

Beginnings are hard, aren't they? But luckily for my purposes, Charles Dickens had some absolute rip-snorters. Think of the pervasive, rolling mists of Bleak House: 'Fog everywhere. Fog up the river where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it flows deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city'... Perhaps a suitable curtain-raiser for my singular state of uncertainty in firing up this blog... Then there is the limitless sense of life's possibilities delineated in The Pickwick Papers - 'the first ray of light which illumines the gloom, and converts into a dazzling brilliancy that earlier obscurity in which the earlier history of the public career of the immortal Pickwick would appear to be involved...'. Stack that against the fixed, comic resolve of A Christmas Carol's 'Marley was dead, to begin with'. And, yes, inevitably, A Tale of Two Cities: 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times'. For the moment, that may just be the right one. I'm not sure where this blog might go, and to resolve my pre-production anxieties into a stolid ball of apathy seems as good a solution as any.

Armed with the rare luxury of a six month rehearsal period, the aim of this blog is to provide an all-purpose production diary ahead of Pickwick & Nickleby - a one-man show in which I grunt, burble and roar Dickens for just over an hour before passing out backstage. To the best of my knowledge, a full production diary hasn't been written for a play in Cambridge - and even if it has, I'd be surprised if it was attempted on the scale optimistically visualised here. The absence of such a document is a crying shame in many respects, because Cambridge drama, whilst not the orgiastic explosion of prodigious brilliance that some would like to believe, is consistently varied, exciting and very, very interesting. Not that this is your conventional Cambridge production (our team currently numbers three), so I'm hoping to supplement this with other experiences of a theatrical persuasion. Expect a few words on The Country Wife (for which Wycherley had the short-sighted impetuosity to write Pinchwife too many lines...), a chronicle of my summer job at The York Dungeon (a terrific place crammed with terrific actors) and a little something on the revival of the Marlowe Society's ill-fated production of The Alchemist - now set for the ADC in early October. The aim of all this is to give as rich and as comprehensive an account of my joyful (but often very difficult) relationship with acting over the course of six months.

Another hope of mine is to foster a sense of community here. This may be an intimate show planned on a very small scale, but theatre great gift is to communicate to others. I'll be looking to my theatrically-minded buddies - from York, from Cambridge and from the geographical mousetrap of the Internet - to provide short, informal articles covering their own views on acting. I'll also draft up a short account of what little I know of you and why this makes you worth listening to! This shouldn't be taken as some fawning, slime-dripping overture to people's egos either. No time for that nonsense here. Theatre is inherently childish, and student theatre in particular. A bunch of jumped-up, self-important youths (myself included) playing at endless little games of the imagination. I can direct! I can produce! I'll paint the sets - you do the lights! You can review! Acting is the worst of all: a great cavalcade of dressing-up games, face-pulling, amusing vulgarities and socially acceptable lying. Childishness may be a death-blow to pretension, but it remains an abundantly positive thing. Childishness means simplicity, and this seems to be a virtue to strive for - the essential element most under threat from the ominous, obfuscating clouds of adulthood. I'm of the opinion that everyone, no matter what their experience, has something interesting and insightful to say about the creation of good theatre. So whether you're a pretender to the throne of Gielgud and Olivier or are interested in no more than the happiness that drama can bring, feel free to muck in and contribute. Nothing can do more for the success of this diary. And who knows - we may finally succeed in formulating a 'common sense' approach to acting!

Discarding that digression, I'd also like to flag up this blog as a form of self-therapy. Writing for pleasure is often difficult for me, and having botched my previous attempts at keeping a consistently thoughtful and clutter-free blog, I'd love to get it right this time. Because it's marvellous when the words do come... The aim won't be to produce anything polished or perfect in my writings - just to revel in the uncomplicated pleasure of language flowing from my brain, down into my fingertips and popping up onscreen. Without becoming too self-absorbed about it either, acting is a centrifuge for much that I find bothersome and dissatisfying in life. Perhaps all this will evolve into some grand and rigorous attempt at psychoanalysis. Or perhaps not, and writing will merely remain a private basin in which to wash away my sins... Horribly self-absorbed, I know, but acting hinges on self-absorption by its very nature. This needn't fluctuate into ego though, so do give me a sound few knocks on the head if my pontifications become too bloody indulgent to stomach.

Incidentally, I hope that everyone will take a few seconds to comment now and again! As with rehearsing a play in isolation, it's easy to become discouraged with writing when you feel that your energies are being released into a void. So do let us fling our competing paragraphs together every so often - if only to marvel at the strangeness of the echo!

Goodbye for now, favourite at your discretion, partake in the shameless self-promotion of the Facebook group (a cheeky link for you there) and I hope you'll be dropping by again soon!