So it has come to this, eh? No, no, don't cry – just move your eyes along the letters until this terrible experience is over. Right... acting... I suppose the main thing about acting is that I find it a very strange, terrible and alluring thing. I should point out at this stage I have no great expertise at acting, nor have I ever studied it beyond a certain, low-level point that will come up later, so I suppose everything you are about to read is utter rubbish – but! But. I shall endeavour to make my typings such wide-ranging and speculative thought farts that they inevitably get something right and you leave with only a mild sense of wasted time.
My first experience with it was some sort of play I was in that I only half remember – it was in my odd playschool in Johannesburg and myself and two others were playing some part that required us to be in our underpants... Reading back over that, how sinister! But we got a big laugh and that's all I wanted – yup, a big laugh at you in your underwear at age 4 or 5, that's all you need, oh my yes! Then, in my Manx primary school, I was the lead part in “The Boy Who Cried Mammoth” (we were learning about cavemen, so relevance was forced upon the play). This part entailed banging a stick on something (farming?) and shouting “OH I AM SO BORED, I WONDER WHAT I CAN DO FOR FUN” and then – well, it writes itself, doesn't it? Then something later in Year 5 about time travel or something? Hazy memories...
High school next! I played various minor parts (I was not to be trusted) in “A Christmas Carol” and “The Railway Children”, then some larger parts in productions of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, “The Wind in the Willows” and “Escape from Stalag Luft 112B” (an episode of “Ripping Yarns”). While doing this I briefly did those extra Speech and Drama lesson things, though cancelled them after Grade 3 due to a combination of my own incompetence when it came to getting signed out from lessons and just general irritability.
The reason for all this self-indulgent blathering and pointless crapping on is that it is all part of my attempt to say something about acting, though I am not sure what. Acting was always weird to me – what is it in our nature or nurture that means one of us is very good at convincing an audience (but not fully convincing them) that they are angry or happy or sad, whereas someone else is a cardboard word-stutterer, unable to conceive of applying their own emotional range to a different character or mindset? The armchair psychologist explanation is always something to do with attention seeking: none of us got enough compliments on our crayon scribbles as kiddies so now we prance around pretending to be a dead king and so forth. Personally, I believe it has a lot to do with empathy, not just in the sense that someone has an innate quality in them or their performance that allows the audience to empathise with them and thus enjoy their performance but also the actor's ability to use empathy to better understand their character. For instance, perhaps truly understanding grief as a person allows you to perform the part of a grief stricken character to a better extent. I'm sure I read/heard somewhere something similar if not exactly the same – good actors using their pasts to inform their performances.
Right, so that's something about acting... do you know, I think the next thing to talk about is the social scene of acting? Writing as I am at the end of my first year at Cambridge I suppose I have some but nowhere near all of the experience necessary to make some small, irrelevant comment on it. The ADC theatre is an amazing place, it's unique globally and houses not only the ADC itself but also the rumbling, tumbling Footlights – we are truly fortunate to have access to the whole thing. Additionally, I have never been anywhere as simultaneously bizarre, endearing, jovial, tense, amusing and fraught with so much angst and so many in-jokes that at times you can see it flooding out of the smoking area like wavy lines in a diagram. On some nights, the waves are so powerful they bring down light aircraft and migrating birds. Notwithstanding the addictive, heady atmosphere, the bar is fantastic and so is the company so I will be inexorably drawn there night after night, like a boozy moth with procrastination issues.
Comedic acting would have to be my main area of interest, what with doing some comedy and so on, though I will not try and say anything truly appropriate because, well, what the piss do I know? Well, all I can surmise is that some people seem to have an innate ability to time their lines to get big laughs, or to use physicality to turn a boring line into a hilarious one. Obviously this process is much helped by rehearsal and things like that, but that still doesn't explain the ability of some to improvise comedy or comedic acting better than others can even do it having rehearsed it. I suppose the summary of this tawdry piece of fluff would be that I view the whole thing as a big black silhouette with a white question mark in the centre – in essence I'd quite like there to be some sort of huge, “Mythbusters” style investigation into the whole thing to clear it all up, whilst being aware simultaneously that no such thing could ever occur. The whole issue is far too complex and self-involved and human to ever be satisfyingly explained to everyone, although some actors make a good fist of it in things like “Inside the Actors Studio” (I just had to look up that title to make sure it lacked an apostrophe... typical...). Overall, blah blah blah what I think durr durr durr conclusion etc etc etc irrelevant self-indulgent trash ooh darling let's bitch about the industry.
Bloody good fun though, the acting.
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