Guest Speaker #5: Kieran Corcoran

A very special guest this time. I present to you Mr Kieran Corcoran: fellow Selwyn-based English second-year; eternally formidable supervision partner; devotee of all things Grecian; part-time dabbler in the dramatic arts. After the disappointment of the cancellation of The Country Wife, Kieran was sporting enough to quench my theatrical drought with some eleventh hour stunt-casting in Love's Labour's Lost. This production he directed - co-directed, I should say, with fellow Anglo-centric Selwynite Clare Rivers Mohan, who will surely gut me if I neglect to mention her - to justifiable success in May Week. And a jolly good review, might I add, an all too rare commodity in Cambridge that attests to the production's quality. A man committed to the classics, Kieran's remaining ventures in Cambridge drama have been steeped in the seventeenth century. He was Priam and Nestor in Peterhouse's Troilus and Cressida, alternately projecting senility through the psychic medium of a comedy beard and jousting pretentious witticisms with Will Seaward's Agamemnon (an enviable experience, that). The following term saw a double bill, with a sell-out Macbeth in the Corpus Playroom and a site-specific Volpone. If Kieran doesn't mature into an eminent Cambridge professor, afloat in an ever-encircling wreath of tobacco smoke and discoursing voluminously on Socrates and Plato - then, gentlemen, I will eat my hat. And I don't even wear a hat. That's how confident I am.


I'd just like to start by pointing out that in comparison to the theatrical heavyweights who are wont to contribute to this blog, I am but an inconsequential minnow – the smallest of fries, the greenest of horns and the lamest of n00bs. You see, my theatrical career (generous nomenclature) only really gained any shape at all when I came up to Cambridge. No youth theatre for this one, no tricks of the trade, no techniques in the bag – only a stack of enthusiasm. Needless to say, I was roundly outclassed by the likes of James (this continues to be the case), but thanks to the fondness of Shakespeare &co. for bit-parts, and the odd situation in Cambridge whereby there is quite often a shortage of willing actors, I got my foot in the door. As a result, having acted in three shows and directed one, I'm now a lot more confident, at least a bit more competent, and, best of all, I've met some stellar people along the way.

Now, the most pontificated-upon (pontifacted? pontifexed?) aspect of drama in the blog so far has been the art of acting well, and what exactly it consists of. If anyone on the vasty plains of earth can give a definitive answer, it's sure not me, but have my tuppence nonetheless. Although drama is my chief “extra-curricular” activity, there's no way I can leave my day-job (English student) out of it – at the end of the day, they're all texts, ripe for being picked apart. Not to say that all of the extra-textual bits aren't important – lights, action, props, costume and all that are obviously vital, but I don't really know that much about them, whereas scripts are something I can understand (“But do you really understand them?!?” chimes a chorus of glowering academics in my mind – but whether I do or not, I can do more with them than a lighting rig). Time spent in recourse to the text, going over it more, really getting inside every ebb and flow of meaning is never time wasted. One of the big pitfalls I've noticed in student theatre that actors (and I imagine directors too) just don't know the text well enough – and I'm far from guiltless on this count myself. When line-learning is approached with the attitude of cramming for your GCSEs rather than preparing to give the best possible rendition of a work of art, you're bound to loose points – but this is an understandable lapse given the extreme time-pressure which has characterised every show I've been involved with thus far: there are myriad other things which demand attention, and so long as the lines are roughly done, the show can go on – job done. But not really job done – especially with older texts like Shakespeare and Jonson, you need to put the legwork in, you have to really go to the audience since, due to the strangeness of the language and culture from which the script hails, audiences will struggle to come to you. You have time to prepare, they don't, so it's only decent of you to make the effort, old bean.

The results can be phenomenal – the chap playing Parolles when I went to see All's Well That Ends Well at the National Theatre last year was astoundingly good at making the (sometimes extremely obscure) lines make real sense – and comic sense too. Lines I'd puzzled over for several minutes when reading at home before giving up on provoked instinctive and immediate laughter when passing his lips – and it wasn't just because they were accompanied by crude gestures and a sly wink. It was because he knew exactly what they meant, and exactly how to make his audience know that too. This can be rare, even on a professional level. Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost is a prime example – although Branagh himself is on the ball as ever, his supporting members (especially the Princess of France) seemed a bit bewildered at times, and the effect was a tad underwhelming to say the least.

But back to the point – knowing the text, and always digging deeper. So far as my own acting goes, some of the most pleasant experiences I've had of being directed are those in which a speech which I “understood” ended up having a lot more to it than I'd thought. This is an especially prominent feature of good auditions too; auditions in which I walk out knowing the text a lot better than when I walked in are genuinely enjoyable; and it makes any rejection e-mails which follow a lot easier to bare! So much can hinge on a single word, and a passage you thought had one basic thrust, or one emotional mode to it, almost always has nuances, undercurrents and complexities which take time and effort to realise, and putting in the time and effort can be immensely rewarding.

On the flipside, one of my biggest regrets about directing Love's Labour's Lost was that, due to time pressures and logistical difficulties, I didn't have nearly as much time as I'd have liked to get this kind of involved textual work done with the cast members while we were rehearsing. As it turned out, everyone made a very good job of what they'd been given, even without much directorial help, but I'd be a fool to say that more practice wouldn't have improved things. James especially was magic on this front - I barely directed him at all and he made a lot more of his role than I'd even thought possible, which was a godsend given the general last-minute chaos into which he graciously allowed himself to be dragged after a much-needed cast member had to drop out.

However, for all the Yin of my rabbiting on about how vital the text is, there is an inevitable Yang to restore the Zen-like balance of successful theatre. Luckily for Love's Labour's Lost, this came in the form of my co-director, Clare, who was able to remind me (quite forcefully at times) about how I needed to pay attention to other bits of the performance too – troublesome details like who's on-stage when and whether they're standing in-front of each other. So mine is an attitude which can be taken too far, but also one which shouldn't be forgotten.

Well, I've more or less exhausted my reserves of dramatic discourse now, and I hope I've not reminded you too much of a year-9 English teacher moaning about how you have to read the text. All that remains is for me to voice my excitement about the Dickens show – I'm looking forward to it immensely, and this blog alone attests to the huge amount of work James is putting in. I'll see you all in the audience.