Love and Acting

Blimey. That sounds a bit weighty. I'm not one to experience strong emotions in this life. For better or for worse, moderation remains my governing code, and no matter how often I try to dredge up an honest scrap of emotion, I find myself timelessly pent in by dull, grinding stolidity. That's not to say that I'm at all unhappy - far from it, by and large. Through the course of this holiday in particular, I've been basking in the glow of a benevolent - and, occasionally, happily, even overwhelming - contentedness. But I did stumble on a quotation from Mary Shelley earlier in the year that has since become a firm favourite. It expresses this murky condition perfectly: 'Some have a passion for reforming the world. Others do not cling to particular opinions... Besides, I feel the counter-arguments too strongly.' What a thing that must be - to have opinions! Not on things that matter to you. No, no, no - I'm quite prodigiously and dysfunctionally eloquent on all of that claptrap. To have opinions on lots of different things. Things that don't matter, things you're not even necessarily informed about... Politics, for instance. The environment. Activism, charities. Music. A feeling, beyond anything, of being well-adjusted, expertly attuned, to the minute intricacies of life. That subtle social code that dictates someone reads The Guardian instead of The Observer; that they that they purchase a blazer with four buttons on the sleeve instead of three. I regard this sort of thing as a nightmare. Perhaps these are views that will come only with age... Age - and experience. (Or arid, baseless bigotry, conditioned by convenience and cynicism!) That would do quite nicely. On a less fanciful, more pressing note, the formation of opinions would be consolation indeed in getting on with this bloody degree. If you can't opine, then you can't argue, and argument is so often the core of these tricksy arts subjects. At the very least, it would make supervisions a less clammy and oppressive experience.

I suppose this is all my way of saying that I'm not one to experience strong emotions in acting either. Love is the strongest of all emotions - positive ones, at any rate - so it's interesting to speculate on the influence it might hold over a performance. This isn't entirely off-topic; trying to thrash out the Smike and Nickleby relationship (my constant theme) has been helped on a little by thinking on the subject of loved ones, those both lost and found. The perhaps inevitable backlash to this real-life inertia has been my unusually aggressive presence on-stage. Just as Mary Shelley, a shy, retiring nineteen year old, gave full license to her dark side in the creation of Frankenstein, so too have I, sharing every one of her nineteen years and a considerably diminished propensity for genius, found a bizarre creative outlet and intermittent life substitute in the business of acting. My own perception of my characterisations is distorted at best. As strange as it may seem, I've never gone out of my way to be bad, but it does dawn on me from time to time that I really do far too much - flashy cartoon performances replete with bellowing, flailing, shrieking, wailing; in short, a plethora of infantile showings-off, and above all, that persistent, hovering M-word: manic, manic, manic, manic. It's only in the last year that I've undergone the unsettling experience of my entire theatrical persona being distilled to one word. I now spend the majority of my dabblings in acting succumbing to divided loyalties: torn between trying to escape the manic, before giving in to play up to it with renewed aggression. But can such wild, deluded abandon be conducive to the cultivation of love? I use the word in the broadest possible sense, and I'll be unpacking a few of its applications as I rattle on with this entry.

First then: have I ever had a proper love scene? Not quite. Unless by love scene, you mean hate scene. They all seem to have been stonkingly bitter affairs. I've had an astounding amount of dead wives, for instance... Scarlet Petals Underfoot was a long, melancholic paen to one, painted in the fashion of those interminable, interchangeable vignettes of Vincent Price contemplating a portrait of his dead wife in the Roger Corman Poe films... Dear, religious Roy of Neville's Island had a field day recounting the blackness attendant on his beloved's death, all the while convincing a fellow lad that his own wife was making passionate love on the bread shelf at Safeway's. Return to the Forbidden Planet had my wife rise from the dead in the act break, only to sing me into the clutches of a carnivorous green beastie and kill me off to restore the balance. Possibly in a spirit of unconscious revenge, the majority of Funeral Games was spent in pretending to kill my wife off, and furthermore convince the world at large of the reality of the crime. In A Christmas Carol, any love was confined to the limbo of Christmas Past, with Scrooge's affections principally focused on the coins thrown to the ground by saintly, virginal Belle, her disgust at his grasping, scraping, clutching covetousness convincing her to leave for good. Pericles was another sorry, manipulative tryst, with poor, gullible Cleon persuaded to hide wifey's assassination-based treachery prior to the gods dispatching lynch-mobs and infernoes and conveniently collapsing palaces to do the pair of us away... There's a very simple message here: marry me and you're for it, girls. Keep your distance.

One of my big regrets in The Elephant Man was the deleton of the tender, beautiful love shared by John Merrick and Mrs Kendal. I can see why it went. Nudity is a big dilemma for a youthful cast. A number of clever compromises were tossed about - to have Mrs Kendal undress behind a screen set in one corner of the stage, to have her disrobe only as far as her slip - but none that really preserved the integrity of the scene. The odds were stacked against us, and the scene was at last removed in full. I regard it as one of the most beautiful scenes I've ever read in a play - and couldn't help but feel that a substantial bit of soul went out of The Elephant Man in its passing. So if anyone wants to shoe-horn me into a revival at some point (not that I'm holding my breath or anything, blue-faced depressant that I am), I'll be only too happy to oblige! Merrick is a character I still have a great rapport with... Gah, I won't hold my breath. It's a fascinating piece of writing. Sparely written. Bernard Pomerance's duologues usually are, and in many ways, the play is no more than an extended procession of them. There's not an exclamation mark to be found here - even in places where a particular emotional register would seem to call for such - and parenthetical stage directions are rendered almost non-existent. Pomerance foists no responsibility onto the actor to make up for deficiencies in his language; invests no faith in the elusive performance gifts of inspiration and inventiveness reserved to the limited few. The text is all, and he trusts to it utterly. This, of course, is the joy in having a subject matter so pure and fruitful that it plays itself out to its own happy conclusion. No need for embellishment or colour. That will come quite naturally with the idiosyncrasy-prone translation to the living, breathing, shuffling actor. This kind of minimalism has always eluded me (not for lack of trying), so it exudes a much-envied fascination. It's a while since I've read the extract, so I'll provide it here unabridged - for my own benefit as much as yours:

Rain in Merrick's room. MERRICK working. MRS. KENDAL.
MERRICK. The prince has a mistress. (Silence.) The Irishman had one. Everyone seems to. Or a wife. Some have both. I have concluded I need a mistress. It is bad enough not to sleep like others.
MRS. KENDAL. Sitting up, you mean. Couldn't be very restful.
MERRICK. I have to. Too heavy to lay down. My head. But to sleep alone; that is worst of all.
MRS. KENDAL. The artist expresses his love through his works. That is civilisation.
MERRICK. Are you shocked?
MRS. KENDAL. Why should I be?
MERRICK. Others would be.
MRS. KENDAL. I am not others.
MERRICK. I suppose it is hopeless.
MRS. KENDAL. Nothing is hopeless. However it is unlikely.
MERRICK. I thought you might have a few ideas.
MRS: KENDAL. I can guess who has the ideas here.
MERRICK. You don't know something. I have never even seen a naked woman.
MRS. KENDAL. Surely in all the fairs you worked.
MERRICK. I mean a real woman.
MRS. KENDAL. Is one more real than another?
MERRICK. I mean like the ones in the theatre. The opera.
MRS. KENDAL. Surely you can't mean they are more real?
MERRICK. In the audience. A woman not worn out early. Not deformed by awful life. A lady. Someone kept up. Respectful of herself. You don't know what fairgrounds are like, Mrs. Kendal.
MRS. KENDAL. You mean someone like Princess Alexandra?
MERRICK: Not so old.
MRS. KENDAL. Ah. Like Dorothy.
MERRICK. She does not look happy. No.
MRS. KENDAL. Lady Ellen?
MERRICK. Too thin.
MRS. KENDAL. Then who?
MERRICK. Certain women. They have a kind of ripeness. They seem to stop at a perfect point.
MRS. KENDAL. My dear she doesn't exist.
MERRICK. That is probably why I never saw her.
MRS. KENDAL. What would your friend Bishop How say of all this I wonder?
MERRICK. He says I should put these things out of my mind.
MRS. KENDAL. Is that the best he can suggest?
MERRICK: I put them out of my mind. They reappeared, snap.
MRS. KENDAL: What about Frederick?
MERRICK. He would be appalled if I told him.
MRS. KENDAL. I am flattered. Too little trust has maimed my life. But that is another story.
MERRICK. What a rain. Are we going to read this afternoon?
MRS. KENDAL. Yes. Some women are lucky to look well, that is all. It is a rather arbitrary gift; it has no really good use, though it has uses, I will say that. Anyway it does not signify very much.
MERRICK. To me it does.
MRS. KENDAL. Well. You are mistaken.
MERRICK. What are we going to read?
MRS. KENDAL. Trust is very important you know. I trust you.
MERRICK. Thank you very much. I have a book of Thomas Hardy's here. He is a friend of Frederick's. Shall we read that?
MRS. KENDAL. Turn around a moment. Don't look.
MERRICK. Is this a game?
MRS. KENDAL. I would not call it a game. A surprise. (She begins undressing.)
MERRICK. What kind of a surprise?
MRS. KENDAL. I saw photographs of you. Before I met you. You didn't know that, did you?
MERRICK. The ones from the first time, in '84? No, I didn't.
MRS. KENDAL. I felt it was – unjust. I don't know why. I cannot say my sense of justice is my most highly developed characteristic. You may turn around again. Well. A little funny, isn't it?
MERRICK. It is the most beautiful sight I have seen. Ever.
MRS. KENDAL. If you tell anyone, I shall not see you again, we shall not read, we shall not talk, we shall do nothing. Wait. (Undoes her hair.) There. No illusions. Now. What is there to say? 'I am extremely pleased to have made your acquaintance?'
Enter TREVES.
TREVES. For God's sakes. What is going on here? What is going on?
MRS. KENDAL. For a moment, Paradise, Freddie. (She begins dressing.)
TREVES. But - have you no sense of decency? Woman, dress yourself quickly.
(Silence. MERRICK goes to put another piece on St. Phillip's.)
Are you not ashamed? Do you know what you are? Don't you know what is forbidden?
Fadeout.

Richard III was probably the love scene I got the most pleasure from: planting a lascivious, lingering kiss on the cheek of Queen Elizabeth after cajoling her into giving her daughter over to my fitful marital bed. Originally, we'd rallied for a mouth-to-mouth kiss between mother and future son-in-law, which would have been quite astoundingly creepy. I'd decided to smear my face in Vaseline throughout the play, and had also slicked my hair back, in a bid to transform myself into an overgrown, hunchbacked sewer rat (Professor Ratigan had nuthin' on me). On the lip-kissing front, we relented in the end - at least partly because Elizabeth's real-life boyfriend would be in the audience, and might not take kindly to such perverted overtures - but I still think we managed to crank up the perversity to the point where the scene was considerably more unsettling and erotic than Richard's much-lauded wooing of Anne. It was a profoundly satisfying scene to play, replete with assorted strokings and rubbings. Never before have I felt such palpable waves of hate come streaming in from an audience. The Relapse was of a similar order, I suppose, with those dreadful, perverted scenes of old Coupler necking and vampirising Young Fashion for the gratification of his distended, pedaristic lusts - although with that production, the default response was resounding indifference. Until George Potts appeared to dispense seminal ad-libs on cornflakes or marmalade, or Will Seaward to declare his affections as solid and true as Adam Ant... And everything with Andy Brock. Come to think of it, there were a lot of bright spots in the Vanbrugh firmament!

For as much as I encounter love stories on stage (perverted and otherwise), I've noticed that it's my tendency to turn them into hate stories. I've never been daunted by the prospect of parading my perversion in theatre. As time goes on, I'm finding that I relish it. There is no greater release than inviting an audience to bask in your ugliness, hideousness, monstrosity. Gone is the obscenity of theatre as an obscene girl's finishing school, as 'dressing up for mummy and daddy' - you are encouraged, nay, applauded for behaving as beastly as ever you like for people who've paid for the privelige. It almost feels a con - too good to be true. After Funeral Games, a crew member told me that her friend said that she'd had nightmares about me. Wonderful! Allow me to quote a Pringle monologue, if only as a counter to the sentiment of The Elephant Man... I love it. Within the subversive, suggestive nightmare realm of Funeral Games, it came closer than any other section to extricating the Ortonian aesthetic: deviant, sexually playful beasties, flapping about in deep waters. In imagery and tone, it coincides astonishingly closely with Leonard Cohen's 'Suzanne', which I proceeded to listen to obsessively throughout the rehearsal process. Here we are then:

PRINGLE. I had a remarkable experience last night. (He puts the letters into a folder.) The Lord came to me. I made a Covenant under the memorial arbour in the garden of the Lady of the Wand.
CAULFIELD. One of the Sisterhood?
PRINGLE. A woman of great humility and private fortune.
CAULFIELD. She's wealthy?
PRINGLE. She's a lost sheep with a golden fleece. We speak of her riches in hushed whispers. It means nothing to us.
CAULFIELD. Is she a philanthropist?
PRINGLE. She's a diamond. Lately she demonstrated her belief in Christian charity by building a synagogue on the banks of the Nile.
CAULFIELD. Is she Jewish?
PRINGLE. She's welcome anywhere. In Camden Town they call her Macushla. A very real honour. They accept that woman as a mother without question. In the garden of her detached ranch-type dwelling the vision of the Lord came upon me. I was swept up and the springs of my heart were opened. I made a vow. Taking my cue from Holy Writ. 'My wife must be punished.' The words I spoke weren't rejected or pooh-poohed. I was hoisted high on the shoulders of two priestly personalities. (Tears roll down his cheeks.) The Lady of the Wand shook forth the glorious strands of her golden hair. There were loud hosannas. Palm branches. I was girt in white. The grounds of that Surrey mansion were ablaze with the ecumenical spirit until the small hours. My commandment was repeated like a catechism: 'Thou shalt not suffer an adultress to live.'

I almost long for someone to ask me to do a nude scene - an idea that probably originated with my recognition of how badly Daniel Radcliffe fouled this simple task up in Equus... Remember Dysart's closing speech about his barely functional rubber genitals? Spread that delightfully puerile image to Radcliffe's entire person, clothed or unclothed, and you have my assessment of his acting... I don't care how much he's improving, O Mighty Brothers Warner... If he's spent that proportion of his development glued to a film set, he should be up to the standard of Olivier by now... Nude scenes are an absolute gift. This is quite tangible from the sensation of watching them. You at once feel a change of energy in the auditorium. There's that phrase in Macbeth - 'light thickens' - and there's a comparable atmospheric density that builds about the naked actor, as though the collective prudishness of the audience is attempting to superimpose some article of dress onto their frame. It's but a high-octane version of what normally goes on in an auditorium, each individual audience member acutely aware of how everyone else is behaving. It's the point at which theatre becomes a fascinating social experiment. Comedies are the boldest illustration of this, entertainments that cry out for an aural response and tend to succeed in eliciting one. But next time you're watching a comedy, take note of when people laugh, how people laugh - whether of their own volition or in tandem with others; whether in isolation or out of a community spirit, in mirth or pressure. This is a simple dual example. There are more strains of laughter attendant at a comedy than even Uncle Albert and his flying tea party retinue would care to delineate, and I often find myself getting more enjoyment from thinking about these knotty social expressions than the comedy. Much the same could be said for scenes that provoke weeping. How many hands will go to how many eyes - whose hand will go first; whose tears will roll on unchecked? Nudity is more extreme still, for flying in the face of social propriety and roundly slapping it about the chops, leaving its captives quite uncertain as to what to do next.(It's long been the tradition in Britain to pretend we're that bit more progressive than we are - anything that comes even vaguely close to breaking the mould has us quaking in our boots and covering up table-legs again.) Unless you're the sort that can seriously contemplate masturbating at the back of an XXX Movie Theater (the arrest figures confirm that there are such people), you'll find that you moderate your behavior quite rigidly (apologies for innuendo). Theatre demands a sort of muted masturbation in calling up an audience response in the normal way of things - some outward manifestation of inward pleasure, some outpouring in exchange of the stimuli ahead of you. Confront an audience head-on with the steamy, sexual core of theatre and it can have a quite potent effect. What to do, in this deadly hush - what to do to prevent being thought conspicuous? It's the primal terror of being singled out. What to do then? The token noises? Polite cough? Nervous laughter? How about absolute stillness? A difficult one, that. The smallest move made bolder in the contrast. It goes without saying that you're in far greater trouble if you happen to be of the male persuasion, and - God help you - you find yourself aroused by what's taking place. It's a well-worn truism that being forced to bare all in public is akin to a bucket of cold water, but the same needn't apply to the spectator, encased in the deceptive protective bubble of a darkened auditorium. The fact that nudity so often precedes an act break is not only inconvenient here, but downright dangerous.

Maybe nudity's a dirty trick (in more than the puerile sense), a cheap manipulative tool, no different to the NSPCC clogging their adverts with innumerable infants bound up in an eternally despairing black-and-white netherworld. Yet tearing off your clothes won't win you the love of an audience, no more than making them laugh or cry will. What these manipulative tactics do achieve is the projection of some scope of power over an audience. To me and probably many others, power is a problematic concept in theatre, a violation of the unwritten code of equality between actor and audience, but it is undeniable that it can and does exist - and that some actors absolutely revel in it. Whilst this is desirable in certain sorts of part, the general trend in these overreaching few is to abuse such power, reducing their art to a series of self-confident effects that treat the audience with a marked degree of egotistical contempt. It's no longer about the character. We're back to the girl's finishing school, the actor whining 'look at me!' as they complete task after meaningless task and invite the assembled company to bask in their aura. All at once, they become theatre - and not just in the pretentious, arse-licking, shuddery sense, although that is often the unavoidable side-effect - they become the auditorium, they usurp the role of the audience, so far as the transfer of energy is switched over to them and generosity internalised. Sometimes these people need a good, stern kicking and a stout reminder to open themselves up to more of the same from an audience. Actors watching themselves on-stage - appalling travesty, selfish action. How does it go...? 'Great power demands great responsibility'? Nudity is a creative tool. It shouldn't be used as a shock tactic or an explosive, attention-seeking special effect. In this sense, it's very fortunate that no-one's offered me a nude scene. (Even more fortunate for audiences, I hasten to add.) I worry that I know what I'd be tempted to do with it.

(I needn't add that at Equus, the reception was purely academic. This was a drama class outing, after all. A mass squeaking of chairs as my fellow class-mates in the gallery, male and female united as one, leaned forward to take in the ever-so-magical wand of the boy who lived. At the performance's close, a certain beloved art teacher arose with a haughty air and exclaimed 'Well! That wasn't very impressive.' Ambiguity - fleeting only. We all knew she wasn't talking about the play. My friend Davies and I have since delighted in imagining her whipping out a pair of nineteenth-century opera glasses, interspersing her elegant focusings and refocusings with reedy, indignant cries of 'Can't see it! Still can't see it!' Ah. What larks. One can only imagine how much Gielgud, the little-known jobbing actor for which the theatre is named, would have appreciated this daily naughtiness.)

There's quite a bit of play-acting in my 'Vitriolic Valentine' - a spurious observation that I believe justifies its inclusion here. In retrospect, I'm bloody relieved that no-one read my old blog, because it makes me look like the most sexually warped individual in all creation. It was written in response to my steady realisation that I was doomed to be forever ignored by the person I thought most wonderful in all the world. One of the most upsetting things about being gay are the vastly increased odds that you'll fall in love with someone with whom there isn't the faintest hope of reciprocation. This can spring from a basic incompatibility of preferences, or the sickly, sweaty prospect of coming clean about a passion that will most likely see you spurned, rejected and decried as an aberration, or an uneasy compromise between the two. In one sense, this can be marvellously freeing; in another, more real sense, it's corrosive, wretched, damaging and brutally unjust. That's not to suggest that the uneasy weight of possibility in heterosexual liasions is any easier to cope with, because let's face it - all unrequited loves are painful, and to pretend that one sexual order has the monopoly on such a pang (or that such a pang is worth having a monopoly on) is, quite frankly, absurd. A love can fester most deliciously in time - when not permitted to get out - and this one wound up dissolved into bitterness. It was probably the most painless close-down of emotion I could find, though I don't think that it was the most gracious or respectful way to quash it (to myself, least of all, but also to the other party). It's one of those regrets I'll lay to rest for the present. Anyway. I looked it over and it made me chortle. I'll set about posting it in full, unexpurgated from the original - but not until I've included a few apologies.

APOLOGIES: yes, this is the origin of the bassoon simile - just call me an inspired self-plagiarist; I don't actually have body dismorphia - looking back, I think I get a perverse kick out of painting myself as horrendously as possible - this probably links into the revelling-in-perversity angle that's come to dominate my acting; 'low culture'... oh, I detest myself for such pretension - especially given how much I do enjoy watching/jeering at Hollyoaks; the 'astronomically talented' bit is a low blow, and any suggestion that I use this as an index of value in another human being is not only upsetting, but just plain wrong; big apologies that it gets so sanctimonial, preachy, and saccharine at the end... eurgh.

Here it is then... Deep breath:

Ah. Another corporate global relationships festival is upon is. Rise up, countrymen! Impale cherubim on their scarlet arrows! Infuse heart-shaped chocolates with arsenic! Alight in Clinton Cards and vomit across the displays! I have anyway conceived myself incapable of any sort of successful relationship by now. As a person, I am incompatible with the faintest suggestion of this sickly dilution of self. Empathy I am lacking, closeness I despise. Compassion I have none. Love chills me to the bone. I am somehow deformed this way, abhorrent by birth. This is not so bad. Deformity is an inherently poetic matter, after all. It is responsible for all my childhood heroes, from the Phantom of the Opera to the Frankenstein Monster to the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Acknowledging one's own unattractiveness is a valuable stepping stone in life. A bone protrudes from my chest in the most disconcerting way. My voice is a bassoon recorded at half speed, a lugubrious spatter of muddy syllables and dropped letters countered by that loathsome, uncontrollable smugness. I have a sizeable hunch and misshapen spine, a veritable coup de grace of premature kyphosis. My neck juts out and curves in such a way that it resembles a worm emerging from its burrow. My movements are awkward, my walk that of a stork collecting its pension. We become what we joke about in time. I am far too old. Were I ever to engage with someone, it would be the ultimate feat of mind over matter. And the mind is an impenetrable thicket in its right. I don't think either of us would be willing to take the job on. One or both of us would lose interest, blows and partings would be dealt and we'd both wonder what the bloody point had been. This view does not stem from bitterness, but rather a hopeful pessimism. Life is invariably delightful when viewed through a tragic glass. Despite any number of personal brickbats, I am content with my lot.

For you see, this is preferable to the alternative. The pale, preening pose and posture of it all, the unhealthy squelch and slap of physical intimacy, that messy human nonsense. The relationship transfigured to flesh. It's enough to make you retch. It's enough to make you sweat the cold dew of fear. It's enough to curdle blood and bones to red-and-white jelly. It's enough to make you cry out to God. My God! It has all the profundity of an adolescent masturbatory fantasy, that pale, spotty concoction that informs all aspects of low culture. The wet dream of Hollyoaks. Page Three of The Sun. The twin tomatoes of a teenager's buttocks ricocheting against their exposed white underwear. Relationships are at one with this pallid, soulless trash, the force that stands for everything repugnant in modern society. Alas. 'Tis not for the likes of us.

That there's a day reserved for this ridiculous rite is even worse. Saint Valentine's Day, like Easter and Christmas, is rightly celebrated by Christians alone. Valentine warrants the faintest footnote in the Christian calendar - we know only two things of him. First, his name. It's Valentine, you know? Second, his burial place. That is of even less consequence. There's more love in a digestive biscuit. Since there's a selection of eleven Valentine's Days to choose from, there's no reason a Christian should celebrate it any more fervidly than, say, Saint Swithun's Day. Or Hannukah, for that matter. As ever though, in jumps Joe Public for the chocolate eggs and stocking fillers. Blame Geoffrey Chaucer for this sorry state of affairs. Stonking good writing in The Canterbury Tales aside, he's got a lot to answer for after creating the Valentine's Day myth. The idea that love and a commercial holiday are compatible is frankly laughable. It's like Santa Claus usurping Jesus Christ as the figurehead of Christmas. Beyond their natty dress sense and fathomless age, the two have strikingly little in common.

Fair enough. I am a cold sort of fish. But supposing you can live on in this puerile dreamworld, I beg of you, please ask yourself: just what the hell has it all been about? What, indeed, is the driving force behind these pathetic relationships?

It's certainly not love - not real love, true love, pure and untainted and unrequited love. A love worth having, in short. For it is not enough to love - you must love to love. You must be moved to shout your love from the rooftops to the heavenly serenade of birdsong and cathedral bells. Petrarch's love for Laura, now that is love. Peach Geldof's love for the no-name drummer she married, now that is something else entirely. That is madness, idiocy, egotism and near-unbearable crassness curled up into one insufferable succubus purring incessantly on the living room rug. A relationship cannot be excused as friendship either. By that definition, I'm more than married to Callum and Davies. In fact, I'm laid up in bed rubbing Vic on my chest after disgorging their seventeen children in a night of heated labour. If love is but friendship in acceleration, friendship with neon lights and and glow sticks and sparkles attached, then I have tasted all the happiness the world can offer. Friendship has contained for me the same highs and lows, the same strife and stress, the same exquisite, sainted silliness and the same unmitigated joy. If that is all love amounts to, then I have tasted all the happiness the world can offer. People have been too good to me. Far better than they have any business being, given my appalling heartlessness and generally surly demeanour. I am beyond grateful for them. I am quite satisfied - I need no more.

We must look to other areas to unravel the relationships enigma. A conformity ritual? Personal weakness more like. Practise! Practise for what? Life is no dress rehearsal in wait of polished performance. Life is a messy and thoroughly embarrassing improvisation with the odd moment of accidental genius. Best of the excuses is 'harmless fun.' Harmless fun! Oh, FUCK. OFF. We must have a little confidence, a little respect for ourselves. A little of the life-enhancing egotism we profess to suppress with these tawdry relationships! Relationships remain, as ever, the supremely selfish act: low, unconscientious, course and vile, disqualifying all others from your life. Relationships equate to a definite addiction, a selfish leave take of the senses! As much as it is claimed that friends will not be dismissed and rejected, they are - oh, yes they are, with breathtaking speed. The two are, in final analysis, incompatible. Think of it! Years of devotion cast aside for larger breasts, perkier buttocks, a particularly large dropsical-shaped sausage - whatever! A devout betrayal of all that is good and right in friendship. It is utterly shameful. There is no excuse. It is said that all we look for in a mate is a reflection of ourselves. I can believe it. Lovers come to mimic and mirror each other, gorging themselves on their own personality. So relationships are an ego trip, maybe. Self-justification. Two exquisitely narcissistic bubbles simply falling into each other. Perhaps that's all that's needed. Yet I find egotism is best performed within the safety of our own heads. Take this diatribe as an example. I have found the intellectual satisfaction of writing it ten times more arousing than a romp through the garden of consensual sex. The click and whirr of this exquisite marriage between keyboard and brain is worth a wilderness of licking, panting, heavy breathing and hot flushes. I am self-sufficient. I have discovered the joy of life without relationships.

And yet... and yet... and yet...

I believe in the reality of love. With painful, pitiless acuteness. I do not completely trust the love I feel myself - not yet, at any rate. I'll take some convincing. Far too self-referentially bitter and twisted am I to acknowledge personal truths at speed. I have had one so unbearably kind, well-intentioned, good-natured and, might I add, astronomically talented profess their love to me. It was a pleasant thing to know, a warm thing to know. It reawakened some jewel of faith in humanity. But it meant nothing. I felt nothing. What could I give back? What could I do in deference to that love? How could I possibly serve it? I felt nothing of the same. Simon Callow was right - 'equality of love is absolutely uncommon.' Equality of indifference, however, is not, and this is the code we tend to live by as human beings. You must look for satisfaction elsewhere. Otherwise you'll find yourself sacrificing sanity and reason for something you had already had. Contained within you. For love lies dormant within us at all times, should we only seek it. Love originates in the human beast and that is where it must remain. It is only natural.

The love I place my faith in is to be shared. This love is not selfish or furtive or attention-seeking or pig-headed or wrong. Here is love in its purest distillation, a unified state of compassion. The love with which we treat not just ourselves, not just one special other, but everyone. All the time. I am no saint (not even a Saint Valentine). I fall frightfully short of this standard every day of my life. I must get my satisfaction from trying. It is my eternal wish to do a bit of good in this world and, God help me, someday I'll succeed. For it is in this elevated plateaux of love that our salvation lies. Our final deliverance from the narrow-minded squalor of relationships.

Oof. I have issues.

Now, to finally drag myself back on-topic, this idea of a communal love-sharing (not too different to these woolly post-modern humanist notions fizzing about, which are themselves derived from Christian ethics) - this is astoundingly close to my model for theatre. Love between actor and audience is something I'd like to think I've got altogether more close to than the 'real' experience of it, and I know that I've at least had the chance to bask in the love that a few very gifted performers have cultivated. Funnily enough, it doesn't have to be a particularly pleasant character to inspire devotion. One time I'd like to think I have honed it is with the Torturer at The York Dungeon - as unlovely a soul as you're likely to encounter, the embodiment of evil, in fact, but still possessed of a certain something. Charisma, maybe? Devilish magnetism? Hard to say. For one reason and another, the concept of stage charisma is something I've been thinking about a fair bit recently, and it's not all that far removed from this discussion of love. I veer from one camp to the other - torn between the thought that charisma may actually be a burgeoning strain of the horrendous, self-extolling egotism that I've ranted about above, or a more vibrant and dynamic manifestation of this elusive love that I continue to rabbit on about. Perhaps there's no distinction. Or perhaps only the most marginal one - a razor-sharp divide, with audience responses as changeable as the wind. A dangerous thing. But again, I do think that power plays a substantial part - bending the audience to an overriding will, forcing them into a default channel and making sure their reaction is as uniform as possible. An effort to impose control on the audience - the force that, in effect, should really be controlling you. A tricky business. How do you keep charisma charming, like an Antonio Salieri? How do you make it threatening, like a Stanley Kowalski? Are you aiming for some mixture of the two? You're playing with fire. It's exciting, it's scary. It'll light your way to bed or burn the staircase from under your feet. You're only as good as your audience, and perhaps the vulnerability, the essential vulnerability that will be discussed a little later on, is restored by this simple recourse to trust.

Just as I was dusting off this entry for completion, I stumbled on the most unexpected echo of these sentiments, so much so that I thought I might as well share it. Behold! Yet another appearance from Kenneth Williams, on Parkinson in 1979. You can find it here, if you're interested in watching the whole thing. This I would recommend - Williams deserves to be enshrined with the likes of Clive James and Stephen Fry as one of the great, flowery, aesthete raconteurs of British television. Here is an acted character worlds removed from the private man, who felt himself to be irredeemably hideous, suffered terribly from depression, lived alone with his mother for his entire life and eventually died a suicide. Making others laugh, but never himself. In this elegant, witty and entirely charming persona, Williams has no time for such melancholia. In fact, one of the highlights of the interview is Kenneth's reapprasial of Joe Orton as simply a fun person to be around instead of a fountain gushing out darkness day, night and noon (the exploits of his letter-writing persona 'Edna Wellthorpe' - and her various attempts to stage a production of compassionate gay drama Nelson is a Nance at the local church hall - should put paid to this notion for good). Anyway. Generally as affected as you'd imagine it's possible for an actor to get, the lost heritage of Williams's stage work might well have offered a different perspective on his talents. This is an astonishingly frank and pure spillage of philosophy - particularly for coming from the angularity and contortion of this so-called 'wasp with adenoids'. Whether Williams put it into practise or not is a mystery. But his words have endured (quite unexpected fun, transcribing his lightning-fast diction, but I've done my best):

I think what they're coming for is to be beguiled... To be - I think, what Shaw says about theatre is the most significant, 'to illuminate the dark places of the mind', and I think if you engage them in that process, then they will accept it, they'll accept it totally, whatever the picture you're creating, because you're engaging them. I think the moment you're failing, whether it's comedy or tragedy - and really, they're only two sides of the same coin - the moment you're failing is when they are not engaged by you. And that means you're not being vulnerable anymore. Vulnerability is what acting's about. You go onto a stage and you say, 'Well, this is it. If you don't - 'this is my baby, I'm doing this for you'. If they don't like it, and you're not prepared to be vulnerable, then it doesn't work at all - it doesn't work and it never will work. But if you are prepared to be vulnerable, I'd love them to come with you. And there is that reciprocity established, they'll come with you halfway, and they'll say 'Is it any good?' and go with you. If it's not, and you're not prepared to be engaging, then it's death. And I know actors that have been vulnerable, that feel afterwards - having put a hand out, it's been spat on - they think 'oh!' for the rest of their life, they're not going to do it. You know what I mean? They're going to hold themselves like that. And it doesn't work: you've got to go on putting it out. And it's a terrible risk that you take. But you take it, you take it nightly.

As I said, it does seem odd to think of Kenneth Williams as at all vulnerable. But he is, through and through. He thrusts himself into a position of supreme vulnerability here. Listen to the crowd laugh at his voice, hardly before he's got a word out. In a spirit of affection, I'm sure, but there's little that's more distressing than provoking a laugh by acting in the way that seems most natural to you. The man was trashed too much in his own day and is trashed too much in this one... not that he isn't beyond all that by now. He has nothing but respect from me.

I fear that unless I can hone a bit of reflexive love between actor and audience for Pickwick & Nickleby, I will fail very badly indeed. Such an ambitious undertaking is always going to be a bit of a failure - but hopefully not excessively so! I can rehearse the play to death in isolation, but a vital piece of the its soul is missing. Things will probably start to change the instant I get it back before my director and a team of committed acquaintances and well-wishers... For the moment though, I am performing only to myself (and to you, the reader, in a far more limited capacity), and the self-absorbtion is stifling. Bring back Cambridge. Bring back people.