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.

Fork in the Road

It's high time I dredged up a post on the 'Nickleby' section of the Dickens show, if only to bookend my pontifications on 'Pickwick' from a few weeks ago. Sadly, this means that scariest of things: an on-topic blog entry. However, all is not lost! I've managed to slide into a monstrous twofold tangent on Drugger and the Dungeon somewhere towards the middle. So not only is the structure of this entry forked, ensnaring the reader with the deceptive guile of a serpent's tongue, but my theatrical future - for a little while at least. Competing commitments and the overwhelming tiredness that they'll surely induce look set to distract me from Dickens, if only for a short period. But with a little optimistic luck, I should return to the project refreshed and prepared to go on fighting.

My general tide of opinion in the last entry was that the 'Nickleby' segment was a much stronger piece of theatre than the 'Pickwick' one. That opinion has redoubled and multiplied during the rehearsal process, and it's not an altogether comfortable thought. Deep down, I do believe that an actor can very rarely be much better than their material. Yet the unwieldy and capricious code by which textual value is judged has come to befuddle and dismay me with such frequency in recent years that it's a reality that I've rarely been happy to embrace ('now more than ever!' he claimeth, with the melancholy Byronic posturings of a true English student). Maybe it's some deep-set inferiority complex generated by the sheer number of mediocre scripts I've played in my time - or, more terrifying yet, the recognition that the select few scripts of real brilliance and quality that I've become mixed up with have ended in a distinct feeling of failure... Not making the full use of it and all that. My dramatic instincts, fuelled by the retributive demons of perfectionism and OCD, have always run towards completeness. But perhaps this is neither productive or useful in the long run, as much as it tries to be. Satisfaction is simply not an option for an actor if they're attempting to do their best. Standards shift, expectations rise, the bar is raised and an entire performance can be frittered away in desperately trying to grab at it, hoist yourself into some suspended bubble of comfort. Yet that begs the even more drastic, potentially deadly question of just where we should derive satisfaction from in our acting? It's not in everyone to get a kick out of the puritanical quest for absolute purity in performance... It's not in me, I know that much.

For me then, my joy in a production tends to come from the elements that orbit my performance like so many twinkling meteors, glittering moons and super-secret Russian satellites, rather than the arid, featureless rock of my own contribution. The actors. A certain intonation that strikes or amuses you. Analysing the audience as though dousing for water. A scrap of costume, a fraction of set. Interesting lighting configurations! In essence, the component parts of the very infrastructure that defends against personal failure in the first place. Return to the Forbidden Planet was a perfect example of this phenomenon. Too many elements of absolute joy came together in this production - together, they read like the Christmas list of a hyperactive infant. Oh, but really, it was fantastic. I got to die from being eaten by a giant green monster! An' I got to rise from the dead at the end! An' I got to wear a Dracula cape an' all - like Lugosi, like Carradine, like Lee! An' I got to do the 'Monster Mash' - one of the all-time great novelty songs! An' first done as an imitation of Boris Karloff. Boris Karloff! Karloff the Uncanny! William Henry Pratt! What sainted good luck! Not least of these distractions was the chance to sing. To suddenly discover the power of an orchestra looming behind you is fantastically liberating, especially when you have an inkling, as a non-singer, that it's never going to happen again. Now, attend to the video closely: this is a happy actor. And, as a direct result, it's one of the very few examples of my own work that I can watch with (relative) ease:



The very reasons that I believe the 'Nickleby' section to be a superior piece of theatre are what make it so bloody difficult to perform. Geographically, the pieces are polar opposites. 'Bardell and Pickwick' is extremely limited, boasting only two locations (and even that marginal variety is the result of my clumsily interpolating material from a later chapter to try and provide a more satisfying coda). By contrast, 'Nicholas Nickleby at the Yorkshire School' not only drags its eponymous protagonist into the classroom, but a staggering variety of other locations in the process, including a London inn, a storm-blasted road and a country barn. The opportunities that it provides for physicality and technical distinctiveness are tremendously exciting, but also cause for a few headaches - if all goes as planned, we'll be testing the prosaic functionality of the Larkum to its very limits as a performance space.

There are also a lot of mercilessly quick duologues, usually counterpointing Nicholas with Squeers or Smike - a quite remarkable contrast, pitting the personification of bland, faceless heroism against two of the most hopelessly twisted creatures in the Dickens repertoire. It's probably far more trouble than it's worth, but the effectiveness of switching between two separate lighting cues has come under consideration. Peter Jackson looked to cross-cutting to give the impression of the schizophrenic divide between Smeagol and Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. It's perhaps fortunate that we can't drag this cinematic technique onstage with us, because I always found it a little confusing. For one thing, it constitutes a direct breach of Hitchcock's shot-reverse-shot philosophy of character representation by applying it to one subject - or perhaps a too eager literalisation of the same. Just how did the character shift from one position to another so quickly anyway? I know, I know... The psychological aspect of filmmaking is utterly lost on me. The Broadway production of Jekyll and Hyde used lighting cues to great effect in the climactic song 'Confrontation' - but for us to pull it off with this degree of fluidity would be an astounding feat. As with all of these big-budget musicals, the technical elements are surely rehearsed to death, and the very nature of musical theatre means that the lighting technician will at least have an unchanging symphonic background as a reliable guide to follow. In the Dickens show, a consistency of characterisation would have to be secured, and when dealing with bare prose, such a thing can never be assured. There's a professionally filmed version of the stage musical floating about, starring David Hasselhoff (of all people!) in the lead(s). I have my doubts about his singing, and he pulls a succession of pretty dubious facial expressions, so I've decided to avoid using that one. The actor here, Rob Evan, has the benefit of a gloriously floppy hairpiece as well. Squeers's missing eye will be our considerably cheaper counterpart:



I have a feeling that the jokes of 'Nickleby' are a good deal funnier than those of 'Pickwick' as well - although it's vital to regulate this intimation so that it doesn't tip over into the sort of self-satisfied comic hubris that would make the performance utterly unamusing. It probably has a lot to do with the dynamism of tone that 'Nickleby' offers. 'Pickwick' is insane from start to finish and happy to be so; the Monty Python to the Fawlty Towers of 'Nickleby'. Yes, John Cleese is hysterically good in both, but Python's anarchy is so brutal and relentless that it promotes a feeling of disconnection after a while, eventually tending towards a low-key despair with humanity (Family Guy is a later, more violent example of this nihilistic disorder). Fawlty Towers managed to retain some level of humanity amidst the madness with its careful balance of rounded characters and pantomime hysteria. Yet despite the relative strength of 'Nickleby', this hasn't made it more fun to perform than 'Pickwick'. The courtroom setting of 'Pickwick' offers a rare chance for some utterly self-conscious theatre: every character acts a part, and every character acts that part supremely badly, their performances thrown over their baser motives like a semi-transparent veil. I'm always delighted to be able to root myself to the spot and feel justified in doing so (disposing of leg movement - one less thing to worry about), and a courtroom setting provides an exemplary opportunity for this. Disappearing into an extended monologue is also riotous good fun, and the dependable Serjeant Buzfuz engages in this pursuit for well over ten minutes. 'Nickleby' is just that bit more complex. Potential rewards then. But only if it's done right. There's no hiding this time. No seeking salvation in the orbit of exterior elements. The whites of the audience's eyes. Do or die. And such and such.

I've complained about the difficulties of the Smike and Nickleby relationship an inordinate amount of times by now. As a result, I see no harm whatsoever in bothering you with my plight again - for now I feel I'm at the beginnings of a solution. Smike seems to have been roundly brutalised by Phiz, the quintessential Dickens artist and the man responsible for the busy, excitable engravings that accompany Nicholas Nickleby. It's difficult to dispute the huge debt that Dickens's fiction owes to the visual arts. The original premise of The Pickwick Papers was that Dickens's prose would be subordinate to a comic series of renderings depicting the sporting pursuits of English country gentlemen. Oh, yes. People were easily amused back then. Nor can it be denied that Dickens cared very deeply about the images that accompanied his work - so much so that he had Phiz redraw the illustrations of the original Pickwick artist, who had gone and committed suicide only a few installments into the serial's run. So much for preserving the memory of the dead. Smike emerges very much the way one would expect from a superficially sympathetic outlook on the mentally handicapped in early nineteenth century society. By and large, the images of Smike are horrendous - a succession of ugly, gaping, mongoloid facial disasters, more characteristic of the emblematic racism of Uncle Tom's Cabin than a soul in torment. Towards the end, this is sacrificed for the weepy sentiment of a cherubic deathbed scene, but the overriding impression is brutish. One particular image has caught my imagination though. Smike's first appearance is on the bare peripheries of a much larger engraving, depicting one of the most celebrated atrocities of Dotheboys Hall: plying the boys with brimstone and treacle to deprive them their appetites and hence the cost of an extra meal. Even in the bottom left corner, Smike can hardly be argued as the image's focus, what with the impetuous figure of Young Wackford straddling his person as a pilfered boot is thrust onto his foot. But the figure's appearance is truly haunting, in some respects even elegant - a sort of fallen angel, freighted with shadow and decay. It's probably a creative compromise. By this point in the narrative, Smike's character was not established beyond a nondescript phantom of doom, and the figure cultivates an appropriate aura of mystery. Seek it out if you can. Perhaps you'll see what I saw.

A viewing of The Whales of August provided a second and altogether more unexpected source of inspiration. For the uninitiated, it's a sentimental drama about two old spinsters living on the coast in Maine. The Simpsons memorably parodied it as The Buttercups of Autumn, in which an old woman's fevered ramblings that 'I fear I have become a buttercup of winter' are met with a jaunty 'hush up, Nana - that's fool's talk!' I was expecting something of this order when I got round to watching it, but I was actually pleasantly surprised. It's pretty hard to synopsise such a plotless film. The narrative pace is at one with the characters - slow, directionless, even a little arthritic. But narrative really isn't the point here. The Whales of August is a very engaging character study, probing the strange beauty and dignity that can be reclaimed from the plateau of hopelessness that threatens to consume the end of human life. In adapting the stage play to cinema, Lindsay Anderson seems to have delighted in assembling a cast of faded Hollywood legends, most of whom seemed to take their last glorious bow in the film. All else that followed was dross. Lillian Gish, the former silent film actress, so feisty and memorable in The Night of the Hunter, by this time aged ninety-four; Vincent Price, miraculously promoted back from the cinematic mausoleum to the exotic seducer familiar from Laura and Dragonwyck; and Bette Davis, one of the screen's most endlessly fascinating actresses, who so memorably did it the hard way. In the entry preceding this one, my self-important little treatise on ham, I briefly mentioned the macabre fascination to be gleaned from her drastically altered performances after the series of strokes she suffered in her final years. As the only really good film she made in her last twenty years on earth, The Whales of August is the best example of this sad phenomenon. Her character has a spiritual essence in common with Smike - or at least, what I would like Smike to be. One of the film's critical notices (happily reproduced by Wikipedia) expresses the fascination of Davis's performance far better than I can:

Bette crawls across the screen like a testy old hornet on a windowpane, snarling, staggering, twitching – a symphony of misfired synapses.

Here's a clip. In all fairness, Davis takes some getting used to. There's an impulsive inclination to recoil and grit your teeth a bit. Sense prevails with slow immersion. It's a film of supreme emotional manipulation ('OH, LORDY NO!' you scream, 'THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT THE SWANS AGAIN!), but I enjoyed it anyway:



I've got round to producing a 'master' version of the show in audio form by now, the plan being that I insistently listen to it until the lines fit as securely and naturally as a second skin. Smike is a little too wooden for my tastes right now. That may be down to the limitations of recording as much as anything though - standing rigidly to attention in deference to the hearing powers of a little black box is far removed from the action of Smike's scenes, which generally involve lying across some meagre stick of furniture, prostrate and paralytic, all the while doubled up with numerous chokes and sobs. Horribly mechanical to reflect on it this way, but it's a badly needed premeditation. Spontaneity in pencilling in the 'big' emotions simply looks like under-rehearsal, while an animated physicality can be the most fantastic release. I think I've given up on making Nicholas less wooden. It's got to the point where I'm struggling to subtract any further from my natural voice. And who knows, maybe the invasion of a little boredom will serve as a welcome relief from the merciless saturation of grotesques bearing in on the show elsewhere... That's not a very conscientious standpoint though, so rest assured that I'm working on it.

In aid of my dissertation, I've started to labour on the only thing I've found to work when writing about any sort of literature: micro-analyses, which demand a text's every irritating quirk is noted down in pedantic, peevish detail. It's particularly illuminating when the task involves some sort of textual comparison, but all that flicking between the texts of the public readings and Dickens's dauntingly thick novels take a heck of a long time. It's been beneficial in preparing the show though. The Philip Collins footnotes are excellent from start to finish, and have been particularly useful where unearthing some extra bits of business for the show are concerned. Collins records a few of Dickens's more hilarious improvisations from his enactment of the teaching methods of Wackford Squeers - identifying 'window' as a preposition and railing against Greek and Hebrew for no discernible reason, amongst other esoteric delights - and I've spliced them into the show accordingly. One especially pleasing revelation came from W. M. Wright's performance notes on 'Nickleby', noting that Mrs Squeers received 'Mrs. Cluppins's voice'. Beautiful. At the peak of his creative powers, Dickens still stooped to being an inspired self-plagiarist. It may not seem like a lot, but such snippets are an enormous comfort when preparing a show in which virtuosity of character and distinctiveness for the sake of it sometimes seem like the whole point - and quite incorrectly, of course. I also happened upon this quotation from Kate Field, which I thought was an absolute gem:

When Serjeant Buzfuz ... aims a forefinger at the defendant's head, it becomes a query, whether grotesque action is not as difficult to excel in as absolute grace. Dickens has learned its secret.

I'll continue labouring on the micro-analyses of the Dickens readings, but I'm quite aware that any performance work on Pickwick & Nickleby is going to slow down for a while now. Nevertheless, I'm fairly excited by how the first leg of the rehearsal process has gone, and feel reasonably confident that adequate foundations have been laid for future development. As I write this, I've completed my re-training, shadowing and first run of public performances for The York Dungeon. (The time setting listed above this post can be safely ignored; there's something confuddling and awry in what pops up there in relation to publishing times.) This also explains why my productivity of blodging has ground to an almost steady halt, so apologies for that too - not that I imagine the surely ravening hoardes who follow this journal feels a pang of regret when they discover there to be no new entries. The Dungeon has been entirely wonderful - everything I could have hoped for after almost a year away, and stimulating and rewarding in so many little ways. But then, that's a whole blog entry by itself. Or a mini-series of blog entries. A mini-series with a spin-off, a guest spot on Parkinson and a muster of TV spots promoting Butterfingers... A man has dreams, you know. Blame 'a man' for this latest inundation of words, and proceed to the next tangent, quick trot, quick trot...

I've also been thinking lightly in the direction of The Alchemist. I didn't crack Abel Drugger last time (there was barely time to crack an egg, rehearsals were so frantic), but I hope to get a little closer on this occasion. So, in the course of my daily ferreting through various different bookshelves, I've managed to unearth a few halfway interesting fragments. Unbelievably stimulating for anyone who's about to play Abel Drugger, mildly irritating for all else, but here goes anyway. If nothing else, I shall profit by it!

The first interesting thing was in All the World's a Stage by Ronald Harwood. It's been malingering on my bookshelf for quite a few years now, seldom read but often skimmed, and has been imbued in my memory bank mainly for its wonderful closing gallery of actors that Harwood considers particularly notable (with some unusual selections, such as Donald Wolfit and Michael Hordern). On the latest lightning-speed flick-through however, I halfway jumped out of my skin at the sight of a full-page image of Abel Drugger. To be precise, it was a severely cropped detail of David Garrick in the role, taken from this famous portrait (Garrick is the figure on the far right):


I found some additional material on Garrick in a fairly good popular biography of him at the library. The newly redesigned York Central Library, to be precise (or should that be Explore Centre...?), which at least does a good coffee, even if the bookshelves are blasphemously balanced on wheels. The author is Jean Bendetti, and the title is David Garrick and the Birth of the Modern Theatre. Modernity scares me, so I was almost warned off by that pithy title, but the gorgeous cover art of Garrick's Richard III persuaded me to wait until the interval at least. Here's a paragraph that caught my interest, at least partly for distilling so much that frustrated me in grappling with the character:

Abel Drugger is one of six victims of fraud. It is a minor role, with few lines. On the surface there is little in the dialogue to give a clue as to how the role should be played. Everything is left to the actor, and Garrick seized the opportunity to establish one of his most famous roles out of almost nothing. In so doing, he demonstrated a new way of playing comedy, one freed from mugging and grimacing and the obvious playing for laughs that had distinguished Theophilus Cibber.

Given that Garrick opened one fateful theatre season by alternating the roles of Hamlet and Drugger, it's difficult not to speculate on his decision being driven by a spice of ego. High tragedy and high farce side by side; the most brooding and contemplative of characters pitted against the most idiotic and pliable. 'But look at my RANGE!' you hear his phantom fairly cry across the ages. But if Garrick was really out to impress, why did he not go for Face or Subtle? Both offer up a sort of character actor's paradise, boasting multiple identities skewed to seduce the audience with their combined charisma. Perhaps it's something to do with the fundamental difference between leading roles and supporting roles. Both invariably seem to produce performances of a similar nature - and that would very neatly explain why actors have such phenomenal trouble in breaking out of their casting brackets. And the dirty upstaging tricks that Garrick employed in The Alchemist have since become legend. After all, this is the same man who rewrote Shakespeare by granting Richard III the immortal crowd-pleaser 'So much for Buckingham!'. Garrick's motives for the character were not pure, but the greatness of his achievement was such that nobody particularly cares.

Bendetti also includes the humourous anecdote of a Lichfield grocer, who, after an exposure to Garrick's Drugger, was so overcome by the performance's realism that he took the actor for the character, and scorned any further acquaintance with such a seedy, dirt-encrusted peasant. More than a little reminiscent of the modern accounts of viewers confusing soap actors with the characters they play onscreen. Although with most soaps, its arguable as to whether the actor is playing the character or the character the actor, so often do they seem to exactly coincide... It's the hilarious gimmick by which Hollyoaks has gained my undying respect. There's a also a sidebar on the showboating, scene-stealing tactics that Garrick employed to keep the limelight focused squarely on himself. For example, he would take it upon himself to break a urinal and look very dejected to play on the sensitivities of his audiences. This spurious business was apparently stolen for a later production, which featured the Drugger of Colley Cibber: the original Lord Foppington in The Relapse. (Perhaps Andy Brock should take over as Drugger...) Most outrageous of all, Garrick's Drugger would enter an animal passion upon discovering he had been conned at the end, tearing his shirt off as though primed for a boxing match. This is strikingly reminiscent of the way that Macklin and Irving and Olivier would augment Shylock's final exit in The Merchant of Venice with an offstage scream to ease extra sympathy (not to mention terror) from an audience. As much as that though, these actor choices can be taken as filling what many consider a gaping void in the Shakespeare text. Possibly Garrick's bravado amounted to a tacit acknowledgement of something vitally lacking in the Drugger character as written by Jonson. Garrick added a coda that made sense to him based on the rest of his minutely observed performance. It may offer the key to his entire interpretation, but whether it serves the text is a point for debate.

It also seems that Alec Guinness had quite a fondness for the humble tobacconist. Cue book number three: Piers Paul Reid's authorised biography, simply titled Alec Guinness (makes sense). It was one of his greatest early stage successes, hailed as 'a glorious piece of playing' by James Agate of The Sunday Times in the 1946 season at the Old Vic. Michael Billington (who gets my vote as our best living theatre critic) also imparts a little Guinness wisdom that sheds some light on his Drugger:

He was not a lion among actors - he was a formidable and fantastically inventive actor and one that was a pleasure to watch. he had an ability to enact spirituality and goodness and kindness which are normally hard to potray ... And he could play characters with an obsession. Abel Drugger in The Alchemist - a dreamer - is said to have been one of the great cameo appearances of all time...

Simon Callow's latest, My Life in Pieces, builds on this conception of Drugger with a further insight into Guinness:

There was a kind of part that he longed to play but which seemed not to exist: fantastical creations, like the Drugger with which he had such a success at the Vic in the Thirties [Callow is a decade out], but also poetic, moonstruck. 'One had a sort of gift, a rather small gift, for clownish parts, for innocents. There haven't been any possibilities in that line lately.' It was hard to envisage the seriously stout gentleman opposite me, brimful of alcohol and with a fag hanging from his lips, undertaking any such light-footed role, but then he would make a moment's mental contact with the image in his mind, and there it would be, on his face, in his body, in the room with us - his harlequin, an exquisite creation as light as a dragonfly's wing...

The talk that Simon Russell Beale gave at the ADC was a further prod in this direction - and of course came at a time, way back in April, when there were still a few bleak hopes that the original production would go ahead - maybe on the Saturday, maybe in May Week. A ridiculously nice chap actually. He made the effort to stop me while I was rushing in and out of the theatre to pick up various bits and pieces I'd forgotten (common occurrence, this), and initiated a (very) brief exchange. I'd worn my best purple tie as a spiritual commemoration of the lost tobacconist, so I even felt bold enough to answer back. More importantly, the conversation gives me a chance to revive my beloved 'SI & I' format in memorialising the conversation. I really must badger people called Simon more often.

SI: Who did you say you were playing again?

I: Drugger.

SI: Oh! He's - MAR-VELL-OUS!

Not me, you understand. The character, Drugger. This needs flagging up as a potential source of confusion - certainly, when Beale asked us which characters we were playing in a more formal manner a little earlier, the mere presence of Will Seaward in connection with Mammon provoked the most gushing, voluptuous and spectacularly luvvie-ish 'Oh! He's - MAR-VELL-OUS!' in all creation. This was naturally before Seaward fled the ADC in disgrace, having broken the composure of England's greatest stage actor by having the unforgivable nerve to ask a question devoid of pretension. I kid you not!

SI: Yes, we had an Indian chap when we did it.

I: Ah. Were you going for the hippie angle?

By this time I'd read far too many reviews of productions that transformed Drugger into some far-out, pot-smoking delinquent. Now, I'm willing to do many ridiculous things onstage, and usually on the most risible and ill-founded of pretences, but the thought of being forced into a tie-dyed tent and a cloud of appropriately Drugger-ish smoke was sufficiently frightening that I spent the rehearsal week in a mild state of nausea.

SI: No - corner shop, actually.

I don't think there's all that much to be gleaned from the exchange. It was a quite interesting thirty seconds, but rather than penetrate to the heart and soul of Abel Drugger, it focused on the attendent gimmicks that directors fall upon to make the character more digestible. This is the nightmare of Drugger. There's so very little in the text. Maybe there's nothing more to the character than exists on the surface. Even in Being an Actor, in which Callow reports on the nightmares of an earlier National Theatre staging of The Alchemist, he mentions the actor who plays Drugger only by virtue of his wonderful wide eyes. Again, that daunting situation of an actor reduced to their component parts - just a bunch of blinks and twitches rather than entering as a being with a heart and soul to bare.

Perhaps this then is the key. Simplicity. Simplicity seemed to be the keynote of Simon Russell Beale's really quite illuminating talk on the show. He mentioned that the heart should bleed a little for the plight of such blithe, innocent dreamers as Mammon and Dapper and Drugger. Should Drugger really tug on the heartstrings? Is that facility really accomodated by the script? And is that even compatible with the version that we were engaged in creating? It struck me as an astonishingly youthful production. Very fast, very funny, quite a lot of naughty and sexy business, and anarchic from start to finish. But which misfit in this adolescent playground is the lowly Abel Drugger...? In other words, the mystery continues!

In Defence of Ham

A word of caution: the following isn't to be taken at all seriously. It's intended to provoke, niggle, pique and otherwise irritate. Like most of the detritus slowly filling up this blog, it's penned in an ultraviolet, mock-heroic hand, so provided you forget my contentiousness and allow the generalised rhetorical sweep to guide you to the end, you're sure to have a splendid time. Terror is my constant companion in rehearsals for the Dickens show. And in waking up... And in not doing the work... And in doing the work, popping to the supermarket for a bottle of milk, most everything really... It's in these times of isolation that I turn to my deepest insecurities, hash out manifestos and get-out clauses by way of protection, and hope to have some relic to comfort me in the dark, dark hours after the sodding reviews come out... Nevertheless, it's also a (very jokey) distillation of a some of what has been building in my head for the last few years with regards to the much maligned lot of the character actor. Perhaps someday I'll produce the serious version and finally settle my score with Stanislavsky. For the time being though:

IN DEFENCE OF HAM; Or
WHY DO I ACT SO HARD?; Or
HELP, VINCENT!* THEY'RE TRYING TO TAKE MY PLAY AWAY!

For the majority of people, ham, hamminess and all things pertaining to the hammy point to one very simple thing: overacting. And quite right too. But where so many people fall down is in railing against overacting as an abomination; a heinous sin and a wicked indulgence; a rank insult for all concerned. What total nonsense. There is bad overacting, certainly, and there is bad overacting in spades. But good overacting is something else entirely: a tempestuous, volatile and endlessly intriguing pursuit that remains deeply misunderstood.

The early cinema offers a portal to the past, and it positively abounds with what might be politely termed 'ham'. The smouldering eyes and bewitching arched hands of Bela Lugosi - the screen's eternal Dracula, regardless of the role's requirements. The Boston drawl and acerbic demeanour of Bette Davis, tightened into self-caricature by the strokes she suffered late in life. The futile, ham-fisted blusterings of Nigel Bruce, consistent in picture after picture, back again and again by popular demand. Nor are the accepted greats exempt: look to Olivier and his quivering, rapacious chameleon of a nose; Gielgud with the breathy cultivation of a slightly ruffled peacock; even Brando, the undisputed patron saint of naturalistic realism, and his omnipresent mouth full of toilet paper. Can these be considered the celebrated vestiges of actor 'personality' that the school of underplaying seeks to venerate? Not a chance. These traits pop up with such startling regularity and boldness in the work of each of these performers that they cannot be labelled anything but deliberate stylistic choices. Attention-seeking ones, at that. In acting as in life, what we at first accept as small quirks of personality become absorbed into a style with the passing years. Yet it is often precisely this style that makes an actor so very interesting. 'Mannerism' is another of those cruel terms so flippantly applied to actors whose quirks refuse to be suppressed. But why should they be? Clearly they have risen to a point beyond the actor's real-life persona - they have become tokens to a heightened world, a plane on which human beings can aspire to and eventually become the most expressive possible versions of themselves, at once bound in and released by the creative prison of their natural instrument. It seems that the common maxim of the drama school is to nip such inconsistencies in the bud and expunge their candidates of irregularity at the first opportunity. Theatre is no better for this crude variation on Nazi selection. Acting can and so often should be a wild, fantastical menagerie of spectacle and wonder - and so it was until the last half-century or so. Embarrassment in the face of the theatrical is a very recent innovation, and an altogether baffling one. Overacting is a legitimate performance art in its own right, and deserves to be recognised as such.

It is for this reason that I demand a reassessment of the term 'ham'. What sort of images does this simple word evoke? Abundance; plenty; generosity; flavour; robustness; in short, a feast. Hang on a minute... And these are the things that we're meant to apologise for in our acting? Predictably, there isn't a widely agreed term with which to deride those who persistently indulge in the far greater treachery of doing too little onstage. Very predictably, for the business of doing too little obsesses over such slipperiness and obfuscation. We must instead be content with a tangled, sinewy net of vaguely applicable terms... Nuance. Naturalism. Underplaying. Subtlety above all, subtlety is too often the calling card of the lazy under-actor. And subtlety is not an appealing word. What does it conjure up? Deception; sneakiness; double-crossing; a concentrated effort to defy the rules; if we're going to get horrendously pretentious and allusive about this (here goes), the Subtle of The Alchemist, who spends his complete dramatic career pulling the wool over the eyes of the trusting and the innocent. The ham actor lays all his cards on the table, so to speak. There are no secrets. From the very first line, there is a tacit acknowledgement: none of this is real - this is wonderful entertainment in the great tradition of make-believe - trust me for only a moment and wonderful things will happen. And then, having given ourselves over to the improbable, we can progress to far greater rewards.

For profundity can spring from the strangest of places. Above all, profundity mustn't be laboured for. That is a crime of the modern age. Look to the most primal image of theatre, the child curled up in their grandmother's lap and the telling of fairy stories. Saccharine as hell? Quite so, quite so, but do please stick with me on this one. No false, distorting glass; no smoke and mirrors here - rather, a heightened sensitivity and appreciation that springs from innocence. Does the grandmother seek to hoodwink, to bamboozle, to deceive by successive twists of subtlety and deception? Not at all. The spell emanates from a much purer place. A little trust is all that is required. Ham acting is instinctively trusting. At the very outset, at a single stroke, it overleaps that hurdle which underplayed performances will waste the entire length of a play in fumbling and fetishising over: reality. With that simple agreement of wonder between and actor and audience, a great wave of energy is released. Then a play can truly go into orbit, perhaps even reduce its audience to that primitive child-like state. This is a far more effective way to locate the chink in an audience's armour and penetrate deep into the soul. It needn't do this, of course. Most of the time, it most certainly won't. But this is of little consequence, for at least it doesn't try - at least it doesn't provide us cause for real embarrassment with its incessant proddings for profundity. Subtle performances will naturally summon up the illusion of reality, but this is a reality of strict convenience, clipped and confined to the precise dimension's of the warring actor's ego. It is seldom if ever 'real'. That awful, strained, painfully embarrassing bray for audience rapture is the facetious battle-cry of the naturalistic theatre; the sole preserve and progeny of a supremely ungenerous acting style. By a miraculous inversion, there is nothing less self-conscious than ham, that allegedly most self-conscious of acting styles.

It is curious indeed to note which entertainments have kept the theatre alive. Pantomime. Melodrama. Circuses. And even within circuses, the primordial terrors of the freak show... Throughout the ages, these have been the guaranteed theatrical money-makers. People are always on the hunt for some manner of catharsis in theatre. Why must this be divorced from the allegedly artistic, heightened and exalted side of drama? Shakespeare demands subtlety? Very well, if you insist. But these plays were written for performance - and I really do struggle to imagine what simulacrum of subtlety could thrive in an inn-yard, the goodly players struggling for supremacy against the braying asses and the cackling hens, the drunken peasant thralls and the perennial cabbage flying through the air. Lest it be forgotten, it is the hammiest of the Shakespeare repertoire that has enjoyed the most successful performance history - Titus Andronicus and Richard III, that admirable pair of sixteenth century Sweeney Todds; Macbeth and its sensationalist honour roll of ghosts and wicked witches; even Pericles, a text derided for its geographical schizophrenia and surreal grasp of plot, has always been observed to work remarkably well onstage, a fantasy spectacle that bursts at the seams with wonder. It's a testament to Shakespeare's genius that he crafted plays of such intricate complexity, likely in the full knowledge that not an fraction of it would be comprehended in the hearing - no matter how preciously spoken. Was this something in the order of an act of compensation? Is it beyond the realms of possibility that Shakespeare purposefully saturated his plays with the quite impossible vastness of human experience, well knowing that this was essential practice when so much would be lost to the umpteen distractions of the reality of performance?

Of course, it's splendid that we now think we're equipped to do justice to Shakespeare. But are we any closer? Really? Or are we just working out ever more clever and casually vindictive ways to emend the raw experience of theatre with academic footnotes? You know the sort of drivel: 'Please to note here that Shylock is represented in the style of the King Herod of the medieval Mystery Plays' or 'In deference to Orson Welles, his Mercury Theatre, the spirit of Don Quixote and the most considered mise en scene of Chimes at Midnight, we here interpolate the faintest fragment of the Merry Wives within Henry IV'. The current fashion for productions with puke-inducingly 'relevant' stagings is also symptomatic of this crisis of imagination: 'Now watch as Shylock ordains a glorious Holocaust metaphor - so you see, Shakespeare is timelessly relevant, a Nostradamus figure who predicts the fall of nations' or perhaps 'Our Falstaff has type two diabetes: the good living caught up with him'. That's not to say that modern stagings can't work, when handled sensitively and with a little bit of restraint. But please don't pound our skulls in with it; such ostentatiousness is overacting of an altogether different and quite inexcusable sort. There's something innately childish about it, this dressing up for the critics... All of a sudden, it's no longer enough for Shakespeare to write human beings. Who wouldn't trade a century of RSC performances for the chance to witness just one of those murky rituals when a Shakespeare first slithered out of its slimy, primordial ooze and took its place in the Globe - in all its freakish, bawling, carnivalesque madness? 'Hail Shakespeare, glorious in your morning weeds!' and all that. In spite of its limitations, hamminess here assumes the role of a crusading champion - a last noble vanguard against the insufferable vices of pretension and preciousness.

Do too much. It's far, far better than doing too little. Generosity, compassion and giving, giving, giving to an audience - if only to balance out the guilty burden that you're onstage solely for your own despicable ends. Whenever did attempting to do a good job become a cause for shame? What a hatefully English perspective. For this is the great paradox at the centre of ham acting. More often than not, ham is an antidote to the horrible, hurtful accusations that acting is driven solely by ego. It most certainly is not the manifestation of that principle. That is the province of bad overacting - the ham gone off, banished to some theatrical wasteland and staggering hand-in-hand with 'corpsing' and 'drying' (those two other terms indicative of a fundamental deprivation or decay in performance art). The quest for good overacting - for valiant, true and remarkable ham - is something else again. The stakes are higher, that goes without saying, and the odds of looking an absolute fool or failing outright are significantly raised. But hell, get on with it - it's just a bloody play, for Gielgud's sake, not some shrapnel-spitting, smoke-spewing Vietnam warscape. Embarrassment must be tackled head-on and wrestled into submission. There's no shame in failure, no shame at all - provided your motives are pure. The only real shame is in willfully delivering an audience with less than they deserve. When the hounds come baying for my blood, I'll not palm them off with a sliver of subtlety, the faintest ghost of a properly meaty performance... That way lies death and chomping. I'm hellbent on delivering them robust and juicy ham. It could just mean salvation.

*Not entirely whether this refers to Vincent Crummles or Vincent Price. Both are united by their generosity of spirit, and, like that other famous Vincent, had no qualms about sharing their outsize personalities, their mordant wit and small portions of their ears when the occasion called for it. I intend on creating an amalgam of the two - one who spouts Dickensian epithets before gazing sombrely at a portrait of his deceased wife; who dips his patrons in boiling wax before treating them all to a bowl of smoking bishop.

The Dungeon Beckons...

A sublime little place known as The York Dungeon will be absorbing my thoughts more and more over the coming months, so I thought that it only seemed fair to grant it a proper introduction! I think it's also fair to say that it's going to take precedent over the Dickens show for a quite considerable span of physical deprivation, vocal trauma and blissfully early nights. However, I have a hunch - in the figurative sense this time - that there are enough crossovers between Dickens and the Dungeon to make balancing the two projects a useful and interesting exercise. As long as I manage to keep a regular log of my Dungeon experiences, I'll have a good crack at chalking in the tenuous connections between the two, and possibly even probe the potential for each to help the other up to some mutual plane of improvement.

Now, if you're ignorant of the existence of The York Dungeon - then pity to you, my dearest friend, you simply have not lived. It's the establishment that I'll be working in this summer: the North's premier museum of horror; a grand haunt for elegant ghosts; a Dante's Inferno for the new millennium. From my unrepentantly prejudiced perspective, it's a seminal institution, and responsible for playing a singularly happy part in my life. How could it be otherwise? It unites so many things that fire my passions! The most unpleasant and slime-infested corners of English history! The carnival magic of the classic ghost train! The wanton gimmickry of the circus freak show! Good theatre in the magnificent tradition of Victorian melodrama! The glut and gore of the Grand Guignol! And, well-suited to the purposes of this blog, a more than usually healthy dollop of character acting. Splendid! So, with no further ado, I'll introduce you to a few very important people. I'll be spending my time at the Dungeon in the person of seven (and possibly even eight) different characters. In chronological order, then:

WILLIAM: The plague doctor's assistant. Fawning, acidic and more than a little camp. Enjoys full-frontal dismemberment and curing people with large wooden mallets.
THE INNKEEPER: The publican of The Golden Fleece, the most haunted pub in Yorkshire. Dour and lethargic, yet volatile in the extreme. Enjoys spreading tales of sheep molestation and vanishing in well-timed blackouts.
THE ROMAN CENTURION: A lost soul imprisoned beneath York Minster. Self-absorbed, blustering and firm in his duty. Enjoys misquoting Shakespeare and coercing others into situations of mild peril.
THE VIKING: A ruthless invader washed up on Saxon shores. Unspeakably deranged and aggressive. Enjoys worshipping Eric Bloodaxe and mispronouncing Norwegian. I have an unsettling feeling that this character has been obliterated in the recent refurbishment, but we'll see what happens...!
LORD CHIEF JUSTICE JUDGE VENABLES VERNON HARCOURT THE FIFTH: More commonly known as the Judge. A poisonous toad spewing venom from afar. Enjoys inadvertently spitting from a great height and a spot of low-key cross-gender prostitution.
THE TORTURER: The horrible heart of the Dungeon. Perverse, sadistic and irredeemably evil. Enjoys rats that nibble and leakings that resemble rich fountains of strawberry jelly.
THOMAS HADFIELD: Colleague turned hangman of infamous highwayman Dick Turpin. Petty, aggressive and intrinsically jealous. Enjoys stealing clothing and repeating his own name at dramatic moments.
THE WITCH-PRICKER: I am yet to meet this particular character! However, I am assured that he gets his kicks from handing out scrolls, enclosing the general public in sheep-pens and burning heretics. Fun, fun, fun!

This year's Dungeon opus began an almost fantastically well-judged five minutes before the end of my last supervision of term - a miracle made possible by the unholy medium of wireless telephone. An additional five minutes and a hasty redial later, I was in touch with my boss, who wanted to check if I was still interested in returning for the summer. Blimey, you bet I was interested! A bit more recently, I received another phone call divesting dates of vital importance. A few days of rehearsal and training first - and then the official start date! I'm told that I'll be joined in training by Dan Elmes, a jolly nice chap and a wonderful actor (unless he's been kicked out since I last saw him, he'll have just finished his second year at the Birmingham School of Acting). I've also been darkly forewarned to bring some black shoes, which in my experience is proof positive that you'll wind up on the floor and working with the public come afternoon. This will most likely involve 'ghosting' a current Dungeon actor. No term could be more appropriate; last year this involved muttering quietly to myself in a corner, trying to learn from the proper actor's shows as tourists gestured in my direction and asked if I was the walking corpse of the recently interred Michael Jackson - no doubt resurrected Thriller-style for their dubious entertainment. But with a bit of luck, this slight awkwardness will build into trying out the shows myself towards the end of the day! Whilst most of the scripts have undergone changes and developments of one sort or another, I'm hoping that the thespian equivalent of muscle memory will kick in at some point. Surely it's impossible to shower tourists in chlorine, hound them through a mirror maze and expertly manipulate the chappy chopper on literally hundreds of occasions without at least some of the old patterns staying ingrained. I'm aware that there's a danger here of flesh-and-blood characters, no matter how outlandish, degenerating by turns into robots, going through the motions mechanically in a vain attempt to recapture the last really 'good' performance. This is a constant battle for the Dungeon's disciples - and one that is happily reduced by the attraction's constant redevelopments, as well as the more urgent changing demands of each audience.

In the same spirit of fragment-orientated sharing of the Dungeon experience, I'll acquaint you with some of the lines that caught my fancy when I was reading through the new scripts. They're sort of amusing, in a gimmicky and ridiculous way... Aw, to hell with the pretence - they infuse my heart with surge after surge of renewed warmth! This great joy I pass down to you now!

As for the groin, you can check that yourselves... Last time I tried to check people there was... trouble. - when inspecting for symptoms of the plague.

I like pulling out the bits. - whilst hovering over a spread-eagled corpse.

So the lever gets pulled, the trapdoor falls, one feller drops to his death, and Curry drops onto a big pile of... well... what sloshes out of people as they get hanged. - recounting the dignified demise of William Brown.

You! What is your name? Steve...? You are Steve no longer! Henceforth you shall be known as Stevus Tiberius Maximus, centurion of Rome! All hail Stevus! - ruining Steve's life forevermore.

HVIS DU ER NORSK, BEKLAGER JEG FOR UTTALEN MIN... OG JEG ER REDD DENNE SETNINGEN ER ALT JEG KAN! - making a necessary Viking apology.

There was a clap of thunder, a flash of lightning and a big pink puff... of smoke, and this chap here appeared. - challenging the plaintiff's security in their masculinity.

My book tells me that you were seen on Grape Lane, dressed in a long blonde wig, a pink dress and a bit of lippy. You were mincing about with a sign round your neck proclaiming 'Get it here'. - telling off a diseased and scrofulous gentleman.

The tongue is then usually fed back to the victim as I watch them drowning on their own blood. - after demonstrating the tongue tearer.

It was designed with the ladies in mind and you can only use it twice... - wielding a highly suggestive torture implement.

The old fellow, he don’t want to say, so Turpin quick as a flash pulls down the old man’s breeches and starts whacking his bare bottom with his flintlock. - recounting the glamorous life of the highwayman.

Thou hast a black cat and thou lives on the hill! - providing cast-iron evidence for witchery.

In the absence of some enchanting multimedia romp through the addled extremities of my brain, I went a-hunting on YouTube for a rough equivalent. So, with all the pep, vigour and appropriated whimsy of someone who's only just worked out how to embed videos into blog entries, here is what I consider to be the finest representation of the Dungeon experience on the Internet:



I do have a few gripes with it. For starters, it's a little irritating to find the staff rechristened as 'scare actors'. Why, that suggests there's no more to the job than chasing customers down corridors with a chainsaw and hockey mask accessory! Nothing could be further from the truth. The presenter is well-meaning enough, and really quite active in promoting the cause of horror attractions in Britain (more power to him!), but his happy-go-lucky demeanour shouldn't be taken as a reflection of the typical Dungeon experience. It also has to be said that the sets, costumes and makeup only look about half as good as should do here. As with all such attractions, they're designed to be seen through an unearthly diffusive screen of billowing smoke, ultraviolet lighting and prevailing dimness. An invasive smattering of bright light is needed to get a place as pitchy black as the Dungeon on film at all, and that accounts for the very dark shadows cast throughout the film. But all of these deficiencies are surmounted by the absolute loveliness of seeing so much pro-shot footage of the Dungeon, flaunting its crisp, digitised glory for the world to see! Plus you get to see glimpses of some of the legendary Dungeon actors! The grey-bearded chap carrying the lantern is Bryan - the only person I've ever encountered who can reduce a room to helpless laughter with no more than a guttural, half-drunken croaking noise. That's Carl in the judge's wig, looking an absolute nutter and getting to deliver the legendary 'bonking' line for prosperity. In the cloth cap with the bottle of leeches is Mark, one of the most infectiously enthusiastic people under the sun and renowned for sniffing people's faces in the midst of his shows... A disarmingly creepy tactic.

As impressive as the special effects may be - the new witch-burning attraction, led here by the ever-chilling Adam Seymour (a friend of Will Seaward, improbably enough!), is looking particularly impressive - it's the actors who remain the core of the Dungeon. With the annual tweaks, developments and advances that the Dungeon inevitably undergoes, it's this core team of performers who keep the holy candle of the macabre burning and retain the place's soul. Without them, it would be no more than a glorified Chamber of Horrors.

What a privilege to return to this horrid happy family!

The Crafty Art of Crying

For the majority of people who've seen me act in something, it may come as a surprise to know that my characters have fallen into two distinct categories. In one camp are all the familiar harbingers of the Swantonesque sensibility - that endless parade of semi-comedic fools, idiots, goons and grotesques on which I let loose my pent-up reserves of manic energy. Good examples of this are the eight characters with which I infest The York Dungeon... and, come to think of it, every character I've played since coming to Cambridge. In the other camp though, there rest a few basically straight dramatic parts; often twisted into some semblance of comfort by character acting, but something more than one-dimensional buffoons to provoke a cheap laugh. Even stranger, I've wound up doing far too many scenes in which I've been required to bawl my eyes out. The reasons for this aren't exactly clear to me, especially since I'm yet to reach a decisive consensus on how to approach the awkward things. Crying onstage is something I feel I've got markedly worse at as my 'career' (ha!) has progressed. This is a particular cause for concern in Pickwick & Nickleby given the frequency that poor old Smike dissolves into a sobbing, quivering wreck. I'll be using this entry as an opportunity to reflect on the trials of these eclectic crying scenes, and to see whether any pearls of wisdom can be extracted from so much thrashing about in murky waters.

The story starts when I'm thirteen years old (pimply, bespectacled, idealistic). The story also starts with Claude Rains (eminent, renowned, by this point quite dead). For the uninitiated, Rains is one of cinema's master character actors: the man who stole Casablanca from his distinguished co-stars, taught John Gielgud the basics of his craft and possessed a voice like a pipe organ embossed in velvet. His performance in the 1943 version of Phantom of the Opera (curiously lacking the 'The') was a revelation to me. It's not a film that's generally held in high esteem - it's variously reviled for bastardising the novel (not that the novel's all that great to start with...), sanitising the Gothic with the glossy Technicolor finish so common in the period's 'prestige' pictures, and - in a soundbite that's become a petulant rallying cry for disappointed horror fans - containing 'too much opera and not enough Phantom'. My own motives for seeking out the DVD were less than pure. It was to get at another David Skal documentary that made obtaining the film so thrilling; a supplement sure to be packed with the writers and historians I found so stimulating at the time! Greg Mank - Scott MacQueen - Tom Weaver - legendary figures, the lot of 'em! But when I actually got round to watching the film, it was something of a surprise. It bowled me over. Rains turns in an overwhelmingly gentle, sympathetic and (most important of all, this) compassionate performance. He plays the part of Erique Claudin, a much lightened Phantom figure who receives a sizeable tragic back-story before a token splash of acid reduces him to living beneath an opera house. Never has the Phantom been further from the shameless, coarsened seducer of Andrew Lloyd Webber - never has the Phantom been better for it. His interaction with Christine is so blithe and innocent that it would bring a tear to a glass eye. The character crystallised a few things that were central in my mind at the time: a feeling of being prematurely aged; a sort of mixed pity and empathy for older men; my absolute failure to fire up, let alone consummate, any sort of passion for the opposite sex; not least of all, the timeless 'beauty and the beast' resonance that underpins the tale. When I watch the film now, I'm more alert to (or perhaps just more cynical about) the maudlin, sentimental devices with which it manipulates audience sympathies. It no longer has the same impact. But at the time, it channelled much that I found bothersome in my own life and provided it a limited form of release. I remember being particularly stricken by Rains's haunting vignette at the piano, where he sits down and plays Edward Ward's wonderful 'Lullaby of the Bells' with his arthritic and soon to be useless fingers. It's a scene where acting, music and judicious dramatic placement all come together beautifully. There's one particular flash when Claude stares up into the air, mouth slightly agape, looking utterly dejected as he pounds out another thundering chord. Very potent. Have a picture.


As it happened, drama lessons had started that very term at my secondary school. These alternated with dance lessons, which were only there to be gotten out of by such timeless devices as behaving preposterously, setting fire to the curtains or faking an ingrown toenail. (I remain certain that Alastair Timmis accomplished the latter feat for well over a year - a P.E. transferable skill, you see... the clever fellow!) Still, I'm sure that many felt the same way about drama. Leading the classes was Mr Andrew Crisp, and I doubt that I'll ever have another teacher who I respect or admire more. Mr Crisp had an unnerving habit (and this continued, somewhat bafflingly, into GCSE English classes) of getting everyone under his authority to write and perform their own monologues now and again. To hell with Assessment Objectives! We'd wind up with grand monologue festivals that stretched from week to week. The first of these happy occasions came in the drama lessons. Stumped for a subject, I looked to Claude, and dashed off a heartfelt if shallow knock-off of the character that had so inspired me. Basic scenario: pianist attends funeral of beloved music teacher, reflects on his highly successful career, then, just before reaching his apex, drops the newspaper in his lap and exposes his hand for all to see... I had every intention of posting the whole thing, but my thirteen year old writing is so cringingly awful that I could only bear to read it between my fingers. Here however is the pay-off, shortly after the furtive newspaper manoeuvre:

It’s a funny thing, really... A piano lid... Down! Slammed down on one's fingers... Crippled... Crippled, they said. Most incurable... Undone by a dead piece of wood...

Now came the tricky bit. I'd decided that my character should cry here. I'd diligently practised in my room for hours on end (oh, when there was time to rehearse things obsessively...), hunched over on the floor with a large mirror to better observe all manner of strained and convulsive facial expressions. This was a valuable exploration in itself. I was able to learn the rudiments of crying and work out the order in which they could be most effectively deployed. It's odd that something as natural as bursting into tears has to be painstakingly relearned, but surprisingly satisfying to do so. Lip wobbling - the obvious one, the least important in many ways. Skin pulled very tight across the nose. The grimace and mask of grief - the mouth pulled back with such violence as to almost seem a grin. Eyes nearly closed now - on the verge of vanishing into the skull. Looking back, I think that this was also the first time I worked on a character by observing my own facial contortions. By this late stage of rubbery facial manipulation, I find myself automatically grimacing in the presence of mirrors - whether it's for a play or not! Maybe it's the vampire in me.

At any rate, I acted the piece, and then, feeling horribly nervous, reproduced the punishing facial arrangements I'd so carefully pieced together, now combined with all manner of strangulated chokes and hisses. Next thing I know, the rest of the class is clapping with Mr Crisp good-naturedly bellowing 'YOU'VE GOT YOUR A STAR - GET OFF THE STAGE!' Now, this wasn't great acting. Not by a long shot. But I remain certain that it was on that day that I discovered acting as I understand it now: as a seriously engaging and deeply exciting creative process. It also marked the moment that I was able to escape from acting being boring and juvenile - an interminable parade of musicals, pantomimes, nativities and other such showcases engineered by parents to make their children feel clever and useful. Now I could do the odd bit of serious stuff, and by doing so release latent energies that I couldn't have done by any other medium - least of all talking to somebody. Little did I know the dangerous foundations I'd laid for my relationship with crying scenes. Feeling a little bit sorry for myself and letting air escape my throat in a series of fits and starts, combined with the adrenaline rush of doing something a little bit audacious, was fine. For a first time, that is. The very novelty of the procedure was a distraction from the daunting reality behind all such showy emotional spectacles - that I've never once felt comfortable in doing them, or even qualified to try.

For a little while, nothing happened. Mr Crisp eventually let me play Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, in which the old miser gets just a bit overwrought when he's hanging about at his gravestone. I still consider Scrooge to be far better than any performance I've given since, but, as with my heightened response to Claude Rains, this may be down to association beyond anything else. Here was the chance to play another hopelessly aged individual, doomed to isolation from the human race and forever denied happiness in love. By this point, I'd fallen in love for the first time, and disappearing into Scrooge's torturous botched courtship of Belle was again something of a personal release. But here came the fall. I never really felt I got the anguished Scrooge right. Make no mistake, I writhed and contorted and went blue in the face with screaming - it just never felt particularly believable to me. I had the sneaking suspicion that this was hammy business that would look deeply unconvincing to the outside eye. The remainder of the play disintegrated for me after the graveyard. I have no idea what my Scrooge was playing at when he woke up on that fateful Christmas morning, but I don't think it conveyed much of the blind joy of spiritual redemption so vital to the story's impact. I think I gave an adequate impression of Scrooge having lost a few brain cells after a violent collision with a bedpost, but raging insanity doesn't add up to heartfelt happiness for me. I'm sure it was funny enough. But was it right, was it right? Being allowed to perform in the play was happiness enough for me. Maybe that was the problem. I was certain that my personal brickbats would pound on and on forever (only partly true) and that freedom from them could come only in ways far more childish and improbable than ghostly visitations. I had no time for wrenching myself free of the self-pity I was growing dangerously close to becoming infatuated with. I found all of my happiness right there on earth, exploring the dark side of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, replete in his heart-staking, ruler-throwing, marriage-hating glory. Perhaps my inability to cry to my satisfaction was the natural consequence of feeling that much more invested in the unpleasant side of Scrooge. Perhaps it stemmed from my ignorance of my own emotional immaturity, which seemed real enough at the time, full of adolescent indignation and self-righteousness, but wasn't quite up to presenting a man repenting the sins of a lifetime. Or perhaps it was all a great deal simpler than these overworked efforts at dramatic insight, and I was simply a bit worried about spoiling a very good part with an inappropriate dollop of absurdity. Like Richard III, it's one of those parts I'd love to have another go at - I imagine the time in your life you play it at causes it to work out completely differently. And who knows, maybe I'd get it right next time.

Later came The Elephant Man, and the addition of a new scene... one in which John Merrick quite literally lays himself to rest, suffocating to death after trying to lie down 'like everybody else'. I think we did two rehearsals of the death, and given the overwrought, bombastic way I ended up playing it, I don't think anything other than a total change of approach would have improved it. Here is another problem of the crying scene though: the conflict between egotistical self-indulgence and entirely justified melodrama. The scene's dialogue - with which Chris Guard, who played Treves, invariably regales me when I run into him now - positively demands the overwrought and bombastic: 'I am angry... I am angry... Go on, say it, you freak! I am angry! I am angry! I am angry! I am angry!' Underplay that and you're truly screwed; the inherent lunacy of the scenario emerges, and mockery can be the only result. We live in reticent times. No matter how fitting a Wagnerian eruption of emotion may be, the inclination is to label it a faintly embarrassing act of ego. When I look back on that drama lesson monologue, I can detect a definite spice of ego, subdued and redundant maybe, but there nonetheless. You've got to muster up a little arrogance to do these crying scenes with conviction - a certain suggestion of 'yes, this is true, this is real - my emotions are more sincere than anything you're feeling and attention must be paid'. And maybe that arrogance is enough to carry you through even a terrible imitation of crying. This attitude goes against my acting ethos however, so it presents me with a bit of an ideological crisis. Perhaps crying onstage is one of those incredibly rare scenarios in which contempt for your audience is called for. Rare is the occasion that anyone wants to be seen weeping, after all - why should you feel anything but hostility towards these hundreds of nasty, prying eyes? That would certainly explain why I've never been able to cry comfortably onstage. I'm always happiest when there's an atmosphere of mutual cordiality between actor and audience, and an emotional breakdown seems incapable of sustaining such a thing. This might also explain why certain other types of actor enjoy crying onstage for the sheer virtuoso thrill of it, without once feeling a scrap of genuine emotion: an acting philosophy founded on contempt, or at least a far more buoyant ego than I've ever been able to sustain. I look back on The Elephant Man as by far the most convincing crying scene I've done. I'm even told that it was contagious, and that the odd tear sprouted amongst audience members, but I regard this proposition with the deepest suspicion. Ah, well. I've included a photo of Merrick's post-tantrum, pre-death praying to give a vague idea of what the scene was like:


Scarlet Petals Underfoot was the next time I wound up doing a passable imitation of bawling my eyes out. The production was not a happy one for me. Actually, that's a lie - I enjoyed the rehearsal process a great deal, a very rare sensation. But that didn't alter the fact that my character's every line prompted gales of unexpected laughter. Nothing is more corrosive to your confidence than being laughed at by an audience. (By the same token, nothing is more uplifting than laughing with an audience by premeditating and cushioning the jokes.) I was a fool figure, so certain that I'd been delivering a refined and elegant performance in the Paul Scofield vein. That is, until the second I hit the stage. It's experiences of this sort that remind me just how horribly restrictive my natural voice is, in spite of all the alchemy I try to work on it, and why I've come to hate it with such a passion. The laugh quota had fortunately dried up by the time of my drawn-out ten-minute death scene - and that was an enormous relief, given quite how ridiculous an undertaking it was. My character identifies it as the final stages of syphilis (the very mention of the word is enough to provoke titters for many), but it more closely resembles the dreaded consumption. There I sat for a good ten minutes - sweating, gesticulating, coughing up blood, disclosing my numerous liasions with prostitutes, and then (most bizarre, this) freezing every so often to allow for the action to continue on another part of the stage. Here's a snippet of dialogue:

You should have seen Cecilia's mother when she died... The labour had been long and fitful. She was pale as a lily, beautiful still, but daubed in a ghastly red gore. It was the blood that killed her. So you see, Kathryn! I didn't lie about that! Cecilia destroyed her mother! There really is a curse of blood.

To my never-ending chagrin, my seventeen year old writing isn't that much better than my thirteen year old writing... Hoary old melodrama through and through, a piece stoked by my twin passions for The Fall of the House of Usher and the bloodthirsty hilarity of Tod Slaughter. In retrospect, the death scene was deeply unpleasant. A few hours after I faked death with such barnstorming histrionics, someone very close to me passed away in the quietest way imaginable. No matter how convincing acting can be (and this wasn't one of those examples), it remains utterly different to the real experience of death. And that experience is, on the whole, utterly black and horrific. Another dilemma then. Should acting really seek to mimic such horror? Is it ever going to be possible to reproduce it? And is it even advisable to try? Crying scenes, in a muted way, may well tap into the same problematic dynamic of death scenes; that unshakeable feeling that the desire or compulision to perform them stems from some fundamental incompleteness as a person - a lack of life experience or empathy for others, perhaps. What onstage tears can live up to the real thing?

Yet despite this failure, I was coaxed into doing another big shouting and crying scene in Pericles. Again, not a happy production. Frankly, I felt like a total idiot most of the time, a sensation that increasingly came to plague me in my last years at York Youth Theatre. Good place that it is, it was always too bloody sociable for someone with all the social airs and graces of a walnut. I've never made friends easily, and thanks to my own reticence, I wound up feeling pretty isolated most of the time - a horrible feeling when working on any play. Rehearsing this ridiculous scene of Cleon weeping over his adopted child's murder felt horrendously uncomfortable in front of a group of people for whom I didn't have a lot of natural sympathy (perfectly nice people, it must be said - I'd just been shamefully backwarding in befriending any of them). I'd never experienced stage fright before this play either. Now I was terrified of a repeat of the Scarlet Petals catastrophe - gales of laughter blasting through all the wrong places. Cleon is the most joyless and self-serious character in a play rife with whimsy and enchantment. He's one of Shakespeare's perennial fallen kings, and is burned to death at the end on the sole basis of his wife's treachery. It wasn't a terribly good performance, but at least it didn't end in laughter. Maybe it's because people approach Shakespeare with certain expectations regarding the elevated style of communication that means they're more willing to forgive woodenness and misinterpretation. As far as I can recall, people only laughed on the first night, and then only on one line - Cleon's petulant 'Heavens forgive it!' - so perhaps they were attuned to the withering irony. Or perhaps not.

And even now, I have no idea if any of it was any good. I have numerous photos from the production by which I've tried to gauge how effective the crying scene was - but it's only one piece of the jigsaw, of course, devoid of voice, movement and dramatic context. From left to right then: default or 'control' Cleon; mid-tantrum Cleon; deep anguish Cleon. Enjoy! (And remember - clicking enlarges! Look at the vein pulsing in my temple! Stunning!)


It became another curious phenomenon at York Youth Theatre (and again, probably one that only ever bothered me) that we were given practically no direction in creating our characters. On further reflection, that's not completely fair - we had a very good director on Pericles. Yet there still seemed to be an odd reticence in dishing out criticism. Generally, I like being told when I'm shamefully awful at something - provided the time and resources are there to make it passably good. I'm always incredibly paranoid about uncommunicative directors. I instantly assume they're against me and detest the work I'm putting out. I clearly remember how upset I felt, after the first night of Ninety Eighty-Four, when the entire cast assembled for notes. I was singled out (naturally) with the memorable statement: 'Oh, James. Could you tone down some of the gestures? Syme became a little camp yesterday'. Wild laughter, and thereafter an inability to get away from crass and irritating jokes about my character's sexuality in the dressing room. 'Oh, thanks,' I thought. 'You give me no advice on how to play the character in rehearsal, let me make an idiot of myself in front of hundreds of people, and then use my failure to curry a bit of warped popularity with the cast. Charming. Just charming.' In actual fact, I thought I'd been precociously clever in interpreting Syme as a waspish and embittered homosexual. I still have the shoddily written character notes on my computer to prove it:

He is a very, very frightened man. He shares an affinity with Winston in his cleverness, which makes him very vulnerable. He hides this fear, attempting to outwit others in order to push their guilt and make himself feel above suspicion... Or is he just a nasty piece of work who gets a perverted thrill from upsetting others? He hides behind the vast superiority of Big Brother, covering up the all-encompassing misery of his own life by making Winston feel scared for his life. Probably also a repressed homosexual. Some of his lines to Winston in particular are very suspect. He does come across as screamingly spindly, weak and mannered...

Retribution of a sort came when the reviews labelled the direction flavourless and dull, but at least appreciated my performance for being that wee bit zesty and flamboyant. But enough digressing. I suppose that what I'm trying to say is that had our Pericles director given me a little more guidance with the nasty task of crying, the performances probably wouldn't have felt like such an ordeal. All the directors that I've worked with have shyed away from giving the crying scenes proper attention - out of what can only be lablled embarrassment, I suppose. Now, if I find them so humiliating (if strangely exhilarating) to perform, then they surely can't be a picnic for the audience to watch. It falls to the sainted Andrew Crisp and his kind bellowing at my thirteen year old self to kindle the least faith in my power to weep onstage.

As a postscript, I'll share the list I devised when at work on the Smike scene in Pickwick & Nickleby, hoping to ease the most meagre drop of water from the resistant Swanton tear ducts in doing so. I came up with a bunch of things across a range of media that have, at some point, made me cry, bawl and weep - or more frequently, sent me into a depressive haze pretty darn close to it. Maybe it's this beastly commodification of emotion that made the exercise so redundant, but if anyone with a grudge against me ever decides to ambush me with a combination of three or more of these things, they will successfully reduce me to a nervous, gibbering wreck. I've tried to include links where possible:

MUSIC: The second movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 (very restful, but almost unbearably sad); Tchaikovsky's 'Pathetique' Symphony (another association-driven memory; my first listen to it came after a good few hours of reading about Tchaikovsky's tormented life and feeling jolly sad about it); Noel Coward singing 'Time and Again' ('Just when I think my guardian angel's winning / I go spinning / Back to the beginning...' - ouch); 'I'm on Fire' (anyone used to sympathising with the monster will get a lot from this stalkerish atmosphere piece); 'Hurt' (I favour the Nine Inch Nails version for the purposes of instant self-pity, but Johnny Cash is also harrowing); 'Bette Davis Eyes' (I've great admiration for the actress, but no idea why the song hits me so hard - there's some powerful tonal melancholy hidden in there, I expect); the credits music for The Animals of Farthing Wood (not a programme I ever had a particular affinity for... but the music conjures up a lost world of childhood); 'Someday' from The Hunchback of Notre Dame (a film I still hold very dear - being a credits song, I associate this music with leaving it); Einaudi's 'Behind the Window' (this stayed with me for years after hearing it on the radio, but I only found the name out recently - it's the slow bits that get me); 'After the Rain' (not much of a Bassey-booster, but this song caught me).

FILM: Just about all of Lon Chaney's tortured pantomime in The Phantom of the Opera (it's the film that got me into classic horror, and remains potent for that reason alone); the blind hermit scene in Bride of Frankenstein (every damn time... acting with absolute integrity); Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (oh, dear - dedicated to the witch as I may have been, it conjures up so much lost innocence); Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (especially the section beginning 'I never realised till now how ugly I am...'); The Wizard of Oz (the entire thing is painful - an atmosphere redolent with grandparents and certain sorts of home that can never be returned to); the end of Dark Victory (dying with dignity attains a whole new meaning once you've seen this film); Bela Lugosi's monologues in Bride of the Monster (a desperately unhappy actor going to pieces and giving his all in absolute dreck); Peter Cushing staring at his dead wife's portrait in The Ghoul (sadder when you know the back story - the loss of Cushing's beloved Helen was raw at the time of filming, and he insisted her picture be used); Vincent Price's death in Edward Scissorhands (too much to see someone I love so much looking this feeble - I think I lost sleep over this when I first saw it).

LITERATURE: Shakespeare's Sonnets (I defy anyone not to be moved - they've aged better than anything else in the canon!); Frankenstein (the creature has always struck me as a sympathetic companion rather than a cruel manipulator - his diatribes on 'the wretched' hit me hard at a young age); De Profundis (not the thing to read when you're coping with your own unrequieted love, I can tell you); The Phantom of the Opera (not a particularly good book, but the Phantom's monologues came to obsess me for a long while - I ended up recording them and putting them online, but I'm far too embarrassed to post the links); Love is Where it Falls (full of quite remarkable personal anguish, but my own passion for Callow tips this over the edge); Father of Frankenstein (quite a few of the monologues that Christopher Bram puts in James Whale's mouth are very touching).

This has been a ridiculously long blog entry even by my standards - so long that it deserves a special edition DVD boxset with featurettes, deleted scenes and an audio commentary in which snooty historians try to coax something coherent from surviving cast members. This rant was spurred on by the difficulties of performing the Nicholas and Smike relationship in my Dickens show to an acceptable standard. I'm sure that it's a point of contention that'll come up again. For now though, I am too tired to carry on, and I imagine that you're too tired to keep reading. Have a rest, treat yourself to something nice, and I only hope I've shed some light upon the the crafty art of crying.

Guest Speaker #3: Pierre Novellie

How best to describe Pierre? Tall, beardy South African. Despoiler of Viking tombs. Former foremost first-year Footlight (henceforth, he'll be a foremost second-year Footlight - and since that doesn't alliterate, he can jolly well go to blazes). But when he's not jesting, howling or otherwise smokering for our stand-up pleasure, Pierre is a rather wonderful comic actor. I first encountered Pierre in my most traumatic week yet at Cambridge: Week Five of Michaelmas to be precise, and the umpteen dramatic perils of As You Desire Me. His ability to peel back his eyelids, impersonate fifty-feet women and reduce me to helpless laughter (mostly onstage... mostly to my performance's benefit) made him tremendously endearing and one of the few bright spots of that bleak, bleak period. Since then, we've got along famously. Pierre trapped my fingers in a treasure chest, tore out my tongue, imprisoned me in a barrel, threatened to blow me up and then shot me to death at the behest of Will Seaward in Silent Canonfire. Pierre's also responsible for some of the most supremely expressive eyebrow contortions I've yet encountered in The Bald Primadonna, delineating a hundred different ways to orchestrate the simple three-letter acronym 'WTF?'. This August, he'll be returning to piratical shores when he revives his Captain Hatebeard for the Edinburgh incarnation of Silent Cannonfire. He's produced an article brimming with wit, pith and vitriol aimed at all the right places - so sit up and take notice, world!


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.