On Acting

I always was a shy boy.

Looking back now, from an era when there is more sensitivity and awareness about mental health, I wouldn’t be surprised to find I was on a spectrum somewhere. When you are convinced that everyone in the world is looking at you and judging your every movement, it’s little wonder that you retreat into more solitary pursuits, like reading and writing and drawing and making Airfix kits.

My mother only did one cruel thing in her entire gentle life – in an attempt to bring us both out of our shells, she made my brother and me join the Life Boys, a vicious gang of hormonal thugs who hung about some church hall in fake sailor gear every Tuesday night, playing British Bulldog and trying surreptitiously to murder each other. Church parade every Sunday found us marching round the streets in company with an enormous raucous band of brass instruments. People used to come out into their front gardens to watch (hardly surprising, they couldn’t hear themselves do anything else when we were in the vicinity), and I’m sure the drummers competed deliberately to see who could make the most unnecessary noise. I thought I would die. Thank God for senior school, when we could piously claim excess of homework meant Tuesday nights away from the books was no longer viable.

Once into my teens I could no more have stood on a stage to entertain people than I could have swum the English Channel. At that time, in the sixth form there was a tradition that boys in their final year would take turns reading the lesson from a lectern at morning assembly. Maybe they were trying to get us used to standing up in front of a crowd to give a briefing or make a presentation or something. Certainly didn’t do me any good. I used to dread my turn coming round, and never got any better at it because I simply didn’t know how to even attempt to overcome such social embarrassment. Thank Christ the place was still single sex, I honestly don’t think I would have been physically capable of walking out onto a stage to read the Bible to a bunch of schoolgirls…

So that was me for nearly twenty timid, trembling years, until university. I don’t know what changed. Maybe being away from home, more scared and alone than I had ever felt in my life, I recalled some vague existential teachings from Camus (we’d done L’étranger, ‘The Outsider’, as a set text in French), and I resolved to take my fate into my own hands. Or I finally got so bored and disgusted with myself, constantly watching life pass me by, that I decided to do something about it. Whatever, I took my guitar along to the college folk club one night and, juddering with nerves, warbled my best Fred Wedlock impersonation. The humour of the song, together with my thick West Country accent, was received more warmly than I had any right to expect. A little light went on. The relief. The sense of acceptance. The joy of finally overcoming an obstacle which had never really existed anywhere except between my two sticky-out ears. The folk clubs led to revues. The revues led to performing in a few sketches on stage, then plays. And by the end of my second year, I couldn’t get enough of it.

Throughout the eighties, I was a member of numerous amateur acting groups and ad hoc set-ups, performing everything from Ayckbourn and Frayn to agit-prop political scenes at rallies. I scarcely cared what it was, frankly, I just wanted people to look at me. Making up for all that lost time, I suppose. Of course, the fear of failure or embarrassment was never far away, and I don’t think there was ever a single night in my performing career where I wasn’t rigid with nerves immediately before my first entrance, wishing I could be somewhere else doing, well, anything other than what I was about to do. But once you were on, you no longer had time to think about that; everything else just melted away.

And it was certainly true that the spotlights had powerful curative properties. If ever you turned up to the theatre with a heavy cold or a bad leg or something, within moments of stepping out onto the stage, those aches and pains disappeared as if by magic and you felt fit and energised and raring to go. Because you couldn’t let your public down, could you?

The only time the adrenaline of performance didn’t completely work was during our run of Ring Round the Moon (1987), where the props people had provided us with the spikiest, most unforgiving wrought-iron garden bench it had ever been my misfortune to lounge about on pretending I was taking my ease on a balmy summer’s afternoon. I could not get myself comfortable, not even with cushions. Worse, there was a scene in the second act where I was supposed to make an entrance upstage right, romantically and heroically carrying my girlfriend whom I had just rescued from a body of water. I tried lifting her up in rehearsals, I tried very hard, but it wasn’t working, something wasn’t right. Turned out I was, in fact, nursing a rather debilitating lower back condition. It was only later I realised I had been suffering discomfort from it for years, but only now had the medical profession been able to put a name to it (something that made me sound like a dinosaur, it seemed to me). So acting can do that too: work like a diagnostician for what ails you.

Seducing Mandy L in Ring Round the Moon. I can no longer remember which was the evil twin, Hugo or Frederic, but I do know Mandy never liked me doing that to her arm. She said it tickled when she was trying to keep a straight face. But only the evil twin would have tried to make her corpse. Method, see?

Maybe I was simply already too old for the part – early thirties. In the script, Hugo/Frederic is described as ‘a young man-about-town’; Paul Scofield, when he created the part in 1950, was only twenty-eight.

Which is another thing: it’s never a bad idea, I think, when an amateur company is putting on a show, to check out the cast list of the original professional production to see who created the parts on stage. The producer, the director and the playwright between them, all good theatre professionals, will have come up with the ideal actor in terms not only of box office appeal and what the company can afford, but also what kind of vibe they might be intended to convey. In the original run of Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day (1978), for instance, the main female protagonist Ruth was played by Diana Rigg. What comes to mind when you think of Diana Rigg? Elegance, yes, but also strength, a certain no-nonsense toughness, barbed wit, maybe an element of coldness, all of which Stoppard’s Ruth needed to possess. In other productions I know of, the part has been played by Maggie Smith, Jacqueline Pearce and Kate O’Mara, all of them uniquely appropriate in their different ways. (Interestingly, the published text of the play describes Guthrie, a war photographer, as “in his forties; perhaps quite short; fit, can look after himself; wears tough clothes blue denim, comfortable boots”. In the original production at the Phoenix Theatre he was portrayed by the excellent William Marlowe, who wasn’t short at all, but his careworn face and penetrating eyes immediately told you much of what you needed to know about the man and what he’d seen during the course of his work; his clothes told you the rest. (In this, he looked a lot like noted photojournalist Don McCullin, who I remember when Michael Parkinson interviewed him once had that same kind of intense, haunted look.)

In amateur circles, on the other hand, casting generally has to make do with the best available. When William Goldman writes in his screenplay for The Princess Bride that the eponymous Buttercup is ‘probably the most beautiful woman in the world’, there’s a good chance the studio’s casting department will come pretty close to providing someone who might well fit that exacting bill, at least for a lot of the cinema-going public. (It was Robin Wright in the film, of course. Not too shabby at all.) The choice becomes somewhat more academic when your casting pool as limited to maybe the twenty or thirty people who like doing this sort of thing for recreation and companionship at the end of a long day at the office. Any bright young ingénue, for instance, will probably be anyone in the company under forty.

This kind of restriction can become particularly awkward when reference is made in the text to any specific physical attributes a character is supposed to possess. In Vivat! Vivat Regina at Oxford I was cast as Robert Dudley, Elizabeth I’s favourite. At one point the Queen in my presence is bullying an ambassador to get him to say how tall the king of Spain is. “Alas, Your Grace,” replies the hapless ambassador, “how tall is tall?” The Queen points at Dudley: “This gentleman is tall,” making the point, in dramatic terms, that with prime examples of beefcake like Dudley hanging round her court, any foreign prince seeking her hand had better make sure he can measure up if he hopes to be in with a shout at all. But I am barely six feet, and in looks far from being the dandified bastard the pictures tell us the historical Dudley was. I did the best I could with a swaggering walk and a snooty sneer, but I never felt the audience were completely taken in.

“How tall is tall?” “This gentleman is tall.” Not so much, Liz. And judging by those gaping breeches, a stronger pair of period braces wouldn’t have gone amiss either.

One thing I have found is that just as intelligence and humour share a strong bond, so do the twin skills of comedy and acting. (Is a person funny because they’re intelligent, or intelligent because they’re funny? Discuss.) Maybe it’s something to do with the comedian’s superior sense of timing, but comedians generally make very good actors too. Morecambe and Wise appeared in an episode of The Sweeney once, that tough cop show from Euston Films in the late 1970s, and I was deeply impressed by Eric Morecombe’s way with a line, even when he wasn’t supposed to be ‘being funny’. He simply had a natural way with the rhythm of the words, an ease and charm that was fully convincing, even when he was meant to be playing someone a lot like himself. And surely it’s harder to give a good performance the closer the character is to you? It’s much easier to pretend a lot than to pretend a little.

In fact, I continue to be amazed at how much a great actor can do with the most meagre material. I saw Alan Howard on TV once playing a scene from Coriolanus. It was towards the end of the tense confrontation where Volumnia persuades her son not to destroy Rome. I remember the way Howard’s Coriolanus says just five words, which appear in the text as “O my mother, mother! O!”. There’s hardly anything there on the page, but the emotion he got into that phrase, the pain, the depth of anguish, the love – as if he knows she’s just signed his death warrant but he’s willing to go along with it for her sake.

But Coriolanus is a serious play, it was never going to end well. Even more effective is the sudden change from comedy to tragedy, when the person we’ve been laughing along with suddenly shows us a completely unexpected side of themselves. There was a wonderful example of this at one of Rowan Atkinson’s Edinburgh revues in the late 1970s, when after a full show, at the end of the second encore, he returned dressed as a janitor, obviously wishing the rowdy audience would just go home. He prepares a cup of cocoa, then pauses and surreptitiously starts counting the house with a spoon, wondering if there will be enough to go round.  There won’t, so he gives it up and lies down upstage to sleep. The lights go down and a single spot picks out the huddled figure lying alone in the dark, and the spot slowly becomes smaller and smaller, picking out Rowan’s face as a gentle melody sounds: “Dear lord and father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways…” And just as he begins to cry himself to sleep like a lonely child, the light snaps off. I didn’t know whether to weep or give a standing ovation, so I ended up doing both.  

My own time on the boards is far behind me now – I was certainly never called on to give a performance quite as gut-wrenching as either of these, thank God – but it was certainly a lot of fun while it lasted. In terms of growing my craft I can’t say with any assurance that I even scratched the surface of what is possible in terms of technique. I was happy enough just to learn the lines and stay focused long enough to get most of them out in more or less the right order. But I don’t think I could go back now, not least because I seem to have lost the facility to take anything in. A couple of years ago I tried to learn a little more Italian. We were constantly going back to the country on holiday, after all, and it wasn’t as if I didn’t have form in this area (degree in Modern Languages, thank you very much). But I couldn’t get anywhere with it. Maybe I was being too ambitious? Maybe I was just busy, and couldn’t find the time? I certainly didn’t intend to sit down every evening cramming in the pages and pages of nouns and verbs and adjectives the way I used to in school. So I lowered my sights and decided, on a whim, to just learn the Greek alphabet instead. Just the twenty-four letters, in order. Shouldn’t be that difficult, surely? Couldn’t even do that. Seems my chances of ever again mastering a main part for the two hours’ traffic of a play are now vanishingly slight.

But it would have been interesting, I think, to have taken it further, had I ever had the opportunity. One night, our little company was lucky enough to receive a guest lecture by a former tutor at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, which in its day has produced the likes of Peter O’Toole, Olivia Colman, Jeremy Irons, Samantha Bond, Daniel Day-Lewis and Annette Crosbie to name but a few. Among the pearls he dropped at our feet, I remember two in particular: the consonants convey the meaning, the vowels convey the emotion. He also suggested that a good actor needed to imagine that sitting at the back of the auditorium there was a blind person, a deaf person and a foreigner who couldn’t speak a work of the language. Only if all of them could understand perfectly what the actor was doing on stage could the performance be considered a success. Now that’s what we in the business call a tough house.