WEEK NINE IN THE ACTORS' STUDIO

I’ve got a rather large, arse shaped secret. I’m in a pantomime! I must admit it is something of a curates egg, but listen, I’m being paid and someone’s got to keep me in Merlot. I thought/dreamed it was going to be the Keith Allen spectacular and I’d be cast as the Fairy Godfather in a lovely tutu and glittery tights and get to chat up Lily at the cast party. Oh no, an arse it is, and off-west end at that. Don’t laugh. And yes, I’m the back end of a horse. I said stop sniggering and cut that well practiced (in the last 48 hours anyway) joke that the casting is highly appropriate: it’s not doing my fragile actor’s ego any good at all. Well, it’s true, I have rather put on weight over the course of this term (despite the dance / pilates / Alexander / meditation classes we’ve attended). So, it may well be entirely appropriate that I am, a metaphorical and actual back end of a horse. At least it’s not a bus. So, I’m not going to tell you what show it is (I know you’ll all be queuing up) and anyway, my esteemed dramatic training institution is very very snooty about people appearing as actors in anything while they are training, god forbid a pantomime horses arse.

But I am rising (or is that bending?) to the challenge and at least no-one will see my visage. We haven’t had a dress rehearsal yet so I haven’t had to stick my face into the other halves sweaty butt so far but I’m very much not looking forward to it. However, I have met the true arse of the piece: the director. He keeps referring to me as John Prescott? Or at least us, that is ‘the horse’ as John Prescott. Neither of us are even Northern. Being the back, does that make me Prescott? What a wanker. And the joke doesn’t even make sense, at least not to me. Unless it’s some Tory wank joke about Prescott being a horses arse. The director has got a tweed jacket and Chelsea boots and keeps flirting with one of the ugly sisters and I guess he does look like some kind of early 90’s throw-back Tory; I didn’t think they existed anymore. Oh yes, I suppose there is David Cameron. Wanker.

So this is an illegal foray into paid work. We aren’t allowed to perform, can you believe it? That’s what they are training us for! We can’t even perform our improv group (‘Just say yes!’) which is a joy to all budding dramaturges everywhere: trust your audience and a play of epic proportions will be written before your eyes. We’ve been practicing this week and have decided (oooh, us anarchists …) to subvert the powers that be and get a few improv gigs behind their backs. We need the laughs. We need an audience. We need the adoration. Goddamiit, there’s only so much Brecht, Stan and Grotowski that you can take before you need some fucking laughs. We’ve got a troupe of twelve of us. Brave soldiers in the land of improvisation. At the audience’s command (via the compare) last night we became epic characters in a new 19th century melodrama of Gulliver’s Travels. There was a taxidermist, a dentist, a chiropodist (it was a marginal–medical conference by default) and various sundry characters. We sang monumental songs and made history. What we were all doing in Gulliver’s travels only a postmodern analyst could possibly know. But they laughed. God bless them, the audience laughed. And we went home happy.

WEEK EIGHT IN THE ACTORS' STUDIO

If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.

Today we spent an hour and a half acting class on this one line. It was amazing, probably the best class we have had all term. It’s true, my brain aches and a drowsy numbness pains by sense and I’m questioning whether to go on (I can’t go on. I’ll go on) but it was extraordinary. If it be now, ‘tis not to come? If it be now, ‘tis not to come? Yet it will come? Yet it will come? The agony of the stress, the sense. We all went for the former you will be pleased to know, although a certain person of nationality that will be nameless, insisted on the latter in both cases. What-ever, as Will wouldn’t have said.

We were dizzy with all these words, words, words (see how I did that – sorry – I am an embarrassment), but in a drunk kind of way, like children discovering something for the first time: as every English teacher you’ve ever had told you: he’s such a fucking genius. It’s so rich. There’s so much to do with it. Can you possibly say that without sounding like a tourist just landed in Shakespeare-land-upon-Avon? Obviously not.

To defend what is sounding like a cloyingly naive homage to the Bard, I must say that’s it’s because when I’ve studied it before (at school) no one had a f**king clue what was being said, so it came out as a string of bizarre, halting incantations worse than nails down a blackboard. How many school children have willed Hamlet and Lear and Macbeth and Richard to die by the end of act one? Then suddenly this mahogany-voiced old dude whose been acting, darling, since Kean’s day starts to tell us what the words mean and we pups of the stage start getting it. It makes sense. Such sense. And you don’t need anything else. Just these perfect lines. School plays were always about endless props and dodgy costumes made from old curtains: no wonder, we were trying to cover up that we had no idea what we were saying. Now you realise you need nothing but the words, no props, no fancy technical shit. Words, words, words. A strange and late epiphany you might think, but I tell you, everyone came away with the fear of iambic pentameter lifted and a new desire to do nothing but early modern verse speaking. Bring it on.

I just wonder why I’ve bothered to write this diary all term (and please don’t all write in to say you’ve been wondering that too). Why not just publish a soliloquy every week? He knew. Read this:

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire! Why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust!

WEEK SEVEN IN THE ACTORS' STUDIO

Okay, so it’s seven weeks into the course and you realise you should have read the course outline. I’m supposed to be writing a 10,000 word portfolio about my ‘learning journey’ of this term. WHATTHEFUCK. Sorry, for that undignified outburst. But why didn’t anyone tell me about this at the beginning (actually they did). I’m struggling enough with writing my ‘actors’ studio diary’. The Keen Beans have already written most of it no doubt, peppered with witticisms from their tutors, to impress their tutors. Always a good trick that one. Ten thousand words seems a bit steep I must say. It can be creative and apparently people sometimes submit video diaries, which seems a bit of a wheeze to me – question is do you have to count the words that you say? Hmmm. Think I wont go down that path. Someone also once submitted 10,000 words of emails between him and his ex-wife about his ‘journey’. That guy failed though, so I’ll bin that idea too! I think I’d find it less of a millstone if the title wasn’t ‘learning journey’. It sounds like some new-Labour education document for the dimmos at the back of the class. “So, how was your learning journey this week little Timmy?” Pow! Right in the kisser! – at a guess.

I’m wondering if I should invent Grotowskiesque antics of having spent my weekends running through woods to exhaustion and nearly flaying myself alive in the name of theatre. He sounds like an absolute maniac by all accounts; pushed people to the limits but they loved it. Bloody actors, never know when to stop: such vanity. He didn’t even seem to care that much about the audience which strikes me as rather remiss. No Christmas pantos for him then. However, I think the viva with my tutors, whilst they gaze on my paunch wouldn’t really cut it – the austerity and starvation of absolute poor theatre doesn’t hang easily round my bourgeois wine soaked velvet jacket wearing shoulders. So, best not fib then.

Oh, talking of paunch, went to see Forced Entertainment’s ‘Spectacular’ last night. The most un-spectacular show you’ve ever seen – see how they did that. Now that’s dramatic irony! What a fucking yawn. An intellectual discussion about the nature of theatre and death except it wasn’t that intellectual - for 1 hour 20 minutes from a fat man in a skeleton suit. A sure case of substance over style. A one trick pony. They could just have got away with it in 45 minutes, but the bar was calling after that point. Jesus, anything was calling.

Anyway, I’m a miserable old fart aren’t I? I’m even the only person bar Jonno McCain and his chip empire, who is irritated that Obama has been elected purely because it means the yanks I have to work with are even more smug and excited about being American than they were before. I know what you are thinking: what am I doing in theatre? I don’t like anything I see. I’m too lazy to write about my ‘learning journey’ and the only thing I’ve auditioned for so far has been a Christmas panto. But I feel I ought to prove to you that I am not a total cynic. William Forsythe. A man of genius. Now that’s a reason to be in theatre, or possibly, in my case a reason to give up now and go home realising you’ll never be more than an audience member. Impressing the Csar. Sadler’s Wells. This week. Extraordinary. Funny. Beautiful. Clever. Yes we can!

WEEK SIX IN THE ACTORS' STUDIO

Stanislavski apparently said that the worst thing an actor can do is look in the mirror. Well, this was certainly true this morning. I am ageing. Daily. Nightly. Oh GOD. Oh STAN! The problem with being an actor (I hardly dare say that, yet, given that I haven’t actually been paid to perform yet) is that you become even more ('tis possible?) paranoid about your appearance. And the problem of training to be an actor is that you are constantly comparing yourself to other people around you: flaunting their bodies all the time. Their wrinkles, their muscles, their tone, their hair (did I see a note of grey?), their flexibility, their physical-corporeal-everything. Suddenly it all matters so much more than when just a civilian-being. You realise that you are on sale. Putting yourself out there to be looked at, studied, criticised, adored? Yikes. Not that Stan was actually talking about vanity, which I am, unsung Narcissus as I am. As we all are, we attention seeking needy beings.

Anyway, this wasn’t helped by two instances this week. Firstly one rather irritatingly polished peer has had his portfolio shots done professionally and was flashing them around modestly after the movement class. Whilst I was struggling back into my jeans and stuffing sweaty gym kit into my rucksack he was beside me complementing the photographer on her skills, showing the black and white shots of his torso and rakish cheekbones. There was even just a shot of his calves, looking honed and athletic. Apparently the calves were considered the most beautiful part of a man in the Elizabethan era. Really? So much to choose from and they go for calves? There’s no accounting for taste. Or fashion. I need not dwell on the nauseation of this mock appraisal of the photographer’s skill – clearly we were supposed to be looking at him. And despite myself I had to admit he looked rather good. Wonder if said photographer could do a job on me? Note to self: if I do this must not be seen to be doing it.

Secondly, in all the movement classes at the beginning of term the teachers saw fit to photocopy anatomical drawings of the skeleton, as if we weren’t sure what was inside us and how important this was for our thinking about using our bodies to act. One of them even bought a rather unconvincing hang-up full size plastic one in which one of us (not me) tried to dance with and got told off. God forbid we should mock the theory – it’s the only thing these teachers have got to hang on to. Anyway, this character took it one step further and we set off on a class trip to see ‘Bodyworks’ at the O2 centre to study the human body. This trip was unremittingly grim, not only was it minging with children and their irritated parents, but the exhibition itself was an absolute horror. Why on earth would one want to see inside people’s bodies? I don’t even like looking down my throat when I’ve got tonsillitis. My god. And the punters were loving it, whilst I was retching quietly in a corner. It was supposed to help us … well, I don’t’ actually know how to finish that sentence. It just made me think about death and why one shouldn’t go to public exhibition centres in half term. That, and a class trip to seeing poor old Ralph Fiennes shouting and yelping his way through Oedipus. Not sure what was more gory, the painful directing or Oedipus eye-less or bodyworks. Or indeed my deepening laughter lines. Most definitely the latter.

WEEK FIVE IN THE ACTORS' STUDIO

This has been a week of two halves as all good commentators say. The first part, something of a revelation: a positive mood shift. Term seemed to have calmed into a mellow lull, people were chilled and I’d begun to kick back and feel that I was getting to grips with this game. Even the Sarah Kane read through we’d done didn’t send anyone over the edge. That and the unseasonably bright days (well, one at least) made me think this really was the profession for me, when it goes well, it’s God’s gift to all show-off slackers. All the world’s indeed a stage.

Another delight is always Patricia, on particularly good form this week: most divine and charming older lady with fabulous jewellery who coaches voice work. She’s quite despaired of me -‘Quelle Horreur’ she exclaims every time she catches me fumbling with my oily rags on the front steps, but I suspect she’s smoked worse. However, like anyone who’s been an actress, director and teacher in a drama school for 40 years (I’m guessing, but she could be even more well preserved than that), she’s pretty much seen it all.

She started the class with the following quotation: ‘You must stop worrying about success or failure. Your business is to work, step by step, from day to day, softly-softly; to be prepared for unavoidable mistakes and failures, in a word: follow your own line and leave competition to others’ (Chekhov to his wife an actress). She repeated it three times until it was intoned into us. We nodded and smiled. Success, failure, what of it? What did it matter? We were here to create! To perform! To embrace the artistic life!

Even, had a strangely warming conversation with Keen Bean who also seems to have mellowed somewhat: she even had an alcoholic drink in the pub, even if it was a Bacardi. All was well in the world of the stage.

Then I got home to discover that my unfeasible idiotic flat mate (a drummer) had fitted a cat flap and bought a cat. I kid you not. So, a cat. I can’t begin to imagine where he got it. Or why. It’s not like we have mice. Anyway, never actually saw it as it turned out. Last night suddenly we were being burgled by a screaming child. Wrenched from a pleasant dream of audience applause I started awake. My flat mate wasn’t in. It was 4 a.m. Things were being thrown around the sitting room (where the cat flap is) and there was screaming. I was shitting myself. It went quiet for ages. I finally turned the light on a fucking FOX, again, I kid you not, shot out from behind the sofa and started throwing itself around. I know you think I was drunk, but it was NOT a cat. It was a FOX. Finally – I’ll spare you the details, I got the patio door open and it got out. Poor little fucker. I taped up the flap with brown selotape (does that have a proper name?) and left a note for Jack to send the cat to a new home. Moral of the story: just when things seem good in your life, do not get a cat flap.

WEEK FOUR IN THE ACTORS' STUDIO

“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.” We walked into the studio this week to encounter this quote written in large letters of A3 pieces of paper lying across the floor. It’s Peter Brook (of course! I knew that! Duh!), that wizened little white-haired grand-daddy elf of avante garde theatre. The opening lines of his book, yes, you guessed it, ‘The Empty Space’. We were left to discuss and then create a short improvisation inspired by it. Simple. AAAGGGHHHH. Despite being a trainee actor, improvisation is still as appealing to me as karaoke i.e. only after 2 bottles of wine.

I ended up in the slackers/losers group, a bunch of slightly idle misfits or good humour but generally washiness about them: somewhere I naturally fit whilst nursing vino in the local but am very against when in this kind of scenario. Mainly because at drama school, the torture of ‘group work’ ends in the horror of performing your ‘piece’ (although I prefer the word skit) in front of the rest of the class. So, it’s actually better, if you’re a slacker like me with few ideas and not the wit to carry them out, to get in a group with the strident Euro-trash and yanks or other keenos who will, at least get something done that the director will approve of. You can just go along with the ride. But what a painful ride that can be. It’s a kind of trade off: delayed grimness of the performance versus periodic grimness of being ordered around by a peer-know-it-all. Anyway, I’m sure you get the picture. Group dynamics, analysed for years by the sociologists in a nutshell: suck it up and survive or sit on your fat ass and suffer at the show down.

So, this time I got the slackers. We sat nonchalantly, some chewing gum (expressly forbidden by His Holiness the Latvian Director) mulling over the ‘empty space’ idea, of course not reaslising the irony that our so-called discussion was revealing just that that existed between our ears. Ah, had we but world enough and time, this laziness lady, were no crime. But, we didn’t have time. We sat and chewed it over, listening to the strident voices across the studio: ‘I mean, no space is really empty is it? That’s just imperialist colonialist prejudice. What the explorers found in the (fingers up for rabbit-ear scare quotes) new world, they thought was an empty space but it wasn’t ….:” Blah blah.

Fuck. Only 20 minutes left till show down. Others were rehearsing. We were still a veritable empty space itself. His Holiness looking on in unexpectant horror. In the end this dozer guy called Bill, who looks like he’s spent most of his time on a surf board stood up and did a monologue saying ‘you’re not really here, this space is empty’ whilst pointing at us with a fearful expression. It looked entirely like he was on drugs. He probably was/is. The others did some fairly impressive stuff given we had 50 minutes to prepare it. I’m beginning to think these idiots are smarter than they look. His Holiness then introduced us to Peter Brook’s idea of The Deadly Theatre. Say no more. He couldn’t even bear to look at us. I cringed so physically I’m surprised I didn’t flatten myself and crawl out under the door. New resolution: suck it up and survive.

WEEK THREE IN THE ACTORS' STUDIO

I’ve been given on hundred lines and a seriously withering look by our fearsome Latvian acting teacher. I’m in the dramatic dog house. Despite being sober as a judge this week (detoxing after last weeks’ Oliver Reedian excesses), I’ve managed to offend. Apparently Stanislavski’s ‘system’ is not the same as ‘method acting’. Oh what a novice I am. What a fool! There was a sharp intake of breath (particularly from the yanks in the group) when, in discussion, I conflated the two. Method acting is something of a dirty word so it turns out. I felt like I’d just surmised that there wasn’t much difference between Jesus and Mohammed to a bunch of fundamentalists (of either stripe).

These people are remarkably dogmatic given that Stan himself reportedly told an actor who’d taken many notes during endless rehearsals with him to burn them all and that each actor should keep reinventing himself. And they are bizarrely exacting given every teacher we have seems to say something contrary about him. ‘His ‘system’ is a technique-less technique’. ‘It’s complex but simple’. ‘It’s all about the body but you shouldn’t try and embody someone else’ but then again ‘you should deeply analyse your character’s emotions and motivations’. ‘It’s all about acting ‘as if’’, I can only conclude: ‘everything is acting, but there’s good acting and bad acting’. It’s about the most confusing method (!) of teaching I’ve ever been subject to.

Given the evangelism of those who write and talk about him I can’t help wondering if he wasn’t just a rather grand and daringly charismatic man who charmed/scared people into doing what he wanted? Just a good director? I might not propose that view quite yet in the seminars …

I keep having flashes of Ian McKellan in ‘Extras’ when describing to Ricky Gervaise his role as Gandalf: ‘How do I act so well? I pretend to be the person I am portraying in the film or play …. You are aware that I am not a wizard … I thought what it might be like to be a wizard and then acted like that on the day …. You are pretending, and that is acting”. Genius. And he got knighted. Perhaps I should stop trying to act and start pretending.

The remaining question of the week is what is Juliette Binoche doing trying to dance with Akram Khan at the National Theatre? Akram, Akram, get a grip on yourself! That and her mortifyingly bad charcoal portraits of friends and family emblazoned across the foyer in the BFI, and the retrospective of all her films at the BFI. What a south-bank-ego-fest. Embarrassing. At least this is something that we all managed to bond on, after a class trip to see her loveliness herself plieing across the stage (well, peeing and fighting is more accurate). Of course we’re not jealous of her stellar acting career, it’s just, stick to what you’re good at darling. Meeooow.

WEEK TWO IN THE ACTORS' STUDIO

I’m slouched, feeling rough as a badger, on the front steps off the Esteemed Dramatic Institution polishing off a medicinal Gauloises at 9.28am before the first three-hour movement class … and I don’t feel like moving.

Watching my fellow classmates bound up the stairs as if they were auditioning for the Wizard of Oz is slightly less mortifying than the appearance of my new best friend: Miss Keen Bean. Oh, and today (bless her) she’s wearing the EDI stash - hoodie and t-shirt (the latter exposed when the former removed). Who could find time to buy the college ‘sweats’ before week two? I want to trip her up.

I realize I’m late and dribble in after her. My head aches. God. Stairs. I wheeze up, jeans straining against my aching knees, Miss K.B bounding ahead: all black pumps and ‘sweat pants’. I hate that expression. What’s wrong with good-old tracksuit bottoms? That’s what they were called at my school anyway. That and pleated gym skirts and green flash. Sweat pants? That’s both too coy and too graphic.

The day was saved by the teacher. The most extraordinary, exquisitely unexpected man with something of a gut - a man of the trade who also likes a pie! A fellow soldier on this battlefield of the wan, the thin and the healthy! Hurrah! He told us about a technique Grotowski submitted his students to which allowed them to discover the power of their own bodies. He would deposit them in an isolated forest, forcing them to fend for themselves for weeks on end, one of these experiments resulting in a student’s death. I try to blot out the image of a bloodied and mangled K.B. as we begin to dance.

Well, some people danced. They did. I shuffled and stumbled and breathed heavily down people’s necks – a heady mix of espresso, fags, last night’s Rioja and Listerine. Mmm.

It was a kind of early morning madness that seemed suddenly absolutely right and exactly what everybody should be doing at 9.45 in the morning: throwing themselves around a studio to Bach and Beyonce, whirling dervishes, waltzing and jiving and swirling, curling, curving, the room, me, the others, life! Carpe Diem! I wanted to bellow out the windows: “what the fuck, you pedestrians, you land lubbers, you CIVILIANS, you slugs of the pavement! Look at us; we are the SOLDIERS OF THEATRE.”

At this point I had to face that I was still drunk from the night before and my whirling dervishness came to an abrupt halt as I bolted for the bathroom and vomited furiously. Feeling much refreshed I returned, realizing with some triumph and not a little amusement, that I realize I am turning into Peter O’Toole in the latter stages of his career at the very beginning of mine. Chin chin!

WEEK ONE IN THE ACTORS’ STUDIO

I’m still totally foxed as to how I got through the audition. Am I an actor? No way. A director? Nah. A designer? Nope. And after week one I’m not sure I want to be any of those things.

Who are these people? When I was selected out of the thousands of people who applied I assumed they’d be thoughtfully honing down a list of no-hopers to find a ready made friendship group for me! Oh no they didn’t. It’s like the bar in Star Wars. Some of them are giggling at everything the tutor says like love sick teenagers (males and females) it’s gross – you’d think he was Universal’s casting director. Come to think of it, maybe he is…. Some are foreign and kind of impenetrable – I suppose they have potential. Many of them are deeply, deeply and pretentious (or is that nervous? See, I’m trying to give the benefit of the doubt). I’ve had enough of people drinking herbal tea and eating Guarana berries for their spiritual and physical well-being. God deliver me from Pilates. F*ck Pilates. It’s just bullsh*t.

A bottle of red wine and some fish and chips is what’s needed. The girls are all so incredibly thin. They definitely need a dose of that. Doesn’t the world ever want fat actresses? Obviously not. I guess it’s easier to don a fat suit than the other way round. Nobody smokes. It’s a disaster. The men are men, I suppose and a bit of a rum lot. To be honest I haven’t actually had the courage to talk to any of them yet and am dismissing them as they looked like they knew a lot more about theatre than me. I’m afraid I feel like a shambling slob so far. Circus skills next week can only finish me off.

Today we played with a paper cup. I’m serious. We had to walk towards a paper cup, pick it up and give it to the director. Then we had to do it with our eyes closed. We all f*ked it up of course. How are you supposed to pick up a cup half way across a room with your eyes closed? I ask you. They told us a story: apparently Stanislavski told an actress, on her first day of training; “there is a needle hidden in that curtain over there and I want you to act as if you are looking for it and that if you don’t find it then I will chuck you off the course”. So she goes mental trying to find the needle, wailing in fear and frantically searching. He stops her. He tells her that there really IS a needle in the curtain and if she doesn’t find it she will be chucked off the course. She suddenly becomes very serious and searches with great care and slow attention. So, I guess we shouldn’t overact or we’ll get chucked off the course. Not sure how you overact failing to pick up a paper cup. My fumbling was real, not acting. What is this all about? I’m supposed to be keeping a reflective diary for my tutor. The page has the giant doodles of a lunatic right now like those Samaritan posters. Need someone to talk to? Damn right.

And when am I ever going to have to pick up a cup or search for a needle when I’m being an extra in The Bill which is the sum total of my ambition right now. Or I’d just settle for being an extra in a zombie film to get me back in the company of humans.