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!