Dressing room, 10:01pm:

‘I’m really sorry.’

‘It’s ok.  It’s your hanger.’

‘No, I mean, I’m really sorry.  You weren’t supposed to hear that.’

‘It’s ok.  It’s fine.  You’re right.’

‘I was joking—‘

‘You’re right.  I did die onstage tonight.’

‘No—‘

‘However.  It’s made me realise that…that’s the way to go.’

‘Uh?’

‘I mean, if you really had to shuffle off this mortal coil…it’s the ideal exit…to die onstage…to sleep, perchance to dream…’

‘Are you—‘

‘In the middle of a monologue— no, even better, at the curtain call.  Hand on chest, a solemn bow, never to rise again.  Just a big X on next year’s Spotlight page.’

‘All you did was corpse, mate.  Get over it.’

To corpse, perchance to die. 

Speaking of corpses, my laptop gave up the ghost.  I’m grieving a piece of silicon.  Not quite living, and yet more animated than many a casting suite.  Don’t get me wrong:  if I had to choose between my Turkish Swimming Cats and my laptop, I’d pull the plug without a second poke on facebook.  But Sir Walter was almost feline — he made the same thrumming noise, was adopted from a neglectful owner, and was about as fuzzy.

I wrote my first plays on Sir Walter.  He will be missed.  What won’t be missed is his compulsive power guzzling, self-governing mouse and inability to wield more than three fonts.  Everything got written in either ‘Herculaneum’, ‘Party’, or some form of hieroglyphics.

But I digress.  I’ll define ‘corpsing’ as it appears in my new laptop’s dictionary (the fact that my new laptop has just drawn a red squiggly line under the word ‘corpsing’ does not bode well):

“Corpsing is theatrical slang term for when an actor breaks character by laughing, or by causing another cast member to laugh.  Literally, to murder the scene.”

The power of the corpse is mighty.  One poorly timed joke can strip the performance of its magic, or, less often, decimate an audience…with pleasure.  It’s a tightrope.  Mostly, of course, the actors receive from their audience a judgement as acerbic as any:  You’ve taken our money and are quite literally laughing in our face. 

A corpse succeeds during Deus ex Machina — something goes wrong onstage through no particular fault of the actors.  It also works when a performance, verging on rapture, tips and plummets into infectious hysteria.

In my play there’s a wedding in which my line of

‘Vat on urrs do you sink you arr?’

precedes a bilious speech of comely satanics by the protagonist.  One show, it somehow became 

‘Vat on arr do you urrs do you arr…’

which cruelly propelled the poor actor off into his colossal speech with a barely-suppressed burgeoning belly laugh.  I felt so bad I implemented furious bucket-kicking (Stanislavski, Building A Character, Chapter 11) resulting in toppling scenery, spooking the cast, and disintegrating said bucket.   

I bought a new bucket the day after.  Hell hath no fury like a disgruntled SM. 

Corpse, by all means.  But considerately.

–>

Finally, fame.

As I’m closing up the bar and collecting glasses, a Canadian girl appears:

‘Omigod!  You’re totally the boy from that face on that computery thing!  You’re Pericles!’

‘Uh, yeah.  If I could just transfer your drink to a plastic cup—‘

‘Pericles, your name is…Pericles.  That is trippy cool.  You must have had, like, hippy parents.’

‘Greek, close enough.’

‘Pericles!  Let’s hug!’

I weigh up explaining why I don’t particularly want to hug her against the time it’ll take to just hug her.  I hug her.

‘Pericles!  Let’s dance!’

I enthusiastically decline and take the rubbish out.  She dances vigorously and promptly falls over.  Her Mexican boyfriend returns from the toilet and asks her what the hell she’s doing:

‘I’m dancing…with Pericles!’

He turns to me:

‘Hey, my friend.  My friend, you got some cigarette papers?’

I happily give him a whole pack.  As I unplug the dishwasher, he comes running back in:

‘Hey, hey, my friend.  You an actor, huh?  This is for you!  Gracias!’

He puts something in my hand and runs off.  I look down at what I presume to be a peso or two. 

It’s a big ball of green fluff. 

I’ve just been tipped.  In narcotics.

As they leave, I hear:

‘Hey, he’s an actor, right?  They love that stuff!’

‘Pericles loves that stuff!’

Ahem. 

Pericles does not, in particular, love that stuff. 

So why do the law-abiding orphans of the arts council get branded with being perpetually under the influence?  Compulsive drinkers, druggers, fighters, lovers.  Because they live life on the edge?  That’s just a cliché spouted by teenagers trying to get out of studying Tourism at Aberdeen.  Vice may be exciting in a young actor necking whiskey in his interval, but a washed-up rep veteran with a nose like a bloody mary?  The romance fizzles.

Most of the best actors I know have had or still have problems with drink or drugs; and always with relationships.  So does their talent spring from their compulsion, in the way that the 19^th century aesthetes believed Absinthe kept their pen nibs erect?  Or is it because they’re deviant that we love them?

It’s a sort of inverse morality to politics — in which our leaders must be superhuman, sublime perfections sculpted from propriety, who would certainly never partake in green or white or any other affiliate of the rainbow.  Actors, on the other hand, are the conduit to an uglier life experience.

People come to the theatre for a kind of negative imagining.  What the actor commits on stage, we have the guilty luxury of being party to — hypocrisy, infidelity, violence, retribution, vulnerability.  If the characters can only jump through these hoops of fire, then we may not need to.  Or, if we do, we may have a better idea of how to do it.  

So, in true rebel style, I’m hopping on a plane to the Caribbean to ‘research my next play’. 

Escapism, you see, is the only drug of choice.

–>