There’s an old wives’ tale about Woody Allen casting for his fair-weather film Match Point.  Judge for yourself: Woody was casting for the part of a washed-up table-tennis champion who loses a big match.  Two actors had been battling it out for the role, and seeing as each of them had passed the time-old test of possessing a full, clean, driver’s license, it was neck and neck.  So they called up Woody on the video-link, and Woody said,  

‘Well, hey, maybe, how about this: maybe we should let them play table-tennis for it!’ As every actor knows, somewhere in each casting department there lies a dust-caked table-tennis table.  So they get them to play against each other for the part.  They play a sweltering game, and eventually, one of the actors emerges victorious.  The loser slumps, sobs, reconsiders that Tree Surgery NVQ, etc. 

They take them down to see video-Woody, and video-Woody asks who won the match, and they tell him, and he says: ‘Great!  Well done him!  Now give the part to the other guy.’ 

Because of course, it was a casting for a failed table-tennis champion. Part of me likes this approach, however haphazard.  I mean, come on, we’ve done this cold-reading stuff to death now; surely the process can evolve — Having ‘sick-offs’ to cast hospital dramas, in which auditionees are subjected to various tropical diseases and the last to be hospitalized wins.  An ‘etiquette-off’ for period plays, where only the politest prevail.  A televised ‘fame-off’ to cast the lead in a musical, where only the most attention-starved and desperate make it through a gauntlet of bloated producers and toady impresarios…oh, no, wait, that’s been done.  

This week I get a big audition, and the omens come thick and fast.  Firstly, I have a dream about myself and the Old Vic’s artistic director having a blazing row over where to put a bust of Shakespeare.  It results in him setting the whole place alight.  Secondly, I’m given a cursed Buddha that promptly bursts into flames and has to be thrown into the sink, burning my thumb into a big blistering bubble-topped ogre-digit.  Finally, I get to the Globe for the audition and everyone in the building has been evacuated due to a fire alarm.  What all these ‘fire’ omens mean I do not know.  Perhaps I need to pay my gas bill.  My mind is very clever in that way. Anyway.  Walking along the South Bank, waiting for the Globe to un-evacuate, I smoke a rollie, Guardian under arm, and gaze out to the river, muttering my iambic.   

I bump into a young man with a Guardian under his arm, smoking a rollie.  He is muttering iambic to himself. ‘Here for the audition?’ 

‘Who’s not.’ (There now comes a point when both actors presume that they are up for the same part) 

‘You up for…?’ ‘Tybalt.’ 

‘Ah.  Romeo.’ (Both actors sigh in relief, and scour the thatching on the Globe for tell-tale signs of smoke)

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I’m in fisticuffs with my director.  Irony aside, we’re arguing over whether the act of watching violence encourages violence itself.  It doesn’t help that we’ve spent the day working on a film script about Vikings - possibly the bloodiest culture since primordial man fell out of his soup. 

We’ve come away on a mini-sabbatical to Paris to work the script (how we’ve managed to convince our other-halves that leaving Greenwich Mean Time is an essential part of the creative process is as much your guess as mine).  So far so good.  We’re in a cottage by a lake, cocooned by forest, and the Louvre only thirty minutes from our door-stump. 

But back to the mêlée.  The violence in movies is harmless, he argues.  In films, we buy into a fantasy that nothing is real, and are able to watch unpalatable scenes, safe behind our popcorn (this would explain why horror-theatre, other than The Woman In Black, has never really caught on in the West End).  However, he thinks that violence doesn’t work onstage.  It’s too real.  

Do we shy away from brutality on stage?  Bond has a baby stoned in Saved.  That’s as violent an act as I can think of.  But the ‘violence’ happens in the audience’s imagination – there is no close-up, graciously.  Most of my experiences of the Bard’s battles have seemed woefully unconvincing – they sort of have to, otherwise the audience starts worrying about loose battle-axes twirling into the cheap seats and heads really rolling in the aisles. 

Do we need more drama in drama?  When a conflict is the physical manifestation of the drama itself, it should only really happen when all other means of psychological activity have been used.  A dramaturg of mine told me a playwright only sticks in a slap or a kiss when they’re at a dead end for vital interaction between the characters.  That makes me fairly guilty.  Although the animal in us is as fascinating as anything, the brute is not — I’d rather see playful decimation than a frustrated thump. 

Vengeance aside, I can’t think of any satisfaction in violence unless it comes from an unworthy opponent, like the moment in Wuthering Heights where Cathy’s weedy husband, humiliated by the towering Heathcliff, jumps to his feet and strikes him dead in the throat.  Heathcliff may be the virile lead, but you’ve got to admire Edgar’s spunk.  In theatre, there’s something attractive about the threat of violence without the violence itself.  I suppose it’s the same thing that attracts atheists like Richard Dawkins to the idea of God: we obsess over the things we can’t believe in.  Monsieur Le Realisateur has us up at 4am to get cracking with the Norsemen, so here’s me signing off to retire to Valhalla for an hour or two.  And what with being in a different time zone, I’ve briefly relinquished my un-carnivorous regime.  What better way to think like a Viking than to eat like a Gladiator? 

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Casting suite, 10:07am. 

‘So…Snowdon…Snooo-don…Any relation?’  

‘Uh.  In London?  Just my mum.  Uncles in Korea, and Canada.  Not at the same time.  I’ve got two.’ 

‘Right…No, I meant any relation to…you know.’ 

 ‘You?  I don’t think so’  ‘No, no…to Lord Snowdon’ 

‘Ah.  No.  Not that I can prove.’ 

 ‘Ah.  Too bad.  Well, thanks for coming.’  Hmm.  For most, children are the creative act of a lifetime.  So how do actors, writers, directors— who can barely look after themselves, never mind their characters— ever manage to mould the ultimate protagonist: their progeny? 

At a dress run of the Wuthering Heights that I’ve somehow pieced together, I bump into the happiest married couple I know.  She is achingly pregnant.  You know, when even their teeth have a rosy glow.  And there it is, a bump the size of a Kansas watermelon.  And I can’t help but think Bravo…how the hedda gabler do you do it?! If my mum had to work evenings in a Lebanese restaurant in addition to being an anthropological-journalist, then how are hapless actors supposed to rear the fruits of their (let’s face it, often prolific) liaisons? 

Sometimes a little Tinkerbelly can help the Peter/Petunia Pans to mature.  The rare drama-school breeders I’ve met tend to be the most focused — failure isn’t really an option when you’ve jacked your £40k corporate pay-dirt to master the fine art of the semi-supine. During my last play, we had a few empty Sunday matinees (hey, who doesn’t?!).  One such Sunday our leading man had hoped to take his young son to his first ever football match, but we prepared anyway as some VIPs were booked in.  Come curtain-up…still a gaping auditorium.  By which time the magic moment had long gone.  Don’t get me wrong, I hate football (unless it’s World Cup, in which case, Go Cameroon) but this was a tender moment forever lost.  Of course, families are as important in this profession as any teetering Hilton or canker-infested Bush.  My life-long hero Daniel Day-Lewis certainly had a leg-up with a Poet Laureate for a father and an Ealing Studios honcho as a grandpapa.  The odd star does rise from obscurity, which is why a play like Tamburlaine The Great has such pull with the X-Factor generation — a shepherd boy can conquer the world.  A star can be born.  But oftener, they’re moulded.   

Keira, Alfie, D.D-L — there will always be bloodlines.  Even Gielgud had Ellen Terry in his corner.  I’m not disputing their titanic talents (not for most of them, anyway); I’m just implying that sometimes it all feels a little bit Don Corleone.    Much to mum’s disappointment, I’m a good decade away from progeny, but when they do begin to burble, you can bet I’ll be right there supporting them as they bounce on my laptop, garbling lines to prep me for my big audition.  And I’ll be reassuring them that one day, great-granddaddy Lord Snowdon will arrive.  With a very large cache of missed-birthday presents. –>

‘Good evening, stage door.  How can I help—’ ‘Kevin!  Spacey!  Kevin Spacey.  I need to speak to Kevin.  Kevin Spacey. 

‘Alright…the problem there is—‘ ‘I know he’s there.’ 

(chilling silence) ‘Who’s calling please?’ 

‘Erm…Martine McCutcheon.  Martine.’ (she pronounces Martine ‘Martini’) 

‘Ri-i-i-ght.  Yep.  No, still no response I’m afraid—‘ ‘Don’t you dare imply I’m delduded.’ 

‘I’m sorry?’ ‘Put me through to someone else.  Put me through to someone above you.  Now!’ 

‘Well that’s a little patronizing—‘ ‘Put me through to the manager of the theatre!’ 

‘No managers here, madam, just actors frantically beavering around the wings.  Would you care to have a word with one of them?  I think Christian Slater’s available.’ ‘Erm.  No.  Tell him sorry, though.  I’ll call back.’ 

Stalkers are funny creatures, aren’t they? In my play Lichentongue there’s a stalker, and the more I write of her, the more I fall ever so slightly in love.  She’s wacky, naïve, obsessive, technophobic…and I think she’s just darling.  Which, according to her, is the sort of word Audrey Hepburn would use.   

Although life in the Wild West End has not necessarily endeared the career-choice of stalker to me, it’s the inevitable byproduct of an industry built on ego.  What does interest me is when these fans fail to distinguish whether it’s the actor or the character that they’re stalking.  It’s the existential equivalent of an Escher painting. Example:  Heath Ledger’s funeral was picketed by a small ‘church’ of people who have previously protested US soldiers’ memorials.  In their esteemed opinion, the Iraq morass is God’s judgement on America for tolerating homosexuality.   

First of all, anyone that thinks America ‘tolerates’ homosexuality should try advocating Oscar Wilde’s lifestyle choices in any selection of taverns below the Wisconsin line.  Secondly, if that’s their idea of divine justice, why stop at smiting a father-of-one who happened to play a homosexual?  Why not, say, whole Sodoms and Gomorrahi of actual ‘sinners’, running rampant across the spangled states, eating children, etcetera, etcetera (whatever the current Republican position is). The point, however grim, highlights the difficulty that the tenacious stalker has in recognizing the difference between actor and character.  A difficulty that some actors can relate to.  Carrie Fisher (of Princess Leia fame) still has strangers spouting sci-fi jargon and attempting to ‘rescue her’ on the street.  On the other hand, Chris Langham’s adventures on the internet and Winona Ryder’s kleptophilia are prime examples of where the character leads, one should not always follow.  

The closest I’ve come to being stalked was a petty serendipity — acting in a play and then hightailing it to work at a bar down the road afterwards.  The audience members that wandered into that particular watering-hole were visibly aggrieved to come face-to-face with the Dostoevskian nihilist prince they’d just endured onstage — now apparently appearing in that old classic, Pouring A Pint Of Guinness.  And in that context, it must have seemed that I was stalking them, anyway. Whatever the case, I’m looking forward to ‘Martini’s next call. 

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