Actually, Joseph is a sore subject.  When I was eleven, I auditioned for Joseph and The Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, which was a veritable Hamlet to this budding attention-seeker.  I got up to sing I Close My Eyes, closing my eyes (a particularly revolutionary creative decision at the time, but I, ladies and gentlemen, have always been a maverick), and belted my little voice out.  Problem being that my little voice was experiencing a little transition called ‘puberty’.  So I cracked and wailed my way through the song and sat down with a proud little smile, as the teachers smiled patronizingly and prodded their eardrums to check for perforations.  Then my friend Hal got up.  Hal was brilliant.  Everyone loved Hal.  In fact, one of the pinnacles of my childhood was confessing to Hal that I thought he might be the one: my best friend.  We were sat in the branches of the tallest tree in the alleyway by school, and my sentiment was reciprocated. This, I thought, this, is love. 

But it wasn’t.  Hal got up and trounced my efforts with the silkiest voice we’d heard since Bryan Adam’s recent smash hit, Everything I Do.  To top it off, he usurped the affections of my first crush, Alicia Snow (a girl who had rejected my advances on account of our surnames being similar enough to insinuate incest — clever lass).  The very long point of this being that me and Joseph don’t have the greatest of relationships.  In fact, we’ve only got one thing in common: A great appreciation of dreams.  Example: At drama school, I was struggling with Gorky, playing a pre-revolutionary murderer.  I couldn’t quite get the part together, the weight of guilt was missing.  Then one night I had a dream I had killed my esteemed friend Dani (very talented and very undeserving of assassination, ala dream or otherwise).  I woke up in an icy sweat, pleading forgiveness, vowing to abandon the superficial pursuits of the arts if only she could be resurrected. 

I arrived at college, and there she was, gesticulating in the canteen and complaining about English weather.  Phew.  Our teacher agreed that dreams have an eerie power to feed into our performances.  He had to experience being shot for a telly once and, graciously, had never been so.  But he had had an incredibly grisly dream about being shot in the leg.  So he used that. There’s a Pharotic plague of drama schools these days.  And most teach the same old thing; the same broad Method/Commedia Dell’arte/Trevor Nunn style of acting.  So what about a Dreama School? 

Dreama

School is made up of a theatre surrounded by clusters of bean bags and a maze of hammocks.  And the rule is, if you want to act it, dream it first. 

As a connoisseur of sleep and theatre in equal measures, I can’t think of anything better.  Students for the class of 2008, feel free to sign up at the bottom of this page.  Zzzz.   –>

Smoking ban getting you down? Not enjoying that carcinogenic buzz al fresco? Wanting to ensure that if emphysema has the impudence to take you out you can bring down a few others with you? Well. Move to America, land of the free. Land of the loopists.

Imagine this: you mosey on down to your local watering-hole and come to a black curtain that says STAGE ENTRANCE. You pass a table labelled PROPS DEPT, but the only props required for this particular production are piles of black ashtrays. The security staff and barpersons each have a ‘character name’ and you are referred to by your own…because you are playing yourself. A year ago. Before the smoking ban. In a production of the impishly entitled Tobacco Monologues. And yes, you may smoke freely.

In Minnesota, several bars have gotten around those pesky general health laws using a legal exception that allows notified and approving patrons at given ‘theatre-nights’ to smoke, as they did pre-ban. Who’d have thought a game of Let’s Pretend would prove so popular? More and more bars in the good old U S of A have started hosting vintage nights, where everyone in the bar can come to play themselves a year ago, before the smoking ban. Clever, huh? It’s the brainchild of a lawyer who first discovered the loophole. Who says a Harvard legal training and the fine art of mixology are mutually exclusive? However, it has opened a can of wheezing worms.

I mean, come on, what next? The Importance Of Kissing Strangers? In which folk saunter up to a bar for a theatre night where everyone’s ‘acting’, so any misdemeanours of infidelity are perfectly legit? Or how about Knock Back In Anger, now showing at your nearest bar, where disciples of sadism can pummel the pickled eggs out of each other in a brutal but perfectly, erm, legal and haphazardly choreographed routine?

You’ve got to applaud the audacity of this smokers’ rebellion. But not necessarily the mishandling of theatrical aspiration. My bet is there’s a few bars out there that really are eager to host genuine theatre nights, whether they involve the ‘actors’ smoking or not. And now that the Health Department is issuing fines of up to $10,000 to bars staging theatre nights under the (wait for it, it’s brilliant) Freedom To Breathe Act, the whole thing seems a little unfair. One or two bad apples rot the ashtray.

It’s hardly the greatest injustice the world has known, although there may be a very fine Willy Loman out there denied his performance because of all this. But it is all connected. Smoking in public places encourages chain-puffing and secondary inhalation, leading to illnesses, straining the healthcare system and diverting money from more ‘frivolous’ governmental initiatives. Such as theatre subsidies.

Now if the audiences in these bars really had to sit through smoky performances of Eugene O’Neill’s backlog or Arthur Miller’s lesser known plays, then I’d be happy. No pain, no gain, smokers. –>

For anyone who ever wanted to step into the shoes of a ‘resting’ actor…don’t bother.  Here’s a simple seven-step guide:

Monday: It has been an eternal hell of a whole weekend since your big, life-changing, make-or-break audition.  Although every actor since the dawn of iambic condemns the act, you talk about the play/part/director non-stop as if your wagging tongue were the only antidote to a particularly nasty bout of failure-flu.  It’s very much like being in love: you nauseate everyone around you with incomprehensible dithering about when and what will happen if who and where give you the part.  It’s pathetic. 

Tuesday: You (reasonably) begin to think that things might not work out as your delicate and fairytale heart hopes.  So you buy a Lonely Planet guide to Cambodia/Siberia/Bolivia in the hope that if Equity minimum doesn’t bring you inner-peace, perhaps a poorly-built shack on unfamiliar territory will do.  Genius. 

Wednesday: You forget about said audition just long enough to deal with a flooded flat/sickly moggies/uncle being held captive in Thai prison.  Phew!  The pressure’s off.  For a day, at least.  Don’t worry though: soon you’ll be back to obsessing over your fabulous lifestyle. 

Thursday: Another audition!  But for something you don’t particularly want, and probably wouldn’t be seen dead doing, using an accent from a country you’ve never even heard of, in a costume donated by People Disappointed By Pete Doherty’s Offerings On Ebay. 

Friday: Spent worrying that Job You Don’t Really Want will offer itself up and your agent will be forced accept on your behalf seeing as Job You Really Want are still making up their minds. 

Saturday/Sunday: Spent stricken with rigor-mortis-of-the-personality, pretending that nothing in particular is on your mind.  Friends presume a family member has died, and vice versa.  Shameless self-absorption.   

Everything dulls into grey, and you become amazed at what a cruel mistress life has become to one so obviously destined for success.  You consider putting your cats up for adoption, as you are clearly an unfit provider in the grand jungle of life. You still manage to check your phone about thirty times throughout the day.  Even though it’s a weekend.  Just in case. 

Monday: The agent calls again.  A strange wash of clamouring terror and frantic hope make your voice erupt like a guinea-pig on meth.  Apparently you’re still ‘in-the-mix’.  Sigh.   

By now, kind readers, you realize that as much as waitering is inevitable in struggling actors’ lives, so too is waiting.  Some wise fool said:  Walk in there like you’ve got the part; forget it as soon as you leave.  But a slightly wiser fool called Stanislavski said:  Stakes are everything.  The only antidote is being too busy to care.  Which is why I’m considering putting on a wonderful play about Shelley and Byron.  If anyone knows of a big dusty library that feels like garnering Time Out Critic’s Choice for a few weeks, answers on a postcard please. See?  Distracted myself already.

Join me on a stark sojourn through the sordid and controversial corridors of my past.  Shiver as you discover I used to wax lyrical about Commodore 64s.  Squeal as I titillate you with tales of painting lead figurines deep into the night.  Shudder as I relay the fact that once upon a time I really was very keen on Role-Playing Games. 

Whenever successful actors adorn the pages of the weekend glossies, their previous lives always come across as righteously hip.  Many of them were going to be professional football players.  I, alas, was not.  The closest I got was being regularly deposited in goal on account of my ball-repellant layers of puppy-fat.  The important thing of course is that I can laugh about it now.  Ha ha ha. 

No, I spent most of my childhood playing games.  Not in the Olympic sense; certainly not in the spin-the-bottle, cool-kids-skiving-off-RE-sense.  I mean Role-Playing Games.  Easy now.  I need to be careful writing this, and have probably already condemned myself, ironically.  My grandfather, a sweet fellow of the evangelical ilk, really would tremble and spew like Vesuvius if he knew I’d ever whiled away my weekend over a Dungeons & Dragons set.  But I did.  Out and proud. 

Over the past week I’ve seen two very fine pieces of theatre:  The Sea, at the Haymarket, and Brief Encounter, just opposite.  Their geography also reflects their opposition in style.  Whereas The Sea —set in as traditional a theatre as the West End can offer— was a parody of the theatre-going experience in itself, Brief Encounter commandeered the actual Haymarket cinema, and welcomed you with a serenading cast resplendent in old-style Usherette uniforms.  The theatre felt like a time-machine.  You might even say that the way forward, in this particular case, was the way back.  Although both productions were of a certain degree of genius (that said, Bond’s depths easily overwhelm Coward’s shimmer), it was the flair of the adapted film in an old cinema that won over the audience response.    More to come?  The selling-out of Masque of the Red Death was marred only by the critique that allowing the audience to roam freely disrupted the traditional narrative.  But in a theatre where didacticism is losing its appeal, what better way to engage with the audience than by letting them choose which route the story takes.  And for the producers out there, I need only say the words ‘it’s my third time here’ as incentive for a play that offers multiple narratives. 

Drama Centre taught us to respect the proscenium arch as a hallowed passage, an altar on which the masses could appreciate tradition and history unfurling.  But the boundaries are breaking down.  A strange sort of socialism is treading the boards, where the audience’s desire to step into the fantasy is being increasingly respected. 

Sorry, Grandpa Lee.  But the imagination craves indulgence, and moral subversion or not, audiences are getting tempted down the rabbit-hole more and more.  Wonderland ho.    –>