Last week I walked out onstage with a gigantic fishing rod.

 

Actually, that wasn’t so unusual, I do that every night. I was wearing an old naval costume that made me look like Popeye and Marge Simpson’s secret love-child, and my first words were:

 

‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.’

 

Obviously I didn’t say it like that. But the audience seemed particularly rambunctious. They wailed and hooted at our comedy zingers like never before. We shimmied on the laughter, waltzed on it, actors’ eyes sparkling with the love-hungry jubilation of a baby seal plucked from the jaws of an Orca.

 

And then suddenly I realised who was in watching.

 

The Inner Critic. Uh-oh.

 

Now I’m not the biggest fan of drama schools’ paint-by-number approach to acting, but one of the most constructive techniques they can teach (which, ironically, many students have before they train) is how exactly to throttle their Inner Critic. To death.

 

The Inner Critic is that little gremlin that sits up between your eyebrows making churlish, sarcastic comments throughout your performance:

 

‘Ooh, I wouldn’t have said it like that…’

 

‘Did you just bump into the armchair? Oh, professional!’

 

‘I can’t believe you just stuttered on a sentence as simple as ‘quince jelly’! What a chump!’

 

He’s a tricky old grouch, the Inner Critic. And once he’s in, it’s near impossible to eject him from the auditorium.

 

One of the truly great acting teachers, Sanford Meisner, taught that if your Inner Critic arrives uninvited, your best bet to banish self-consciousness is to put your focus on the other actors. This does in fact work, as a rule of thumb. But what if you’re in a one-man-show? What if the actor opposite you has monumental booger dangling from his filtrum? What if you are desperately trying to focus on the other actors but you can’t because your Inner Critic has just pointed out that your bladder has swollen up like a big itchy watermelon?

 

It’s a pain in the fishing rod, the old Inner Critic. But we must have evolved it for a reason. It’s counter-productive to be so completely in the moment that you forget to leave a gap when the audience laughs. Or if you get so carried away with making a fake fire that what you make in actuality is a real fire that proceeds to burn down the entire West End. Or if you forget that your fictional love scene onstage is not, in fact, a genuine primordial ritual to whip up a baby or two. That’s where the Inner Critic actually comes in helpful: ‘Romeo, Romeo, Withdraw thy tongue, Oh Romeo…’

 

You just have to make sure that his volume dial is turned right down, and that he doesn’t get pernickety about the little details.

 

Like the fact that your 19^th century button-fly has been undone and gaping for the past two acts.

 

That aside, Inner Critic, all is forgiven. Come back, please, do.

 

‘You’ve got to get another job first…’

 

Cheeky bastard.

–>

It’s not everyday that you see someone in a professional vocation completely screw up. You never see a footballer in the midst of a Cup Final suddenly forget how to run. You never see a counter-terrorism operative suddenly forget how to water-board (not that you’d ever see that, of course, ha ha). You never see a paparazzi suddenly draw a blank face as a tottering celebrity emerges from the gutter, sheepishly asking them: “sorry, do you know which button I press to make it flash?”

 

No, these sort of professional wibbles remain firmly in the performer.

 

Most of us have had a brush with the wibble. It might last a millisecond; it might last an agonizing eon: but the Forgetty-Fairy resides in the quaking, fearful heart-pit of every actor. I’ve seen it happen at the RSC; I’ve seen it happen at the Nash (and these are young, oily-minded performers we’re talking about).

 

So what happens exactly? Generally, everything will be going fabulously. The audience will be heaving. Two thousand eyeballs gleaning your every gesture is intimidating, but if things are going well it’s disarmingly pleasurable as a giant butterfly-kiss. And then…something…just…happens. You hear your cue, your mouth opens, and ZCHOOM…the words disappear. Your brain was on a loo-break, and, returning to the monitor, whispers an expletive and shrivels. This first moment is probably the worst. The realisation of what is happening sinks in and it’s not so much your dry and determinedly empty mouth that ushers in the bile, but that little glint of terror in the eyes of the other actors on stage.

 

Recovery is cripplingly difficult. A sweat breaks over you like a small, tepid typhoon and you immediately berate yourself inwardly for wibbling. At which point of course you wibble again.

 

This isn’t simply an age factor. I’ve just finished a show with an actor approaching her 80s and she’s stickle-sharp (perhaps her post-show gorgeings on smoked oysters, mussels and mackerel explains it). The truly disturbing thing is that it can happen at anytime, whether you’ve had your eyes glued to the script for the past four hours or not. Much like death, it descends unseemingly.

 

Sometimes an actor becomes so used to hearing a line in a certain way, if you speak it with even a slightly different intonation, they simply won’t hear it at all. They will then in turn presume that you have wibbled, and attempt to undertake the noble task of saving the scene as you gaze horrified at their avuncular improvisations to gently ‘help’ you repeat the line that you’ve just said — in the old way, of course.

 

So. Footballers don’t forget how to run, accountants don’t forget how to subtract two, and Heat magazine readers don’t forget how to slag off a depressed celebrity. But sometimes actors forget their lines. Well, that’s show biz. At least writers never—

 

Sorry, I got distracted by my Turkish Swimming Cats chasing a magpie.

 

What was I saying?

 

Ah, well. Couldn’t have been important.

–>

As we have discovered, there are many a rare and beautiful breed in the frenzied shallows of the Off West End ecology. But Darwinism remains happily at play here; not least amongst the newest arrivals to these dubious waters.

Recently overheard at a drama school showcase:

‘So I’ll give it till the end of the year. And if I don’t get an agent-’

‘You’ll so get an agent.’

‘I know, right? But if I luck out and they don’t, you know, get what I’m about, then I’ll give it nine months.’

‘Why nine months?’

‘Well, the way I figure it, if I can’t become a star within the time it takes to have a baby, then I might as well just have the baby. Easier that way. With, you know, someone with, like, a mortgage, or a peerage, or a garage with a Mondeo in it. Something like that.’

Apart from conjuring up the disturbing image of unemployed actors in their third trimester, this attitude —and its haphazard reliance on luck— is far from comforting.

In Arthur Miller’s fable/play (playble?), The Man That Had All The Luck, there are two brothers. One, a baseball pitcher, destined for the big leagues and buoyed up by the whole town’s constant reassurances that he is ‘goin’ somewhere’; the other a small-time mechanic, self-learned and humble, who begins an apparently inexplicable passage of good luck. As the pitcher-brother becomes a sour misanthrope, and the mechanic-brother’s fortune rockets off on an unstoppable ascendant, this seemingly unasked-for luck begins to madden him, as it might do anyone with humility and conscience. But simply, he deserves his luck.

This is the problem with the public arena of entertainment, where ‘destiny’ appears to play such a pivotal role. People fritter away their whole lives waiting for that big chance, perpetually just-around-the-corner, like some benevolent mugger. Optimism is an essential — but productivity is the natural complement to it, not stagnation.

The higher your exposure in this crazy ecology, and the less you allow yourself to come across as a bigoted, conceited ambition-piñata (trickier than you’d think), the better your chances of, well, surviving. Did I mention that you have to love it more than anything? That too.

My current leading lady is as far from the preconceived notions of that title as I’ve encountered. She’s humble, sensitive, unselfconsciously talented, and has actually spoken the words: ‘If I could work around the theatre for the rest of my life, I’d be the luckiest girl in the world.’ Not so for a stampede of other actors who might be referred to as BOBS or BBOBs (respectively Bafta-Or- Bust, or, less kindly, Big-Brother-Or-Bust).

As the recent parade of cardboard citizens in the City reminds us, no profession is entirely idiot-proof. So who is this Luckster? Well, I suppose the chap or chappette who painstakingly craft their own luck. Those who —through devotion, dexterity and a great big dollop of humour— mark out a territory for themselves, and their unique ubiquity. –>