As former Woolworths employees stump for unpaid work-experience and even the adorable profession of Lollipop-Person is contended between pinch-thin retirees and debt-mired students, it seems morally defunct to bemoan the actor’s monthly struggles with rejection. But, if there’s anything I do well, it’s indulgence.

 

Some actors get several auditions a week. This affords practice to make perfect, or, if not perfect, then at least to remember the casting director’s name and/or star sign. Most are lucky to get one audition a fortnight. Bearing in mind that acting jobs generally last between a day and two months, this leads to severe hikes in anxiety-to-audition ratio. Which goes a long way to explaining why actors behave as they do (flesh-ravenous Cro-Magnons). We are society’s mayflies, frantically beating around any and everybody’s bush before the pointless and desperate mechanism of our biological clocks creak to a standstill. Harsh, but fair.

 

Clearly, I reek of disenfranchisement. In fact, I’m toasting to my CV coming to an abrupt halt with pink cava on a train back to London, careening from a super-salad health-regime and 5k morning-runs to discount bubbly and a packet of novelty Walkers. The line between professional virility and Withnail & I territory is wafer-thin. Or should I say Onion Bhaji crisp-thin

 

So here’s a toast to the actors out there (88% last time I checked) who aren’t working. And a thought for those still desperately bashing your heads against call-centre handsets or fishmonger iceboxes:

 

There has to be more to resting than staring at the mobile and willing your agency’s name to appear whilst a jaunty ring-tone jostles your bed-sit. Unemployment must be tackled as vigorously as the work itself, even if that’s just ping-ponging idiotic ideas amongst your friends, enemies, or even your cats (actually, cats often provide the silent mockery essential to re-ignition).

 

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost met working in a Mexican restaurant. Stephen Spielberg fooled security at a Hollywood studio just so he could come in every day and feel like a director. Even Daniel Day-Lewis took up Italian cobbling when he lost his creative oomph. Whatever you do, don’t give in to atrophy. It’s not just a difficult word to spell. It’s a difficult world to escape.

 

Do something stupid with your unemployment. Propose an opera for crows. Write a melodrama for cartoon superheroes. Choreograph an impromptu tango in your local supermarket. Do anything, the first thing that comes into your mind, rather than mollycoddling your email and wondering if perhaps your agent has confused you with Christian Bale and thinks that you’re doing incredibly well.

 

And then tell me all about it, so that I and any other Boo-Hoo-ters can feel better about ourselves. 

 

Acting, above all else, is waking up to think ‘today’s the day.’

 

It’s that or quaffing imitation champers from a paper cup till you can’t tell the booze from the tears. You have been warned.

–>

It could be snow-fever. It might be the full moon. It’s probably just a case of the grumps. But seeing as it’s Darwin 200th birthday, I’m responding to an enigmatic link I’ve been sent concerning acting and…religion. Here goes.

 

First of all the author strikes a curious analogy between the playwright as God The Creator, and the actor being God As Man. So far, so weird.

 

“For the Christian, acting is a vocation.”

 

For all those Atheist, Muslim and Jedi actors out there, it must just be whimsy.

 

“Performance is an act of obedience.”

 

After ten years in theatre I can safely say that there is nothing less interesting than an obedient performance.

 

“Their art is a matter of submission and denial of the self rather than self-aggrandizement.”

 

Submission and denial of the self? Oh, that’s right, that’s why A Doll’s House set 19th century Norway alight with scandal. And why we love to hate that humble, unambitious Richard III. I can’t think what the actor’s process is about if not about celebration, and, yes, exploitation of the self. As the blushing legend Eleanora Duse said: ‘All I have to offer is the revelation of my soul’.

 

“The Christian actor is more likely to seek out plays with moral and philosophical impact.”

 

Moral I can believe. But philosophical?  Take it from an ancient Greek, Philosophy has been roasting on pyres ever since Religion clubbed Ethics and dragged it back to its cave.

 

“Christian actors avoid plays fostering anti-Christian purposes…plays intended to foster hatred (including anti-semitism)…”

 

I like the way he puts including anti-semitism, as if this can occasionally be written off as a half-hearted attempt at hatred. Obviously he’s talking about cartoon villains —Barabas, Shylock— but I doubt anyone’s ever joined the BNP after a galvanizing matinee in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

 

“…Or plays that advocate reprehensible behaviour…easily summarized by the traditional seven deadlies: pride, covetousness, wrath, lechery, gluttony, envy and sloth.”

 

Oh, my. What is the deal with ‘seven deadlies’? They sound like a litter of adorable, kitten-eating puppies. Moreover, these seven deadlies are all so gut-wrenchingly, beautifully human. I don’t think I want to see a piece of theatre where they don’t come into play: Willy Loman wants to make money, Juliet lusts after Romeo: brilliant! We can identify with that.

 

Concluding:

 

“Just as Jesus seems aware simultaneously of his divine and human identities, so these actors are conscious of being themselves and at the same time of ‘being’ their characters.”

 

Invert that for a moment and suppose that perhaps the borderline confusion that actors experience is something innate in Man, a frolic between the shadows of fantasy and reality, play that could easily be mistaken for say, ooh, I don’t know: believing you posses a direct hotline to a divine creator. Poor old Joan of Arc. 

 

Theatre is what it is. And nobody can take credit for its majesty except theatre itself.

 

Ah. Even if you don’t want to be a heretic, at least indulge in a little heretickling.

 

 

–>

Sheer, rollicking bliss! The evening performance has been exorcized. With each scintillating pigment of emotion ejected, we shed our costumes like scabietic snakes and scrape translucent powder from our cheeks.

 

And then that seductive voice crackles onto the tannoy:

 

‘Thank you ladies and gentlemen. Once changed could you please make your way down to the auditorium for the audience Q&A.‘

 

Deviously, she adds:

 

‘Your free drink awaits you on stage.’

 

The way to an actor’s heart? Through their liver.

 

So we muster downstairs and sheepishly amble across the stage, laying claim to our complimentary manna. Examining the audience for tear-stains and laughter-crinks, we prepare to be barraged with the old corkers. Such as:

 

‘How do you remember your lines?’

 

‘Oh, (insert name of cast scapegoat) doesn’t bother. We try to work around him.’

 

(everybody laughs)

 

‘In the thirties everybody had turn-ups. I noticed none of you did. Why?’

 

‘We’re pretending! It’s a theatre, not a time machine.’

 

(everybody laughs)

 

‘How did you perfect the American accent?’

 

‘Watching Little House On The Prairie. Except for (insert cast scapegoat). He got in a muddle and watched Home & Away.’

 

(everybody laughs)

 

And then, controversy:

 

‘I enjoyed the play to a point, but I can’t help but feel —with eight male characters and two female— could we please, perhaps, move into the 21^st century?’

 

I don’t think actors are used to criticism. Especially criticism they can’t do much about. ‘Quick! Somebody dig up Arthur Miller! He needs to re-title it Death Of A Saleswoman!’

 

Now I’ve written several all-female pieces, despite bawdier friends suggesting that this has more to do with constructing a Playboy Mansion Of Theatre than championing feminism (and to that may I retort that bunnies they were not). Still, the question seemed unfair. A quietly articulate cast-member hit back with:

 

‘I cannot surmise the amount of times where somebody at these Q&As has complained that we’re putting on another Shakespeare or not producing a play about this or that social travesty. It frustrates me for the simple reason that we are all here to talk about the production you saw tonight. Any other questions—about the theatre programming or contemporary artistic inclination— are entirely nugatory.’

 

Whilst the auditorium erupted into applause and brays of ‘here-here!’ I made a mental note to look up the word ‘nugatory’. Turns out it’s an admirably sneaky way of saying somebody’s point is worthless. And whether it was right or wrong for the question to be aired in the first place, the auditorium by now was crackling with drama.     

 

This, of course, is the closest that genteel theatre will get to Augusto Boal’s innovative Forum Theatre. But later that evening the whole bar was still ear-deep in debate about the nature of luck and fate, of work and dedication, comparing fortune with chaos theory and the interminably slow logic of evolution.

 

And if that all arises from one contentious question —nugatory or not— then I say keep ‘em coming.

 

Along with the free drinks.

–>