Finding Coward-ly Courage
The last piece I posted quoted the leading lady character from “The Dresser” saying ““Civilians [outsiders] never understand”. One of the things that is most misunderstood about actors is associating the profession with woolly sentimentality, typified in the phrase “The show must go on.” In my experience — and, as I have said before, one person’s experience is only ever that — actors are a pretty down-to-earth bunch, occasionally lapsing into gallows humour about their occupation. “Why did the actor leave his curtains closed in the morning?” “To give himself something to do in the afternoon”. They don’t, as I say, talk about ‘resting’ for getting no work — there is rather a masochistic relish about calling that particular spade a spade. It occurs to me that if there is a euphemism, or at least a polite phrase, for not working, it is “available”. I picked that up in my spell with an actors’ co-operative.
So if the show must go on (and ironically we have seen so much of the opposite this bad year), I can think of a good practical reason — that it’s a damn sight more trouble, and potentially disagreeable, to cancel than to whack on ‘regardless’. I say this as one who has in a couple of situations had to explain to an audience that it can’t go on, and they won’t be seeing the entertainment for which they had come out that evening. Not fun. And lots of consequences to go into.
With another of those ironies, the composer and performer of the satirical song “Why must the show go on?” is of course the incomparable and ultra-professional Sir Noel Coward. A good deal of irony and paradox about Coward. Sentimental, yes — “London pride has been handed down to us” — along with a certain ruthlessness in his phenomenal career. So far as I know he never failed to appear as billed, though he preferred to commit himself for shorter periods than perhaps managements might have preferred. He had the most important thing in a professional, the courage to keep going. Even when the tide of theatrical fashion turned for a time right against his sort of writing and performing.
Is ruthlessness essential? None of us do theatre for the sake of each others’ beautiful eyes, as the French say. But that doesn’t rule out respect and consideration for colleagues, or friendship.
We are coming to the end of this bad year, which has caused me to sing to myself another of Sir Noel’s compositions, “There are bad times just around the corner”. Well, let’s hope we’ve turned the last bad corner, as a nation. We need feeling and we need toughness, as I’ve been trying to say above, if we’re to get through it all. No longer a paradox, perhaps. Sir Noel ‘toughed out’ the Second World War with his contrasting personal qualities. I once had a conversation with an actor who wasn’t sure whether he had ‘the confidence not to have confidence’. His subsequent record showed that he had it. Perhaps what we need today — I know I do — is the courage not (necessarily) to have courage!
