In on the act?
Anyone who has glanced through my little blog will have gathered that I am fascinated by words. How we use them to connect, sometimes how we use them to dissociate. Shaw said that the moment an Englishman opens his mouth, he makes some other Englishman despise him. It is certainly true that what we say carries a great deal of information about who we are. And I’m thinking of vocabulary as much as accents.
I’ve already written about when actors started to say “dried” rather than “dried up”, when “an engagement” became simply “a job”. Dividing by generation, I suppose, but also making obsolete some outsiders’ ideas of theatre language. When, I wonder, did theatre people really say ‘slap’ for make-up. Did they? And the famous case is “resting” for out of work, which journalists confidently produce as actors’ terminology. I have asked actors of widely varying generations whether ‘resting’ was ever current with this meaning. All said no.
My personal theory is that journalists got it from interviewing film actors, who if the part is major are likely to work dawn-to-dusk days for long periods. Naturally such performers don’t usually do it fifty weeks or so in the year, like people in permanent jobs do. Hence “resting”. Perhaps. In such ways can misunderstandings grow up.
“Civilians never understand” says the leading lady in Ronald Harwood’s renowned backstage play “The Dresser”. Now there is an irony about the way this play uses ‘civilian’. I have been in the profession since the nineteen sixties, and I have never heard anyone outside the play use it to mean ‘non-actor’. Sometimes you just have to conclude: Perhaps they do; perhaps they did; one person’s experience is always finally only one person’s experience. This playwright should know. Harwood was a most distinguished dramatist. He had been an actor. All the ‘civilians’ write that he had been a dresser. But they seem to mean that he was simultaneously an actor and a dresser. Do they perhaps mean an acting A.S.M. (assistant stage manager), lending a hand? To me its sounds like when they write ‘a walk-on part’. But if it’s a walk-on it’s not a part, and vice versa!
A few years ago I was interviewed by a theatre critic who had also been a friend of old. So old indeed that he had not seen my work for half a century. He is excellent company, and I enjoyed a delightful visit to his home for the interview. Then he took me out to lunch, and some time later took me on his press freebies to a show at the Globe, including another meal beforehand. We had known each other in a local amateur company before I got started in the profession, and what he subsequently wrote associated me with the amateur theatre scene, anachronistically.
The account of our interview paid me some touching compliments, and some back-handed ones, which I know is his style. He told me his brother had ticked him off for it recently! He relishes indiscretion (one subject of a piece he wrote allegedly threatened to sue), and I had assiduously avoided any actorish ‘bitching’. Unfortunately he mis-identified two out of the three actors I covered in my Year of Understudying (told in an earlier blog). No one would have employed me to understudy George Cole as a seedy little petty crook, “Minder” type. Though the interview generously opines that I could have done it if required.
The point about that Year — other actors will understand this — is not that it was any sort of artistic triumph, but that it was a year, exactly as in an open-ended job you work through the year. Not by landing one long run but by going literally from one booking to another. Overlapping for a few weeks. And during that year I fitted in other things — I think my uttering two words to Christopher Eccleston in “Our Friends in the North” was then. And I know that one of my several outings as John Major in “On the Record” on TV was in the latter part of that year, I remember a dressing room conversation about it. I also directed a studio production of Strindberg, and had committee meetings for Logos Theatre Company re-scheduled for afternoons because I was understudying. Yes, that’s the reality. You have to be there every evening. It’s so hard for people outside to get it. Civilians, as Ronald Harwood says.
And though I don’t want this blog to turn into an obituary column, and have already written about several deaths, I cannot mention Sir Ronald without remarking sadly on his recent passing. A life full of honours lived on the highest artistic and professional level. His work will live on.
