As the old year comes to a close it seems appropriate to post some early work. I’m grateful to an old friend from college who spotted this eclectic collection.
This little piece is from way back in the last millennium. It is the result of two days work (one per character). They played it like it was a matter of national importance (i.e. a lot) and it remains, thirty five years on, the highest hourly rate I’ve ever been paid for acting.
If it doesn’t load where we want it, the bit with me begins at 5:27.
Other than that:
New Perspective
I’ve taken the unusual step of asking my agent not to submit me for anything outside of certain secret select categories.
I have finally realized the wisdom as expressed by another old chum from college, “I long ago gave up the idea of being a big star, now I just want to be fabulously wealthy!“
“How many of your clients tell you they don’t want to work?” I asked my agent.
“None of them.” He said.
Fair enough. The corollary to an answer given by a doctor to a friend when he asked, “How many of your patients die?”
“All of them.” Said the doctor.
So I’m taking the next year to write, barring something irresistible from the two select categories mentioned above.
I’ve read Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing.
It took about 10 minutes to read, another 10xn to appreciate and I guess it’ll be multiples of 10 hours, months or years (if I live that long) to apply them.
Meanwhile here is attempt at what not to do when writing books, as Elmore has it:
Prologue
There had been rain. Rain that was deeply and meaningfully wet. But nowit was snowing moodily. The flakes drifted down like celestial dandruff. She put the kettle on for tea and scant minutes later the jolly whistle announced water at a rolling boil. “Do you want some honey in your tea?” she enquired abruptly. “How long have we been married?” he rejoined, sarcastically. “Too long!” was her unspoken thought. “Didn’t you oughter know bai now!?” he continued, lapsing into the twang of his rural vernacular, flipping the pages of his newspaper in a huff with a noisome grunt that annihilated any residual sweetness in the room. She sniffed, blew her nose, coughed, dried her hands handily and poured the angry water onto the placid tealeaves.
Forward to 2023
So now that I am finished with acting for the time being (except for the S.S.C. – secret select categories), what to do? I know! … I’ll be a writer.
I’ve read Annie Lammot’s book, Bird By Bird, and Stephen King’s book, On Writing, I’ve thumbed through Strunk and White’s, The Elements of Style, I’ve watched masterclasses on Masterclass from Aaron Sorkin to Walter Mosely. I’ve taken to heart the maxims:
Don’t get it right, get it written.
Don’t make it good, make it by Tuesday.
Any fool can write, it takes a man to re-write.
Tricky one that, in these gender-sensitive days. Phases sometimes used in legal contracts to indicate inclusion might help. Is it better rendered: Any fool can write, it takes a woman/man/human/person/sentient being/humanoid native of planet Earth to re-write?
I have no answer.
This comes late for Hanukkah, early for Christmas, but bang on for the Solstice and for Yule.
You could say “Season’s Greetings”. For a comedic take, see Alan Aybourn’s play of that title and my retrospective blog post about touring in it with the late great Marti Caine
Whichever way you celebrate, best wishes to you, and have a fantastic New Year!
Back in 1984 Simon Callow (you’ve seen him in the films) published a book called, Being An Actor. In it he wrote, “I don’t know of any other attempt by an actor of my generation to describe the theater in which we work.”
Well Simon…
Big thanks to you personally and to everyone who has followed this blog. The book would never have been written without you.
… Just in case you were wondering what it looks like when a plutocrat with possible kleptocratic tendencies has sole charge of a great institution which he might, in fact, regard as his personal ATM, there could be no finer prototypic manual than the theatrical memoir, Stage Blood.
This outstanding volume by that distinguished man of international theatre, Michael Blakemore, compares and contrasts the regimes of Sir (later, Lord) Laurence Olivier with its basis in public service, and Peter (later, Sir Peter) Hall with its accent on a percentage.
Spoiler alert: there are a few self-referencing, free-associative links in this post.
I’ve had it again: the actor’s nightmare. The one where you’re in act one and you realize with shock-horror that you don’t know your lines for act two.
That’s the basic. Obviously there are as many variations on this as there are actors. In this one I had played one of my favorite scenes in all literature. Here’s how it goes:
Scene: a garden patio some where in Buckinghamshire, England. It is Sunday morning and a middle-aged couple are having breakfast over the Sunday papers. After a pause …
Him: I can’t say I’m very taken with this marmalade.
Her: No, neither am I.
Him: Then why did you buy it?
Her: They didn’t have our sort.
The exchanges continue in this vein and the button on this opening segment of Act One, Scene Two of this masterpiece, Relatively Speaking, by Sir Alan Ayckbourn is …
Him: If you ask me we’d have been a lot better off with jam!
I consider this scene to be the finest exposition in all drama on the state of British middle-class marriage in the second half of the 20th century.
Bit of backstory here:
A few years ago I was walking on in Brian Bedford’s extraordinary production of The Importance of being Earnest(see this blog December 2010)Â designed by the late, great Desmond Heeley. It was a very agreeable and comfortable engagement, Broadway money, minimal work required, plenty of free time.
Then the offer came to cross the country to San Diego and play a named part in the US premiere of Sir Alan Ayckbourn’s 82nd (!!!) play. Well no matter how comfortable or well-paid a walk on, the offer of a real role will rouse the blood of any self-respecting actor, after all it’s why we joined. But there’s more to it than that.
On the whole actors are sensitive to augury. Do I take the best friend in a fungal infection commercial, or do I play Cleopatra in drag in an all male production touring to Iceland, Greenland and the Falklands? Give me a sign.
So this play, Life of Riley, Sir Alan’s 82nd or 83rd – can’t remember which offhand – suffice to say he knocks ’em out, plays a cheeky joke on all of us with a bit of self-referencing (bit like this post, following in the steps of the master). In that, the opening scene is a couple rehearsing the scene above (yes, my favorite) for a local production somewhere within the world of the play. And Relatively Speaking was Sir Alan’s 10th or 11th, or it may have been 16th play, but his first commercial hit. So, Sir Alan is here referencing his early work. The reference is undisclosed, it’s an in-joke, not unlike say, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew getting the astrology wrong in Twelfth Night. Not only that, but each of the four scenes in Life of Riley opens with a variation on the Relatively Speaking scene (rehearsed, rehearsed in strife, rehearsed in exasperation, post-show discussion including how it should have been rehearsed).
But wait, there’s more.
I had a few years previously directed this very play, Relatively Speaking, in the very same San Diego.
And the name of the role in Life of Riley, and the guy rehearsing my fav. scene?
Colin.
Therefore, a pun on my favorite scene in my favorite play, as US premiere of my favorite author, and the role spookily, my own name. Throw in San Diego in the summer, Jacaranda blossom, The Old Globe theatre, well appointed old-world accommodation, beaches nearby. Somehow the drastic salary reduction didn’t seem to matter.
Another, at that point unknown, jackpot was that my scene partner was the incomparable Henny Russell (see this blog June 2011)Â with whom, to my delight I am about to work again (see this blog last entry), although sadly in The Audience, Mrs Thatcher and Churchill say nothing to each other – although perhaps another famous dialogue could be adapted thus:
Mrs Thatcher: If I were married to you I’d poison your tea.
Churchill: If I were married to you I’d drink it.Â
We pick up the actor’s nightmare when I’ve played the scene, the marmalade one,  and I’m relaxing in my dressing room. There’s a book, there may be a fine-quality whisky (even though I never drink during a show – seriously I don’t – afterwards is a different matter), but if there isn’t actually a whisky it feels like there is one. I’ve taken off the jacket, tie and shoes and am leaning back on a chair with my feet on the make-up counter, I’m reading something pleasing (don’t know what it is, but it’s making me smile). The dressing room lights are mellow, and the counter resembles the practical confusion of my study. There are books, papers, bills, there’s make-up, and other theatrical accessories all piled irregularly in happy confusion and I know where everything is and I’m looking forward to the curtain call where I’m confident there will be a warm reception.
Suddenly something alerts me. I’ve forgotten something. What play are we doing? Relatively Speaking, ok, all I have to do is wait for the final scene … no, hold it, I’m confused … somehow I’ve got the idea that I’m on tour and I’m in the company of The Madness of George IIIwhere I played a telling cameo, and also once when one of the other guys was sick, took over as the vicar giving a blessing in the very last image of the play. I look down and see that I’m half dressed in religious vestments … but … wtf (!?!) … it’s not George, it’s RELATIVELY SPEAKING.
The chair comes upright and I spring from it and furiously rummage the counter for the script (where the f**k is it???)Â as whisky, books and make-up go flying. Over the p.a. I hear dialogue from the scene where my entrance is coming up. I sprint (if that word can be applied to undressing and dressing) out of the vicar’s garb into the tweedy jacket and cords of an Englishman in his garden and jam both legs into one leg of the trousers. There’s no time to undo this. Hopping around like a demented pogo stick, anxiety becomes terror as I at last find the script which has morphed from a slim volume into something Dickens might have written in one of his more verbose moods, and I riffle the pages desperately looking for my lines.
And there they are all neatly highlighted in yellow.
Do I know them?
NO! ARGH!
These are lines I have never seen (and lines that Ayckbourn never wrote – or did he?). I turn a page and I see a block of text, again highlighted, it is the beginning of a twelve page monologue and all of it is strange to me.
What is to be done? Can I busk/impovise it? No! Don’t be ridiculous! Not even Eddie Izzard could do that! My entrance is coming up (a matter of seconds now). I am still wrongly dressed, I catch myself in the mirror and see that my thinning hair is now back-combed in horror and I look like a steampunk version of a pantomime dame. Adrenalin and some unknown hallucinogenic course through me.
Suddenly I’m in the wings, from the darkness I see the brightly lit stage, inwardly I invoke the genius of Ayckbourn, Moliere and Shakespeare, desperately appealing to all three to come up with some brilliant sleight-of-form that can save me and amuse the (enormous) audience. But I know it’s hopeless. I’m completely f**k*d. My terror escalates …
And then I wake up.
Sigmund Freud
Do we need to send to Vienna to work this one out?
Not so much.
Although I am offering either a quality whisky or a free tarot reading for the best interpretation offered by my readers – 100 words max please – and the judge’s decision will be final. Yes, even actors (me) playing statesmen (Churchill) have to have day jobs (see www.mcphillamytarot.com).
I was right about the alphabetical thing. Actor/Astrologer – I’m more likely now to remember what I do on the side. Although which side is on the side is moot.
But this post is not to mingle these two occupations. Rather to separate them.
Response from the theatre-savvy people who read this page has been mixed. Some of us leap like young gazelles into the mystic. Some are quietly interested (in this category is one friend who has taken to calling me Madame Arcati). And some are reluctant to believe it, up to and including my personal favorite, a message from one friend after one of my promo emails, asking me if I’d been hacked.
So after this post I’ll keep the Acting here and the Astrology over there. McPhillamyTarot.com is now up and running, and there’s a brand new astro-tarot blog starting. If the stars call to you, by all means check it out.
And let me remind you that for the first 90 days in business, I’m offering a pay-what-you’re-happy-to-pay (with a zero minimum) aka a FREE sample.
Ok enough about that. Except to say that in my researches I’ve been taking in the mind-altering discoveries made possible by the Hubble telescope — you know the one I mean? The one that orbits the earth, the one that when they pointed it at a single fragment of sky they discovered billions of galaxies. Er, let me say that again, billions of galaxies. And just looking at one tiny piece of the infinite sky. The universe is a big place.
Compared to the infinite endlessness and abundance, anything that astrology could say is kind of … local. Or is it …?Â
I won’t say any more here, but these and other questions will be explored over there, at mcphillamytarot.com
Except I will say that the day the Creator of the Infinitude of the Multiplicity — aka in some circles, GOD, and by many other names — was bored, and looking for a way to stir things a bit, well on that day S/HE invented … The Audition.
Yes, but it took the guy downstairs to come up with the call-back, or what we used to call in England, the recall.
Eee but it’s a tough gig being alive …
Or as Shakespeare puts it:
“… Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.”
