LET'S FACE IT

Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

                                                                                             Oscar Wilde

As promised, a new cinematic concoction:

SEEKING A NEWER WORLD

                    My purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
                              Tennyson, Ulysses

I can’t decide whether the Brushes app is a red herring in my career as a part-time painter or not. The iPhone ‘paintings’ I did, partly whilst travelling on the Tube to and from London Bridge and Antigone, were absorbing and made the time fly. I think my attempt on iPad to realize an illusory childhood vision of mountains, which I was disappointed to learn were ‘all clouds and sunset’ as my mother explained, is one I should make again in real paint. (N.B. As a boy soprano at Rehoboth Methodist Chapel I would sing Mendelssohn’s ‘Oh! For the wings of a dove’.)

My gallery seat [in the Alhambra Theatre] afforded me the best view of Bradford, and indeed of life, I’d ever had – not counting a magnificent range of hills and mountains bathed in pink and golden light, which had revealed itself one evening a year or two earlier, down the cobbled road at the corner of our street of back-to-backs, soaring up on the other side of the railway lines and beyond Bowling Park. I fully expected to be reaching the foothills next morning and exploring the streets and lanes, where, I imagined, donkeys pulled carts up through quaint mountain villages. I was thrilled that, after all, the great and beautiful world I’d become aware of by repute had turned out to be only a tram ride away. But no; the journey was impossible, as my mother explained when I persuaded her to come out to the corner and look: ‘It’s only made of clouds and sunset, Edward.’ (From Slim Chances)

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This partial preview of Sara Kestelman as Coco may seem coy, but I am saving up the whole iPad portrait to accompany a written piece.

URBAN LAMENT II

This is not the foreshadowed new film, but a pithy sequel to my first good-humoured urban lament, which seemed to strike a chord. Once again filmed covertly on location.

IN THE ROUND, PART 2

Thank you for your warm appreciation of last week’s excerpt from my National Theatre Platform in March. Here is another, from the final few minutes:

‘Comedy’, after I had just applied the final brushstrokes.

Kathleen and I have a new film ‘in the works’, which we hope to share with you soon.

IN THE ROUND

The National Theatre Archive has made available to me a recording of my Platform in March to launch Slim Chances. Two cameras were lurking in the upper reaches of the Cottesloe as I performed ‘in the round’ to a full house.

Was it in the attic that I bumped the back of my head? The evidence should have been covered with make-up, but I had no dresser to check me front and back before I went on in improvisatory mode at six o’clock … onto the set of The Holy Rosenbergs due to be performed that night – a living room in Edgware, North West London.

Here is an excerpt or two from the forty-five minute Platform. (As the volume is slightly challenged, the video might best be heard through earphones or external speakers.)

I would just like to say in closing that I read all your comments each week and find them touching and encouraging by turns.
E.P.

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Just a reminder that signed copies of Slim Chances are available from Edward’s website along with a limited-edition pack of postcards and greeting cards produced for his Burgh House exhibition.

K.R.

ANCIENT YET MODERN

Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. F. Scott Fitzgerald 

Tiresias, reputed to have been 300 years old, is the latest, and I hope the most advanced, in my studies of old age. The very first was my award-winning performance of a poet in a retirement home, which I played at the age of seventeen with the aid of white greasepaint and powder in my hair. The Bradford Association of Youth Clubs shield for Best Performance of 1954 is small but impressively classical, with the winged figure of Nike holding what I can claim as my second laurel wreath; I had won the previous year too.

But before you laugh, the adjudicator in 1954 was an august sixty-one and knew about acting and creeping old age first hand, having played Viola in Twelfth Night at the Old Vic in 1927, graduating to Gertrude to the young Olivier’s Hamlet ten years later. Esmé Church as the principal of my drama school most certainly must have recommended me on the strength of my performance of the old poet to play the aged butler Frith in Rebecca – my first professional performance – in the Halifax Rep, when the company needed some cheap acting students to make up the numbers.

I don’t have to act decrepitude or dulled senses anymore, but there are advantages: I was alone in not detecting the smell of dead rat the other night under the upstage left corner of the rostrum of the Antigone set underneath the dank railway arches that form the Southwark Playhouse. In fact, concurrently on Sundays I was playing Greff in the musical Coco – Chanel’s sixty-year-old lawyer with a wife and young mistress … this required some effort of youthful characterization – a true ‘character’ part.

Having delivered Tiresias’ prophetic coup de grâce to Kreon, I was speaking my last lines to him – ‘I am a good archer, you will not slip through the heat of my arrows’ – and was just about to be led off the stage by Ruben, the younger of my boy guides. It was the last performance of the Antigone run and Doug, the elder of my guides, was watching the performance from the second row: by law, minors are protected from the tyranny of seven or eight performances a week and have to alternate. You would think as a grown-up, after seven performances of Tiresias a week for a month, I would have securely got the hang of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s translation, but not a performance had gone by without me supplying my own minor variations, occasional snippets of substitute translation, and this last performance was no exception.

However it is a variation of gesture I am concerned with here and Wertenbaker and Sophocles give one free rein in the gesture department. In rehearsal, as well as striving to be in the magic NOW in which all drama, ancient and modern, takes place, one was always haunted by the nebulous echoes of ancient classical utterance and visions of classical gesture. These are both indefinable of course. Actually Classical Acting was defined for me unforgettably, not by an imagined glimpse of masked actors performing a sunlit matinee at the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens ca. 442 BC, but by an Old Vic top-floor dressing room conversation one night in 1965. Leslie, an elderly dresser, entered dramatically into a discussion being held by bit players in one of those longeurs between spasmodic appearances made famous by Stoppard. We were talking about Christopher Fry’s play, The Dark is Light Enough, which Les seemed to believe was a classical play, at any rate his sudden intervention was ‘Bit of the Othello touch that – The Dark is Light Enough.’ It was a conversation-stopper. We had to know what he could possibly mean. (Olivier’s Othello was in the NT’s Old Vic repertoire at the time.) ‘The Othello touch,’ he persisted.

‘Leslie, what do you mean?’

‘The Othello touch,’ he went on in his elderly cockney croak. ‘You know – the long robes and the pointin’ and the flailin’ about.’

I had remembered this conversation when our Antigone costume designer had suggested Tiresias should have a long cloak and showed an illustration of a sort of patchwork Afghan bedspread that might have been from a Kabul catalogue. It was with some pride that I saw it was of an infinitely less impressive design than the actual one I happened to have bought perhaps fifteen years ago from an intriguing little shop off Shepherd’s Bush Green, an Aladdin’s cave of Arabian fabrics and garments and high-quality tat. I was dubious about wearing such a garment in a production that featured modern military fatigues (and even, to my surprise at the dress rehearsal, an overture of helicopter and a suicide bomb). When I dug out my magnificent patchwork, I was a little dismayed; it had become moth-eaten, appropriate one might think for a prophet who is so old that even in the most up-to-the-moment production his wardrobe might predate the mothball.

Mothballed acting is another thing: how to reconcile the world of passports, suits and video cameras, which I found myself parachuted into as a late recruit to the company; how to merge in as Tiresias, divining signs from the way meat burns on altars and the inability of the gods to receive the smoke. Then, when a young director suggests a passage could be less ‘rhetorical’, one suspects one is being cautioned for acting.

But it is not vox I am talking about, it is gesture. I confess that Olivier’s Old Vic Othello had haunted about me in the Bermondsey rehearsal room, white-haired and wispy though I am. The shades of Thespis and his successors in their masks, Olivier in his black make-up, all had waited with me in the gloomy off-stage corner under the arches. They had been present even on nights when I had felt that curious nerveless indifference that can invade an actor before his entrance – a sure sign that that elemental existential energy had better manifest itself from somewhere or one will be left with … technique and no mystery.

I had been doing an archer’s gesture to accompany the line, ‘I am a good archer’. On the last night, on impulse, I abandoned it, stood still and said the line rather more simply, sotto voce. When we got off, I talked about the moment with my guide, young Ruben, who said it was good, better in fact, because, he said, the words seemed more important and I had already done a turning movement a few lines earlier and it was better only turning once. Out of the mouths of ‘screenagers’ one has perfected praise.

But Doug was my first guide and did the most performances and when we came off after the matinée – his last performance – he immediately embraced me. His succinct evaluations of how the scene had gone, observations about the pace or the momentum had always been welcome, encouraging, never impertinent or patronizingly tactful. They had even been amusing. After a preview he marvelled at my ability to make the bits I’d invented sound ‘just like the rest of it’, at the same time remarking how lucky he was to be working with an actor of my experience.

Prophesy in the theatre is a dodgy business. Have my teenage laurels been crowned? I can’t prophesy what might come of the fact that the octenagarian Sir Peter Hall was in the audience of that last matinée. But the very young seem to me to be full of promise and their wisdom palpable … of course, as a species, we humans are no wiser than the Ancient Greeks, however much I have been impressed by Ruben and Doug’s instinctive mastery of the iPhone (married to their ignorance of Peter Hall)  But, after all, what are fame and transient laurels – what is the difference of a few decades when one is working on a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old script?

AN ANTIDOTE TO LONDON BRIDGE TUNNEL VISION

Coco and Antigone have ended, the heady cocktail of 60s Broadway musical and ancient Greek tragedy, but Life and Art continue, and, having last week graduated from the iPhone to the iPad's slightly larger virtual canvas, I present here my very first iPad painting - in the making as it were.