“So are you gonna do a Welsh accent for Fluellen,” M asks me. First question. “It’s not important,” I reflexively reply. Because it isn’t. I’ve got text to convey, drive and meaning and purpose within it. I’ve got to try and make a believable person with some words on a page. I will almost certainly sound more Welsh than I do when you usually talk to me. But it can’t be my focus or the work will suffer. “I’m doing a Cornish accent,” he goes on to tell me. And he does. He observably “does” what may or may not be a Cornish accent. “I do a good Welsh too,” he says, and makes some noises. And I got thinking about this whole business of acting.
To my ear, I couldn’t hear his text because he was doing the Cornish accent. He knows what he’s saying but we don’t and we need to. I thought of my instinct when he asked me if I was doing Welsh – to go full taffy and prove I can “do” it. But then I checked myself. A: Because my job is to be an actor. Not to prove I can act. To be it not do it. And B: Because I don’t think of myself as strong in Welsh. So this has to be my standpoint. But I do think of myself as strong in Scottish, for instance, but again there’s huge nuance district to district. Buying a crocodile at a car boot in Carnoustie sounds very different from getting a girl in the gorbels in Glasgow. Welsh can’t be painted with a fat brush either.
A bit later on he was talking about his ADHD and I thought that tracked. Pretty much every actor I know is dealing with a lesser or greater degree of ADHD. But now it’s a big part of your dialogue. I’m not gonna pay for a diagnosis unless it somehow becomes relevant.
Another frequent actor option is narcissism. It’s either all about THIS STUFF AND OOH THIS IS INTERESTING AND WHAT IF I WAS LIKE THIS OR THIS. Or is I AM WONDERFUL, OBSERVE ME, HANG ON MY WORDS YOU SERRIED RANKS. Sure, there are plenty of them, we’ve all worked with them. They do well or they quit. There’s got to be an engine for this shit we do though. It’s not fun enough between the jobs otherwise.
Work smart. Learn your lines neutral but to the depth of reflex. Be alert to your surroundings aka don’t walk into each other and the furniture. Be audible. Target things and make responsive choices live.
This is cue script Shakespeare. It will only fly if we are looking and listening. We have learnt it all in a bubble, but we absolutely have to play it all for and with each other or it’s gonna be a company of actors in fucking hamster balls. “I’m sure you’ve all planned loads but in order to do what you’ve planned then you have to know your cues and your lines,” says one of the group leaders and all my learning from doing work like this for so long is that the less you plan and harder you listen the more you fly and pick everyone up with you. If you know how you’re gonna say it before you say it, it’s dead in your pocket. I don’t want to be Fluellen in a hamsterball derby.
Rant aside it’s been a lovely day. M is old school and is newly at The Factory where he has been quietly pissing me off for ego and coarse acting and academic interpretation long before I realised he is involved in this. It’s a generational thing though and I like him as a person. This job ain’t the Factory either and I can lay some of that down. It is a lot of lovely practitioners with definite actual chops coming together at a history festival to do a cue script rendition of Henry V their way. It’s historical experimentation. It’s a geek out. “Let’s try and do this like they would have done it.” For a load of history buffs and re-enactors. I’m on side. If I end up having to go full taffy to fit it I’ll swallow my pride and run around with a leek.
The original Shakespeare company all had their roles within the unit sorted. You can really track the voices through the plays. We are just a bunch of relative strangers to each other. Perhaps by the end of this we will be friends. But not if I let myself keep being annoyed with M for being coarse. It’s why I’m writing it out here. Getting it out of my system. Few enough people read this that I’m confident it won’t get back to him, and if it does I stand by every word of it and it’s perfectly legit to like someone who annoys you at work.
I’ve got a lot more work to do and not a very long time to do it. Less blog more sleep.
How the hell did I recover so quickly from my manflu? Not a clue. Miracles.
AlBarclay 