Straining Every Nerve

The whole day from the moment you get up to the moment you hit the sack is like no other. If anything it's like some peculiar birthday. Everybody is extremely nice to you. There will be telegrams and cards possibly presents and flowers. Your dressing room begins to resemble a hospital ward or a funeral parlour. Whether the director has called you in or not you're unlikely to be able to resist the magnetic pull of the theatre. You’ll pick at your lunch. You'll drink many cups of black coffee. There will be a number of people in the audience most of whom will have seen it before when they didn't laugh. Now they won't laugh again. Those who haven't seen it before won't laugh either or if they do, it'll be in quite the wrong place. The play will seem to last eight and a half hours. You will barely be thinking of your performance because you're haunted by the fact that the lighting plan appears to have been designed by Rembrandt. You can't see your fellow actors so how can the audience? All in all. you just long for the whole thing to be over.

Theatre auditions generally take place in the auditorium of a theatre other than the one in which the play will go on. The director, the assistant director, the casting agent, possibly the theatre's artistic director, probably the producer are all lounging in the stalls with their feet on the back of the seat in front? There are twenty or thirty plastic cups with cigarette butts lying in an inch of coffee littering the aisles. The air is thick with smoke and raucous laughter. The director has been telling a joke. About the previous actor you think darkly and they'll have a little joke about you too when you've gone. People leap up to greet you, the casting director introduces you to everyone, you shake the director as firmly by the hand as you can without betraying your tension. Your voice is trembling oddly. You long for a cigarette even though you don't smoke but you don't take the one offered to you because it might seem unprofessional and your mouth is already so dry that it's painful to swallow.

"You deserve a rest." No. The only thing I deserve, I hope is a job. If you have a job a few weeks hence, then a gap of a few weeks will be most welcome. But any time, any day not working and without the prospect of work, is dead time, grey time anxious and haunted times. You could learn German, take driving lessons, night classes in the History of Art. No, you couldn't. Even if you've got any money, which is unlikely, it's impossible to settle to anything. There's something wrong, something missing.

1. Is being an actor a vocation or can anybody do this? Does it require special education? Why?

2. Have you ever thought of becoming an actor? Why?

3. Describe your experience of acting.

4. Write an argumentative essay on the topic “Advantages and disadvantages of being an actor”.

34. Speak about your favourite actor/actress.

Discussion

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14