Acting Reality.

I’m currently doing acting workshops on Saturday afternoons 2 till 5 by Brilliantsteve. Brilliantsteve is a young whipper-snapper who doesn’t get any wider from his feet up, apart from his eyes, which seem like searchlights looking for planes. He is a beaver herding carthorses. His blissful unawareness that fetlocks get creaky and brains get slow from years in yokes makes us all regress to foals. The wonderful thing about thespians, which has to be an opening line from a Poo poem, is that they take care of each other, because basically acting is a marshal art for egos. By the strangest of paradoxes playing ourselves can become so hackneyed we sleepwalk through the role but playing another character requires such attention that acting becomes the greater reality. This week we are doing balance and imbalance. These are jolts in expectation; those moment when the dream of a fried egg sandwich is broken, like the egg, by the smell of Hydrogen sulphide. Our balanced trance is upended by recalcitrant reality and by fair means or foul we must make the best of it. When, for example we played a person welcoming but being ignored by a passing person Jo showed an understandable humiliation where as Maggie showed all the signs of an unspoken, “that bitch just blanked me!” We began simply by playing ‘when it’s your turn to say your name you forget where or who you are’, which I have to say I found surprisingly easy. After a good friend advised me on entering therapy training to, “forget expectations, just take yourself”, forgetting who and where I am have become all together too enjoyable, sometimes worryingly so. The upshot of all this ‘acting’ is proving our bodies speak louder than words, that the merest muscular inflection purveys some truth louder than our mealy mouths could ever hope to. Jo for example proved to be an amazing neck actress, an anatomical subsection I’d previously overlooked, but in the hands of a master, a remarkable expresser of numerous fleeting emotions. So do come along next week, Brilliantsteve is doing improvisation. Now what’s my…. Oh yes Stiffmouse.