Is it just me, or is the acting game becoming less of a noble profession and more of a dangerous pastime? Days were when the greatest hardship a stage actor faced was having to lay still as the corpse in an Agatha Christie play, while the only thing you had to struggle with was your motivation. Nowadays a hard hat and a certificate from Mensa is almost as much a requirement as an Equity card and a rehearsal script.
Whether it’s having to simulate professional wrestling in Claire Luckham’s Trafford Tanzi, being suspended by your ankles in Jez Butterworth’s Mojo, or even spending half the evening with a pair of knickers stuffed down your throat as one character has to endure in Ariel Dorfmann’s Death and the Maiden, the stage is no longer a profession for the fainthearted or delicate constitution as directors and playwrights seek new ways to titillate jaded audience palates.
For instance, Robert Le Page’s infamous 1992 production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream at the National Theatre which was set in a swamp, required the cast to traipse around in thick mud for the evening, resulting in the first reported case of trench foot in a British hospital since 1918. Timothy Spall, playing Bottom, summed up the experience months later with some lyricism when he observed “I’m still picking mud out of my arse even now.”
The actress Tilda Swinton ventured into performance art in 1995 by spending eight hours a day exhibiting herself in a glass case as part of the artist Cornelia Parker’s project The Maybe. She survived her sojourns by sleeping throughout the entire performance, a trick that I’ve noticed West End audiences often paying £45 each to duplicate in the front stalls.
But even this is as nothing compared with the travails of one actor in Sarah Kane’s play Blasted. Performed in the intimate surroundings of the Royal Court Upstairs, Pip Donaghy was blinded, forced to defecate and consume a dead baby, and ended up by being covered in builders’ rubble. Whether any of this was simulated was difficult to tell from where I was sitting: it was hard to see much through splayed fingers.
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The feats of mental endurance required can be equally testing. In the revival now running at Scarborough of Alan Ayckbourn’s interlocking portmanteau of comedies, Intimate Exchanges, a cast of only two actors perform a combination of eight different plays, with 16 different endings and involving playing myriad characters. They will memorise 17 hours of dialogue and survive 195 performances on little more than their talent, their costumes and enough easy-fastening Velcro to fill Selfridges.
However, the chief tormentor of actors, both physically and psychologically, surely has to be Samuel Beckett. In his play Happy Days the heroine is buried up to her neck in sand, while in his drama Play the entire cast are interred inside identical grey urns. In Not I he scales even greater heights of fiendish invention, requiring the solo performer to stand on a raised dais in the pitch black throughout with only her mouth illuminated. By contrast, Mich-ael Gambon seems to have got away lightly in the forthcoming production of Beckett’s Eh Joe at the Duke of York’s Theatre, merely having to sit in silence for 30 minutes. As he admitted with understandable glee, “It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it.”
These high-profile examples of sacrifice are only the tip of the iceberg. Any jobbing actors’ CV will include a litany of deprivations, humiliations and daily embarrassments all in pursuit of the next mortgage payment. Juggling, gymnastics and nudity are all in a night’s work nowadays. But ironically it’s in the area of family entertainment that the greatest miseries lie. Whether you’re playing Tinkie Winkie on a tour of The Teletubbies or appearing in the cast of The Lion King, the ordeal of spending up to three hours in an animal skin can sap the morale of the most willing actor. And as for panto . . . In one of his first roles, as Dick Whittington’s cat, Gary Oldman spent up to four hours a day crawling around on all fours in a thick furry costume made from off-cuts from the local carpet warehouse and with plastic whiskers stuck to his face. (Mind you, there are some men I know who would pay a great deal of money for such an experience in the back streets of Soho.) So why do we do it? Why do we put ourselves through the sort of misery and hardship that would have David Blaine calling for an ambulance? I suppose it’s the simple fact that most of us are still stage-struck. Or as the old stagehand in the circus replied when asked why he didn’t forsake a lifetime of shovelling elephant dung and do something else: “What? And give up showbusiness?”