Actor, know your place (26.05.06)
When I was at school I was really good at maths. I once even got a little smiley face stuck on my exercise book for doing a particularly hard sum. I always loved maths. I even toyed with the idea of becoming an accountant, but ended up doing something else. I sometimes think now, maybe I should try accountancy? I mean, all my family used to say I’d be a famous accountant one day. Whenever they had a dinner party they used to make me get up and do a long division for their guests. It was so embarrassing. I usually had to do one of the latest long divisions from a really high profile FT case. I mean, I was OK – well, I think I was quite good. I always got the long-division solos in the interschool maths competitions. Yeah, I could have gone into accounting. But I decided to be an actress instead.
You never hear people saying that, do you? Funny that. That’s probably because everyone knows that accountancy is a highly qualified career for which you spend many hours, days and years studying extremely hard. For which you have to read many books on technique and process. For which you have to have a highly developed specialised knowledge. For which you have to have nous, instinct and a natural talent. So, nothing like acting then.
So when people say Oh, yeah, I could have been an actor you know. I was always very good at acting when I was at school, that doesn’t make me angry at all. Because, after all, if you can wear a tea-towel around your head, point at the ceiling and say "look, a star in the East" and not fuck up your lines, then obviously you’ve got the talent to bring to the Lady Macbeth "all the perfumes of Arabia" scene a startlingly fresh perspective, to imbue Martha in Albee’s …Virginia Woolf with a hitherto unseen level of pathos, to move an audience to tears as Schiller’s Mary Stuart in the play of the same name. As we all know, acting has nothing to do with talent, gifts or genius. And it certainly has nothing to do with hard work, dedication and graft. Acting, is all about dossing. All about not wanting to get a ‘real’ job. People are only actors so that they don’t have to get up early in the morning to commute to work. And, more importantly, anyone can do it.
I think Shakespeare put it best when he said "All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players". Although, if you ask me, I don’t think that was quite what he was getting at.
But then what do I know? I’m just an actor. Although, I could have been an accountant…
You never hear people saying that, do you? Funny that. That’s probably because everyone knows that accountancy is a highly qualified career for which you spend many hours, days and years studying extremely hard. For which you have to read many books on technique and process. For which you have to have a highly developed specialised knowledge. For which you have to have nous, instinct and a natural talent. So, nothing like acting then.
So when people say Oh, yeah, I could have been an actor you know. I was always very good at acting when I was at school, that doesn’t make me angry at all. Because, after all, if you can wear a tea-towel around your head, point at the ceiling and say "look, a star in the East" and not fuck up your lines, then obviously you’ve got the talent to bring to the Lady Macbeth "all the perfumes of Arabia" scene a startlingly fresh perspective, to imbue Martha in Albee’s …Virginia Woolf with a hitherto unseen level of pathos, to move an audience to tears as Schiller’s Mary Stuart in the play of the same name. As we all know, acting has nothing to do with talent, gifts or genius. And it certainly has nothing to do with hard work, dedication and graft. Acting, is all about dossing. All about not wanting to get a ‘real’ job. People are only actors so that they don’t have to get up early in the morning to commute to work. And, more importantly, anyone can do it.
I think Shakespeare put it best when he said "All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players". Although, if you ask me, I don’t think that was quite what he was getting at.
But then what do I know? I’m just an actor. Although, I could have been an accountant…
posted by Tegwen at 09:25
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