Love, Murdering your darlings and Generosity: Blog 21

We're the bridge across forever, arching above the sea, adventuring for our pleasure, living mysteries for the fun of it, choosing disasters, triumphs, challenges, impossible odds, testing ourselves over and again, learning love and love and LOVE!

(Richard Bach - The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story)

Richard Bach

Actors are often described as  'Luvvies' and just now looking at a variety of dictionary definitions I see that almost all are very negative: 

Luvvie ( luvvies plural) People sometimes refer to actors as luvvies as a humorous way of criticising their emotional behaviour and their feeling that they are important.

The term 'luvvie' has existed for a long time as a derogatory noun for pretentious, overblown, narcissistic people of an artistic or dramatic bent. A column in Private Eye was briefly renamed Trevvies for several issues in the mid-1990s after the director Trevor Nunn's use of the term as offensive “as calling a black man a ‘nigger’.

Its a strange one, and certainly we are known to use it about ourselves, usually spoken in an artificial and 'dwaling' voice with exaggerated hugs and false kisses as if we are protecting ourselves from the implied attack embued in the word. At least if we try to own it with humour, we can retain some control over it.

Of course its not difficult to root the name back to its simple meaning
lov·ey[luhv-ee]
noun Chiefly British Informal.
sweetheart; dear: used as a term of endearment. 

And of course the word love sits behind this. Why on earth then is it used by some so nastily towards actors? Certainly we are a demonstrative bunch, some would say narcissistic even and we do put ourselves out there to be shot down. We appear to wear our hearts on our sleeves, we spend our evenings dressing up and showing off in front of hundreds of people. That's ok in a child performing a show in a make-shift theatre in the living room for doting parents, but not for a grown adult surely? 

So why is it then that so many people love theatre, opera, dance and film? Let alone concerts and festivals. Surely its those very same Luvvies that create those things? There is a contradiction inherent in this. I am sure a psychologist could shed more light and interpretation on this than I can, and I don't have a profound hypothesis as its only this morning I find myself rusing on it.

I suspect maybe its just that actors are vehicles, channels, portals to the imagination and the soul. Dare I say mirror? - Well Shakespeare said it so eloquently in Hamlet:

Hamlet:
Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this
special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature:
for any thing so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose
end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the
mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own
image, and the very age and body of the time his form and
pressure.
Hamlet Act 3, scene 2, 17–24

I guess it can feel both wonderful and scary to travel through the medium of the performance. Its like we might lose something of ourselves if we dare to enter too wholly. And the possibility of transformation sits just on the edge of consciousness, and that is pretty huge. The shamanic traditions have always known this. By inviting the tribe (audience) into the imaginal space there is a possibility that they might struggle to return to business as usual. How many people do you know who claim to have had spiritual, even mystical experiences through being witness to a performance or a piece of music, a painting? This is the most common of things actually. We feel stirred in some way by image, emotion, sound and it draws us back to it again and again. The media and entertainment industry bank on this, and go hell for leather to market this imaginal space to us. 

And the actor (Luvvie) is simply a conduit to this other space, and I make no bones about this, this other space is exquisite. We all know it to one degree or another, its what makes us human. Its full of love dare I say (as a Luvvie!), and I am always hesitant to say that my rehearsal space must be full of love, because its such a loaded word. It can easily be dismissed as trite, self indulgent, flabby, Hallmark card like. So I use it cautiously here, but nonetheless I name it because it is the truth.  We have to surrender ourselves to text, space and the creative process because it is only when there is love that we can touch a source of artistic authenticity. As a result of this we love each other sometimes with unwise careless abandon that is easy to ridicule. Indeed I get that, it can look superficial from the outside, and maybe sometimes it is a mask inhabited.

But for me and the actors and creatives I work with it is an unspoken assumption that the 'doing' and 'being' of love is the very substance and material of what we must do. 

Now here's the thing, however 'loved' up and obsessed we might appear to be in the process of making, the thing that differentiates it from indulgence is the cruelty and uncompromising duty to take a knife to what we make too. You will often hear these days the phrase "Murder your darlings". 

I thought its origin was with TS Elliot but in fact it comes from Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (21 November 1863 – 12 May 1944) who was a British writer and published under the pen name of Q. He is primarily remembered for the monumental Oxford Book Of English Verse 1250–1900 (later extended to 1918), and for his literary criticism. His Cambridge inaugural lecture series, published as On the Art of Writing, is the source of this popular writers' adage "murder your darlings".

So we work with the invisible clay, or love to uncover the piece we are making. We are never totally sure what will be revealed, but we know that it already exists. Its hard to get started sometimes, but once we are working with that raw material, love, we are consistently surprised and elated. And then we look at what we have made, and can see that it doesn't at all capture the joy and magic we have just found. Here comes the craft. This is when we have to work like road builders to pound, cut, lift, push and pull this thing to forge a shape that can once again allow that first love to be revealed in full. This is the 'murder your darlings' that Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch refers to in his lecture. And this is painful. Its easy to hold on to the seduction of a well formed song or piece of writing, or scene because you love it so much even if it does not serve the piece fully. It requires a move from pleasure of creation to ruthlessness. Not an easy transition believe me.

I always force myself to do this when I am caught in the love space when making a new piece. In my recent direction of the Broadway pantomime I made myself insist that the cast and all the creative team decamp from the cosiness of the rehearsal room at the Malthouse to the bare stage of the theatre. Its what I call a 'naked' run. Its putting what you have made so far on its feet in a much more challenging space, the performance space.  What we had just made and were in love with was just horrible, horrible, horrible! It was wooden, disconnected, frail,dead. We all left the 3 hours disheartened and a bit scared. Maybe we weren't as good as we thought we were. In fact this was proof that we weren't. The kick in the backside that I know instinctively we have to have mid way through a rehearsal period, or I too will get swept up too warmly in the love. 

And so it is for me that there is one primary ingredient that makes what we do - and that is love, from which all else flows. So I am happy this morning to reclaim the name 'Luvvie' and wear the badge with pride today.

Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

Have a luvvie day!