The Actor as Agent of Change: Blog 58

Good morning!

This isn't Pam

I was having dinner with my friend Pam last night at her new flat in North Chingford. She recently lost her husband and has moved from Suffolk to take up a new job in Redbridge. Its a lovely little flat only a stone's throw away from the high street with its little coffee bars and cosy restaurants. 

So over a very nice home made curry our conversation naturally turned to the nature of change. 

Pam said that only a couple of years ago she would never have imagined the life she now leads. Change came into her life through the loss of someone she loved and was followed by a searing grief that erupts like a volcano. 

We all know that change is certain in whatever shape it arrives. And generally we aren't very good at it. Security, routine, relationships and family protect us from facing the truth of moment by moment change let alone the big stuff that is undeniable. Its a good job too for all of our sanity that we can create the illusion of certainty and familiarity. That is until something enters our life that utterly changes it. These changes may be devastating loss as for Pam, or something wonderful like getting that new job. Of course changes are happening all the time and some are so imperceptible that they probably don't make any obvious and immediate impact. But of course one thing does always lead to another! 

I believe we all know instinctively that each moment might lead us in a myriad of directions. We talk about "If I hadn't arrived at that exact moment I would have never have done ......" and there is a kind of prescience in that. A feeling that fate has somehow played its hand, and of course particularly joyful if we like the change.

What's this got to do with the actor? Well we 'do' change for a living. In fact I suspect that most of us are change junkies. We thrive on it. Actors take it in their stride to have to be intensely present in different spaces from one project to another. They know that if the work is good they will bond and make relationships that will feel like the most wonderful family for the time of the project. They also know that this ends and things change again as they move on. They are used to living out of a suitcase, knowing just what they need to live a peripatetic life.Adapting, mecurial and at times deeply disingenuous!  

I remember it well from my early years as an actor. You know just how much to pack and what to take with you to give you a sense of "home" wherever you rest your head that night. I was working on accommodation budgets last night for a new project and it struck me that this fluidity of change and movement and lack of routine in itself becomes the routine. 

The actor's core work is change. In the space of a couple of hours playing Hamlet we see a complex journey of human change right in front of our eyes. So it is with any good play. The character begins in one place and ends up somewhere entirely different! 

What a great job it is to be able to inhabit someone else's skin for the duration of a production. It also means that when you are bored with your own neuroses and ways of being you can you enter an alternative life through your imagination and emotions. So change is breath and life blood for actors, and if they can remain fluid they will work for a life time. 

Of course there are also very real, practical and financial aspects that kick into an actor's life usually in their early thirties when the desire for home and children become primary. The security and routine we rightly need to give to children is not easily aligned for some actors with the inevitable lack of certainty, usually rubbish money and hotel weariness. I was talking to an actor in is early thirties only this weekend. He is supremely talented, but was telling me that he has just left his agent and won't be looking for acting jobs any more as he needs financial security to start a family.There was a certain wistfulness in his eyes as he pondered his decision.

I remember that challenge when my children were small. Indeed I took a full time teaching job on a theatre degree course when our eldest daughter, Grace was born. I survived it for three months. There have been many times when I have wished I could have stayed there, not least in the past few years of the devastating cuts to the arts.  

A by-product of our jobs as actors, is that we experience keenly and on a daily basis the nature of uncertainty and one way or other we learn to live with it, going inside our selves for a sense of fundamental home and security that is not bound by the material. Its a roller coaster. But actors create lots of different characters in plays in their professional life times and most are fascinated by the human condition as its the source material for their work. They find and taste the essence of that other human being and make it their own and with each production and through playing each different character they change themselves a little. 

It is not an accident that in 2001 when we did our rebrand for Arc with Woof Olins that we created our strap line  Arc - Theatre for change which is in the DNA of what we do and is a constant reminder that nothing stays the same. 

Have a great day.