Low life | 28 March 2018

I go to the theatre but rarely because I am overpowered by even mediocre acting and find it exhausting. Theatre has the same effect on me, I imagine, as the Great Exhibition must have had on a Dorset peasant with a cheap-day return on the newly opened Great Western Railway. But by what strange magic does an actor transcend his or her everyday persona and convincingly dissemble an altogether different, fictional one? Is it the training? Or a gene — Romany, perhaps? Or are actors afflicted by a peculiar personality disorder in which part of the brain is either overdeveloped or missing?

For a newspaper article, I once rehearsed with a theatre company for a week. I was Second Jailer for the opening night of Puss in Boots. The cast were professional actors glad to have work and they called each other darling. A veteran Shakespearean actor was our pantomime dame, a role that demanded only a slightly toned-down version of his real self.