Conquering fear - yes, this is an actor's life

12 April 2012

The recent popularity of London theatre is interesting partly because it goes against the entertainment tide.

Theatre is not 3D or Wii, it is not at your convenience or in your home and it is relatively expensive. Yet it uniquely tugs at the mind and the heart.

I love theatre because I am always expectant. Perhaps because greater effort is required (time, distance, money, let alone open-mindedness), a performance is always a significant event. The opening of Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art at the National Theatre last week felt like Christmas.

The authentic experience is demanding of audiences and exposing of actors. I was slightly troubled by the comparison made in The Habit of Art between actors and soldiers going over the top. Let us remember that actors' lives are not at stake.

But I do believe that emotional honesty on stage is a feat of courage. Who could not be moved by Vanessa Redgrave's dignified presentation of the Natasha Richardson Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actress yesterday?

She spoke of her need to guard her feelings for her late beloved daughter although she recognised her duty as an actress to strip to the core.

I sat next to Patrick Stewart at the awards. For all his experience, he said that he still felt sick before performances.

When he was younger, he even kept a mental speech prepared to deliver to the audience. Sorry, can't go on, am leaving now, do hope you have better luck with the replacement.

Stewart was in The Iceman Cometh with Ian Holm, when Holm suffered such paralysing stage fright that he withdrew from theatre for several years. So Stewart's prepared speech was not so far- fetched.

Yet, said Stewart, actors suffer far less mental illness and anguish than other professions, perhaps because they run the gauntlet on stage.

The art of life is chiefly conquering fear. Timidity is a safe option but it is not a grand one.

The distinction between recklessness and courage is sometimes described as awareness. If you do not calculate risk, you are merely foolish. I remember asking a friend who hunted if he ever felt fear and he said that his legs were like jelly.

He described looking at the gate, and understanding with terrible clarity the consequences of misjudging it. The adrenaline cannot quite disguise the clanging of the heart.

But he jumped as an act of will and because he did not want to let down those who rode with him.

By this definition of courage - self discipline and comradeship - actors are indeed like soldiers.

Admit it: the customer is sometimes plain wrong

I once sat through a high-cost, high-intensity weekend to look at ways of transforming the newspaper on which I then worked.

Several sessions and gurus and coffees and migraines later, the oracle words were scratched in chalk on a board. The Customer Is King.

The belief that the customer is always right and must always be accommodated led, as far as newspapers were concerned, to the great free online experiment.

Now some newspapers are backtracking, saying that the customers can't always have everything they want.

But deference to customers is engraved on the heart of all business leaders.

Asked what the secret of a successful business is, they will always reply, as if the thought is freshly minted, "I believe that the customer is king."

So it was rather cheering to hear Stuart Rose, interviewed on Desert Island Discs, admit that he keeps a "nutters' file" of customers' complaints and that he is tempted to give as good as he got.

The urbane head of Marks and Spencer does not look like a Basil Fawlty, so I can only assume that the customer is sometimes plain wrong.

The wax and wane in my street

The fast-changing character of London is reflected in its local shops.

In my neighbourhood, pawn brokers have given way, hopefully, to interior-design businesses which look both appealing and commercially uncertain.

A much-loved butcher left unable to pay the rent. Naturally, the arrival of a small beauty spa is a source of great pride.

The Asian woman who runs it single handed is making up her mind about the area. It is family friendly, yet a gun was pulled in the off licence the other day. She initially refused to wax men, thinking it improper. Yet the demand is enormous.

She has persuaded her husband that the rise of the meterosexual is one of London's great social changes, and their fortunes depend on it.

Among the many snooty dismissals of Sarah Palin as an American freak show, Naomi Wolf stands out as a writer prepared to consider the Republican pin-up seriously.

This treatment makes Palin both more substantial and more scary and is intended to rouse the good Democratic forces against her.

Thus Wolf warns, shrewdly, that: "Feminism in the US and the UK has been largely defined by issues on the Left and spokeswomen on the Left, so much so that feminism is often taken as a subset of liberalism, and assumed to be pro choice by definition, big government and secular."

It strikes Wolf that there is also something called "conservative feminism" and that "the first candidate who comes along espousing that philosophy will be formidable".

Like Harriet Harman, however, Wolf cannot confront the fact that such a candidate has already come along, changing the landscape more dramatically than any of her sisters of the Left.

Why can't the liberal Left acknowledge the existence and legacy of Margaret Thatcher?

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