I Blame, Michael Caine.

The Cockney Bastard

Recently I read Michael Caine’s second memoir. His sequel to the first one he wrote in 1992 thinking his career had gone the way of the dinosaur. I find it marvelous that Michael is one of the few actor’s who was lucky enough to find a resurrection in his career. Just when he thought that the leading man, for which he was famous, was no longer within his grasp, life slapped him on the back and told him to quit whining and get back in front of that camera. Having read both memoirs it’s clear that this is a common theme in his life.  Continuance. Just when things look bleak, life slaps you in the face and says continue. I hope life does the same for me. 

At just about the same time I resigned the leafs of his book to the abyss that is my shelf collection; I lost my day job. Now this job was nothing special, a banal activity to give me a little mula to pay the landlord for my moldy underground shit box, so it was not an emotional loss at all, but it did cause a kind of crisis. Now I had no excuse to stay in Toronto. You see I had always felt kind of out of place in that city. All the stylish folks with their skinny jeans and handle rim glasses seemed to stab their disdain into my chest every time I walked through the cracked streets of downtown. It was like they could tell that my clothes didn’t fit and the body underneath was somehow wrong. I don’t mean wrong in the sense that a malformed beast is wrong. I just mean out of place like a salt shaker on a gourmet chef’s dinner table. I felt useless in the city and, what is more important, that it had no use for me. 

Being cast out from a job I hated and without theatrical prospects; I decided to call it quits. No more was I going to force myself to buy into the ‘Toronto store’. I was going to get rid of the junk I had accumulated through years of stupid struggle and launch into the larger world to find myself, yet again. I have done this many times. Myself seems very tough to find.

Was this a good choice? The jury is still out on that one. I have seen no better theatrical prospect, I have felt even more inadequate in that realm. I know that I am suited for it yet still it feels like French to me. There are moments when the stage feels like second nature and there are moments where it feels like I am a fish swimming up stream. The mantra I have been quoting in my head has been from the example of Michael. Survive. 

You see throughout his life, in the acting realm, he was beset by people who pegged him as this or that. Some called him too feminine to play butch, others called him too erudite to play working class; an utterly absurd claim as he comes from one of the most poverty stricken lives I have ever read about and I am an avid reader of Dickens.  All through this, though, Caine repeated: Survival is key. 

It’s really the only important thing in any artistic life; living with art and not allowing life’s pressures to crush you into a slave. Speaking as someone who suffers the creative journey there are many terrible things that you must contend with. They join conference every night and form demons that haunt you. Demons that sit on a panel that judge you for existing. The key is to survive their nightly trials and just continue marching into that great yonder sunshine; hoping one day to find an oasis that will sustain you.

One sentence that sticks out for me in his long busy life: “Just survive and soon you’ll be the last body in the room and all the jobs will come to you no matter if you are right for them or not.”

Though I am a vehement Atheist as anyone with two eyes, ears and knows me, will tell you, there is one valuable thing to take away from the many legends of the religious. That is the idea of tribulation. A prophet goes through many tests to prove his faith. Sadly, in their existence, this “faith” is in something that is absurd. Never minding that it should be admired in a roundabout way. My faith in coming success, no matter how far, bears striking similarity to these zealots. I know if I remain persistent and send out my cover letters and applications, someone, somewhere, will return and allow me to jump from my life’s motorbike to their minivan. 

A depiction of journey of the artist. 

Survival. 

I blame Michael Caine for causing me such an outlook that keeps me from being satisfied with the mundane. I cant work at a banal job or troll the bars for my future spouse because to me it is my self actualization that needs to be recognized above all else. I cannot feel fulfilled by existing only to exist. I am surviving to create and enrich. 

Curse you, Caine! You cockney bastard.       

A Circle Jerk for Actors: The Curtain Call

What I feel like when I do a curtain call. 

Ladies and Gentlemen I hate curtain calls. They are inane, uncomfortable and purely exist for the vanity of the artist. 

It is often said that actors are vain in their need for approval. They make so little financially that they pay themselves with the glowing applause the spews forth at the end of a play. However this is not my experience. I hate them. I never enjoyed being seen in full costume while being 'out of character.' I hated being subjected to the cavalcade of percussive slaps that apparently tells you  you have done a good job on the stage. 

Sadly It has become common for the audience to applaud even if the show wasn’t good or the actor flubbed his way into an eternity of shit stained gobblety gook. This is similar to the patronizing tip given to a terrible server, because you know they get paid hardly enough to keep their stomach’s full of ramen noodles. One applauds the actor mainly to tip the actor. This is not a good thing. 

Applause should not be saved for the tail end of the play but should be sporadic through out. Only then the actor knows the audience’s thoughts on the play and the how she is doing.

Recently, I began work as an usher at that bastion of Tyrone Gutheriesque repertory performance; Soulpepper. The first play they had me corrale the aging cattle into is Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. This is serendipity because this is one of the plays that I know off by heart. It is only fitting that it begins my foray into the blue haired world of Toronto Rep. I was interested see how a Canadian company full of many talented and not so talented artists would tackle the decomposing symphony of nothing, that is this play. 

Well after having seen it five times....It’s adequate. 

Ham and Clov. Not at Soulpepper. These actors
are far too engaged. 

They follow the script. Nothing is out of the ordinary for a Beckettite. It lacks energy, yes, but what doesn’t in Toronto. Eric Petersen’s Nag is brilliant. Matamoros' Clov is less so. Joseph Ziegler’s Ham is practiced, boring and utterly uninteresting, but what Ziegler performance differs from this? (Maybe his Loman?) Vacratsis’ Nell is depressing and disjointed makes her wonderful. The show on the whole, mediocre, but one that follows the Beckettite code. Except of course for curtain call at the end. 

Yes, you heard me. There was a curtain call. The Star’s review said there wasn’t and perhaps not in the classic sense, meaning a wall of beaming actors parading across the playing space to bow at a painstakingly low speed, but there was a call.

At the end, the lights burst on to show a stage where the actors all stayed in their final positions. The only reason for this post show tableau is to relieve the audience of the confusion of when to clap and therefore leave. The moment evokes that scene in Amadeus where the kappelmeister accuses Wolfgang of being a poor composer because he does not write  two ‘bom boms’ at the end of his arias to tell the audience when to clap. My problem with this moment is not so much the inherent vanity of the act of the curtain call, but the fact that it negates the production itself. 

Beckett’s absurdism has been read into by many competent critics from across the spectrum, from psychology to astrophysics. All them share the goal of attempting to read pattern into the seemingly meaningless attributes of his plays. Yet, Beckett himself through the guise of his characters and indeed in later interviews about his works stresses that meaninglessness is the very point. It should begin, go on, then end as suddenly and pointlessly as it began.  Ham even states this clearly in countless soliloquies within Endgame. 

By the imposition of the ending curtain call, as simplistic as it is, the production proscribes rules on a chaotic entity. It gives meaning where none is meant. The production allows the audience to read into it and begin to think of this play in a chronological narrative form; which it is not as nothing happens. It is the separation between Absurdism and standard Existentialism. Existentialism holds that nothing is authentic while Absurdism goes much further and suggests that meaning is only construed by the individual. A curtain call gives a play this play a conclusion; showing the audience that this was a play and now you must clap.   Endgame should be allowed to just dissipate into nothingness. 

I must make it clear that I am not bashing this production. I am quite happy that Soulpepper even attempted to do this play for a crowd that really does not like something unless it nurses them along. I am pointing out the problem with presenting a play that does not fit a mould, in a mould. If a company cannot produce a play as intended, then why produce it? 

It was common place in the American Theatre of the 1860s and after to produce half productions or copy productions of plays. For instance you would get Othellos in the US that sang Coon Songs in amongst Shakespearean soliloquies to better entertain the Northern American audience. Here a Coon Song negates and down plays the status of Othello the commander and undermines the narrative. A curtain call does the same to Beckett. 

Is Daniel Brooks (the director) trying to read narrative where none exists? 

Sadly, no. I do not think Daniel Brooks is even thinking about the play in this decision. I think he is thinking about the accepted rules of a performance. In the Canadian Theatre mind, or at least the one that functions in this house,  a play must have a curtain call so the audience can wake up from their lolled slumber and clap. Therefore there must be one to round out the confusing dialogue driven ninety minutes of this play or the Canadian theatre gods (many of which live in the hallowed bricked walls of Soulpepper) will smite the theatre to ashes. This curtain call is a vanity nod to bloated actors on its stage. 

Actors should realize that the curtain call is worthless and not do them. Yet many don’t. Why? As I have been working in and learning about the field I have realized a terrifying trend. Actors are losing their passion for the work and merely doing the work for gratification from others. They are proving Freud right. For lack of a better word, they are doing it for possible ‘fame.’ Perhaps this is the real reason I find the act of the curtain call so reprehensible. It is the personification of vanity. Have we not learned anything from Bottom? Art for the sake of self gratification is not art but masterbation and is foolish.  

Actors, next time you stand out for a bow look at what you are doing. 

You are masterbating.