When acting is useless and a poem

I’ve only recently started acting.  The people who’ve seen me on stage might dispute this, saying I’m yet to start (they’re wrong – look at the eyebrows in my Facebook pictures – magnificent!).  Others might claim I’ve been masquerading as all kinds of things over the years and am therefore very experienced if only marginally accomplished.  We’ll ignore those people.  Anyway, I’ve enjoyed it so far and it’s been stimulating to start something new.  As you get older you do tend to have tried all sorts of activities.  You develop a good idea of your strengths and weaknesses and tend to play to them and avoid them.   Acting is something that I’ve genuinely never tried before and I’m right at the bottom of the learning curve.  This means that pretty much every experience contains a valuable lesson and something new and interesting.  This sense of exploration is very liberating, particularly when with so many others of my areas of interest I’m taking a new experience and filing it on a shelf next to other similar experiences.  With acting my shelf is bare.  And possibly my cupboard.

There are certainly a lot of better definitions of the essence of acting than this, but you might describe it as ‘showing feelings that you’re not feeling’.  I’d always thought that this would be a useful skill to have.  There plenty of times in your professional life when you need to pretend to be interested in a conversation that you don’t care about.  Or to be calm in the face of idiocy, knowing that if you lose your temper it’ll not help you get the outcome you want from a situation.  Sometimes it’s as a little white lie so as not to upset someone.  Sometimes it’s to deceive the other person to hide your own inadequacy.  A better person might be able to listen more carefully and sympathetically but I’m worried about a problem of my own and it’s distracting me when I should be all there for you. 

Sadly though, at the most important times, when I’d really want to be able to show myself as a different and stronger person I can’t.  To take a redundancy with a wry smile and a shrug when you’re put everything into the job and you want to hide your anguish at the unfairness of the decision.  To be scared almost to the point of being unable to move as you step up to a tough cliff face on an Alpine mountaineering route but wanting to raise a laugh, a quip and the illusion of courage.  To smile at the girl who’s breaking your heart and tell her it’s ok and to try to spare her feelings when you’re in that weightless moment before the new gravity pulls you down and spinning out of control.

So, when it really matters, acting is pretty useless.  But then when it really matters most things are.  I suppose having to be honest and face these situations as yourself is the best way.  Good luck and chin up. 

As this post is a little short and as the last poem was so well received, here’s another.  I wrote the bones of it in about 10 minutes in the summer but then spent a few sessions trying to re-write it.  I stuck it up on UKClimbing so I suppose I should put it up here too.

Just Because

My choices seem like burdens

Each one a chance to make a mistake I can’t correct

I plough furrows across my brow

a path to nowhere on the landing carpet

To do something 'just because' is what a child would do

or something you would do, at your giggling best.

Taking my hand and dragging me into something

I might think better of.

That rush of dread in my gut and then laughter

when I realise that this is what I wanted.

Not this just this giddy twirl across the floor

but this untethered way of being.

Of course 'just because' works both ways.

When I sit and think of why I love you

I can marshall a hundred marching reasons

and you, it seems, can think of none.

David Millington

21^st February 2011

Nottingham