Lights, Camera, and potentially at some point possibly some action?????

I prayed to the Patron Saint of theatre, St Genesius last night. Kind of thought, fuck it. Worth a shot? And ever since, I’ve been compulsively checking my emails for the audition that I’m convinced will change everything, as if the casting company were a boy I’d been crushing on since primary school and finally had my first date with. Oh, when will he CALL! Although, I don’t know if St Genesius has a turnover rate that rapid. 10pm prayer and then an 11:30am dispatch of good luck seems an Amazon-like level of corporate overtime abuse.

Out of over 200 patron saints there’s only one patron of actors, after all. He must be in high demand. I can hardly imagine Blaise, the patron saint of Town Criers gets much action anymore (though this is a profession I would literally be delighted to move in to,) nor that for the profession of ‘Teutonic Knight’. But hey, I’m sure there’s still a Teutonic Knight recruitment agency office somewhere- perhaps round the back of St Gertrude’s Chapel in Staines, next to the bins. Splayed like the Vitruvian Man, holding the crumbling shack up with his bare hands, this singular employee is convinced the TK comeback is imminent. “It iS tHe TeUtOniC KniGhtS WhO WiLL dEfeAt PuTiN” He mumbles to himself with a quiver to his blood shot eye.

This is it, I suppose. This is me for the foreseeable. Fish fingers for breakfast, anxiety for lunch. Why isn’t just doing a decent tape and then promising the director you’ll be really good at the part enough? I’m torn between using this time to better myself, and sinking into a spiteful swamp of sulking begrudgement any time someone else has a great audition come through. I think I can deduce that I’m not exactly a saint if the thought that literally everyone is in the same miserable boat, fills me with relief and mild joy.

They do warn you, of course. Drama School teachers spend half their time telling you you’re a total maverick with such ground-breaking uniqueness the industry cannot wait to spread its frigid legs for you, and the other half of the time telling you that you’ll be unemployed almost constantly, that your underperformance, lack of emotional presence and inability to consistently meet circumstance will cause do-overs that hold everyone up, cost the studio thousands of pounds and may eventually cost you your barely existent reputation that hangs from your withering, un-compelling toe like a piece of chewing gum yearning to return to its undisturbed spot on the pavestone. And no, this pavestone certainly isn’t along the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Let’s play odds on. Odds on you getting on your hands and knees and pretending to be a brown bear, frequently roar thunderously from the depths of your diaphragm and pad your paws in the air at imaginary bees, while we 15 people watch? Odds on you freezing still like a starfish, staring vacantly into the eyes of each audience member and repeatedly moan ‘I am glass’ like Joni Mitchell having an orgasm while you slowly rotate in a circle? Odds on you imagining murdering your arch enemy’s newborn baby while throwing pages of a book onto a fire and shrieking manically? Yes, of course, while the rest of us all watch, obviously??? Oh, and don’t even THINK about laughing during any of this. Don’t you DARE disrupt the integrity of the exercise. These are the soul constituents that will reveal if you truly are An Act-or.

I loved drama school, most of the time. And I loved my teachers, most of the time. Even the controversial ones had their charm. I am aware of how much I owe that place, professionally and personally. Drama school gave me my confidence back (though I find listening to Reneé Rapp speak for an hour does nearly the same job) and taught me pretty much everything I know about stagecraft, preparation and embodiment. Oh, and I finally found a work ethic. Fine, drama school, you win!!!!! I can look past feeling socially ill-fit, as I adored 70 percent of the class. And frankly that room taught me a lot about my own ignorance towards the nuances of issues regarding equality and society that I was well overdue a brushing up on.

First impressions are funny. More and more I’m impressed by those secure enough to hold something back when they first meet someone, unlike myself; I’d turn myself inside out for someone I’d met 3 minutes ago. Here is a full run down of what I was like as a child, and here is the actual medical footage of my recent colonoscopy.

But it turns out, I can go deeper. Let me introduce you to the ice breaker of all ice breakers, the apex of forced intimacy (Stadium Kiss Cams a close 2nd place), The Dance Exercise. This exercise is essentially spending an hour having a 3-minute-long interpretive, pas de deux with each member of the (soon-to-feel) cohort, whilst Enya-like melodies glide out of the trypophobic holes in the speaker. Too nascent and eager to impress to have a sense of humour about it, I instinctively found myself raising hands to the cheeks of strangers, staring them deeply in the eye and cradling my partner’s face into my shoulder until at least one of us was crying, or tried to force crying so that everyone else knew we had ‘range’. (I simply loved those people exaggerating a brushing away of tears, of course waiting until they were in the eye line of someone else to do it). To a passer-by, this room might have looked like some kind of en-mass release therapy for the recently bereaved. Or a Midsommar style cult ritual where the maternal leader attempts to heal childhood wounds.

Some duets were funny, in hindsight. My favourite may have been the moment I enacted with a partner the supposed first time he had ever stood on just one leg. For no real reason, I raised one of his feet in the air, and in a moment of comedic genius, he mimed a terrified scream. It was so simple, yet prodded at whatever spot it is in me that always involuntarily bends me into a doubled-over L shape of cackle, as if there is an invisible ghost at my rear prepping me for a brisk shag from behind.

Yet still, intimacy hadn’t found the innermost part of me; turns out there are holes and bends in my tricuspid valve that lead even deeper, where true embarrassment sits and plots its malevolent usurpation (yes, I googled the names of heart valves, and I chose tricuspid because it sounds a bit like cupid, which is fitting for my next anecdote.)

It is hard enough fancying someone in the class when you could at any moment be hollered up to the stage to enact a full-bodied and vocal depiction of a fire alarm, toilet flushing or a hippopotamus. Not. So. Hot. But I challenge anyone not to turn immediately red like litmus paper, when the exercise is to speak a poem directly into their crush’s eyes (very much an unserendipitous tide of partnering misfortune) both of you fully aware you fancy each other but not brave enough to say it, while they, in turn, look into yours and command you to repeat a word that they feel you didn’t land. Now imagine if one of those words was ‘kiss’ or ‘sex’, as were in my poem. And, as the exercise demands, you have to repeat it over and over again, into their eyes, until they feel like you mean it. Try and retain your regular beige pallor. I dare you.

So yes!!!! Obviously we fucked? And obviously it was incredible? That’s not to say the moments of lead up weren’t almost physically painful, but hey, pressure creates diamonds. Or explosive and word vomit-y confessions of lust at Tottenham Court Road tube station, sandwiched in between a snoring geriatric and someone messily scoffing a late night maccies. Romance isn’t dead!!!

I know its tacky to quote yourself, but I’d like to reiterate (or directly copy and paste) a sentiment from another post. I would like to name and shame a very particular period of time. That 5-15 minutes between knowing you’re going to kiss someone and then actually kissing. It is truly sickening. There’s a point where words and their meaning divorce completely and every utterance is just a queasy time filler of sound to pace the moment perfectly. You could be quietly yodelling or reciting Lincoln’s ‘Four score and seven years ago’ speech (as I’m sure any true and noble Americans do before they kiss, every time) and the other person wouldn’t register it- they’d know you were talking, but they’re only focused on what’s coming. By this point, the air isn’t really air, in its place is a thick gunge of anxious tension that you could reach out and grab a handful of. The resistance is paralysing, like trying to wade through mud, and the only place to move is your face closer to theirs, through the invisible gunge, in the hope that they don’t say “wait what are you doing?”

People who don’t find this relatable are clearly sadists. When people say “nah that’s the best bit!” about this awful little prelude, they are either twisted, or they are smug in the level of ease and breeze they must move through the rest of their life with. Are you telling me that you don’t spend the moments before you kiss someone worrying that you’re going to actually shit your pants? That those minutes are an enjoyable, sexy little ticking time bomb??? Fuck you. I’d genuinely be a huge advocate for “we’re going to kiss later.” “at 11:05, we’re going to kiss.” I’d really appreciate it.

And so, our romance commenced. Being bound together in those cold brick studios panned out rather beautifully. Being each other’s rock in a place where your ability and demeanour were under constant scrutiny, provided a nice cushion to the sporadic little spitballs of judgement. Any pressure-cooked spats had between members of the group due to being trapped together for 9 hours every day became funny little anecdotes or giggles between me and my partner under duvet covers after hours. Someone taking the time to give someone else a stern talking to for stealing a roll of toilet paper during a cost-of-living crisis seriously needs to get a grip (this actually happened). The argument that it was an independent theatre studio that we need to support of course stood, but the supposed 'delinquent' wasn’t to know that the cleaners of that studio quirkily opt never to replace empty or missing toilet rolls (or maybe they’re stealing the supply themselves!) and he certainly wasn’t hoarding it to spite the pooey arseholes of his castmates (as previously thought), forcing them to use headbands and socks to wipe while he sits atop fort of stolen rolls, wearing a loo-paper-fashioned crown and cackling tyrannically. As if. The bi-product of humourless, moral perfectionism is unfortunately often a black and white view of right and wrong, which isn't how people nor things are. At least it made my therapist laugh.

There are two people in particular that stand out for me when I look back at my time at that place. The industry liason who’s compassion for being a young recently graduated actor was genuinely overwhelming, so much so that she’s still kind enough to pull me in for castings.

And then there’s the shaved-headed monk-looking acting coach who taught me, in the best way, that none of this really matters. Its ironic because the more he said this and the more I adored him, the more my work mattered. Or rather, doing him proud mattered. The most rewarding praise I’ve ever gotten from perhaps anyone ever was after a particularly bold rendition of Eilert’s suicide scene in Hedda Gabler. The words ‘sense of time’ punched continuously at my eardrum like the relentless fists of a boxer at a speedbag. When I knew I’d spent everything I had, the final words of the scene practically skipped out of my mouth, springing off a premature laugh of relief; after which my teacher tipped his head, paused and exclaimed, “that was a good bit of acting.” You can imagine how, in a drama school, a mere ‘good’ can feel like you’ve just been told by Meryl Streep herself that you are the modern-day Holy Roman Emperor of acting.

Now here I am, sat in Alice House in West Hampstead, where Matty works, nursing a cup of rooibos tea while he attempts to seduce me with elaborate latte art from behind the bar (froth willies etc). Intermittent panics are sated by unsolicited blog entries; I am so thrilled, reader, you are embarking on this terrifying journey with me!!!! The urge to email 40 casting directors a day is one tricky to sate. The intrusive thoughts that I am a failure for every second I am not working as an actor come in waves and to be honest, the only reason I’m finishing this blog post is to evade the unsolicited horror-biopic that my mind conjures about my future failed acting career. The worst part? I don’t even play myself. Not even in my own imagination did I get the part. You know who plays me? Millie Bobby Brown. Millie Bobby fucking Brown. My OCD has conjured up this taunting little mind-film and employed my arch nemesis. The little girl who stole so much from so many. She’s not even the right casting. The right casting is either Kristen Wiig or Harriet Dyer. Just putting that out there for if I die and you guys want to make a film about my life and I don’t get another moment to tell you. Gosh. Phew!!! Feels good to finally have my legacy sorted.

I know i'll be fine, and I know all my incredibly talented classmates will be fine too. Its just this bit: the liminal, empty space that leaves all this time for self-doubt. As if you're stood in an empty field that spans for miles, and the big, bright, booming city where you want to be is visible in the far distance, but you can only tread 1 pigeon step at a time towards it. I, rather serendipitously bumped into my friends mum, Marianne, at the pool yesterday, who used to help me with all my monologues for youth theatre when I was younger. We shared stories about tragic auditions, exchanged tips for upcoming ones and just mutually soothed that desperate, hollow feeling that arises when a tape hasn't presented itself in weeks. It was such a relieving release that I didn't even notice how cold my wet, goosepimpled body was getting standing at the poolside in just my costume. Nor that she almost entirely forgot to do any swimming at all.

This woman has seen me grow and change more than anybody (not in a puberty way!!!). She has watched me dip in and out of neuroticism, out of failures and triumphs in this industry from the first time she saw me act as a red-lippy-wearing, no-nonsense northern secretary in my year 11 GCSE piece, to the little fringey bits we put on in cramped theatres above dingy pubs today. And truthfully, among everyone that has told me i'll be ok, if Marianne says it, I think I will be. So thats something.