The directors focused mainly on the comedy in the play rather than the complex themes, which meant we were all grand gestures and silly voices, bordering on Blackadder protagonists. Looking back, I should never have played Don Pedro like that. My arms were all over the place, the character was larger than life. I had no subtlety. I suppose it fitted in with the direction of the play. Some people thought I was great, others probably thought I was shit. Well, I know for a fact some people thought I was less than terrific. Michael always told me that all that really counts, conceited as it seems, is that you are happy with your own performance. If you’re a perfectionist, and you are content with the job you did, then it doesn’t matter what the quibblers think. I just wish I’d learned to stand still on stage at that point, displaying authority and confidence as an actor. Instead, I was so gesticulatory that I poked Michael in the eye on the last night during our first scene.
Despite the reservations I have about my performance, all brought on by dubious hindsight, the play went swimmingly. It was the most financially successful Shakespeare play Act One had done in all its years of putting on Shakespeare plays. I loved making the audience laugh, although I had so many bad habits, altering my performance to suit the kind of audience in on the night (no audience is ever the same) and never really reacting to what was happening on stage as if I were truly in that moment. Every reaction, every movement and grand gesture I made, had been pre-planned. Michael demonstrated a lot more subtlety and spontaneity, but that fitted with the character, Claudio. A reviewer likened his reaction to discovering that the love of his life Hero wasn’t actually dead to somebody discovering their car keys. Maybe we were extreme opposites. I’m just glad I didn’t get a mention in that particular review.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
After Show Parties
It was like playing the Big Bad Wolf all over again. During show week, and for a while afterwards, people around university would recognize me as Don Pedro. It was a tiny taste of fame, and I bloody loved it. One of the best things about doing a play is the party afterwards. Michael and I got hammered at his straight after the final performance, and then headed to one of the directors’ houses. Michael couldn’t talk after a few hours. He just grunted, burped and farted his way through proceedings. The girls, as is customary, and not just because of Michael’s farting, got emotional at the end of the night. It was the last performance, and the cast would be separated. No more intense rehearsal periods, bonding like a family. So Michael, in his one moment of clarity that evening, decided to put Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah on the CD player. The mellow guitar strings and the melancholic lyrics caused the girls to sob until they were shrieking.
‘I’ve heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord…’
Michael stood by, murmuring the lyrics, a big bottle of cheap cider in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and a mischievous smile on his face.
Michael and I could afford to cause trouble at our own after show party, but it was when we crashed someone else’s that shit went down. Act One put on a very well done production of The Breakfast Club that year. I’d had my doubts that they could take this eighties’ American movie classic directed by John Hughes and adapt it for the stage, set in modern day, with British accents. Don’t ask me how, but they did it. The audience roared with laughter. The characters, five high school stereotypes, were reinvented and played very well by the amateur students. Michael and I had a few at the bar and then bought some stinkingly cheap cider from a local newsagent that tasted and smelt like cat’s piss. We somehow found ourselves at the after show party, despite not being invited. At the time, there was a drug boom. This boom wasn’t quite the ecstasy generation with all its romantic bullshit and rave music. No, it was the boom of a legal high known as MCAT, which you’d shove up your nose and immediately realize it shouldn’t have been legal.
MCAT, or Mephedrone, became the drug of Act One that year. Every fucker was at it, even those you’d least expect to insufflate some mysterious powder that nobody at the time really knew anything about. The drug has a similar effect to MDMA or cocaine. It makes you grind your teeth and love life for a while. Students were buying the stuff in bulk on the Internet and selling it when it eventually became illegal in the United Kingdom. I’ve never experienced anything like it when I did a line at The Breakfast Club after show party. Just one line and I felt electricity in my fingertips, my heart thunder, a hot flush, my eyes grow wide and the urge to talk shit for as long as my inhibitions were gone. I’ve got no idea what happened at that party. All I remember is having a bag of that stuff in my hand, sitting on the bog, eating and snorting it like a wreck, at 11am. I fell out of the house, having not slept for an entire night, and bumped into Michael.
‘You’re a fucking wreck!’ he said.
I was covered in a strawberry milkshake I’d just bought, a fag between my twitching fingers, my eyes like red stars.
‘Where are you going? Why aren’t you still at the party?’ I asked, puffing vigorously on my cigarette as if my life depended on it.
‘I’m going to my lecture. The party ended hours ago. Just you and a couple of crazy bastards decided you wanted to stay up for breakfast. Where are they now?’
‘Mate, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t remember anything. All I know is I’m buzzing my tits off and if my mother sees me like this when I get home I’ll get castrated…’
‘Ah fuck it. I didn’t want to go to lecture anyway. Come back to mine. You can kip in the spare room.’
I didn’t wake up until late that evening. MCAT made me feel depressed as hell. My life suddenly, and without reason, felt worthless. I was a wreck. But then I ate some fried chicken and got merry at Michael’s. The problem with MCAT was how addictive it could be. There was a period when I couldn’t go out and drink without doing a few lines. It really worried me, so I took some time off going out in general (a whole two weeks without being intoxicated) and then enjoyed just having a fair few beers without stuffing that dangerous shit up my nose. It wasn’t worth the palpitations and the depression. It concerned me that I could get addicted to something so easily. Especially drugs. Michael was addicted to shagging, but I suppose that isn’t a healthy addiction either when you’re as careless as he was with what he liked to describe as ‘an innocent game of hide the sausage.’ He was forever playing Russian roulette with STIs.
Michael and I portrayed some good parts with other amateur theatre companies. I played Demetrius to his Lysander in a wonderful production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We performed in an old church hall. It had been converted into a theatre so there was plenty of space on the thrust stage, and the venue could hold almost four hundred audience members, but the acoustics were all over the place and you had to be so careful of your diction and projection, especially performing Shakespeare, so people could understand what the hell you were talking about. The scene that got the most laughs was the lovers’ fight. Michael and I, drugged by an airy spirit named Puck, fight over a woman. The play demonstrates the deluded nature of lovers and how love is blind. I bet most of the audience wished they were blind when Michael, in the ensuing struggle, had his trousers ripped off (they were Velcro), revealing bright purple boxer shorts with smiley faces patterned all over them. He spent the rest of the play in these shorts, save for the final scene when he donned a suit.
I also did a production of Romeo and Juliet with the same company in the exact same theatre. I played Benvolio, which was the most challenging part I’d been given at that point. The character, Romeo’s cousin, undergoes so much emotionally. He can be humorous, he can be pensive, violent and, in my final scene on stage, he can break down in tears. What I really loved about the character was his physicality. The director saw him as a street brawler, so I bulked up for the part, ate as much as I liked. The thing is I was doing so much cardio because there were loads of fight scenes and lots of running around to do as Benvolio, so I didn’t gain any fat, just muscle. When I watch the D
VD, as I do on rare occasions when I’m feeling nostalgic about my salad days, I can’t help laughing at how incongruous I look. Michael wasn’t in that production; he was doing something by Oscar Wilde that involved him having a silly mustache and a plummy accent if I remember correctly, so there was nobody to rival my bulk. I really stand out, my arms thick with muscle, my shoulders up to my ears, while Romeo and Mercutio look like regular skinny actors. I think I went back to being lean pretty soon after that play finished, after a short period of chubbiness because I continued to eat junk without the fighting and running around to keep the fat off. We fought with steel pipes and riot shields during that production. The nuts and bolts that secured the shields cut my arms to shreds. I’d never been so battered and bruised after doing a play. I envied Michael and his silly epigrammatic role in the Wilde play. But secretly I bloody loved the physical nature of my part, and wanted to be an action hero on the big screen one day.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Through the Hathorne
The next play I did with Act One was The Crucible. Arthur Miller’s 1952 classic play concerns the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. The text is considered to be allegorical, representing McCarthyism and America’s fear of Communists, but the directors ignored this political angle and anchored it firmly in the time it was set. I desperately wanted to play John Proctor but Michael landed the part, the lucky, albeit talented, git. Proctor is such a meaty role. He’s a farmer who finds himself caught up in the furor. Accusations fly, everybody is accused of being a witch. Proctor has to deal with his sense of guilt after cheating on his wife with Abigail Williams, the play’s young antagonist who uses the town’s paranoia for her own benefit. Proctor is eventually forced to announce his infidelity to everybody, and then sacrifices himself, like a classic tragic figure. He is hanged at the end of the play. Michael did a superb job, much to my chagrin. I maintain he didn’t really nail the part until the latter stages when he had to convey emotion. His chemistry with the girl playing his wife, Elizabeth Proctor, was non-existent, so the scenes with her early in the play weren’t as captivating as when he fights against a decadent legal system. A mix of jealousy and awe always came over me when he broke down in tears, either in rehearsal or on stage. He had such power over an audience.
Despite desperately wanting to play Proctor, I was given the small part of Judge John Hathorne, a nasty, ignorant villain who condemns many of those accused of witchcraft to death. Although it was a minor role, I did a lot of research into the character. The real historical figure named Hathorne never repented after the Salem Witch Trials. I wanted to make him sadistic, almost inhuman. I took notes from Joseph Wiseman’s 1962 performance as Dr No in the first cinematic James Bond film. He rarely blinks, sits upright, every movement purposeful. So it was my aim to stay as still as possible throughout the play, rarely moving unless my character had a purpose. This meant my back was in agony. I had a habit of slouching, so trying to move with military precision, working on my posture and gait to such an extent, meant I was in a lot of pain by the end of show-week. I took note of American novelist Stephen Vincent Benet’s description of Hathorne as a man with the ‘burning gaze of the fanatic’ and pretty much scared the shit out of many audience members. The Crucible was the play I took most seriously as an actor. It gave me an opportunity to rid myself of amateur habits. As wanky as it sounds, I really became that character, lived Hathorne for a week. I’d been impressed with Natalie Portman’s performance in Black Swan, how she transmogrified. I felt grotesque, like a sadistic monster, as I stared into the bathroom mirror on the opening night of the show. I didn’t have to enter until after the interval so it gave me plenty of time to get into character, to believe I belonged in Puritan garb. I’d locked myself away in that bathroom so nobody could disturb me, break my concentration.
The second act opened with my voice booming out of speakers. We’d recorded an interrogation in Cardiff University’s radio department weeks before, so it would sound like I was questioning Martha Corey in another room. And then I’d enter, furious with her husband who had come ‘roaring into this court’. I stared into the mirror, my eyes red, anger surging through my veins, a sense that I’d become totally, ineffably evil, and opened the door, ready. I could hear my voice booming. I was going to miss my cue. One of the crew members grabbed me, utter relief in her eyes, and I sprinted to my entrance, strolled on fully in character, not letting the fact I’d nearly fucked up the whole play bother me at all. I’ve had current members of Act One write to me stating to this day there is a myth that Daniel Mace nearly missed his entrance because he was taking a shit…
What I remember most fondly about that production isn’t the performance (I realize I’m laboring the point of seeking acting perfection and probably boring readers who aren’t preoccupied with this aspect of my memoir…), but the atmosphere in the cast, among the ‘Crucilads’ and ‘Crucilasses’. We all spent a lot of time together outside of rehearsals, and our favorite haunt was a place called Pontcanna Fields - a swathe of forestry that leads to Bute Park and the Taff Trail. We’d buy the cheapest booze we could find from a German outlet in Cathays. Michael’s preferred drink of choice was this yellow stuff in a wine bottle that could have been cider or sparkling perry or imitation champagne. I could never tell. We’d cross a rickety wooden footbridge, look down at the whooshing water, dogs splashing about in pursuit of drifting sticks, a green lung either side of the river.
We liked to play football or rugby, throw stones in the water - cast couples usually kissed on the edge of the embankment, bathed in a yellow glow. The air was imbued with my favorite smell: burning wood on a summery afternoon. Michael would flirt with the single girls in our cast, his t-shirt discarded, revealing his perdurable tan, the contours of his torso and the ‘Adonis Belt’ he was so proud of – two grooves running from his hips to his pubis.
Flirtatious laughter, or the screams of a girl Michael had hurled playfully into the cooling water, broke through the greenery like a fusillade of bullets through fronds. But the yellow glow would soon shift to orange or red, and we’d all teeter to rehearsal, often too drunk to deliver dialogue.
The following play I did with Act One was Chris Durang’s The Actor’s Nightmare. It was another small part, but gratifying nonetheless. It’s a short comedy about a man who is forced to perform in a play even though he doesn’t know any of the lines, or who he even is for that matter. Every actor has a similar nightmare at some point. I’ve always seen it as a good omen before a show opens. Stops you from relaxing too much. Nerves and adrenaline can be good for a performer. I played a figure known only as ‘The Executioner’. He appears at the play’s conclusion as a character from Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons (the principle character finds himself in various plays as the narrative goes on, including Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Samuel Beckett’s Private Lives). I wore a mask, black trousers and shoes, and that’s all. I worked hard to get in shape for the role, didn’t want to embarrass myself topless in front of an audience. Ended up losing half a stone in six days through careful diet and plenty of gym sessions. All that starvation meant I was pissed as a fart at the after show party. And sick as a dog. Every cliché to describe being dangerously bollocksed that a writer can muster.
I thought The Actor’s Nightmare would be my last play with the society, fancied getting involved with other companies, not restraining myself to an amateur troupe forever. Of course, the bug was too powerful. The socials were too much fun. No hangover was painful enough. After all, despite whining about some of the inevitable backstabbing and the tiny minority of dodgy characters, it was doubtless, as the next measly role I played with the society would say, the ‘most best, most dearest’ aspect of my whole university experience.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Pros and Cons of a Relationship
When I was a child, my mother held me in her arms. I was crying. Don’t know why. But little Daniel needed his mother’s comforting cuddles, and that’s what he got. Warmth, t
he soft texture of her clothing on my cheek as I nestled into her. Until I snotted all over her jumper, which caused her to push me away and shout at me. Now I don’t know if this moment caused me deep issues and fears of emotional abandonment as an adult, or if I’m just chatting pretentious Freudian bollocks, but I developed an irrational fear of losing Lauren. As Graham Greene writes, ‘Always I was afraid of losing happiness’. Single people, who feel lonely every minute of their lives without a partner, are often under the impression that a relationship is the cure for everything, the elixir of love, or l’elisir d’amore, as the Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti would call it, that makes birds sing and the leaves on the trees green. As soon as they find someone then life is dandy. Disney has taught us that matrimony means we all live happily ever after. The truth is there are pros and cons in every relationship, and if the cons outweigh the pros, as we often find occurs on the path to that final stone (to repeat the wanky metaphor I used earlier), then it’s time to get out and learn from our experiences. Fortunately, the pros outweighed the cons with Lauren. But one of the biggest obstacles we faced happened early in our relationship, and I was given a choice whether to forgive, pretend to forget, and have faith in her, or to end something that had so much potential.
Cinnamon Twigs Page 8