9
Alone in the wilderness
Then there’s the question of how much an actor tries to become the character they’re portraying, or whose work they’re performing. Maureen Lipman, in Re:Joyce, dressed like Joyce Grenfell and took on some of her vocal cadences and mannerisms; Vanessa Redgrave, performing Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, with the author very much alive, present and physically quite dissimilar, thought of her character as ‘she, the speaker, the storyteller’, not as an impersonation.
For Joanna Lumley there is intense satisfaction in being solely responsible for the imaginative leap required to evoke an entire world. For Simon Callow, the company he keeps with ‘Bill Sykes, Mrs Gamp and Mr Podsnap’ means that he’s never lonely. For Michael Pennington, intellectual curiosity makes the journey richly rewarding. For Patrick Malahide, the only thing that comes near it for terror and fulfilment is single-handed sailing. For all of them, you sense that solo performance has an element of possession about it, of being uniquely connected to a live crackling current of inspiration.
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