Low life | 28 March 2018

I go to the theatre but rarely because I am overpowered by even mediocre acting and find it exhausting. Theatre has the same effect on me, I imagine, as the Great Exhibition must have had on a Dorset peasant with a cheap-day return on the newly opened Great Western Railway. But by what strange magic does an actor transcend his or her everyday persona and convincingly dissemble an altogether different, fictional one? Is it the training? Or a gene — Romany, perhaps? Or are actors afflicted by a peculiar personality disorder in which part of the brain is either overdeveloped or missing?

For a newspaper article, I once rehearsed with a theatre company for a week. I was Second Jailer for the opening night of Puss in Boots. The cast were professional actors glad to have work and they called each other darling. A veteran Shakespearean actor was our pantomime dame, a role that demanded only a slightly toned-down version of his real self. The cast warmly welcomed me into the family. Between ten in the morning and midnight we were either rehearsing or crowded around the same two round tables in the boozer.

At times these actors seemed frankly cynical and artificial, at others kind and sincere. Sometimes they were all of these things at once. When I left and said goodbye to the careworn director, he burst into tears. But none of them would give a straight answer when I asked why they did it or what it was that made an actor convince. When I suggested that an actor’s strange power must surely be the result of a pact with the Devil, they said I wasn’t far out.

Last week, I went to see a production of R.C.