2.5 Not Just Dance

In Dance this week we learned about Georgian manners: how to stand, how to walk, how to bow, how to lead a lady (by the right hand so she doesn’t bump the sword!) and how to dance one of the dances; none other than ‘Mr. Beveridge’s Maggot’, Darcy and Lizzie’s dance in the BBC Pride & Prejudice. So fun!!

Also this week we decided on a scene to shoot later this term for our showreel. I paired with Sam, a brilliant actor from New Zealand, and we found a scene from a play called ‘Journey’s End’. It’s a drama about the First World War, set in a bunker in the trenches. I’m going to get to be a WWI officer, in the uniform and with the accent. I’m jolly excited!

I sometimes wonder if aiming and training for film first will limit my ability when working in theatre in the future. Veteran actress and Central alumnus Vanessa Redgrave, CBE said something very reassuring in an interview she gave at the school this week. She said she’d learnt more about acting for theatre by doing film because it shows if the truth is really there. So maybe I’m actually approaching things in a better order.

Markoesa invited me to see a dance show directed by her dad called ‘At Swim Two Boys’. I didn’t really know what it was about, though I suppose I could have guessed, and it’s not the kind of thing I would normally choose to go and see. It was a sort of homoerotic movement and musical performance, the two male performers dancing on a stage covered in a layer of water. So the audience in the front row (where we were sitting) got sufficiently soaked during the show to give new meaning to the word ‘immersive’! I had very mixed feelings about the whole experience, most of which I did not voice because I wanted time to think it through. I was impressed by the live music and careful choreography but my overwhelming response was one of deep sorrow for the brokenness of humanity. There was one point where the characters were lying in an embrace (‘spooning’ I believe it’s called) and we were offered an alternative perspective through a projected image from an overhead camera. Two men in what appeared to be an intimate, loving relationship and yet I was struck by the realisation that though this might be romance, it wasn’t love. This was furtive, exclusive and selfish. They’d turned their backs on the author of love, on God, He was being shut out and rejected, and somehow, on a really tiny scale, I felt His pain at our rebelliousness.

It should have come as no surprise that the story ended with one of the boys accidentally and tragically killing the other, and being left alone. How revealing that even people who don’t know the Lord and have no Biblical knowledge somehow still know that “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Here art was reflecting reality, but, mercifully, not the whole truth. The picture God gives us of real love is one of open, all-inclusive selflessness: an empty cross on a hill. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16). Praise God for Jesus!

2.4 Shows and Movies

I’m going to the theatre a lot these days! This week I went to see two more shows. The first was ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ which was alright, not great. I’m very familiar with the 1952 film version with Michael Redgrave which was so good it makes me a severe critic of the show. The actors playing Algernon and Cecily were pretty good but the rest were rubbish. Too demonstratively dumb. The performance of Lady Bracknell was quite agonising. The actress spoke all her lines very slowly and never once changed pace! It got very frustrating. They added one element which was both ingenious and hilarious. The actor playing the butler (at both locations) would break the fourth wall in an attempt to show the audience what a great actor he was. It turned two rather boring bit-parts into a brilliant comic role.

The second was a show called ‘Master Class’ about the fiery opera singer Maria Callas. An acquaintance from All Souls who works in theatre very kindly procured four complimentary tickets for me for the press night, so my three lovely flatmates and I got to see this great show for free! And it was superb. It took the form of an actual live workshop and Tyne Daly playing Callas would speak directly to the audience. This was interrupted at intervals with flashbacks of significant moments in Callas’ life retold through monologue, sound and lighting. It was an immersive experience and I felt afterwards that I’d actually been through a singing master class and had really learnt some great stuff. Markoesa and I appreciated it on an even deeper level because a lot of what ‘Callas’ said to her students was exactly what we get taught on our course. After all, singing is basically acting.

We had more snow this week and I got a bit of a cold, which wasn’t all that fun. My old friend sleep depravation is back again as well. Already. It’s only week four. Somehow I found the time to watch some films this week too. One was Sense and Sensibility which is the film that inspired Markoesa to want to become an actor in England. We watched it in our cosy living room with dressing gowns on and the snow outside and it was, as the Dutch say, gezellig. It actually reminded me of home a lot, since it’s been a favourite in our household for a few years now. I also finally got round to watching Trainspotting (totally different). I thought since it’s most people’s picture of Scotland I’d best sound it out and I thought it was a well-made and entertaining movie. Ewan McGregor and Danny Boyle kick-starting some pretty impressive careers. Shame they’re not talking to each other anymore.

I did something silly this weekend. It was just too tempting. I went to the extras casting for the upcoming film version of Les Miserables starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Helena Bonham Carter and a hundred other stars. Filming starts in March at Pinewood Studios and it’s due for release in January 2013. It would be so awesome to play a French soldier in the Revolution, and maybe get a chat with Wolverine or Maximus! I’ve since discovered that Mr Crowe is set to play Noah in Aronofsky’s upcoming version of Noah’s ark! Anyway I turned up at Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where the casting was taking place, on a cold Sunday morning with a few of my classmates and there was a huge queue of hopeful extras. So big in fact that the production guys told us, and everyone past a certain point, just to go home because they had enough people. Being a bit more filmmaking-savvy than most, and knowing this was probably just a crowd-control measure, we ignored them and continued queuing. Later they were handing out forms to specific people, saying they were only looking for a specific look so only those people need come in. I got given a form, which was kind of exciting but also quite rubbish because my classmates didn’t… But we all kept queuing. When I got in I had to fill out a form with general information then get measured, then have my photo taken. My classmates and I then queued again and second time round we all got forms! So we all got seen and though most likely nothing will come of it I still enjoyed the experience and it was a good lesson in patience, especially the patience required for major big-budget movies.

2.3 Work and Wonder

This week started with a bit of a shock. Not long after leaving our Birthday/Burns’ Night party on Saturday night my Texan classmate Brad got hit by a cab. He fractured his skull, damaged his face, shoulder and collarbone, and ended up in hospital. I could barely believe it to begin with. I know it’s bad but after my initial shock I couldn’t help wondering what had become of the haggis I’d given him to take home and which he’d put in his pocket… Thankfully he made a pretty speedy recovery with no major permanent damage.

I went to the theatre right next to the school to see a play called ‘The Trial of Ubu’. It was stylistically interesting but beyond that it was a little bit boring and not especially meaningful. One cool thing was they achieved the effect of fast forwarding using lighting and sound while the actors moved really jerkily and quickly, even breathing really fast. That was kind of impressive and very effective.

This Wednesday was a milestone in my time at Central. After much contacting and pushing and emailing and organising I finally found myself hosting the first meeting of Central’s Christian Union. It was just me and two girls, but it’s a start! And I know there are other Christians who will hopefully start coming along. There had been a Christian Society last year but since I’ve been here nothing has happened and I really needed it. When part of an institution it’s so important for Christians to meet together, within that environment, to firstly encourage one another and secondly to be equipped for being more effective witnesses in that place. We had a chat, did a quick Bible study and prayed. It was small, straightforward and simple… and immensely exhilarating.

For our first project this term we’ve been working on the screenplay for the Keira Knightley film The Duchess. Much as I dislike her, and it, one of the perks has been that we get to dress up in period costumes and prance around as if we were in the Georgian era. One of the common misconceptions about this time, I’ve discovered, is that the people were all cold, rigid and stiff. In reality they were actually a lot better at socialising, and physically more relaxed and comfortable than we are now. They simply understood the importance of manners, and posture and lack of tension. Interestingly the physical alignment and relaxation work we spent most of our first term painstakingly learning would already be habitual to folk back then.

Something magical happened on Saturday. I got home at 6pm after doing some shopping and my flatmate Amy and I were getting ready to go out to a house party. Just before we left, at about 9pm, we looked out the window and it was white. The world was covered in a thick layer of snow! It had been chilly throughout the day but there was no sign of a snowfall. It was so sudden and it was such quality snow that I could hardly believe it. The picture below was taken that night on the street outside my house. As it turned out the actual party was pretty rubbish but getting there and back was a wonderful wintry adventure. London freaks out in wild weather of course so public transport was a bit sketchy. Sadly the snow left as quickly as it had come and within three days no one could have guessed that the city had been completely white not long ago. Then again, perhaps that’s a good thing as it made me feel very Christmassy and it’s FAR too early for that. I’d like Spring next please.

2.2 Tae Be Or No Tae Be

So what did I do on Burns’ Night this year? Well, actually I was performing on the stage of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre! Our Voice teacher just happens to be the Voice Coach at the Globe (I know!) so he took us on a little school trip to explore the space and have a go delivering a Shakespeare monologue from the stage. So fun! I did a dramatic belter, where King Claudius calls upon England to help him kill Hamlet. It’s such an inspiring space to perform in; being all at once grand and intimate, cosmic and personal. And we were the first year group of this course to be given this opportunity. I feel very privileged, and now I want to do Shakespeare too!

Speaking of privileged. My great friend Murdo Macleod and his Hungarian fiancé Csilla came to stay this week. He asked me if I’d be his best man at the wedding in October! I seem to remember I had a miniature fit of joy before expressing my willingness. The ceremony will be in Hungary and my speech will be translated line-by-line, which should have an interesting effect on the jokes. I’m tremendously excited. It’s all happening this year…

We have a new Dance teacher who is very- erm… well, shall we say, he’s very good at telling us about himself. It is a very impressive CV to be fair. He’s responsible for choreographing the wand fight in Order of the Phoenix along with pretty much every dance scene in any BBC period drama in the last ten years, apparently. He is a darn good teacher. We’re learning Merengue, Jive, Schottische, a bit of Baroque, and maybe some Tango. Lovin’ it!

On Friday we had an Industry Day where we got to attend a Q&A with two Agents then two Casting Directors and finally two Actors. It was really useful to make contact with the industry, so to speak, and got me thinking about life after drama school and what I need to do to prepare for that. One of the Casting Directors said an encouraging thing. She said there’s too much sensationalist stuff performed at showcases and not enough classical scenes. In short, too much swearing! I loved that, and I quite agree. If I get to do a theatre showcase I plan on doing a scene from a classical text.

Our last class of the week was something of an emotional roller-coaster. It was with the Director of one of the short films we’ll be shooting next term and we had to tell an emotive story from our past, and play a piece of music to go along with it. Most people were a wreck by the end but I felt a bit foolish. As it went on each person’s story was a more heart-wrenching tear-jerker than the one before – when they discovered their Dad had been cheating on their Mum, when they had an abortion, when they lost their best friend – but my story was about a time when I was very young and was given a Cyprus knife, and had great fun playing with it, and then it got broken! Heavy emotional baggage to be sure! In all seriousness, it was another reminder that my classmates, like everyone, are hurt, lost and broken people who desperately need the love of the Father.

I did actually celebrate Burns’ Night. We had a party at our flat as a joint birthday celebration for my flatmate Amy and my classmate Matt and also for Burns’ Night. I cooked some haggis, neaps and tatties, put on a CD of bagpipe music (the good old Harvey Bros) and wore the full Highland rig. I dutifully recited the ‘Address to a Haggis’ and I was thrilled when, later on in the night, we got some Ceilidh dancing going in the kitchen! In honour of Matt’s birthday I composed a song, and in honour of Rabbie Burns’ birthday I set it to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’! It was a great laugh, and I think Matt was rather moved to have a song written for him. I named it ‘For Auld Matt’ and my favourite line is:

“Now where is he likely to be in five or ten years time?
I'm sure he could get to Hollywood if he had a face like mine!”

Needless to say, there was much LOL-ing.

2.1 Escape to Exeter

I have my own profile on Central’s website! How often I did browse through the student profiles this time last year as I considered my future and what it might be like to be on this course. Now I am. Check it out: http://www.cssd.ac.uk/students/profiles/philip-todd

We had to hand in a two thousand word critical reflection at the start of this term. What a nightmare. Somehow, I don’t know how, this fairly simple, straightforward task became a mountainous challenge, which drove me within firing range of my wits end. Maybe it was because I got so used to being told to ‘think’ less and ‘do’ more last term that made sitting down to something academic so difficult. However, after a few very late nights I handed it in, more relieved than satisfied, and started the term with mental exhaustion, sleep deprivation and smothered motivation.

It didn’t help therefore that, for the Performing Research Unit that we embark on this term, the first couple of days were a research intensive. More thinking! Though it was rather nice to be able to just sit in lectures and listen. I suppose that’s what uni is like for most people. I confess it was, on occasion, a fight against drowsiness, especially when the lecturer chose to use very academic or technical language or even just read their lecture from a paper. That annoyed me a bit and if nothing else the two days gave me a good insight into what makes an engaging presentation, and not.

On top of that our project work for this week was to compile and present research for the feature film script that we will be working on for the first few weeks. The script is The Duchess so the period we’re researching is the late eighteenth century, which is actually really interesting but again it requires still more sedentary thinking.

Our first practical class came as a breath of fresh air. It was a new class on Meisner technique with a new teacher called Emett. He’s from Northern Ireland originally and a bit unbelievably nice. I’ve been looking forward to exploring Meisner because I can see in those of the class who have done this work before that it really helps with their listening, intuition and immediacy when acting. And the work is mostly all about using imagination and playing games! I think I’m really going to like this class.

I was glad to have the opportunity to get away at the weekend and visit my second cousins in Exeter. Firstly because they’re wonderful people and I don’t get to see them that often and secondly because I know as the term goes on it will become increasingly impossible to do anything extra at the weekends. My stay was both relaxing and recreational. I played Cluedo, went for runs and ate cake. We went to see Spielberg’s War Horse and immediately afterwards James was able to show me on a map exactly where in Devon they shot it! We went walking in Dartmoor and climbed on the tors where I could lean into the wind and it was strong enough to hold me up, and then I had a juicy Devon steak in a homely English pub. It was great to escape, to see more of England and have a break from the regular routine. Here’s a picture from the windy moor:

ThE eNd

Time flies when you’re having fun. This term has indeed flown, but not so fast that I haven’t been able to catch on and enjoy the ride. This last week was filled with assessments: for Voice, Camera, Dance, and two for Movement. I rather enjoyed these and the sense of completion that they gave.

In our last class before the holidays we watched the short films from our Mike Leigh Project. Some of it was seriously impressive (and entertaining) but a lot of it, and most of my part, was seriously disappointing. In my attempts to be ‘real’ my character had diminished in purpose and importance so that on screen my performance was somewhat uninteresting. However, I learned a lot from the experience of creating a character in this particular way and, after all, the focus of this project was on the process, not the product.

I’m apparently youthful enough to qualify as a high school pupil. My course leader chose me and some others in the class to be involved in an extra project where we were the cast for a mock horror trailer set in a high school. Unpaid, a favour perhaps, but even so this was a fun few hours and I got to try out a London accent, and squirt on some fake blood and pretend I was dying which is always a laugh. Afterwards we discovered that the trailer may be shown at some prestigious places, to some rather important people, which was a good reminder that it’s important to always give 100% whatever the work.

Also this week we showcased the scenes we’ve been working on in our extra theatre classes throughout the term. I pranced around as Henry Higgins in my period dressing gown and slicked hair, with my RP accent, and it was really “quite a pleasure”. ‘Pygmalion’ by George Bernard Shaw is wonderfully written, sumptuous theatre and I love period roles. I hope I will get to do more of that in the future.

I left my end-of-term tutorial with mingled joy and despair. Apparently I started the term quite shy and have become much more brave and confident, which is positive. It’s also hardly surprising since this term has been my first experience of any kind of actor training, and of living in London. I think I can forgive myself for being a bit tentative to begin with. The main thrust of the criticism from my tutors was that I need to start stretching myself and not being afraid to go to the extremes in characters. This is fair enough, and I agree, but it touches on an important issue that I discussed with some of my classmates in some depth. How extreme can, or should, I actually go? Is it possible to be an unlimited, unrestricted actor and also a moral person? Does an actor need to separate their professional life and personal life, and pretend that what they do in their professional life isn’t really them? As a Christian, how can I be the best actor I can be without compromising my faith? I know this is an issue I will continue to face throughout my life. My conclusion was to accept that at any given time I am faced with two clear options, which are often in tension: to do what the world wants or to do what God wants. I am determined to always try to do the latter. Often this will seem strange or foolish to others (my tutors and classmates especially); the world will not understand, maybe sometimes even I won’t fully understand, but the truth is this: in Christ I am “a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17) and therefore to do anything else would be against my very nature.

I’ve learnt so much, I’ve grown, and I’m thoroughly enjoying this course but I am looking forward to being on home soil, celebrating Christmas and New Year with family and old friends and having a good break to recover, and absorb. I finished the week with a Christmas house party and the next morning I was on the train speeding back up to Scotland!

“For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.” 1 Timothy 4:8

9

“Hold onto your butts!” mutters Samuel L. Jackson as our heroes start their tour in Jurassic Park. For our research presentation on the visual effects in this film my partner, American classmate Matt Block, kicked us off by saying the same thing to the class. We had a lot of fun with this presentation, maybe a bit too much. We came dressed in shirts, khaki shorts and long socks, I wore a hat, and Matt broke out his wound make-up wizardry to give us each some vicious looking cuts and bruises; as if to suggest we’d just survived Jurassic Park! I hope we don’t get marked down for not taking it seriously enough. We saw no point in making the presentation dry and academic even if that is what the assignment might have suggested. I learned that theoretical and academic research doesn’t have to be dull and dusty. It can be an exciting adventure, complete with dinosaurs!

This week was the culmination of all our work on the Mike Leigh project. We’d all created and developed our own characters, we’d met with other characters and worked on improvisations, as a group we’d written a script, and now this week we shot it. It was very quick. We only had one day to shoot a twenty-minute script so it felt a bit rushed through and before I knew it we’d wrapped, and that was the end of my character.

Also this week I met up with a very friendly agent and actress called Joanna Hole. She is almost certainly the most useful contact I have but it was so refreshing just to meet up and chat as real people. I didn’t feel I needed to ‘make an impression’ or ‘network’ in any way, we just genuinely got to know each other a bit. And that’s what it’s really about. I do think a career ought not to be built just on contacts with people that you know a bit or have worked with, but on real relationships.

I love Christmas. And I love singing. So imagine Carol Services. Actually the best thing about Carol Services for me is that they’re an excuse to bring friends along to church. All three of my flatmates came along last Sunday evening. I was part of a small group singing Silent Night in English, German and Mandarin! This Sunday two of my classmates came along. All Souls do awesome Carol Services. Joyful arrangements of carols with a big orchestral accompaniment, powerful musical performances, and an engaging talk about the real meaning of Christmas where the Gospel is explained loudly and clearly. Just perfect for bringing my non-Christian friends along to and it always led to good chats later on.

What were the odds that I would end up living right next to the work place of one of the only people I know in London, a primary school teacher called Alice? What are the chances that she would be responsible for putting on a nativity show and would invite me to come in and help? What is the likelihood that it would actually happen? Not high, but it did. I love being with and working with children so much, and I really miss it when I’m studying; there’s too many people of a similar age about. I need to spend time with some like-minded primary school kids to get things back in perspective. So I went in one day, watched them rehearse the play, gave them some suggestions and played some drama games with them. I enjoyed it just as much as my course work. It’s been said before: acting is child’s play. So maybe this is another option for the future. As Alice put it in a text afterwards, “You had a real natural flair with them – if you don’t make it to Hollywood…”