Talking Acting

In service to the art

Sometime around April 2024 I heard the actor Ethan Hawke in an interview clip on a social media platform say a beautiful thing. I don’t know when or where he said it and I am going to have to paraphrase because it was gone before I had time to save it. He was speaking about some advice he gave his daughter when she asked about becoming an actor. I guess he’d just been asked the question from the audience but that wasn’t part of the clip.

He said his advice went something like this. If you are going to do that, ask yourself this question: “Somewhere down the line, can I imagine a happy and fulfilling life teaching theatre in a high school in Iowa?” (I may well have the state wrong, but I think the point was it was not anywhere near New York, Chicago or Los Angeles). “If you can’t, don’t do it. Because if you do choose to be an actor you will be in service to this art form and you will be taken wherever that takes you”.

As I say, it’s a paraphrase. But it struck a chord with me because he had articulated how I have always felt about acting.

Much like many actors, I was bitten by the theatre bug quite young. The tipping point for me came at age 15 (I had been thinking about it for ever though) when I played my first proper character in my first real play. Something in my brain snapped and I knew I would never care about anything else that I could do with my life even remotely as much. School, of which I had never been much of a fan, ceased to occupy even a tiny bit of importance to me – other than the annual school play.

Everyone told me I couldn’t do it, so I made doubly sure to crash my A levels to give me no real option. When I did mix with real theatre professionals, I was told consistently that I had to train and that meant drama school. Luckily in the mid-1980s you could still get a government grant to do that. I dutifully wrote off for (way pre-internet days) and read all the drama school prospectuses for the major schools, of which I think there were probably about 15. One stood out to me like a beacon – East 15 Acting School

The prospectus managed to seem serious about the art and craft of acting whilst also remaining playful and creative. There was one paragraph about the importance of actors rediscovering the joy of climbing trees. I already knew something about the innovative theatre company - Theatre Workshop - from which the school had sprung and of their inspirational leader - Joan Littlewood. I had made the theatre section of Lancaster Public Library (where my family lived through my teenage years) my go to after school hangout and I can still picture the first page of the chapter in some book about British twentieth century theatre about them. There was a still image of their seminal show Oh! What a Lovely War at the top of the first page.

I applied. I auditioned. It was my first-choice school. I got the call saying I had a place whilst staying with my grandparents for a couple of days before my next audition. I didn’t even go to that audition. It was another brain snapping moment. I could not believe it was real. I could not believe my luck. I was genuinely not dreaming of stardom or fame. There was a movie called Fame and a TV show that followed it the 1980s. “You want fame? Well, fame costs. And right here is where you start paying”. I didn’t want that. I just wanted to act. My ambition at that point was to work in regional theatres in the UK like the Dukes Playhouse in Lancaster, where I practically squatted during what would now be called my “gap year”, but in the north-west of England in the 1980s was just called “being on the dole”.

At the time, the Dukes was run by Jonathan Petherbridge. He was young. He programmed incredibly ambitiously, from Jacobean tragedy to newly commissioned pieces. There was a dedicated, permanent company of theatre in education actors devising their own work. The theatre produced ten full, original productions every year across two spaces. I loved everything about it. That is what I wanted to do. Unfortunately, that was all coming to an end for the Dukes and most of the similar regional theatres of the time as government funding dried up.

East 15 was a wild and sometimes dangerous ride but it was never dull. Somewhere around the mid-point of the three-year course I knew I would want to return to teach there some day, and I did on a number of occasions. And now I find myself teaching acting all the time. I absolutely knew what my through-line from being 15 years old was, right up to my present day 57 years old. And Ethan Hawke articulates it perfectly. I am, and always have been, in service to this art form called acting. I have been since I first started rehearsing for the role of Marlow, the Butler in The Silver Box by John Galsworthy at school in autumn 1982 directed by an inspirational teacher called Peter Sampson. Who I’m sure was also in the same service.

This is my first Substack post - I’m not even sure that is what it is called. My intention is to post once a week with my reflections on what I am doing and how that relates to the art and craft of acting. Then perhaps to widen the conversation about acting and actors as we go. I say “we”. It’s very much just me at the moment, talking acting with myself. Let’s see how that goes.