An Actor's Life

Acting is a strange profession when you come to think of it. Regurgitating the same lines night after night after night. You'd think they'd get sick of it after a while. But apparently not. Just look at the Mousetrap. This really is a case of acting out your life!

I willingly concede that much of what we do each day is repetitive: getting up, eating meals, etc. but, with the possible exception of this household, they are not actually the same meals.

Actors say that no two audiences are ever the same, but how do they know? I mean the lights are dimmed and they can't see us really, can they? I suppose they can hear us laugh, but that's not much good in a tragedy, is it?

And then how do they learn their lines and, as Michel Leeb once said, come out with them in the RIGHT ORDER? I once came across a young woman learning her part in a Parisian park. In a way, I envied her for her ability to lose herself in her role, declaiming away with many an extravagant gesture and blissfully unaware of the rest of us edging nervously past her.

 

From the professional point of view, of course, actors have a lot going for them. They only have to learn their lines once and after that they can virtually sleepwalk their way through each performance, always assuming that their team mates fellow actors have remembered to learn THEIR lines.

They and people like my brother - who sells caviar to the cognoscenti - are in a far more enviable position than the likes of me. Unlike my brother, I can ill afford to serve up the same old translation day after day regardless of the original. In short, I am one of a dying breed of craftsmen, soon to be replaced by Google Translate.