On non-iversarys

Neither my husband nor I ever remember our anniversary. Is this telling? Does a couple that relies on one of their family members wishing them well on the date of their marriage, to remind them about their big day, pass for Happily Marrieds? Or should we be booking ourselves into counselling, tout suite? Its a tough call; six years on, how far we have walked, side by side. As I look at him, his face illuminated by his laptop while he types like a grumpy ballet accompanist across the table from me, I see the same face I saw the first moment he walked into my life. Give or take a few strands of hair... I'm sure he has changed, but I can't see it. But I see in myself nothing of the flighty, stroppy young thing I was when I blithely waltzed into that candlelit chapel to stand beside him. I feel like an entirely different being. I feel every cold winter shopping trip, every summer picnic, every argument about who does more laundry than whom, every moment he's looked straight through my carefully constructed facade and stared at my naked soul. And I don't wish any of them undone. Sometimes life is a garden, sometimes its a howling wilderness, but whatever the weather, he is the tree beside me. Which is what I've chosen instead of hearts and flowers. And its enough.

On the actress faced with a choice...

Today, Day Four of my course discovering the Meisner technique at the Actor's Centre, started well. I cycled off to the Cromwell Hospital (where tulips bloom on every table in the marble lobby and all the signs are in English and Arabic) to hear good news from my sunny South African physio. With her sharp fingers unraveling tender knots in my thigh, she mused that my knee, currently grumpy after not being rested properly post Dartmoor marathon, may be ready for a gentle run next week. The thought makes me elated, and apprehensive. After two months of not running, will I fall in love with it all over again? Or will memories of ease and speed taunt me from beyond a prison of fleshy pain? Pondering this, I stopped for a soya chai latte at a little cafe in South Kensington. The man in the queue behind me, in the garb of an English academic, was gone almost as soon as he took a seat at the pavement table beside me and only the drying froth on a cup and a smouldering ashtray bore testament to his brief hiatus in a well-practised commute. I took Picadilly, past the Ritz, and skirted the fray of Leicester Square, already open for business and heaving with Those Who Do and Those Who Watch.(An aside: what is the switch that flips in the human brain which says 'I am about to find myself in a foreign city, therefore it is prudent to dress like I shall be climbing an Alp'?) At the Actor's Centre, my fellow neophytes were blowing on the over-roasted filter coffee hawked by the canteen and discussing their weekends. When Scott Williams arrived like summer, we began to play and I rejoiced in the simple act of playing. Its a massive relief to think, and examine, and ask questions again, after too long with my mind frozen on Survive. Then, during lunch break, we tumbled onto the streets of Covent Garden with the rest of London. I headed straight to the library on Charing Cross and seized a David Hare play that I don't know, Amy's View. Then, on the way back for the afternoon session, I was springing gladly up St Martin's Lane to Seven Dials and remembering how I used to tumble into this rabbit hole with my eyes wide and my feet tingling at the famous streets beneath them and get hopelessly lost, when a man stopped me and offered me a free haircut. He was scouting for potential models for his hair cutting training salon. I said no politely and walked on. Then I stopped and reconsidered. I haven't had any attention paid to my hair in several months, besides dyeing it red for an audition and swiftly correcting the mistake with a bottle of Boots bleach. And I have a session booked to take new headshots, a very crucial part of the actor's armoury, next week and was wondering how on earth I would pay for the necessary cut before then. This stranger couldn't have been more timely and I suddenly saw this man as placed before me with an alluring offer. It was a defining moment; Does She Go Back To The Acting Class, Or Allow Vanity To Lead Her Into The Swanky Salon? What do you think? Three hours later, I emerged with a sleek bob and dashed up to the Actors' Centre to collect my bag. I consoled myself that I had read the David Hare play from cover to cover and now want to tackle the role of Amy, who is a beautiful character who brings together her mother, an ageing theatre actress, and her true love, an art critic scathing of the state of theatre, which prompts the debate at the core of the piece: is theatre still relevant? Jack, the filmmaker who is recording our class, told me I had missed the lecture on Preparation and I decided that, rather than wallow in guilt, I would learn with renewed vigour tomorrow. And so I cycled home (with my mind wheeling through the play and its topic of the continuing power of theatre and its relevance in a digital age with audiences conditioned to watching from the other side of a screen) and got out my script (I am performing a piece from the play Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay Abaire with my scene partner Carla at an open stage evening in Brick Lane next week) and baked a batch of lebkukhen for Christmas gifts. And it was a good way to end an interesting day.

On browsing the buffet at the library

My idea of luxury now is stopping in at the Charing Cross library after acting class, as the city slides from work into play on a crisp dark evening, and gathering up an armful of books I know I won't have time to read... I have Carol Ann Duffy's anthology, Rapture, for the bathroom and Diana Mosley's essays The Pursuit of Laughter for my night table and Chekov's play Platonov for my handbag. Now all I need is the ability to stop and sit long enough to do more than relish the titles. Perhaps this is like the allure of a whirlwind romance; you never acquaint yourself with more than the cover, thus shielding yourself from the possibility of disillusionment...

On the art of acting

I began studying the Meisner technique in a 6 day course with Scott Williams yesterday. Its the first time since drama school ended eight years (eight years already!) that I've really asked questions about the art of acting. I graduated from the school of The Show Must Go On!, and majored in gritted teeth and sequins. But never have I actually spent any time philosophizing about what it is that I've been compelled to do since I could hold my head up for a camera or jig about in nappies for admiring applause. Anything below the surface of the business I've dismissed as hokum, in an attempt to avoid staring into the whirling depths that lure you into an infamous quagmire filled with tortured, questing people. It is one too many awful auditions, from which I have stumbled thinking all sorts of things beginning with Why? When? How? that has at last made me realise that I must face up to my fear and doubt, and ask the hard questions of myself. What is acting? And how do you do it? Something that has bubbled up from the discussions Scott has led so far is the question Are actors really creative artists? When we 'create' a role, are we not simply putting a shiny surface up in front of our audience and allowing light to bounce off ourselves, leaving them to see what they will in the reflection? When someone says of my performance 'I don't believe you!', are they not just saying 'I don't believe you!'? Or is Uta Hagen, the great theatre actress whose work ethic I am also busy studying through books and dvds, more on the money when she claims emphatically that an actor is the most creative of artists; we bring our whole being to a space and whittle away the entire human experience, distilling essences and concocting dreams and visions until we have a finite creation to offer up to the light?

The only certainty I have arrived at thus far is that talking about acting is harder than getting up and doing it. But I'm no longer afraid of either.