On chiseling with Cleopatra

I have started a weekly Shakespeare class at the Actors' Centre, focusing on Anthony and Cleopatra. What a girl she was! The Madonna of her age, a perfectly stage-managed figure in a gloriously tumultuous age and a skittish, greedy girl with a raging thirst for attention. Playing her in my jeans and scruffy Ugly boots (a grotesque invention that I abhor as a lover of sartorial beauty and embrace as a cyclist with chilly feet) in a dingy room in Covent Garden on a damp Tuesday night requires a colossal assault on the imagination. And after another day spent punching the phone and watching the clock, meeting a circle of like-minded fantasists and attempting to summon the sweaty, voluptuous, volatile world of Cleopatra's court is soul food. I've been a member of the Actors' Centre for over a year, but have only managed to summon the courage to attend a handful of classes. This is due to a ridiculous shyness that overtakes me in front of my peers. I'm completely happy to gambol out on stage in front of two thousand strangers. Shove me up in front of three fellow actors with a script in my hand, and I'm a dribbling mute. Alright, I'm exaggerating a tiny bit. But, somehow, without my being aware, something has finally grown up within me, and I have realised that I am not afraid anymore. I admit that I am an actress, and not nearly the actress I can or want to be. Which is what the Centre is all about; its a hot bed of people at every level of development, there to pursue the better person they sense inside. We are all there to chisel away at the superfluous that surrounds and stifles. And it feels so good, at last, to stand up, pick up the tools, and begin to chip.