M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A at the Greater Manchester Fringe : 13th & 14th July, 2014

                                          http://vimeo.com/96428730

I'll be performing M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A, by Lena Kitsopoulou, translated by yours truly and directed by Stella Duffy,  in Manchester at The Castle Hotel on July 13th (Matinee 3 PM, then again at 7:30 PM) and 14th (7:30 PM) as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe. My friend Ray Turner very kindly made this lovely trailer, so you could decide if you wanted to come see it. It would be really nice if you would come see it. I would love to have you there.

TICKETS

Playing Keepsie-Upsie.

It’s a truism that live performance, whatever else it might be, is a collaboration between audience and performer(s). It’s a truism because it’s true. It identifies a phenomenon I think we’re all aware of when we’re part of it but which is very difficult to describe or even visualise. 

I  imagine the shape of the show as something we hold between us, lightly, as you hold a kite by the fingertips, singing to the wind in the seconds before you let go. I see it as a sculpture of looks and words and movements, as though we juggled and shaped it among and above us, fluid, hollow, transparent as light. I don’t see it as any of those, exactly, not even all of them together. It's not like that at all. It is kept in the air, though - suspended, like disbelief, raised like a circus tent and kept in the air by ropes held in human hands. And like a circus tent, the more of you there are, the easier it is.

One of the things I do theatre for, ever since I was a kid, is that collective awareness, that sense of being part of a whole that is greater than the sum of us all. What I celebrate in the work I love is the extent to which it feeds that interconnectedness, what I critique in the work I dislike is the way it works to thwart or betray it. And I don’t mean that sense of shared presence as something that’s all sweetness and light, though I think even the bleakest work owes its audience a degree of nurture, of loving-kindness.

Kindness because it’s a kindness people do, when they come to see your work, over and above the price of the ticket, the traveling, the childcare or any other arrangements they’ve made; the simple act of agreeing to give you their attention is a kindness and you owe them at least as much in return.

Outside those immediately connected with the show, 10 people did me that kindness this week. I can see each face as I write, each gaze that connected with mine and fed M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A, and I love them all, a little bit, I treasure their complicity in what I made with them.

But to return to the elaborate metaphors I launched in the first paragraph, I am also very tired, and somewhat drained. Because the fewer you are, the more effort goes into keeping the performance afloat. We did it; my three friends (the audience) and my producer in what I called a ‘dress run’, but was of course a performance on Wednesday in the rehearsal room. We did it on Friday at UCLan; the woman who’d, unfathomably, come all the way from London, my two friends and fellow UCLan alumnae, the performance–maker I toured with once who teaches there now, the man whose face I recognised but name I didn’t know, the event organiser, the usher, the lecturer I never got on with when I was a student. The show, in spite of everything (my mistakes included – I asked far more of them than I intended to, of which more in another post) did stay suspended, and we were in on it together, ‘til the end. 

And of course we’re not in the business of perfection, we’re in the business of experiences that live and enrich. So perhaps it shouldn’t bother me so much that I wasn’t able to add as much nuance and detail as I’d like, not even close. That I dropped one of my favourite moments, and failed to shade things that needed shading, just because there was so much of me used up in keeping the show in the air. Those small audiences were tired too, especially Friday's. They were with me all the way to the end, but they were tired. And that though M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A is fed by this week, the show is awake again and ready to fly, I am a hollow thing, drained, a husk, holding some insights to herself from the experience, some tasks, but no euphoria. I did know that performance doesn’t owe me a high. I knew. But having a show go well and feeling empty... well, there it is.  

Learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A.

  

Before I start, I want to say that learning 70-odd minutes of monologue is no big deal. There are plenty of other people who learn solo shows, many of which are at least an hour long, and don’t write blog posts about it. There are also many people who perform truly awe-inspiring feats of memorisation. Chao Lu  holds the world record for reciting π  to more than 67 thousand places. It took him some 24 hours. I’ve personally witnessed Oliver Senton playing Phil in The Warp  for a similar span– that was a thing to see, and that’s dialogue, which is much harder than monologue to learn.  And if those aren't sufficiently grandiloquent comparisons, then there are the oral traditions. You probably know that the epic of Gilgamesh, the Greek epic poems, the entirety of Brehon law, the Norse sagas, and many another once-memorised text surpass any modern memorisation by orders of magnitude. . . 

So, no big deal.

All the same, because I’m interested in how memorisation works, both technically and psychologically, and because people keep asking me about it, 

here goes:

LEARNING M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A

In early February 2013, I know M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. I’ve read it through several times and it flows. The words come easily to me; they’re my words. LenaKitsopoulou wrote Μ.Α.Ι.Ρ.Ο.Υ.Λ.Α, but the translation is mine. I wrote every word.

I learned the first 2 pages (10 minutes) back in Aprli 2012, not long after I finished the translation, to perform at a scratch night. That was a scratch of the text itself, really. I didn’t do any work on it besides the learning. I just wanted to observe how the language worked with an English-speaking audience, if they understood it. They did, I even got a laugh or two, which was nice.

I spent about an hour a day on it for a week, and don’t remember any difficulty, though I do remember that it prompted minor rewrites. This flows better than that, you need a different turn of phrase here in order not to skip ahead to the next time you use that phrase; that sort of thing. The only bit I remember of that process is the 555 bus.

I’d agreed to meet my son and his aunt in Keswick and the 555 bus is the simplest and prettiest, if slowest way to get there. I look out the window. “This whole concept,” I mutter, “this birth-death, happy-sad, black-white business, is it going to go on much longer?” I am looking at the mossy roots of the trees outside, the little springs that sparkle among the stones, the giddily bouncing wild rabbits. They’re part of the text now.

•           *           *

In late February, 2013, I’m learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. I’m in Athens. I drop my son off at his cousin’s house, and take the bus to the hospital, running lines in my head.  The show is becoming my internal monologue.

My father has just had his spleen removed. It was enormous, full of lymphoma, and excised in an institution that is best known as a maternity hospital. The surgeon is a cousin and a friend – approaching us in the waiting room where the expectant families sit, he tells us Dad was delivered of a spleen weighing only a bit less than my kid did at birth. It wasn’t easy, but it went well. Later, my brother and I go into ICU to see him. He is freshly out from under anaesthesia and incoherent. For the first time I remember he looks old, and frail. Inside my head, Mairoula waxes narcissistic about her mother’s cancer diagnosis. I’m starting to hate her.

A few days later, I have a stupid argument with my brother. The tension is getting to us, the hospital, the worry. I storm off, walk up Kifissias towards the Olympic installations, past the suburban apartment blocks, forgotten village houses  tucked among them with chickens still in the yard, the empty lots full of weeds and wildflowers. “Can’t complain,” I tell the nettles and hubcaps, the already-crumbling concrete of the Calatrava walkway “can’t complain isn’t really gratitude”. Later still, my father asks me about the show. Conscious of not telling him about the character’s Daddy issues, nor her mother’s cancer, I read him the bit about being on a ferry boat, the long and increasingly absurd list of amenities she piles up, then rejects. He laughs.  In May, when we’re cutting down the text for performance, Stella suggests cutting that bit. I refuse; in the hospital, it made my father laugh.

  
                                                      *           *          *

It’s March 2013 and I’m learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. Thanks to Stella, I have a version of the script that looks a lot less daunting than the huge block of text I produced. She’s divided it into scenes and I can begin to see the outlines of the structure buried beneath the verbiage like the trunk of a shrub, just discernible under the leaves.

I know the first five pretty well, so I start with scene six. I put the script on the kitchen counter, just under the window. I read the first sentence aloud, repeat it while walking away. If I forget a word or hesitate or screw up, I walk back to the script, read aloud from there, walk again. When I’ve done that a couple of times without a mistake, I add a second sentence. Five sentences takes me through the door of the annexed kitchen, through the dining room, down the hall and to my front door; ten brings me back. When I’ve done ten sentences perfectly a few times, I start a new section. In the morning, walking back from dropping my kid off at school, I run as much as I know. When it starts to take longer than the 25 minutes of a leisurely stroll back, I take detours. I try not to speak out loud where people can hear me, but sometimes a sidelong glance tells me they can.

                                                      *           *          *

It’s April 2013 and I don’t know M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A, though I know about half of it reasonably well, well enough to be getting on with. . . I don’t. Not really. In rehearsal I’ve got maybe a quarter, maybe a third then it’s rant and flail about for the next bit. I get to the end of a scene and face a mental desolation in which not a whisper of a word appears. I improvise actions. More often, I don’t. Stella gives me things to do. Moving, my body stops my brain remembering. I am the worst actor in the world.

I am entirely in awe of Stella (the Stella Duffy) and still not quite able to believe we’re here, in London, working on my show. I am trying to please. I am diffident. I am also constipated.  My digestion is as sluggish as my brain. I can’t get how three people (Leo Burtin, producing, Stella and I) can rehearse in open space, but because of D & D I love open space, so there I am. We have three days together. On the last day, my bowels awaken. The need to empty them is overpowering, and it hits me right in the middle of the morning’s rehearsal. Working in open space means that it’s cool for me to interrupt the work, explain that there’s something I have to do right then, do it, and come back. Of course I don’t do anything as sensible as that. Instead, I drag my bloated body thorough various ideas that Stella brings in, contributing no thing to the process but my endurance.

We’re working the “rock bottom” bit of the show, where Mairoula longs for the despair of her adolescence, revels in the memory of. It feels like rock bottom to me, too, but I’m not revelling. Stella gets frustrated with me. I don’t blame her, but find myself unable to tell her what’s going on.  I am certain she’s going to decide she can’t work with me after all. Who could work with the near-mute and shambling creature who’s been stumbling through the last two and a half days. I can barely endure sharing a body with her. With Aliki, I mean, though the more I think about Mairoula, the less I like her, too. She’s selfish, vain, pretentious, angry, self-involved, the kind of woman who fawns over men and ignores other women. I’ve forgotten why I ever wanted to play her.

Afterwards, lighter of body but more anxious than ever, I come back and we talk. I own up to the hero worship, and the anxiety, but not to the leaden bowels. It’s not an easy conversation, though Stella handles it with a generosity and perceptiveness I will come to know as typical. She shows no signs of wanting to abandon the project. I am giddy with relief. We’ve got one week off, then another three days in Lancaster.

In that week, rather than resume my one sentence at a time regimen, I try to learn the scenes I half-know by reciting them with the script in front of me and my eyes closed, opening them to check a particular word, or see what happens next. By the time Stella comes up to Lancaster, I know half the show. I’m desperately nervous that the next rehearsal period won’t go well. The night before we start, I invite Stella and Leo to dinner. I fret about the food, because it gives me something to fret about, but in the end it’s as pleasant a meal as I’ve ever shared.

The rehearsal period is a joy, and the exercises Stella brings in show me how to fall in love with Mairoula again. We find some physicality, some hidden structure I can rest on, we find her kindness and her acute, acerbic eye on her own follies, her flights of poetic extravagance. We find, somewhere inside me, an open-hearted warmth to give her, a tenderness for the audience that I see in Stella, and that makes everything alright. We show the first half to some friends in Lancaster, and they’re engaged and friendly. One of them saw that first extract performed the previous year “I can see how much you’ve worked on it since,’ she says, it’s changed completely.”

                                                               *           *           *

It’s May 2013 and I’m learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. Stella has suggested a number of cuts, as we’re trying to bring the length down to under an hour. I’ve accepted most of them, rejected a couple – one because the Greeks will get it, even if no-one else does, and one because I don’t want to lose the bit my father laughed at. I’m surprised by how quickly I get used to skipping bits of text I’ve already learned; I expected that to drive me nuts. We have a final few days of rehearsal scheduled in London, then a little over a month to rehearse on my own before we open.

In London at the end of the month, I still have my script in hand for the last 10 minutes. It makes things tricky, because this is the most physically complex part of the show. We block it as well as we can. It’s almost there. I feel good.

                                                               *            *             *

It’s June 2013, and I’m learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. My housemate is helping me. He’s a graphic designer and a cartoonist, so his schedule is flexible and we can run lines when I’m free. He’s also Greek, and very perceptive about language. He teaches me some of the references I didn’t get in the text, elaborates, comments. He is the perfect person to do this with; patient, knowledgeable, relentless, precise. We run lines every day. I’ve got it all, except that last little bit, which I know vaguely, but not well.

In the last three weeks of June, I have a rehearsal space booked, three times a week. I can lay out the whole playing area, run the actions with the lines. I start to learn things by what I’m doing, not saying. I start to think about how I need to be saying that there so I have time to do that and then I can say that bit right after I’ve finished doing that bit. This is the part of rehearsing I love best. There is more creative ferment earlier in the process, but it’s always shadowed by the fear that it will never come together. At this stage, you have confidence, a shape, a sense of how it will play, but there’s still room for tinkering. I have all the beautiful stuff. The dress, and the rug and the wonderful sofa. Nerissa comes to watch a run. It's the first time anyone's seen it without me holding a script at some point or another. She's concerned about the sweat stains showing. She's right, as usual.

On the days I don’t have the space booked, I take long walks. It’s a beautiful time of year. I gather elder blossoms from the trees by the canal, I wander down into the marshy ground between the canal and the allotments, declaiming a very Greek text to the vivid English leaves. My boots are muddy. I am a study in exhilaration.

                                                          *            *             *

The show went well. One night in Lancaster and a film to show for it, a film which will form the centrepiece of our attempt to book a tour. I spend the summer running the show every day in my head. Back home in Greece, I run it swimming in the sea, the show’s length perfect for my morning workout – breast stroke out, freestyle back. Soon, I start to stumble, and by the end of the holiday I’ve given up. I’ll learn it again when we have dates. 

Tour booking, it turns out, is more complex than we knew. Months pass, and then more, and then hope appears. Her name is Claire and she’s booking the tour right now. Send her an email.

It’s February 2014, and I’m performing M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A again in less than two months. I'm scared, so I wrote to Stella and got the loveliest response. This morning, I went down to the cellar, opened one of the two suitcases where I keep the show, and took out the script; it’s the first time I’ve seen it since July,

It’s February 2014, and I’m learning M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A.

Keep me honest, willya?

How did you learn all those lines?

                        At least one member of any theatre audience anywhere.

It's a question actors roll their eyes at. Line learning, after all, is basic. Wondering at an actor's ability to learn lines is like being impressed by a football player's ability to kick a moving ball. Sure, for a klutz like me, it would be quite an achievement, but to a professional it's entry level stuff. It's basic, like a chef chopping onions or turning on the gas; stuff that any fool can do if they put their mind to it. This particular fool finds it quite easy; much easier than learning blocking or choreography of any kind. I sweat blood to learn movement scores, getting my left and right and my forward and back thoroughly muddled, and no amount of description can help me find my way through, only repetition. In contrast, words in order don't need much to stick in my memory. In an ordinary rehearsal process I need only to read the scene through a few times in advance, and after a handful of rehearsals I know not only my own lines, but everyone else’s too.

Yes, it’s obnoxious, and yes, it makes me cocky. Recently I was performing a horror story at a literary festival, and changed my mind about which story two days before the gig. I adapted the new story into a 10 minute monologue, which took most of the first day, and spent the second day, performance day, learning. It took me about 5 hours of solid work. I got away with it, because my cockiness is not without foundation - and because the director trusted me, she didn’t panic, at least not visibly. It went well, and people said nice things about the show as a whole, and about my part in it. Still, in those last minutes of silent panic, frantically going over the lines in my head as I waited to start, I thought: This has to change. I used to be well-prepared as a matter of course. I didn’t used to put such strain on the equanimity of directors. When did I get like this? Too many last minute gigs, too many shows still devising the day before tech, too many semi –professional shows with their usual mix of dedication and coasting, too many cabarets, too much seat-of-your-pants-theatre.

I don’t think I can get away with that with M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. It’s sixteen pages long, single-spaced, or about an hour and a half of uninterrupted speech. The  director has asked me to be off book before we start rehearsals in April. She’s right, I know she’s right. But it’s not just cockiness that makes me play chicken with my own memory, it’s also a sort of procrastination that only the sheer terror of an unmovable deadline can pierce. If I were to proceed in the way that’s become my habit, I’d look at my calendar sometime in late March, panic, and spend a week or so cramming the text into my brain all day every day. It would more or less work, it would be okay. But okay is not good enough for M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A, for the show I’ve been working to get made for over a year. I picked a very ambitious text, I’ve translated it as well as I can, I have the good fortune to be working with the best possible people to be doing it with – I’m going to learn it. Properly.

That was what I decided, about a month ago. I set myself the goal of learning two pages a week, a nice, relaxed schedule. Too relaxed; there was no fear to keep me working. And there was life. Life happened, as it does, and brought disappointments and exciting developments and a health crisis among my dearest and nearest, and in short, I do not have eight pages under my belt. I have three. This is not a disaster. There’s still all of March to go. If I learn 3 pages a week, I’ll be in good shape for April.

Good shape! That reminds me, I’d also linked a get-performing-fit resolution to the line-learning schedule. I would time my workouts, my much-needed the-last-time-I-was in-good-shape-for-physical-theatre-was-before-my-son-was-born-and-he’s-eight-years-old-now workouts to fit the lines I knew, so that as I learned more text I would spend longer on my fitness. No, I didn’t do that either. It was a good idea though, right? Right. So I’m doing it, now. And to keep me honest, because something has to, I choose you, oh perusers of this blog

I now know the first 3 pages of M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. By Monday the 4th of March, I’m going to know the first 6 pages. And I’ll be able to engage in some cardiovascular activity (probably that knee-to-opposite-elbow thing that’s used a s a hip warm-up) for as long as it takes me to recite them. I’m going to post here to say so, and in honour of that at-least-one audience member, I’m going to tell you how I did it too.

When do you give up?

Warning: This post contains self-pity and may also contain traces of hyperbole. This post was manufactured in a body that wasn't feeling very well at the time and may derive much of its substance from said indisposition.

When do you give up? When do you say, I'm 41 years old, I started trying to earn a living in theatre in my 30s divorced and with a small child, I have no agent, no producer, no ally, no commission,  no funding, no projects off the ground, no prospects, no hope. I'm lucky to be teaching youth theatre which is fun and rewarding, if emotionally exhausting. I'm lucky that my small town has two semi-professional companies who are talented and nice and a pleasure to work with so I can keep doing shows, and who knows, maybe someday they'll be in a position to pay me something against the costs of childcare. When do you say, I haven't been paid for acting since October (though I did get paid in May for presenting a pervasive game so that almost counts) and I'm tired of paying for casting websites, and I'm tired of  applying for festivals, and I'm tired of traveling to one-off gigs that don't even pay my expenses, and I'm tired of writing shows I don't know how to get produced, and I'm tired of talking to people I hope will help me, and I'm tired of busrsaries for the under-25s and free courses in London, and development support for emerging artists in other regions and other forms; and I'm going to give up. I'm going to hang on to the teaching and the semiprofessional gigs for which I only have to pay childcare and not travel as well, and I'm going to give up on anything more. When do you say that? More to the point, when do I say that? Not yet, but I think it may be soon.


Because I have no agent, because I'm 41 and foreign, my strategy for getting my needy ass on stage has involved writing or adapting shows for me to be in. Last year, I applied to six different festivals with three different short performances I'd written. I didn't get in to any. This year, I've written a full-length verbatim piece and translated a monologue. Both have received very encouraging feedback, the monologue even found itself a director. We had a Development Day. I didn't know what a Development Day was, but it clearly had capital letters. What it turned out to be was me reading the script out to people at a venue, who said, in a way that was difficult to dispute and impossible to resent, that it wasn't for them. Then we spent a few hours working on the text. Then I read it again, much better, to an invited audience of one friend and my mother, who both loved it. Then the director went back to the complex pending project that's taking up most of her time, and I took my script home and started tweeting questions that I hoped might lead me to another venue. They did, or at least to a meeting with another venue. I talked about the monologue to someone I really enjoyed talking to, I left her with a copy. She said she was too busy to read it now, but would get back to me in two weeks; that's tomorrow.

My distress may seem premature. Two weeks rarely means 'exactly 14 days', certainly it doesn't when I say it. And 14 days is tomorrow. And if they do say no, there are other venues, there must be other avenues. It's a great script, and I'd be very good in it. And the other one, the verbatim script, I know how to fix it now, and it's got legs... I just don't know how I'll ever get it to a racetrack. I'm just running out of hope, or faith, or energy, or stick-to-itivness or whatever. I'm tired of pushing boulders up foothills and having them roll down again, tired of hoping to someday try to push one up a mountain. Most of all, I'm tired of doing it alone. Every now and then, I find someone I think might be an ally for a project, who'll believe in it as I do, and we'll be a team. I'm tired of having these alliances fall apart, so tired that I'm not really leaning on either potential ally I have now. Because they have more urgent projects, because I can't promise either of us will get paid, because I don't have a producer's skills and I can't afford to hire someone who does. 



I think I'm assuming the venue will not want my monologue, the Mairoula I wax lyrical about in my previous post. And I still love it, believe in it, I'm still aching to perform it. Properly. With time, and direction, because it needs it, it's not the kind of script I can direct myself in. And I don't know where to take it to next, who to talk to how. I never even wanted to get my scripts produced. I'd have been perfectly happy performing other people's words forever. But if Mairoula doesn't find a home tomorrow, I'll keep trying, somehow, though I don't know how. I haven't given up, not yet. But I've started to wonder when I will.

The Translator And The Actor At Cross-Purposes

I don't know how to write about this. If I'd intended to blog about the process of M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. I should have started months ago, at the beginning. Now I need to think - and by think I mean write- about last night, but I can't start there, or nothing will make any sense. I'll have to start at the beginning after all, and see if I can follow my thoughts to where I stand.

                                                       *                  *                   *

The beginning came courtesy of Phoebe, an old friend in Athens who is a journalist but used to be an actor. She reported for the BBC World Service on Greek theatre's response to the economic crisis, discussing several plays that sounded intriguing. Selfish motives foremost in my mind, I asked if any of them might be suitable for translation and performance in English. She replied that the best thing she'd seen in Athens last year was not notably political, but, come to think of it, it might suit me perfectly. It was Μ.Α.Ι.Ρ.Ο.Y.Λ.Α a one woman show written by Lena Kitsopoulou and performed, to great acclaim, by Maria Protopappa.  I asked another good friend, Maro, who also has a deep knowledge of theatre and excellent taste, though different aesthetic preferences from Phoebe. She too, said the show was very powerful, though she warned me it was full of wordplay and references to Greek culture, that it would be almost impossible to translate.

I had to read it. I contacted Lena, whom I didn't know, with some trepidation, but she was warm and friendly, cheerfully sending me a copy of the performance script. I loved it. It surged off the page with a reckless, flamboyant energy; fascinating, exasperating, as alive as any text I've ever seen. I wrote to her again, being perfectly frank about my near total lack of resources;  nevertheless we agreed easily on the terms by which I could use her work. It's not necessary to like a playwright whose work you're dying to perform, but I like Lena very much. Even if M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. never gets off the ground in English, I'll have had the pleasure of getting to know her a bit.

                                                       *                  *                   *

I'm not going to say I didn't struggle with the translation, because I did to some extent, particularly with a section in the middle that's made up almost entirely of punning acronyms. For this section, I sought, and received help from a mixed group of Greek friends and family, who got me unstuck and on the right track more than once. I also had a wonderful time doing it, and found it much easier than I anticipated. I've worked as a translator on and off, it's a natural occupation for someone brought up bilingual, but I'd translated marketing bumf, academic texts, a coffee table book, never a work of art. I loved translating M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A., it was the most fun I've ever had at my desk. If you're reading this and you know anyone who might need a literary translator - Greek to English- please put us in touch. This isn't really a joke; I could use the work.

I won't talk about the content except in general terms. It's a rip-roaring rollercoaster of a stream of consciousness monologue, whose clever, self-aware protagonist tries to conceal her own truths under a slew of great universals and outrageous jokes, some deft, some clunky, and ends up revealing more than she thinks. It's a lovely play. It's also a play that requires a great performance; something with depth, comic timing, a huge emotional range, nuance, layers. Nothing less could carry it, could even begin to approach the power of the words on the page.
 
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It's also a play that strikes very close to home for me. Like me, the protagonist is an actor in early middle age. Like me she is single, language-obsessed, unhappy - unlike me she is childless. There are so many mistakes to make in the performing of it; melodrama beckons, and glib reliance on the wit of the text, so does a cathartic self-indulgent wallow. Now, I didn't come back to acting, my first love, in my 30's because I was scared of a big, juicy, complex part. And I didn't spend two months translating M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A. to balk at playing her. But neither was I unconscious of the scale of the difficulty, of how very much dedicated character work it was going to take to do it properly, nor stupid enough to try it on my own.

I was going to need a director. Not only a very good one, but one who cared about new writing enough to take on this odd and entirely unknown text from another culture,  and would be willing to entrust the acting to me, an odd and entirely unknown actor from another culture. Fortunately, I knew an excellent director, whom I trusted aesthetically and as a person, and she'd seen me do a short solo piece I was quite proud of. It would serve as an audition. She is Louie Ingham, Associate Artist at The Duke's Theatre in Lancaster, where I live, and recently director of one of the most moving things I'd seen there. I sent her the script. She loved it, we agreed to apply for funding, to try to make it happen. I was thrilled, thrilled and impatient to start. Also slightly incredulous, needing the reassurance of a starting date to believe it was real. But Louie's schedule was packed. The earliest we could start development was mid - May. Rehearsals were unlikely to begin before autumn.

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There I was, with a freshly translated play I was itching to start work on, and no director for weeks or months yet. And there came an invitation to a scratch night, issued by undergraduates at my old university. This, I thought to myself, was a great opportunity to try out  a short extract from the script. Undirected of course. I wouldn't attempt to play the character, just speak the words in a way that made sense to me, to see if my translation actually worked in English, spoken aloud. Even just learning it would help me understand how the words felt in my body, in my mouth. It would allow me to further polish the translation, to make sure it was a dramatic text, not just a literary one. I would have no ego riding on the performance because I would have put very little into it. Just learned the lines, played a bit with word stresses, come up with a bit of business. There was no point in trying to do character work, no point in going into any depth without Louie's guidance and support. It was just text, not acting.

The first indication that I might be deluded came as I re-read the script, looking for a good bit to do, an extract that had a shape to it, that gave some idea of what the play was like, without requiring any of the depths I couldn't yet supply. I chose a couple of bits, read them out a few times, started learning the one that sounded best. And stopped. I couldn't learn it. It was too far along. I'd have to start at the beginning, that's where actors start learning monologues, at the beginning. Fortunately the first two pages were pretty self-contained, almost an overture. I started learning them.  I did redraft as I learned, finding the places that didn't flow out loud, and that was good. I learned it more easily than I've ever learned any text, probably because I'd already broken it down into thoughts in order to translate it, or maybe just because I'd worked on the English words for so long that I already knew them a bit.

                     

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Which brings me to last night, to that scratch night, where I learned that it's one thing to say you don't care about your performance as such, just about speaking the words in English to an audience, and another thing to actually not care about your performance, as such. Don't get me wrong; I held the audience, they laughed in the right places, even got a little bit tense in the right places - a little bit.  The text certainly worked, some decisions about it that had troubled me had clearly succeeded, and my core skills in speaking text didn't fail me. But, it was empty when it should have been full, a husk instead of a ripe fruit. In Mairoula's terminology - the title is both a name and an acronym- a watermelon that was a bit unripe, not very juicy, a bit bleah.

And I hated it. I hated not giving my baby - Lena's baby - the care it deserved. It hurt. It hurt during the performance, and it still hurts. A few years ago, in the depths of an ugly depression, I spent a lot of time being emotionally distant from my young son. I'm better now, and I feel like shit about those times. It's not the same thing of course, but the flavour of that guilt is like the taste in my mind right now, the taste of having betrayed a precious, tender creature in my trust. I betrayed M.A.I.R.O.U.L.A.; not grossly, not irrevocably, but I betrayed it. And it haunts me. I've spent all day writing this just to get to these two paragraphs where I can say: How stupid of me to think I could  not care about the performance, even for the sake of the translation. I may be both translator and actor here, and who knows what else, but I can't be both at the same time. And I know it was a scratch, and presented as a work in progress, and it's not the end of the world. I know. But all the same, I'm ashamed of myself. In my enthusiasm, I volunteered to do that little extract at another couple of events. I'm cancelling those. I'll go through the rest of the text reading aloud, making changes like the ones I made in the first two pages, and that's that. The rest can wait, and I can stand waiting much better than I can stand letting the material down again.