Saturday afternoon theatre trip

Yesterday afternoon Louise and I went to see the Mamet play, A Life in the Theatre, starring Patrick Stewart and Joshua Jackson.

First, both Patrick Stewart and Joshua Jackson get almost all of their kit off at several points throughout the play. I can reliably report back that Patrick Stewart most definitely still has it going on while Joshua Jackson has shed the Dawson’s Creek puppy fat and is sporting a very respectable six pack.

Now I've got the primary reason I went to see the play out of the way...

I think David Mamet is an awesome talent. In my career I have been lucky enough to meet some very famous people and yet there are few who have acually floored me (although Jack Nicholson was a close call). But if I was, let's say, at dinner with David Mamet at the table I would definitely be quieter than my normal self. He probably knows the acting profession in all its guises better than most and he has written or adapted several of my favourite plays or movies including Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Speed-The-Plow and the movies Hannibal and State & Main (which he also directed).

A Life in the Theatre is a two man set piece about two actors, one younger and one older, both working in an unnamed theatre production in New York. We see them interacting both behind the scenes and actually "on-stage" in various skits involving amusing costume changes. We are told very little about the play. In fact most of the scenes seem intentionally random and entirely different from the previous one - a scene from WW1 trenches, a modern hospital operating theatre, a private detectives office. It's the botched lines, unreliable stage hands and missed cues that make up most of the play's guffaws. At one point Patrick Stewart's character's character is waiting for a phone to ring and it doesn't so he picks it up and says "I told you not to interrupt me with any calls!" at which point the phone starts ringing. It’s a silly joke – the kind of thing that French & Saunders would do – but it is deeply funny when an actor of the stature of Patrick Stewart is pretending to fluff his cues and lines.

After I settled into the play the first thing that began to annoy me was that I was being told very little about these characters lives off of the stage, but after a while it became evident to me that that was not really relevant to the story. Because while, on the surface, the play seems to be just an amusing pastiche on the life of the "real" working actor - the type that literally spends a life in the theatre - it is actually about what it is these types of people are made up of. So while you don't get the character's back history, you do get to see their insecurities, paranoias, foibles, etc, in all their raw glory.

Anyway, when I got home I did a Google search on Mamet and I found this quote from him. I think it sums up the play much better than I can here:

"A life in the theatre. That is what acting is. Doing the play for the audience. The rest is just practice. And I see that the life of the academy, the graduate school, the studio, while charming and comfortable, are as removed from the life (and the job) of the actor as aerobics are from boxing..."

Now I would be lying if I said that I really enjoyed the experience. I actually did enjoy the play. What I didn't enjoy was that our seats were all the way up in the upper circle and the incline was very, very steep. This, coupled with the fact that I am not good with indoor heights (to the point that I practically have to crouch on the floor and shuffle to get to my chair), made me feel very on edge (literally and figuratively) the whole time.

But that's the price you pay for £15 tickets.