Blank

I blanked several times on Saturday during my first two performances of Angel. And when I think back on the day my mind goes blank again. Not because I have forgotten how the day went, but because my emotions are mixed - pride, relief, anger. excitement - and my usual response to any strong emotion is to bury it deep in my psyche. Emotions are essential on stage, but in real life they get in the way. They use up energy and make you think, do and say things that you later regret. Good emotions seldom last and bad emotions hurt; it's better to put them aside and focus on and enjoy the intellectual side of life.

Let me lay the pop psychology aside and turn to what actually happened on Saturday. The good news is that we all, actors, director and assistant turned up when expected. Performances started more or less on time and were completed without major disaster. The audiences for all six shows were small but appreciative. We made money and are on course to cover our costs. An agent saw me perform and told me he wants me on his books.

The bad news is that all the performances could have been better - and each of us performed less well in the second show than in the first. The silver lining is that each was aware of his own faults and  hyper-critical of his own performance. The saving grace is that the audiences on the whole liked us - and not just friends who would naturally be supportive.

I was actually pleased with my first performance - despite the fact that at one point I had to say "I'm terribly sorry, I've blanked" and wait for Emma to prompt me. Angel is a very intense work and I thought I balanced well the relief and the tension, the lighter and the darker moments. I felt the emotions more keenly than I ever had in rehearsal and I thought my expressions and movements clean and effective. After my bow, however, I managed to completely destroy the good impression I had given. Idiot that I am - my left leg is still sore after hours of my right foot kicking it - instead of going off stage at that moment, my mind blanked again and I switched into producer mode, shifting furniture around on set (that's Angel in the picture) while the audience sat wondering whether the show had finished. (My anger with myself returns as I write this...)

My second performance was a disaster. I had spent eleven hours in various modes - actor, tech, stage manager, front of house, friend, writer - and was tired and headachy. Just before curtain up Emma gave me the notes from my first appearance and went on and on and on with more comments than she had ever given after any rehearsal, giving me the impression that what I - and the audience I had talked to afterwards - had thought was a relative success, was a failure. I tried to take in what she was saying  but couldn't focused. Then, as I was waiting in the wings, front of house told me that the agents who were there to see me weren't in the audience and he couldn't find them, so, in the costume of a priest, I had to go and find them myself. My mood well and truly deflated, it was not surprising that the performance I then gave was flat, lifeless, slow and inappropriate. At the end I came off the stage and swore angrily at myself and the whole production. Again, there was a silver lining - the audience seemed to like it and the agent told me that if I could fulfil certain conditions, he would hire me immediately - but I know very well that my acting in those 40 minutes was close to appalling.

It was our own fault. By taking over the theatre for the day and putting on so many performances, we - particularly I, as producer, actor, front of house - had taken on too much, which meant that our core task of acting suffered.

Yet despite all the glitches I am convinced that we produced a series of one-man plays which are absorbing and deserve to be seen again. Barry Clarke is thoughtful and moving in Ben and Joe's and any criticism he and I might have of his performances on Saturday were minor and rightly unnoticed by the audience. Chris Annus recognises that A Sense of Loss requires more work to bring out the full extent of its subtle emotions. And I know from experience that I can move Angel from being a fair-to-good performance to one which truly grips the audience. This is not the end of these plays but the beginning.

Which means that now that I have had time to rest, my residual emotion is optimism. Bookings for next Saturday, our final performances, including Robin Holden in Los Feliz (who, I wrote earlier on this blog, is excellent) are looking good. We started not badly. I think we're going to do very well. Come see for yourselves.