Book Two Chapter Twenty The Twilight of an Actor

Chapter Twenty   The Twilight of an Actor

Introduction

In the first place The Twilight of an Actor existed as nothing more than the poem Such a Short Space of Time. In the winter of '06, I took out certain key portions of an unfinished autobiographical story penned almost certainly in early summer 1999 with the intention of transforming it into a workable piece of writing. This was the original Short Space, and it was intended to evoke the sense of longing and melancholia with which I was afflicted as the decade, century and millennium were all three coming to an unquiet close. It was published at Blogster on the 19th of February 2006. I decided to flesh it out with some background information in the summer, and so the additional prose section of From Lovelives to the Lost Theatre came into being. In December 2007, a “definitive” version of the piece as a whole was published at FaithWriters, and then again with further very minor variations at Blog.co.uk.

From Lovelives to the Lost Theatre

Following my performance as the landlord, as well as all the other male characters, in Jim Cartwright's bitter-sweet two-handed play Two, which I touched on in some detail in The Trials of a Teetotaller, I performed in one final production at the Rose and Crown theatre, the character-driven comedy Lovelives.

Written by the cast, Lovelives consisted of a series of sketches centring on the desperate antics of a group of singletons attending a suburban lonely hearts club.

A great success at the R&C, Lovelives could have been developed into a television play or even series, but sadly, as is all too often the case, a brilliant cast dispersed after the final show.

In late September '95, at the Tristan Bates theatre in central London, I played two parts in a production of Euripides' Iphigeneia in Taurois (sic), directed by a longtime friend who also translated it. These were Pylades, boon companion of one of the main characters, Orestes, and the Messenger.

From January 1996 until the following summer, I served variously as actor, MC, script writer, singer and musician for Street Level, a Christian theatre company based at the Elim Pentecostal church in West Croydon, Surrey. A group of three, we toured several shows around schools in the Croydon/Norwood/Crystal Palace area of South London, and beyond. One of these, Choices, was almost entirely written by me, although it had been based on an idea by the company leader Serena, who also heavily edited it for performance purposes. The kids were astonishingly receptive to our productions, and we were greeted by them with almost uniform enthusiasm and affection.

Towards the end of the summer, Serena asked me to write a large scale project for Street Level. She suggested a contemporary version of John Bunyan's classic allegorical Christian novel The Pilgim's Progress. I duly spent several weeks labouring over the project until it had evolved into an unwieldy epic which while not without artistic merit, was grossly immature in spiritual terms; and quite understandably, it was never produced. I came ultimately to destroy all but a few pages of it, and I don't have any regrets about my decision.

By early 1997 I'd vanished into the anonymity of office life, remaining therein on and off for over three years. However, there was one final acting hurrah from me in the shape of the series of cameos I contributed to a production of the so-called Scottish Play at the Lost Theatre in the formerly working class West London suburb of Fulham in 1998. Despite these being praised by cast and audience members alike, I've barely acted since for a variety of reasons. While I'm still very much open to the possibility of film or television work, the likelihood of my appearing on stage in a play again is remote indeed because simply, the passion to perform in front of a live audience that once raged inside me has long been quieted.

Some months after appearing as Lennox, as well as other minor characters, in the Scottish Play, I wrote the piece featured below, Such a Short Space of Time. As I stated in the introduction, in the first instance it was not a poem but part of an unfinished short story. My parents were on vacation during the period which inspired the piece, which is to say early in the summer of 1999. Hence, I spent a lot of time at their house performing various tasks such as watering my mother's flowers. As well as this, I took sneaky advantage of their absence to transfer some of my old LPs onto cassette, something that my own music system is incapable of doing, unlike theirs. It was an unsettling experience...to listen to songs that, perhaps in the cases of some of them, I had not heard for ten years, or even fifteen, or more, and which evoked with a heart-rending intensity a time when I was filled to the brim with sheer youthful joy of life and undiluted hope for the future. Yet as I did so, it seemed to me that it was only very recently that I'd heard them for the first time, despite the colossal changes brought about not just in my own life, but the lives of all those of my generation since I'd actually done so. Hence, I was confronted at once with the devastating transience of human life, and the devastating effect the passage of time has on all human life...

Such a Short Space of Time

I love...not just those...

I knew back then,

But those...

Who were young

Back then,

But who’ve since

Come to grief, who...

Having soared so high,

Found the

Consequent descent

Too dreadful to bear,

With my past itself,

Which was only

Yesterday,

No...even less time...

A moment ago,

And when I play

Records from 1975,

Soul records,

Glam records,

Progressive records,

Twenty years melt away

Into nothingness...

What is a twenty-year period?

Little more than

A blink of an eye...

How could

Such a short space

Of time

Cause such devastation?