Translator: Maria Pericleous Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
Exactly five years ago
I was in Damascus.
A very different Damascus to what it is today.
I was at the Festival of Mediterranean Theatre
and we were presenting an American play.
It was a monologue by Neil LaBute
called "Iphigenia in Orem".
This play
was in English,
and very few people in the audience could speak English.
So they were reading French and Arabic supertitles.
It was presented at the Damascus Opera House
and it was certainly the largest audience I had presented that monologue to.
Now during this 45-minute speech
the man I was portraying was confessing
to a stranger in a hotel room that he had killed his infant child
because he believed that such a tragedy
would prevent him from being fired at work.
It was one of those shows where
you could hear a pin drop in the audience.
At the end of the show,
all the team, we were receiving the usual congratulations
at a festival or after the show
but there was one man, an old man
with white hair and very blue, pale blue eyes,
he came to me,
he obviously didn't speak English,
and he shook my hand,
and was just staring at me.
He didn't have to say anything.
I don't know what exactly it is
that the show told him,
but
it was one of those cases where,
much like a Harold Pinter pause,
what was not not said, was much more powerful.
The silence during that handshake is one that I distinctly remember.
It was a spectacular proof to me
that an actor is a vessel through which a story is told.
The most thrilling aspect of creating on stage
is the relationship between you and your audience.
I am always asked what it is that drove me into theatre
and I am never exactly sure what the answer is.
But I remember examples,
examples of art that had an impact on me.
Whether I was a child, a student
or already an actor.
Works of art
that captured me so completely
and made me an immensely excited audience member.
Salvador Dalí's
stork-legged elephants and melting clocks
had set my teenage imagination on fire.
Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in the film "The Hours",
telling her husband at the train station:
"You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard".
Comedy legend Dame Edna Everage
interviewing Little Britain's David Walliams and Matt Lucas
on television, had me laughing so hard
I had to pause and rewind several times
in the 10-minute interview
and it was already the 20th time I was watching that.
When I saw "Cabaret" at the West End in London
I had a frozen sensation at the end.
There were big block letters
CABARET being dropped on stage, one after the other,
sounding like gunshots
and the dancers got naked and suddenly it was silent,
and snowing.
And the world of a nightclub
had turned into a concentration camp.
Now that, at the very end of the show
had me and the audience jumping up for a standing ovation.
In the film "Dangerous Liaisons", one of my favourite films ever,
the final fight between Valmont and Merteuil
had me glued onto the screen,
and i will never forget the delivery by Glenn Close
on the line: "Remember, I am better at this than you are".
I dare say I may have used that line in occasional arguments with friends.
(Laughter)
In his poem "Grey", Constantinos Kavafis looks at a grey precious stone
and he remembers the eyes of a past lover.
The poem ends with the verse
"And, Memory, all you can of this love of mine
Whatever you can bring back to me tonight."
Until today, whenever I read that poem in its entirety,
I never manage to finish it without crying in the end.
What these artists have shown me and keep showing me,
is that there is no corner of the room,
no part of the day, no item in front of us,
no image in our head, no thought in our brain,
that does not have the potential to grow into a work of art.
But the work of art is not the end-product.
The journey doesn't stop at the work of art.
The poem, the painting, the story, the show, the song,
they will, in turn, create more sparks of energy,
in the receiver, the readers, the listeners, the viewers,
the spectators, the audience.
A few years ago I directed "Shirley Valentine" by Willy Russell.
This is a monologue in two acts,
whereby Shirley talks to her kitchen wall in the first act,
and in the second act she talks to a beach rock.
She needs an audience
and obviously her husband is not a very good audience.
She admits to herself that, during that summer
when she went for a holiday to a Greek island,
she did have an uplifting romance that saved her spirits.
It wasn't with a funny Greek man that was flirting with her,
she says: "The only holiday romance that I've had is with myself".
Shirley Valentine discovered who she was and who she wasn't.
Around 1940, Dimitris Psathas created a very funny character.
At least three generations of the entire Greek population on the planet
adore this character to this day,
to the point where her name has been passed on to our everyday language,
meaning a very specific type of woman,
Madam Sousou.
As I am now in rehearsals for this play,
I am amazed by how this period comedy-drama
of the 1940s could very easily, without changing anything,
be a dramatization of contemporary society in 2015.
A story of a bunch of characters with which an audience fully identifies,
70 years after it was written.
Now, I had the honour of playing Valmont in the stage play,
by Christopher Hampton, "Les Liaisons Dangereuses",
who is the same author who wrote the film and won an Oscar for it,
this was about 10 years ago,
and it is one of my favourite stage roles to this day.
He is a villain, he is ruthless,
he spreads misery for his own entertainment.
And yet we see a softer side.
His Achilles heel, his human nature.
As an actor, I had to justify his malicious line of thinking,
and the clash inside him between vice and virtue
was what had inspired me as a reader of the text, originally.
In reality this ying-yang of good and evil
is borrowed from life, it's inside everyone,
and by everyone I mean every member of every audience.
A couple of years ago
I directed a dramatized poetry night for the great Kavafis.
I decided, I daresay quite bravely,
that I was going to be the one to read the poem "Grey" at the end of the show,
there wasn't a single performance when I didn't cry,
but I felt that those tears were part of the homage to the poet,
to a poet that touches the reader
with a simple and short description
of thoughts inside an empty room.
I didn't feel I was so much a character on stage,
but a person in the audience,
celebrating with the audience the genius of the poet.
So we arrive at a very interesting proposition.
There is no art without the receiver.
There is a very simple and very famous philosophical question:
"If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one around,
does it make a sound?"
Since sound is created inside the ear canal,
we have an existential conundrum:
if there is no ear around to capture it, is there a sound at all?
Similarly, do we have art without the audience?
It has been a dozen years I have been creating theatre productions
and I believe that there is no art of theatre
in the absence of an audience.
I can rehearse as long as I like,
I can delve deep and double deep into my character portrayal,
but there is no theatre if there is no one sitting opposite.
Conversely I may not rehearse at all, but if I were to present a play on stage,
to an audience, there would be theatre.
So, by definition,
it is not the work that goes in that makes it theatre,
it is the relationship between artist and audience,
at a specific place and time that makes the magic of theatre.
The magic of live performance.
Whether it is brilliant or appalling theatre,
the artist needs the audience, so that art exists.
So how can we describe
this relationship between artist and audience?
Well, in a very simple verb in the English language,
I would say ,"Sharing".
And how familiar is this word today?
In fact in the last few years,
sharing is not just a verb, it is a concept,
in fact it has become a tool, thanks to social media.
Throughout our day, we have an audience.
We share a post on Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram,
a joke at the dinner table,
we share a problem with a colleague at work,
we make introductions with a stranger,
a phone call,
all these situations every day
involve sharing a piece of yourself with an audience.
And we do want to make a good impression.
We are not opposite a judging committee,
we will not get marked, it is not a competition.
But we do want to get the dinner guests to laugh.
We want the colleague to be intrigued by our story,
we want the stranger to smile after making our acquaintance.
We appreciate those "likes" and "thumbs up"
and we are definitely dreading the "thumbs down",
that are about to be introduced.
So when we share our work, our problems,
our thoughts, our photographs,
we are very keen on a happy audience.
An intrigued audience, an inspired audience.
So what can improve the quality of our sharing?
In the novel by Robert Percy
"Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance"
the author is in search of the true meaning
of quality with a capital "Q"
and I will never forget a four-word sentence
he uses for his protagonist who is striving for quality.
A very basic, primal rule:
"He has to care".
In one of his most recent interviews, Barry Humphries, who is now over 80,
he is the man under the famous purple wig of comedy legend Dame Edna,
he said the simplest thing
about his 60-year international comedy success:
"I decided
that the best thing to talk about
is what you know about."
Can we really share anything that is not ours?
We always say "choose your audience",
"know your audience",
but I feel that that is only dealing with one side of the relationship.
I have come to realise
that the most important part of you and your audience
is You.
Thank you.
(Applause)