Actor's dream
February 28, 2012
Would you like to hear about the Actor's Dream? No, I don't mean to win an Oscar; I mean the kind of dream that is close to a nightmare that is regularly dreamed in various forms by lots of actors as their sleeping brains sort out the fears and anxieties as a testing performance approaches.
Here is what I dreamed last night: I'm on stage with David Rintoul. (Why David? I've no idea. He's working with another RSC company at the moment, on tour) It's the opening scene of the play and I have absolutely no idea of any of my lines at any point. I roughly know the story; we are two academics and he's off to another university teaching post or something and I am telling him he shouldn't do it. I flounder around on stage, conscious that I'm not moving the plot on as I should, and that the audience are getting restive. Thank goodness another actor enters, an old friend of mine called Tim.
The scene changes and the company are in a sort of café. I ask if someone has a script, which turns out to be printed as the first page of an old broadsheet newspaper. I begin to study the script looking for my part and my lines and, with mounting terror, don't recognise anything in this text at all. There is laughter. Somebody had handed me the script of a different play as a joke. They hand me the correct play. Somebody reminds me of my character's name: Bokarka.
The scene changes. We are in a dressing room. Tim remonstrates with me for not giving him his cue to enter last night. I explain that I couldn't remember what it was but I was trying to busk the story as best I could. I am lying down. Another actor is kneeling or standing over me doing a complicated make-up such that I cannot get up. I want to check my script but it is out of reach. With rising panic I eventually ask somebody to hand it to me. It is now in book form. I turn to the opening scene, and again don't recognise anything in it as the scene I am in. Then I remember that we cut a few opening scenes and that the first scene in our play is not the first scene of the script. But I can't remember what we cut and have to ask for help.
Now the scene changes to a rehearsal. We reach the point of an actress' entrance and she isn't there. Nobody knows where she is, but somebody says she was ill yesterday. The First Assistant Director (we don't have them in theatre), a tall bearded man, walks through the actors with a fat felt-tip pen and writes 'Rain' in big letters on a green board close to where I am standing. The dream morphs into me trying to steady my boat with a line that another actor is handing to me through the hatch, and I soon wake up to a glorious dawn sky.
Phew!
by Nick Day
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