Running with it
January 19, 2012
Let's talk about Amie. And the hopes and chances for a young actor in the business today. The one never undiminished, and the other for ever contracting. I watched Jessica Raine the other night - she was the pretty young woman with whom my character became improperly enamoured in an episode of Garrow's Law - I watched her delightful and sensitive performance in Call the Midwife. Jessica's blessed fates seem to be enabling her to hoover up all the best roles for a woman of her age and type. But in her shadow is a legion of hopeful and clever young women on whom fate is not smiling so.
Amie Burns Walker is a talented young lady whose beneficent fates have brought her the chance of a start at the RSC. Her drama school contemporaries must think she is a lucky girl. But there is always a degree to which one makes one's own luck in this chancy trade, and it was Amie's proactive approach to the RSC casting department that got her into the frame. And now she has uncountable opportunities to learn and develop her skills here. I'm already watching her throw caution to the winds and take the risks that will truly flex her talent. What a great boost to a nascent career!
I come from an earlier genus of actor - one now almost extinct - that had so many more opportunities to set a career in motion. When I started in the business every sizeable town had a theatre that would run a whole season of plays with a single company of actors. There was so much work available in the provinces that our union could even stipulate a provisional apprenticeship of forty weeks in provincial theatre before one was eligible to work in television or the West End. It seems unthinkable now. Young actors all over the country had unrivalled opportunities to play comedy, tragedy, farces, thrillers, classics, musicals, pantomime, new writing... a pace and range of work that just has no equal today. Well, those heady days are past. Where an actor of my age had a chance to be in, perhaps, fifty full-on and various theatre productions in the first three years of a career, an actor of similar age today would be rare and lucky to get above single figures in that time.
All the more reason for Amie to relish this wonderful opportunity to watch and listen, to work with some of the best and most proficient directors, to play understudied roles in front of a full and paying audience. It's wonderful to watch that relish in her as she takes her chance and runs with it.
(The What Country Friends is This? plays are; The Tempest, Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors, and are part of the RSC's World Shakespeare Festival)
by Nick Day
| 1 comment
Share this