Why I Love The Theatre

I remember being in a corridor of my aunt's one-bedroom flat in North London, when I was about 6, pretending to be several people at once, playing a scene I had been improvising for at least an hour on my own to an imaginary audience. When I was a little older, in my school playground one of my teachers was trying to get rid of me (I was an irritating child) by asking me to pretend to be a statue while she went on her way. According to her, when she came back I was still frozen in the pose I had assumed some time before. When I was 13, I was cast as Othello, which was performed as part of the Shakespeare Schools Festival at the Stratford Theatre, East London. When I was 15, I went on my first trip to the National Theatre: Henry V with Adrian Lester playing the lead. Ever since my teens, I've been hooked. While the other boys were talking about football and girls, I was writing plays and bunking off PE lessons to buy tickets to shows at the National. With the help of my teacher, mentor and friend Jo, I performed in at least one show every year - be it play, cabaret or even playing characters as part of the school open days.

I became obsessed. Too poor to go to the theatre every week (and also getting into trouble for missing lessons), I started to research and watch performances by celebrated actors long since dead. Michael Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, Richard Burton, and their Lord Laurence Olivier; all of them became my heroes, alongside modern actors such as Chiwetel Ejiofor, David Tennant, Alan Rickman, and Sirs Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi. Theatre spilled into a love for radio plays on BBC Radio 4, which I listened to with a religious fervour far surpassing that of my grandmother. I read plays in between lessons, I helped Jo run the Drama after-school club, and I even wrote and performed an hour-and-a-half-long radio play, which probably wasn't any good, but that didn't matter: I had found my vocation, and I would stick to it.

I took an A-level in Drama and Theatre Studies (an experience which very nearly put me off the theatre for good), and then came to university with only one extra-curricular activity in mind: join the Drama Society. Since then, I have performed in four on-campus plays, taken one to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival on behalf of the society, produced one play, and directed another. Although I didn't personally get involved in any drama activity in Madrid (which I now hugely regret), I still studied Spanish and Latin American drama - especially from the 20th Century - and went to see as much as I could, all the while missing being on stage myself. Now, having returned, I've thrown myself back into it by being cast in two plays - one an independent show being performed in a theatre-pub in Brighton, the other a pre-recorded role in a campus performance. In December, I will be applying for Acting courses at five of the UK's leading Drama Schools, and depending on whether any of them take me, I will soon embark on my professional journey. I don't want fame;  I just want to work.

Whenever I speak to people who knew me as a child, they say I was always performing. Why did the Theatre capture me so much? Because it was the first place I saw everything. I may seem obvious and a little pretentious to say it, but Life and the Theatre are inextricably linked. Despite the clear distinction between everyday life and a play, an audience will connect with the actors in front of them in a way which is not reproduced in any other manner. Even outside of what may be considered conventional Drama, the Theatre is there in front of us. If we watch a football match or attend a conference or concert, the crowd, or audience and players, or performers work with each other to produce a form of mass hysteria. Sometimes this can cause amazing effects and influence the way we think and feel. There is no difference between the feeling one might have watching his country lose at the World Cup final and the end of a Tragedy. The only difference is what he is watching.

Entertainment has always evolved and sometimes died out. We don't watch bear-baiting (unless Simon Cowell counts), but people will still flock to a West End or small town theatre to watch some strangers pretend to be other people and play out their lives: their fears, their routines, their prejudices, their desires, and - most importantly - their potential. Because that is what the Theatre is about. Actors may get the credit, Directors may have great visions, Set Designers and Choreographers may contribute to the aesthetic beauty of their art, but the Theatre brings out and celebrates our potential. Intellectuals have said so since the beginnings of civilisation. The Theatre only serves to prove this to us.

That is why I love the Theatre.

Photo - The Royal National Theatre, on London's South Bank