Turning Point

In the first week of Drama School we were asked to think about a particular experience of watching a film or play which made us realise that we wanted to act, or which made us more aware of our desire. The piece could be about any point in our lives, but the only stipulation was that we were watching the work and not acting in it ourselves. It didn’t take me long to think of my Turning Point, and I thought I’d share it with you in a slightly edited version.

While I was studying for my GCSEs, I would bunk off from PE class on Thursday morning to go to the National Theatre at 7am and queue for day seats. It was the only opportunity for me to go to the theatre and see a play. I could never afford the advertised prices and no one in my family was remotely interested in culture or the arts to encourage me. At school, I had already built up a reputation of being someone with “talent” insofar as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy could be, and although this was a useful tool to prevent being bullied, I was still lonely and had few close friends. I hated PE because I was never any good at sports, and was just generally a lazy person. So I would bunk off the classes and found that going to the theatre had a double reward of getting out of school and having something to look forward to in the evening.

On one of these occasions, I queued for Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, with the intention of taking a friend. I had never heard of McDonagh before, or of any of his plays. All I knew about this one was that it was new writing and the short description written in the season brochure: “a fiction writer living in a police state is interrogated about the gruesome content of his short stories, and their similarities to a number of bizarre child murders occurring in his town.” I was also intrigued by the cast: Jim Broadbent, David Tennant, Nigel Lindsay and Adam Godley. I knew of the former two actors, but I was most interested in seeing something which had had very little prior exposure. For me at that time new writing was an adventure, an experiment with less certainty and far more risk; like a safer and more exciting form of gambling. On this occasion, the bet paid off.

The play was an incredible experience. For two hours, I completely forgot about myself and was sucked into the world of the play. The production was stunning both visually and conceptually, the text seemed flawless, and the performances from each member of the cast were superb. In later years, I would be proud to boast of having seen and known of David Tennant’s talent long before the majority of the country knew him in Doctor Who. At times the play was a mystery thriller; at times a comedy; at times it was meta-theatrical; and at times it was intensely tragic. I recently described the experience as feeling as though a large hand had burst from the stage and grabbed me by the neck, dragging me from one emotional experience to another. The play dealt with some extremely dark themes and ideas, but it was done in such a way as to make me feel both safe and sickened at the same time. I had never before had a viewing experience like it.

Ever since my first visit to the theatre, I knew I wanted to be a stage actor. There was never any question of doing anything else. At times, however, I found it difficult to see the theatre as anything other than a place to escape the mundanity of normal life, an extra-curricular pursuit which some people were lucky or enterprising enough to make money from. I never saw it as a real, living, organic and dangerous place which had the ability to really capture people. I had never been made conscious of its impact before seeing The Pillowman. It was a turning point not simply for intensifying my desire to act, but it also made me aware of how dark the human experience could be and to recognise that every aspect of our existence could be used for theatrical exploration. I began to see the world very differently. It may sound odd in words, but after watching the play I felt more conscious of being alive. Over the years I’ve come to believe that life is theatre and that theatre is the expression of human experience. In hindsight, I think that going to watch this play was the seeding of this belief.