Riding Lights

With the beginning of the holidays at the end of July there is the opportunity for the artistic soul to enrol on creative summer courses. Schools are increasingly finding it difficult to carve out sufficient time in the academic year for extra-curricula plays and concerts, so a residential course in the performing arts elsewhere, can be a really important milestone in a child’s education not to mention an adult’s. Our younger daughter Katy (12), a budding violinist, went to Suffolk for a chamber-music course for string players with Pro-Corda, and our elder daughter Charlotte joined my mother and myself for The Riding Lights Theatre School which takes place in Yorkshire every year. Riding Lights was founded by three graduates in the late seventies. It grew out of the life and mission of St. Michael le Belfrey’s Church presenting punchy, comic sketches on the streets of York and beyond. Since then it has evolved into a highly respected company with its own theatre in the city and a theatre-in-education troupe, Roughshod, who take shows into schools and prisons throughout the year. The summer school is arguably the highpoint of the company’s year as they host around 120 students from 14 to 80 plus who have enrolled on one of the various drama courses on offer. My mother who is 81 was the eldest person this year and like me she had signed up for the “Behind the Lines” course which looks at the crafty art of playwriting. We had also come to perform the one-act play about Christina Rossetti begun on the course the previous year by my friend and colleague Simon Machin. Charlotte had opted for the Riding Lights Express course in which a small group of 14-18 year olds perform an abridged version of a classic text. This year it was to be “Murder in the Cathedral” by T.S. Eliot which dramatizes the martyrdom of Thomas a Beckett using a chorus of women in the style of a Greek Tragedy. So there were three generations of my family at the school and I had a strong sense of things being passed down the line. I’m sure my mother felt it more profoundly still. However, she had not really performed on the stage since her mid-sixties when she brought her excellent career to a premature close somewhat ingloriously by appearing in the “Mousetrap” in the West End. She was as I suggested in an earlier chapter very nervous about playing the poet Christina Rossetti in Simon’s new play “Poison in the Blood,” despite my attempts to defuse the pressure by reminding her it was really just to show-case Simon’s work. The trouble is of course, live performance is, well, live and dangerous and if you freeze or forget your lines there are no safety nets unlike in films were you can simply start again. Some of the greatest actors of the age have fled from stage-work unable to cope with the intense vulnerability of being under the spotlight. The actor has to bare their soul in public and express intense feelings on stage in a way which seems natural and unforced. This ideally require the performer to be very centred and relaxed in spite of the pressure to please the sea of faces peering through the darkness at the brightly lit stage. This is one of the many tough paradoxes for the actor which has taxed practitioners and drama theorists from Stanislavski to the brilliant Polish director Grotowski throughout the last century. Oscars and Oliviers are awarded to a lucky few each year who manage this art with particular flair and integrity on the bigger stages or screens throughout the profession. My mother never won a ‘gong’ in her half a century on the stage, but she has always won praise from critics, colleagues and audiences whether delivering the witty dialogue of Noel Coward or identifying with one of Arthur Miller’s tragic stage characters in plays such as Death of a Salesman.” Acting is certainly a craft one has to work at, but it is first and foremost a gift from God. My mother knew she wanted to act well before she had heard of Stanislavski at RADA. when she felt the force of Joan of Arc’s passionate speeches as a school girl and knew she had found her vocation. Seventy years later she performed the dying poet Rossetti with the same intensity and moved the audience to tears at the Tom Stoppard Theatre in Pocklington. It was a pleasure to share the stage with her. A few days later Charlotte shone through on the same stage in her play and perhaps she will follow her grandmother into the theatre. The best actors must learn to become extremely vulnerable, both in rehearsal and performance, if they are to profoundly touch their audience. Grotowski saw his actors as a kind of priest and understood their performance to be a form of religious sacrifice. The vocations of both priest and performer demand no less than everything over a life-time if they are to be followed with integrity. Neither calling should be heeded lightly although this is easily forgotten in our celebrity culture. I think my mother discovered the truth of this all over again this summer.