“You go and sit in the darkness, only the beautiful ones get to stand in the light”
I left the stage but I couldn’t make myself sit, I stood still facing away from him.
I knew that if I sat something in me would die forever.
I did not sit, I walked to the door, paused, looked back at him, we locked eyes just for one moment, then I turned away and pushed open the doors. I walked out of the class, out of the school.
I kept walking.
I walked out of Etampes, up the hill beyond the park with the lake, eventually the ground leveled out and I was surrounded by trees.
In this small woodland I lay down on my back in the leaves.
Waves of anguish washed over me. I knew I would rather die than accept a life in the darkness. I knew I’d made some terrible mistake that I couldn’t understand, somewhere I had lost the joy I used to feel every time I stepped on stage.
Time passed. I cried. The tears dried. I became still.
My phone rang, was I going to help set up the chairs for that night’s show?
I was the school janitor, it was my job to prepare the seating.
I walked back. I set up the chairs.
I sat by the entrance, ready to turn off the house lights.
Philippe approached me from the door, looking down at me, he reached out a hand and rested it on my shoulder. I looked up into his eyes and saw something vast, his love for art, failure, the stage, for his students, for me. I felt profound tenderness, and a sense arose that he understood me, what it all meant for me. A half smile crossed his face and he gave the slightest nod of his head. I took a breath and half smiled back. He walked off to his chair.
I turned off the house lights and watched the others perform.
***
It was only years later that realised the offer he had made.
That he knew how much was at play for me, as I stood there after another failed exercise, that he saw a point where he could push and maybe I’d open up, respond as I really was in that moment: desperate to save my life, unwilling to act as I was told, needing more than I could ever get.
he wanted me to play with the stakes as high as they needed to be, my soul on the line, because those were the only stakes that make the game of melodrama playable.
But I wasn’t ready to play. I had fallen into shame that would take me years to climb out of. I wasn’t able to share my joy, to sell it with a smile that went all the way through. Instead I felt wretched.
***
I had arrived the first time at the school, quite by accident with just the right mindset for his way of working: I was bored of myself.
Tired of my little games on stage, of the version I chose to share. I knew a bunch of tricks for being liked and likeable, getting laughs or reactions. It’s perfect because what Philippe absolutely hated was exactly these kinds of stingy masks, these false little characters that people hide behind.
I had this smile, it was a gimmick I used when I performed, I would smile while I thought about trying to encapsulate the ridiculousness of pretending to greet an audience nonchalantly, it made the smile a bit odd, it always got a little laugh when I used it in my solo work. I kept doing it because it worked, but it became more and more of a shorthand, more like practiced patter.
The first week in class I tried out my little smile during an exercise. I thought: lets see if he likes this, I know it has worked in the past, so maybe it’s good enough for him…
BANG, his drum fills the room completely.
“Stooopppp!”
HIs eyes are screwed tight, he jabs the drumstick in my direction
“You! Don’t you dare smile like this again in my school! Disgusting little smile!”
He grimaces at the memory of my smile.
“You smile like this: you leave. You leave my school, I kick you out. Boh, this fucking smile is awful, awful!”
He adopts a sickly sweet face and tone
“Is clear little one? You smile, you leave, you never come back.”
“It’s clear”
Fucking brilliant, I was sick of that crappy little smile, of that whole half hearted way of being partly me on stage. I knew I was in the right place, I knew I wanted to throw everything into the bin and set the bin on fire. Turns out that was just the most perfect attitude I could have had and I lucked into it.
Whatever inauthentic shit you turned up with he’d tell you to get rid of it in the most playfully vicious way.
Philippe could see people on stage more perfectly than anyone else I have ever met. It was like he could see not just what they were but what they could be.
What he saw when each student stepped on stage was the impossible beauty they would play with if they were free, a presence that audiences would pay anything to witness. He saw all this potential and then he saw how you actually were in class and it offended him how ugly we chose to be, how false and small and safe and boring.
I knew too that I loved every second I got to play for an audience and I wanted to spend my whole life performing, creating and telling stories, playing. I wanted to be there for them, I hardly even existed, I wasn’t much interested in myself.
But that was about to change.
I did well those first 3 months, he even told me I was good a few times, I got my version of Agemmenon’s speech into the final show that term. I was first up, springing from the floor to audition in front of the year group. I played with savage joy. Afterwards he said:
“This bastard, going first, fuck him you think, he does this and now I have to follow. It was good, no? We see some spirit. What happened Ed? Are you ill? Bah is good, very good. Is in the show. Next”
High praise indeed but I turned it into a trap.
I threw away all my old shit and found something beautiful. I had found something good. oh dear.
oh dear, i developed a taste for being good.
Suddenly I wanted things on stage, I wasn’t just there playing for the audience. I wanted things for myself. I wanted praise, I wanted love, I wanted approval.
oh dear.
But there’s no trick to being good, there’s only throwing everything away each time, walking on stage with delightful uncertainty and finding how to play each night, each second.
But I didn’t see that then, all I wanted was to be good,
The ugliest curse of all.
Acting is a children’s game played with pleasure.
If a child plays for their own joy, there is nothing more beautiful.
If a child plays for someone else’s approval it gets ugly fast.
When I returned to the school a year later all I wanted was to be good and to hold on to what I had found the first time around. And this is exactly the worst, most painful attitude to bring.
“We see the will of a wanker who wants to be good. You sit.”
It was 9 months of hell. I couldn’t step on stage without wanting to be good and it made me bad, and it got worse and worse and it never got better the whole time I was there.
The worse I was the more I wanted to be good the worse I got, round and round in an ever tightening spiral of misery.
But even in this hell of my own creation I found little moments that would guide me in the 15 years that have followed.
When I played purely for my partner in a scene, wanting only to be generous and caring towards them, forgetting myself. I was accidentally beautiful.
When I finally followed Philippe’s instruction to just do my clown passage as quickly as possible and get off the stage, losing all self consciousness I found the perfect timing of my clown. The rolling peels of laughter from the audience, that I could play like an instrument I had known since birth, cleaning up splattered shaving foam pies with my hair. I was accidentally funny.
When I directed a short scene just to be useful to the other two performers, serving their timing, ideas, and their natural playfulness. Even Philippe laughed at them chatting away in a shopping trolley. I was accidentally insightful.
***
So now where am I?
I’ve transmuted my shame into guilt and understanding, my inner critic is more often a useful editor these days, I’ve mostly let go of wanting to be good, embracing my own stupidity and foolishness.
Last week I was with a performer in the rehearsal room, putting games inside their text, it worked as beautifully as it ever does.
Next week I’ll be sat as an outside eye watching a dancer in their final rehearsals. Being present each moment doing my best to see her as fully as Philippe saw us, with love and hope. Making myself useful in service of art.
So if I could return to that moment where I refused to sit, now I would be able to play, to speak, be honest, alive, curious, uncertain, open. I could handle those stakes with joy.
As it was for just one moment, that pause, that look back and turning away, walking out of the school and into the whole life I have lived since then, I found a moment of pure melodrama.
Thank you Philippe for all you have given me.