I could have been anything. Doctor, fireman, semi-professional pig-wrangler – you name it. Had I half a mind, I could have hosted of Celebrity Splash, even if it rendered me overqualified. Life, by its very nature, is full of unexplored opportunities; roads less travelled because fate’s GPS system has seen fit to take you elsewhere. But of all the things I could have been, there is one road less travelled that has more lanes than any other and stretches tantalizingly over the horizon. I could have been an actor.
I could have been anything. Doctor, fireman, semi-professional pig-wrangler – you name it. Had I half a mind, I could have hosted of Celebrity Splash, even if it rendered me overqualified. Life, by its very nature, is full of unexplored opportunities; roads less travelled because fate’s GPS system has seen fit to take you elsewhere. But of all the things I could have been, there is one road less travelled that has more lanes than any other and stretches tantalizingly over the horizon. I could have been an actor.
There are lots of different techniques when it comes to acting. There’s the Lee Strasberg Actor’s Studio Method in which you exploit every ounce of trauma you ever experienced, channeling it into your performance. Then there’s the ‘keep still, move your lips and try not to fall over’ approach so often deployed by models seeking to become actors. Neither appealed. Instead, I invented my own brand of acting, relying on costumes that were deceptively simple, yet allowed me to create complex characters of a kind all too rarely seen on our stages. There is no better example of my astounding technique than my first performance in a Shakespeare play.
Let’s face it, by the mid 1980s Shakespeare was in a whole lot of trouble. His plays struggled to resonate with an audience hungry for theatre so long as it was composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber and, if possible, performed on roller-skates. Hamlet has a lot going for it, but there are precious few musical numbers, to say nothing of a near-phobic absence of skates. As a result, the works of the English language’s greatest playwright were in danger of being lost forever. Someone needed to step in. I simply hadn’t expected that someone to be me.
My high school decided to do a production of Macbeth. This, it must be said, is the equivalent of your local tennis club deciding to build an unmanned spacecraft in order to launch its own satellite or the Rotary club declaring that it intends to start drilling for oil in the supermarket car park. Ambitious is an understatement. Undeterred by the complexity of the work and the potential for disaster, auditions were conducted in the school hall. Mostly, the older kids tried out for the plum roles. Being in year 8, even I knew the odds were against my being given the title job, but I could never have expected the theatrical bounty that was about to come my way.
Shakespeare was responsible for a great many memorable characters. Othello, King Lear and many others I presently can’t recall, will never be forgotten. Some, however, are tragically underrated. But amongst a plethora of underappreciated roles, there are none so hopelessly overlooked as the role of Fleance.
The problems start with the name. Who, in their right mind, would ever call a child ‘Fleance’? It sounds like something your dog gets. It certainly doesn’t strike me as very Scottish. None of the Bay City Rollers were called ‘Fleance’. Granted, it would be a wonderful thing had teenage girls in the 1970s gone crazy for Les, Derek, Woody and Fleance, but it was not to be. For those not familiar with him, Fleance is the son of Banquo and only has two lines in the whole thing before escaping whilst his father (*spoiler alert!*) is brutally murdered. With so little to work with, I clearly had a major challenge on my hands.
1985 was the age of acid wash and it was clear that to bring Fleance to life, I would need a costume. For some reason, I had always associated Shakespearean characters with tights. But tights leave little to the imagination and, quite frankly, seem an unlikely choice for eleventh century Scotland. You can’t, on the one hand, be a paranoid regicidal tyrant and, on the other, look like you’re on the way back from an aerobics class. No matter, having grown up in Tyabb, the idea of donning a pair of tights, even if it was to perform Shakespeare, was simply too much for me.
Instead, I devised a costume that enabled me to do so much more than inhabit the role, but to become Fleance himself. At the heart of my sartorially led transformation was my decision to borrow my father’s brown tracksuit pants. They had seen better days, mostly on the weekends, but were structurally sound. I thought they were ideal for the role in that they were brown. I felt as though brown would have been very popular in eleventh century Scotland. To complete my transformation from 13-year-old student to Shakespearean actor, I also wore gumboots. My metamorphosis was complete.
It’s fair to say that the performance was revelatory. Critics used to seeing try-hards attempt to breath life into the works of the Bard had their minds well and truly blown by the sight of Fleance in gumboots. The combination of Shakespeare’s dazzling prose and pants with an elasticized waist helped drag Macbeth into the Twentieth Century. I could have continued, I guess. Hamlet in ugg boots, The Merchant of Venice in a poncho. But I didn’t want to get carried away. The most important thing about acting is knowing exactly when to leave the stage.