Tango is a difficult play; and Stomil is a testing role, made more so by the fact that he's out of my natural playing range. As an actor I am being challenged to organise a smorgasbord of different genres/playing styles within the same characterisation. There is the overwhelming challenge of drawing a coherent artistic balance from realism, tragedy, comedic, tragicomic, political satire, comedy-of-menace, absurdism, surrealism, avant-garde, poetry, farcical, heavy philosophical, Freudian psychology, meta-theatre, symbolist, a critique of aesthetics and East European politics using the paradigm of family dysfunction... Aaaghh!!! ...Over-load!!!.... Does not compute!!! (Cue sound of brains exploding!)

These individual forms are fine in themselves, and are playable- well, of course they are; and even in an unusual combination of maybe two or three of these the drama might be highly engaging and original. But ALL of them at the same time??? In my view this play asks too much, even of a sophisticated post-modern audience like us. It's a mess; like blancmange, Irish stew, marmite, chicken kiev, chocolate AND sardines all served up to us on the same plate. The audience just can't feel comfortable enough to be able to laugh because they are being preached at by Mrozek, and in a chaotic, unfocused fashion. And the ideas are not clear enough, interesting or relevant enough to really engage them meaningfully on an intellectual level.

And I don't think old Mrozek actually likes the audience very much. When Stomil's character complains that the theatre pre-1900 was bourgeois Mrozek seems to be implying it is tantamount to philistinism to dismiss his own 'modern' play (i.e. "Tango") for its anti-bourgeois message.

Personally, I think Tango is the Polish emperor's new clothes: a clumsy and over-long piece of writing- far too disordered and anarchic to lay claim to being a great play. Stomil character is by turns likeable, repulsive, touching, grotesque, human, unpredictable, predictable, contradictory, ambivalent, brave, cowardly, complex, simple. A mess. Such a mish-mish does not so much encourage a-musement, so much as be-musement.

Ultimately farce really requires simplicity. The audience gets bored eventually. There's far too much preaching from Arthur, from Stomil, from Eugene. Hence the yawns we are hearing from the auditorium. The pomposity of three male egos drowning in a sea of clever rhetoric is not a joke that is easily sustained over 21/2 hours. There is no dramatic tension in those over-long speeches. The audience opt out, and they begin to subconsciously criticise themselves for not being clever enough to understand why they have stopped laughing. They judge themselves as stupid for preferring the slapstick and the knock-about commedia to the clever-clever political satire and rarefied philosophical speechifying that comes to dominate the second half of the play.

To satirise the male characters for their pomposity is a fine joke but Mrozek flogs it to death- literally! By the time Arthur eventually drops down dead the audience have long since stopped caring. It doesn't help that the rich satirical metaphors to do with post-war Polish politics in the play are more or less lost on the 21st century Scottish audience. And after all why should they care?! For what, in the end, is the play's message? ...Err, that discussion and debate is pointless when society can so easily be usurped by a thug with a pistol.

In my experience it is usually the actor gets blamed before the director does (-Because Tango is nominally billed as a hysterical farce, and should therefore be an audience-pleaser, and certainly NOT an alienating experience!), or even the writer for those long gaps where the laughs dry up. After all, isn't Mrozek meant to be 'a living genius', Marta Mari an experienced Polish director who understands Mrozek. ...And we actors? Well, we're just amateurs.

But the jokes fall flat because the momentum and structure of the piece does not sufficiently prepare the audience for the confusing barrage of conflicting objectives, genres and ideas. We poor performers have to sweat hard for those laughs.

Comic farce, metatheatrical aesthetics and political philosophy (-And me!) are not happy bedfellows!

The Actor's Need for Praise

I haven't been able to write here for a little while because I was feeling so deeply uninspired rehearsing Tango. And then just when I had begun to resign myself to the idea that my passion for acting was inexplicably spiralling down the plughole I realised at last night's rehearsal what had been the problem. It was that I hadn't getting any praise or positive reinforcement, and my ego was slowly wasting away from lack of strokes. It was only after Marta , for the first time in 4 weeks praised my timing in a couple big scenes in Tango that I felt a surge of enthusiasm for the work returning, at least substantial enough to inspire me to want to learn my lines properly! I'd been feeling so creatively enervated these last few weeks I'd thought it was because I was 47 and tired after 30 or more years of treading the boards, that the play was crap, that I was miscast, etc... Instead it was merely my bruised and neglected ego suffering from attention deficit. Well, how shallow am I! Of course, if I think about it, I always see a massive improvement in attitude with the pupils I teach, and actors I direct, whenever I single them out for commendation, but even I, at my advanced age, with all my expereince I likewise need to feel I am worthy of some affirmation. Marta it seems is another one of those directors, like so many with whom I have worked, -especially at the Ramshorn for some reason, who simply concentrate on the folk who are falling short of the directorial vision, and who fail to reward those who are doing a good job with the praise they need to properly excel. Thank God for positive notes! I am resolved to give more positive encouragement to my students and to the cast of future productions that I am directing.