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.

Tango by Slawomir Mrozek

I'm preparing for tomorrow's first read-through at the Ramshorn Theatre of Tango, in which I have been cast as Stomil-an avant garde experimental theatre artist. It is very rare for me to be asked to play comedy, and although this play happens to be an esoteric, absurdist piece from Poland (dealing with weighty themes such as Formalism, chaos, ethical/social entropy within a dysfunctional family), it is- well, in a nominal sense at least- a farce, and will hopefully provide me with an unusual opportunity to be funny, anarchic and- for once- playful! Of course this gig is non-professional, but it will also provide me with a chance to demonstrate my wares to prospective agents, having been summarily dumped by West End Management at the weekend (Apparently my drama teaching commitments 'conflict with my availablity for professional acting work').

I've been wrestling with my Life Purpose of late, doubtless fuelled by Hollywood acting coach Bernard Hiller's 3-day "Success in Acting" workshop in Edinburgh last weekend. That experience was an epic wake-up tsunami for the 20 of us who signed up for it, and challenged each one of us to confront our fears and blocks and to ask ourselves deep questions about where we were on our artistic/career/soul paths, and why we appeared to be squandering our God-given talents by remaining in Scotland. Harsh, exacting questions- yet highly apposite ones!

Now I've never really harboured any genuine ambition to be famous, but I do still intend to be the very best actor I can be, to work with the very best. Despite Glasgow being a lovely place to live, it isn't by any stretch of the imagination the epicentre of acting excellence. And Bernie was quite uncompromising on this issue... He urged on us that if you are genuinely serious then you will be prepared to make all the requisite sacrifices, and go wherever in the world the opportunities happened to be in order to fulfil your vision. For him this happened to be the Hollywood hills, although I think for me it would have to be London, or New York i.e. where the best theatre is. The principle still holds though. Bernie did some private coaching with me on the last evening, and encouraged me to think big, and "stop coasting", suggesting that I was utilising just 60% of my true potential. I needed to be pushed to do much more, he said. Like Karen says I am really just "a big fish in a small pond", and I've got lazy.

And the bastard was right, goddamn it. I do need to be pushed harder in order to go further- both as an artist and as a professional. He offered me a job teaching alongside him when he comes to Glasgow next time, which would at least give me the chance to work with better students than the teenage kids I teach at present. (Back to school on Monday :-( )

Flattering as this offer was, I will have to think about whether this is really what I want to do. I live to act, for that is where my talent lies. Of course I can direct, I can teach, I can write, but acting is my truest and most abiding love. So just how much am I prepared to give up in order to remain faithful to my dream?