The theatre year is slowly grinding into gear, and the hot tickets are starting to warm up. Will you be able to snaffle one for McKellen’s Lear in the West End, or Alan Bennett’s new show ‘Allelujah!’ at the Bridge? Maybe you already have a treasured Upper Circle vertigo seat for ‘Hamilton’ burning a hole in your safety deposit box.
Personally, the show I’m most excited about this year is the Royal Shakespeare Company’s forthcoming production of ‘Macbeth’, with the wonderful Christopher Eccleston in the title role and Niamh Cusack as Lady M. To coin a phrase, it’s going to be fantastic (one for the Whovians amongst you there). But, if Mr Eccleston himself is to be believed, it nearly didn’t happen at all. In a recent interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, he claimed that he has always felt snubbed by the Shakespearean theatrical establishment because of his Lancashire accent, and is only playing the Scottish King because he wrote to the artistic director of the RSC, Gregory Doran:
“I wrote an old-fashioned letter to him and I said, ‘Since I was 17 I’ve always wanted to play Macbeth at the Royal Shakespeare Company, so can I do it?’… I’m never offered Shakespeare…”
Good for you Mr Eccleston, I say. There are many lovely things about this – it’s great that he isn’t above asking for work, great too that he has finally achieved a childhood ambition, but I think what delights me most is that he actually got out the Basildon Bond and his trusty Rollerball and put pen to paper. He didn’t WhatsApp Gregory Doran, he didn’t PM him, he didn’t even send him a text, he wrote an actual letter, put a stamp on it and walked to the post box.
It would be nice to believe there was something to be learnt from Christopher. How lovely it would be if we could suddenly hurl our clogs into the machines and go all analogue again; perhaps this news will revive the fortunes of the fountain pen industry and the Post Office in one fell swoop, as scores of millennials put aside their ‘devices’, take up their quills and start firing off inky missives to the great and the good of the theatre world. After all, it’s a lot easier to find out where to post a letter to Gregory Doran and his ilk than it might be to find their personal email addresses, so it certainly feels like you’re breaking through the defences.
The truth, of course, is that Christopher Eccleston could probably have scratched his request on a brick and lobbed it through the window of the RSC canteen and it would have had the same effect. Basically, with that one letter he was offering the RSC the centrepiece of its 2018 season, all wrapped up with a ribbon. But if you’re not of the same calibre as Christopher, I wonder if even the most beautifully handwritten note would have had quite the same degree of success. I have my doubts, even if you’re not aiming for the title role.
For years I would spend ages in the art galleries of the provinces, selecting the most appropriate postcards to send off to casting directors, inviting them to first nights and trying my best to seem eminently employable. So hard to choose – would Kay Magson prefer a nice Degas or a bit of Klimt? A Hockney or a Pollock for John Hubbard? So much effort, so much hope – until one day I heard a casting director at a seminar being asked what irritated her most from actors, and her reply was, ‘Getting all those bloody postcards!’ So that put an end to that.
And did any of those letters and postcards ever actually work anyway? Can a message from one humble, non-famous, non-former-Doctor-Who-type actor amongst tens of thousands of others really make a difference? Does any email actually penetrate the filters, any one tweet really ping out above the tidal wave of others?
There’s just so much communication these days, I don’t know how anyone gets noticed without having to resort to the outrageous or illegal. There’s always the Terry Gilliam approach, of course – famously, when Universal Pictures tried to sit on his masterpiece, ‘Brazil’ in the U.S., Gilliam took out a whole page of the trade newspaper Variety to write a letter to the studio head, Sid Sheinberg:
I have often fantasised about talking out my own full-page ad in The Stage, although I’m not quite sure what I’d say. Something assertive and confident would be good, perhaps:
But that sounds vaguely threatening… I wouldn’t want to upset anyone…. Maybe this would be safer:
But really, letter-writing is just a waste of ink, isn’t it? We actors all know that it makes no difference, nobody really reads them, they just go straight in the recycling. The problem is, however, we also tell ourselves that ‘you never know, my letter might just land on their desk on the right day’ – and there it is again, a shot of that most addictive of all drugs – hope. Well, it worked for Christopher Eccleston, didn’t it?
Dear Michelle Terry…
The Actor's Advocate 