John Wood - How I Clawed My Way to the Middle

It is strange to me that so many people like to listen to so many other people talk about the theatre. There are those who talk for large fees or give it away at small dinner parties... You are there, you are good in the theatre, you have written or directed or acted or designed just because you have and there is little that you can or should be certain about because almost everything in the theatre contradicts something else.

That was written by the playwright Lillian Hellman in her wonderful book Pentimento in 1973. Its a book I commend to anyone with an interest in the arts or things theatrical. Hellman wrote several Broadway theatre hits, and shes a far better writer than me.

According to the inscription in my copy of Pentimento , I must have first read this in 1977, not so long after it was written. I was turning thirty-one, married with two children, and had been a jobbing professional actor for six years or so. Ive now been a jobbing professional actor for half a century, and in recent years have frequently returned to this wisdom from Hellman for perspective particularly since Ive been tasked with writing a memoir.

I have been asked to write a memoir before, but every time I start to do anything about it I very quickly lose interest in the subject of myself, more than the subject of theatre. As Hellman has noted, theatre and theatricals seem to be infinitely interesting. I, on the other hand, am not.

How I Clawed My Way to the Middle may sound ironic, given the national success I seem to have had as an actor, but I think the middle really is as far as I got, and where Ive stayed. I guess the upper rungs, which I never scaled, might be the West End, Broadway or Hollywood. Or even a decent Australian movie. But would success in any of those places have been a leg up? And if so, to where?

In the end I chose it as a title because its very bloody funny. I had contemplated the equally apt Moth Holes in My History. The line I went with I owe to Ron Challinor, one of the funniest men Ive known throughout my rather bizarre career.

Bizarre because its been rather unexpected, and totally accidental. I have always understood theatre to be ephemeral; here today, gone tomorrow. And I really mean gone. Except for the bad reviews they remain like the smell of decomposing... But the shows themselves? Vanished. Completely gone.

Australian theatre has always been a very different beast to that of Broadway or the West End. A somewhat runny-nosed poor cousin that feels it ought to be hidden away from its relatives; the great Australian inferiority complex. But even the most famous stage actors from the golden eras of Broadway and the West End live on only in the memory of the last still-living person who saw them perform. Given the vagaries of ancient memories, those people may not even remember that they remember. And after all, it was only a play. Maybe not even a good one.

A performance on film by a great actor may flicker briefly before fading. Often theyre brought back into existence today on television, but that only renders them even more insubstantial, grainy and unwatchable than they ever were.

I am at my most comfortable performing on stage. However old and crappy I am off stage, Im always re-energised when I walk onto the stage of a full theatre. My entire being takes on an awareness and lightness it doesnt possess in daily life. The rheumatoid arthritis doesnt hurt. Even though Im partially deaf these days, in those moments I can hear every sniffle, cough, whisper or unwrapping of lollies; every softly creeping stagehand, the stage manager cueing lighting.

All right, not all the time. But on occasion it really has been like that. I love it when it happens. There is a sensation of oneness, of you and the audience taking the same breath and gently exhaling. You are mutually dependent: the same communal, communicating, communing beast. Theatre, in fact. It must be what heroin is like for an addict. And you go searching for the next hit.

Reading Hellmans thoughts on Sir Tyrone Guthrie, a man Id known and worked with her descriptions of him in another place and another time, in a different hemisphere on the other side of the planet showed me that I lived in the same dimension. I sort of shared the same air as the people they both knew; they were no longer just flickering, silvery images, but actual living, breathing people, sharing the same world as me. And the same industry.

For the most part Ive enjoyed, even adored my life in... I was about to say art, but I suspect that acting is more of a craft. I doubt it can be taught like needlework, but in some cases that could only be helpful.

I apologise for being such a lovey in descriptions that follow of people Ive known and loved, and I apologise to the many Ive left out. Unlike Hellman, Ive always loved being around theatre people. On stage is where I feel most alive, engaged and sure of my place in the world. Not a great CV for real life, I suspect.

Nowadays I derive most of that pleasure from being in the presence of my grandchildren; Im of an age where I can give them what I was never able to give their parents: time and attention.

INFLUENCES

Trying to write this book has set me thinking (as you would expect it to) about my parents and their place in my life, among other things. They were hugely important and so it must be for every child on the planet. Which makes me so little different from anybody else that its a mystery why Im even attempting an autobiography. Did I say that? A brief memoir. Of sorts. Very brief.

Why bother? What have I got that nobody else has? Im reminded of an Emily Dickinson poem about a frog ribbiting away, broadcasting its life story:

How dreary to be Somebody!