A week of bedrest

After a full week in Dublin, we finally get to drop our props, discard our scripts and come home.

London has never before been so enticing nor welcoming - the jam packed underground, the high-octane pace of the nine-to-fivers commuters, the teenagers loitering, the drunks carousing, the tired mothers pushing their prams wearily calling along the other three or four kids in tow and amidst all this bustle I am grinning zanily because I am finally back at the place I have called home for the past five years. People take no notice of me, because that is a Londoner's trademark - exchange eye contact with no one.

The thick curd of makeup finally removed and my face is relishing the bracing cold wind as winter shows no sign of abating. My suitcase is unpacked and I have resisted the temptation of burning every item that I have spent the last seven weeks wearing. The boyfriend, far more domesticated than me, has put it all in the wash. I am adorned in my favourite purple onesie, striped hat, spreadeagled on the sofa with the cat on my lap.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven"  William Wordsworth

Now don't get me wrong, I love my work. You only have to digest the last four blogs to get that message loud and clear. But - a week of sleep. A whole week of being able to drop my head onto the pillow and waking up at a normal hour without adrenaline coursing through my veins, the shaky hands, the constant replays of each night's performances drumming through my brain at an alarming pace. Despite the show becoming almost routine, the ritual of getting to sleep each night has been almost as arduous and exhausting as the performance itself. You shouldn't have to try hard to fall asleep when you're tired.

A week of normal meals. A cooked meal. Using an oven or a hob. A knife and a chopping board. A pan or good heavens - a wok! Going into the local supermarket was truly like walking into Selfridges with an ex boyfriend's credit card. Or opening presents on Christmas Day. A most bewildering comparison - for I have not been trundling through the Sahara or walking the North Pole. Only eating ready cooked meals and sandwiches for the past seven weeks.

After four days, my boyfriend Alex has finally coerced me out of the house. It is 3 o'clock in the afternoon and I have just eaten my breakfast. We jump onto the bus and slip into Shoreditch, delightfully empty of those pretentious toffs that normally frequent it. We push into a pub and order Coronas. The barman takes my order without question - without asking me to repeat it (for us English sound so foreign to the Irish...or just me) or informing me which poet, author, playwright, famous person used to frequent the place. I need a break from the Irish jollity. Two Coronas, straight up, cash in hand. Job done.

An hour or so later, I'm blessed when two of my girlfriends turn up to catch up on the news. It's wonderful to see them - everything familiar draws me like a moth to a flame and I stare rapt at the same two friends - the duffel coat my friend always wears with the scruffy boots, the red lipstick and smart work clothes of my other friend. They excitedly ask me about the play and I cast their questions off wanting to know more about the latest gossip: who has kissed who, how our team is playing (we all play rugby), is everybody happy. Has everyone missed me? Typical attention seeker.

Then two or three Coronas later, I suddenly find myself lost. Not drunk. Lost. Everything is exactly the same as I left it. And whilst I am still savouring it like all those old creature comforts, it suddenly finds me feeling unsettled - like it doesn't make a difference whether I'm here nor there. Life has gone on.

I had a long conversation with Alex about this bout of insecurity on the way back. I felt really disrespectful - unappreciative, because I was so grateful and happy that my friends had come to join us and yet feeling this slight sense of resentment that all these things had happened without me being there. I felt displaced. Like I wasn't a part of it anymore. I needed to be on stage, doing my job and cajoling the audience into the story, making them love or hate my character. I wasn't needed in London.

He said some good things - not the things I wanted to hear, but the things that would make me think more about what all these feelings of insecurity really meant. One of the reasons why I love him.

And I realise I am incredibly lucky. You sort of always know this - happy family, great friends, good job, have money etc etc - but it gets thrown around like a cliche - it sort of floats beneath the surface of everyday life like a sturdy round comfortable cushion on your backside. We all undervalue it and we all wish we didn't - because it's wrong.

I work in an industry where you are expected to be able to drop everything you are doing at any given time. Us actors seem to spend our lives waiting for this. New parts to play, new experiences - the world is constantly revolving and you with it. And I embrace these changes - they're hard sometimes and I can be homesick. They're hard sometimes and I can feel incredibly low about myself - what am I doing here, why did I think I could be an actress? But the more corners and bends in our lives - the better people we are for it, challenging ourselves and adjusting. I become a better actress too. And at the end of all that acting ruckus, wherever we might be, I get to go home and devour this sense of the familiar. Savour London. Cherish friends and family. And whenever I go away again, I go with their best wishes. I can't berate them for continuing to live in my absence.

A week of bedrest has done me good. I've slept well, ate well, seen my friends, the boyfriend and am ready to face the play with a new sense of vigour. And I have found a new sense of peace - everything I have in my life will be here, not necessarily waiting for me, but even better - welcoming me, when I come back. And in the meantime - I will live, live, live life to the full and relish every wonderful sensation that comes with doing the job I love. Even if our next tour stop is the darkest depths of Wales.

The family circus hits Dublin

"A happy family is but an earlier heaven" George Bernard Shaw

Last week I talked about the futility of trying to keep the performance of 'Translations' the same. That in my exhaustion lay the very premise that I could no longer hold onto a concrete emotion if it was repeated night after night.

A short summary of 800 words or so in my last blog.

It is now Friday night and the pubs in Dublin, all 1,000 of them, have closed for Good Friday. Dublin is now like a ghost town - eerily quiet and the weather came to serve this purpose as snow has been sprinkling down on the city all day. The streets are empty except for the tourists and the taxi drivers, and those in the know who have gathered at O'Connell Street station to buy a one-way ticket to nowhere. For Madigan's Bar at O'Connell Street station is one of the only licensed pubs to sell alcohol on Good Friday and in order to buy an alcoholic beverage, you have to purchase an inter-county train ticket.

My family are in town. And surprisingly, they are not cooped up at Madigan's drinking Guinness. Instead they are sitting but 50 yards from me, encamped in the second row of the Gaiety Theatre waiting for me to come on stage. And the opening night nerves are back.

My family consists of my mum and dad, my 24 year old Antonia and twins Robbie and Sabrina who are 17 years old. My childhood was made up of haystacks, green fields, obstacle courses, a menagerie of animals and a lively chaotic home. My father in the kitchen cooking up a storm, my brother hitting a tennis ball outside, Sabrina encamped on the sofa and mum simultaneously doing the ironing whilst reprimanding her for not doing her homework. Antonia and I bickering away at each other, childishly but equally persistent in having the last word. Like Owen in Translations says "What's that smell this place has always had?", family and home immediately bring a sense of the familiar and yet a million juxtaposed memories come to the fore. Time and place incongruent but the essence always the same. A fiercely proud and protective bunch we are - and after six weeks we are together again.

When I was born deaf, the doctors told my parents that I would never be able to speak. My parents were told firmly that I would need to be sent away from a young age to a school for the deaf and that all my family and friends would have to learn sign language as a means of communicating to me. This was the appropriate response of the medical industry in the 1980s. But I was my mum and dad's first child - and this was far from the perfection one automatically expects with a newborn baby.

My mum fainted.

But, the moment they left the hospital with that news, their response to the doctors was a resounding no. They didn't follow the road that the experts had laid out so rationally. My mum would leave her job and teach me how to talk. I would go to a mainstream primary school, I would have hearing friends, I would have the life that they envisioned for me deaf or not deaf. No easy feat. And now after 27 years, it is possible to recognise that as a streak of stubbornness, denial and resistance to conformity so inherent in our family's genetic makeup as much as a show of brave resistance. 

Teaching me to speak was painful. I was finally fitted with big hearing aids at the age of 4. My mum began the battle of teaching me to recognise that sound could be created and that it meant something. The kettle boiling, my father laughing, the knock on the front door. That these funny warblings that came out of people's mouths with these red lips moving unfathomably were a code for communication. That if you put two and two together, the code was cracked and you could understand them. It's entirely a logical premise.

But if the average person has a vocabulary of 2000 words, and every syllable enunciated and articulated has to be pieced together into a word - let alone a sentence, both my mother and I had a very steep hill to climb.

I can speak. I can speak more fluently than my parents even dreamed of. I've been able to follow my goals, ambitions, dreams - most of them, little hindered by my deafness. And whilst in the acting world, my voice is not perfect, I am carving a successful career for myself. And now with my first theatre role under my belt, my family are here tonight to witness that hard work and investment they made in me, the whole of my life. As our director often likes to say "No pressure".

There is an unforced irony that I'm playing a character who discovers her voice. Sarah, who doesn't speak until her love for Manus pours out of the woodwork, is impelled to speak a whole sentence for the first time. This cyclical nature of my mum watching her deaf daughter play a character who is trying to discover her voice is difficult to ignore. So I can't help but wonder what her response to the play will be. Suddenly I find an untapped emotion in this fear that it might bring back painful memories for her. I am desperate for them to be proud, not of me as their daughter, sister, for that is redundant, but of me in my transformation to a professional actress. It's never mattered so much.

The nerves which had finally started to subside have regurgitated again. The Pink Floyd are playing, the caffeine is kicking in and I am safely locked in my dressing room manifesting all sorts of distractions to prevent the sense of dread washing over me, that my family are lurking only a few feet away in the second row of the theatre. For who could be a more important audience?

I hope that at the end of the show, my mum will be able to turn to me and say "Genevieve, you've made it." And then we can all go and drink Guinness and count our blessings.

To Act...the Truth?

It's Week Three now of this tour of 'Translations', or Week Six if you count the rehearsal process of being locked down in the studio in the Millennium Forum, Derry. We are now in Dublin, performing at one of its most historic, prided theatres, the Gaiety.

Tiredness overwashes me now; a permanent slumber where I cannot tell half the time whether I am sleeping or awake, except when I am live on stage in front of a full-out audience each night. Mid-afternoon matinees, evening performances that run on until close to midnight, the pressure to perform and maintain character, energy, the soul of the play, the big picture, consistency - we are all high wired to keep small clogs in our brain ticking over steadfastly whilst our bodies disintegrate from the sheer energy asked of us. Small clogs that get tweaked again and again when we adjust to new spaces, new auditoriums to project voices, technical apparatus, cultures, cities which all ask something different of this crew and cast of 'Translations' to breathe new life into the play.

I mentioned to a few of you that I had the honour and privilege to meet the playwright of 'Translations' Brian Friel during the first week of tour. Brian Friel, only considered one of the greatest living playwrights of this century. Those standard cliches - "spine-chilling", "quaking in my boots", "mouth-dropping" don't even begin to sum up that unexpected moment of sheer delight and clarity when you are congratulated by the man himself for producing a beautiful performance. The stoic but shaky handgrip, we giggled (can an old man be described as giggling?) over our equally appalling lack of hearing and compared our hearing aids. An unavoidable constant blush (mine). It was a moment when I felt very blessed to be alive.

Last night, the President of Ireland - Michael Higgins, came to visit the show. And we were all asked to stay behind back stage after the performance. Having not grown up in Ireland, this didn't immediately dawn upon me as hugely significant - "What is he, like, is he the equivalent of the Prime Minister?"

"No, he's more like the Queen."

The realisation that I was meeting someone considered royalty was quite a shock and there was suddenly this sense of trepidation about that night's performance.

That night's performance was a success - if it's fair to base it upon the volume of the audience's reactions and applause and we all stood in the wings, waiting for the screen to come down and for the President of Ireland to join us on stage with his entourage. Cameras flashing, zany grins, a mirror image projected overawedness whilst inner me is battled with the exhausting duo of euphoria and tiredness.

Actors all describe acting differently, but, on a simple, mainstream level, one could consider it to be the ability to manifest emotions and actions which are not real. This fascinates me, because in my eyes it seems a closer definition to the talent of artifice.

For me, acting is bringing life to a character by connecting with them in a way that makes it true for both you and for the part you play. It is the opposite of artifice. For me, the depth of a performance and the ability for the audience to connect to you, comes from it being truth. You are Sarah and Sarah is you. You are not pretending to be Sarah. You are, quite simply, her. In other words, acting is not false.

But after seventeen shows with another twenty five or so to go, it's very difficult to maintain that sense of realism without altering your 'natural' reactions. Otherwise the performance becomes stale and unconvincing - for the audience and actors alike.

One only needs to look at the etymology of the word "act" - which derives from the Latin word Actus - "an impulse" and Agere - "to do, stir up", from the root Ag "to draw out, to move" to see the truth in this.

Therefore, it doesn't seem surprising that we have to draw on a lot of inner strength to continue to react authentically to the same piece each night. That the real task that lies behind an actor is to trust themselves to submit to the unpredictable and yet stay intrinsic to the character. To be true to their real natures and not submit to the histrionics of performance. To simply be.

"Simplicity is beauty and beauty is simplicity, nothing more, nothing less" Oscar Wilde 

It does seem ironic, as an actress, that I find myself agreeing with Mr Oscar Wilde.

On the Road

"And we're off! Now we're really started, nothing will stop you now, nothing in the wide world." (Manus to Sarah, 'Translations')

Last week, I talked about the big step into the unknown. We kicked off with opening night in Derry last Wednesday and so far, we've been blessed with good reviews. That frightening (and ultimately unavoidable) travel onto stage last week has so far reaped wonderful things. The adrenaline which keeps me awake at night, the buzz and energy one constantly feeds off from the audience, the need to keep a straight face when the audience erupts in laughter, the hugs backstage, the curtain call, the frantic and harried concentration required at a constant pace morning, afternoon and evening. It's all a massive massive headrush. It's addictive and when at the height of a rollercoaster, you want to hold onto every sensation and thrill for as long as you possibly can.

Not every actor feels this way. And certainly some of the more established actors I have the privilege to be surrounded by restrain from emoting quite on this scale. It's finding a balance between bringing the energy to the performance and galloping a horse at full pace until it runs out of steam. It's holding a little part of yourself back from becoming bosom buddies with every member of cast and crew. It's picking and choosing your moments, time with the director, feeling your way slowly around difficult parts of the script. Pitching your voice at 80% not blasting away at 100% full volume. The former seems far more sensible than the latter. And it's a learning curve I'm benefiting from - observing the old and the new. But there's this unavoidable anarchy that you simply have to throw yourself into when you go on your first professional tour, drinking (not literally) in every fiber of existence, a zest for new places and new experiences. Forgive me for sounding naff...but it is what it is and I am antithetic to avoid it whilst it's here. 

So now we're in Cork. Cork is a strange place, known as the 'rebel city' and it shows - a bizarre confluence of buildings from every historical period one can name, suggesting a resistance to change meant no singular trend or influence ever made a permanent mark on this city. Narrow Victorian cobblestone streets, Georgian townhouses mixed with medieval Cathedrals and startlingly bright modern shops and restaurants pasted along the River Lee. A hodgepodge which resonates with a strange harmony, and one which Corkonians take a peculiar pride in. 

I berated myself slightly when I left Derry that I had not really made much effort to explore its culture - the museums, galleries, the city walls. But when I was sitting on the train, I realised that I had experienced it in its best and truest essence - simply by sitting in the cafes, walking around, taking that moment to just stop and breathe - take it all in. I am loathe to try and describe a place in its entirety because in my opinion museums, galleries, art, writings can only ever bring to life one aspect, one experience of a place. No matter how we try to bring it together, the sum of all parts can never truly be expressed. 

The essence of a place, an experience, is one I try to hold onto. I have no talent for remembering specifics...my best friend at school has this incredible gift of recollecting daft ideas, embarrassing episodes from the days we were young and I often envy her this talent to repeat words and stories verbatim. But I cherish this staying power of essence, scents and perfumes that I can constantly draw on for comfort and motivation when life feels rather cold and bleak. 

I'm a stranger in this eclectic city...and yes, I am surrounded by fantastic people - cast and crew and I am riding that rollercoaster with full steam but I can't but help missing the familiarity of home. Home comforts, family. Those essences so familiar and repeated forward and backwards, inside and out all of our lives. The road can be a lonely place and I guess that's why people clamour for routines and stability, the same social circles. Change is to many, a frightening thing. Home is a safe place. 

On the road, I treasure the opportunity to reflect on home, family and friends and how much they all mean to me. Sometimes one can't see a good thing even when it's staring at you in the face. And a few hundred miles away, on tour with 'Translations' - I am blessed with the best of both worlds - knowing where my heart belongs and living my dream. And I will not shy away from immersing myself in the experience.

"I took the road less travelled by and that has made all the difference" (Robert Frost) 

The Rituals of Opening Night

Tonight is opening night for Brian Friel's Translations directed by Adrian Dunbar at the Millennium Forum, Derry. Playing the part of Sarah, this is the first time I have stepped on stage in front of a live audience in ten years.

Building nerves contained only by a combination of caffeine, Pink Floyd and hiding myself away in the dressing room. A renewed focus on that book I was meant to finish a year ago.

A rather bespectacled, spotty teenager at the time, school plays were all about popularity, glamour and whose embarrassing parents were going to be sitting in the front row. The vociferous grandma with the noisy hearing aid, the young mother with the bawling baby who whispers apologies but still doesn't leave the hall, those annoying prepubescent girls from Year 9, the bright lights, the huddle in the common room/dressing room teamed with a high five, the shushed giggles, the ridiculous amounts of make up - a teenager's makeup AND with the dramatic pat of stage makeup and you can just begin to imagine the carnage. You know, as well as I do, that the small, awkward stage at the local secondary school is as big and overwhelming to a small pupil as the auditorium I am stepping out onto tonight. No matter how big or small, old or young, amateur or professional, it feels like the real thing.

Some of you will remember me talking about my love for acting in the blog I wrote for the BBC back in 2010. That hasn't changed - the standing in front of a camera, gripped by a sense of character and lifted by this transformation of the script into a real life entity - what a privilege to be alive and here in this moment! But somehow launching my theatre career after all this time has created a stumbling block for me. I am crippled once more with the fright and insecurity that I encountered ten years ago.

Deafness and an aspiring actress doth not make a happy conjugation. It was my drama teacher encouraging me to audition for those lead roles every year in the school play. Every year I took that leap of faith that yes, I was a good actress, I understood the part, I learnt the lines, I practiced my diction with my speech therapist, with my mother, in front of the mirror. And yet, time and time again, I was clapping with joy in school assembly for my best friends who got those parts - happy for them but yet crippled with insecurity and dejection that it never came right for me. Not really understanding why. And there was only ever one reason that came to the fore, in harsh words echoed by my drama teacher (why so late?) - my deafness. I can't speak clearly enough for the audience to hear me. After all, who wants to hear a blocked, clanging nasal voice painfully reciting lines across the stage? I can understand that.

And there was the solution - go to university, get a degree, aspire for a good job and build up the pennies. Pay off my student debts, find a lovely boyfriend, move into a house, get married, have children and live a happy, happy life. Nothing wrong with that.

Recently I've been thinking about fate. And whether fate turns a hand when you are unsure of the way. If that's the case, then the opportunity that came to be when I was plucked out of obscurity, sitting in a classroom in Bermondsey to the lead role of Amelia in 'The Silence' - that's a big tell. And lately, when I've been doubting whether this was the still right thing to do, with roles far and few, this part seemed to land on my doorstop. And that only brings me to the conclusion that I was meant to be an actress, to keep working viciously at tuning and retuning my voice for the past three years so that when I step on stage tonight - it's finally right, and I'm right there with it.

So...deep breath - it's time to go on. And when the lights in the auditorium fade out, it won't be in the school hall, camped out in my rabbit outfit waiting for the cue to scamper on and scamper off with a whisker here and there (yes I was 17 years old). It will be my time to stand up straight with my head held up high and march onto that stage into the space where I was born to be.