WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS...

Our latest play ‘Art’ is ‘coming along.’ It is grinding its way along the bumpy road that leads from the first play reading to the congratulatory theatre supper on the Saturday night after the last performance. In between everyone puts in a lot of work. Frustrations abound, we take a step back or sideways for every two that we go forward, in short we ‘come along.’ The Director (Rosie) has the hard job of keeping sufficient momentum to afford steerage way. Feathers through treacle!

But slowly it is taking shape, as plays always do. The approach of opening night concentrates the mind wonderfully. Lines are learnt (or almost so); the set is built (or almost so); the props and dressing in place (or almost so). We even have a brand new grey sofa from IKEA, very comfortable. It plays its part perfectly; it is the only presence on stage that doesn’t overact.

'Art' is a play that demands strong emotion: not a lot of shouting or anger necessarily, though there is that, but simply emotion. Therein lies my problem. I am finding that, at the moment, I can’t easily successfully act and remember my lines.

I remember Alan Bennett talking once about how much good actors ‘emote.’ He was talking after doing a piece with Maggie Smith, who I suppose emotes more than most: those flashing eyes, the gracious sweeps of the limbs, the whooping voice, that crystal delivery in which you can hear every letter, let alone every syllable.

Emoting on stage is not hard - for me anyway - it seems to flow naturally from the words, but it is easy to get so caught up in the feverish intensity of the moment that suddenly - at the end of a passage - you find yourself like a flushed and stranded fish with mouth open and nothing coming out. The mind mechanisms have crashed and like awaking from a deep sleep in a panic in some strange bed you can’t remember where you are.

Of course this sort of thing is worse if you are tired or stressed or if you feel, as I did earlier this week, that I was incubating swine flu. (I’m not as it happens, but thanks for asking) Mistake followed mistake. I was conflating lines and missing cues with abandon. A toy train coming off the rails, but still bouncing valiantly along the track.

As it happened, the previous night Welsh television had re-transmitted a film about Richard Burton, who grew up not a great many miles from where I live now, the twelfth Welsh-speaking child in a family of thirteen. His father was a coal miner in the Welsh pit village of Pontrhydyfen; his mother, who died when he was two, a teacher.

‘Adopted’ by his English master in the grammar school in English-speaking Port Talbot, Philip Burton set about training him as an actor, transforming his high and strongly accented Welsh voice into the deep growl that became so famous.

I loved that voice, so strong, sonorous, resonating. Burton developed it by reciting large chunks of Shakespeare to the sheep high on the windy mountainsides of South Wales. Once this ability to speak in the open air was common among actors and politicians - Lloyd George, once addressed 10,000 people on a Caernarvon mountainside while Queen Victoria used to complain that Prime Minister William Gladstone addressed her as though she were a public meeting, so penetrating was his voice. But that’s all something of the past, diction today is a forgotten art.

Back to my own sad performance. Stumbling in the middle of yet another passage I found myself thinking of the Burton film. And suddenly to the blackness of the ether I transmitted a silent cry for help: “I’m in the s***t down here, Richard, what can I do?”

In an instant I had an answer. Like a text message to the head; a text that growled and burnt into my brain.

“Concentrate on the delivery of the words.”

I knew instantly what that meant. Instead of trying to focus on a line or on an emotion, I should instead concentrate on the delivery of each word, rolling the key ones around and spitting them out with particular stress, enjoying the tone of a word and the pattern of its syllables and making the audience appreciate it too. Not line by line, but word by word.

Did it work? Well, yes, strangely, it did. I became calmer, the lines more focused. But like much of such advice it is easier said than done. It is not simple to concentrate on the delivery of the words in a fast moving dialogue when you have to take in and react to the facial expressions of others.

But, as a technique for projecting Shakespeare to startled sheep on a mountainside it is, I am sure, infallible. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends..........”