Suddenly there are visions on the horizon, though they could all be mirages.

I’ve had several auditions for very good projects, one of them the best television script I’ve ever read: an HBO number, an absolute humdinger that would very likely change my life and which I am trying and failing not to get excited about.

This is the sort of week where I give in and start reading the horoscope again. It’s the pre-summer rush and I imagine most actors out there are walking about in a state of anticipation. It’s a bit like the first steps in a date and you are waiting to see how she feels. 

The other way of looking at it is that we are all addicted gamblers, hooked on the spin of the wheel – the one in 36 chance that this is the job we’ll land. There is no rush like it when you hit, but we know deep down we are suckers for playing. 

And then there is a radio job to do. I had booked a week in Italy, so I was pretty much certain to land a job. The only proven way to get a job is to book a holiday – once you’ve done that, one of those jobs you’d given up on gets wind of your Tuscan folly and offers itself up to you like a spurned lover.

So my Italian R&R from the rigours of unemployment is cancelled, and I will be knocking about in Broadcasting House instead. I adore the radio, and I always get a little thrill as I walk down Regent Street towards Val Myer’s art deco design and Eric Gill’s statue of Prospero and Ariel.

The interior is a disaster, and feels like a nuclear lockdown shelter, but the recording studios are marvels in which almost any soundscape can be conjured. It does seem a small miracle in such reductive times that we still get to doss about reading plays and walking on the spot in shallow gravel for a living. Americans are astonished when I tell them that I perform plays for the radio. Of course, the axe is always hovering.

Most radio directors I’ve worked with are wonderful people – well read, acute, funny and eccentric. They research the work very deeply and are completely committed. I would like to work with some of them in the theatre, but I suppose they may not have the killer drive you need for that, or perhaps they simply believe radio is as expressive as film and theatre, which I think it can be. Orson Welles’ broadcasts were full of humour and excitement and somehow found the perfect balance between expressionism and realism – the performances were neither too grotesque nor too drearily prosaic.

But radio won’t change your life and despite all the fun I’m having, I’m hankering for a new scene, so bring on HBO… I’d end up living in America, which I’m ready for. Somehow a bit of Puritanism appeals right now. It would certainly meet with the approval of my organs. Perhaps I’ll become a Scientologist and learn to be relentlessly positive all the time. 

More Actor X:

Sticky fingers

Casting

Image: Adam Kesher by djenvert, available under a CC BY-NC-ND license.