Act Two - What's My Motivation? (extract).

Ninety per cent of all actors are out of work at any one time. That’s what they all tell you. The business is colossally oversubscribed, and you can expect to have an average net annual income of about £1500.

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And what they don’t tell you is that the same ten per cent of actors tend to work all of the time, the rest spending their entire lives working in bookshops, driving delivery vans or waiting tables. Talent has nothing to do with it – apparently strategy and luck are what you need. So it’s actually very simple. I’ve just got to make sure I’m in the ten per cent.

The Equity contract arrives sometime in mid-August, and frankly it’s something of anticlimax. For a start it’s printed on impossibly thin paper, the sort usually associated with begging letters from charities working in Malawi, and when I sign my name at the bottom the ballpoint tears a hole in the page before I’ve even completed my signature. It’s mostly small print, with lots of crossings out in thick black biro and sub-clauses asking you to initial where indicated: and there are several references to an organization with the unfortunate acronym of SWET; the Society of West End Theatres. There are three copies, one original and two carbon underneath – original to be returned to the theatre, blue copy to be forwarded to Equity, yellow copy to be retained ‘for my own files’.

I’d better buy a file.

The crucial clause is number seven. I’m to ‘play as cast’, which is to acting what allocation on arrival is to the package holiday industry. In other words you have no idea what you’re going to get until you turn up. Technically you are legally guaranteed at least an appearance on stage in each of the four shows, but if they choose to cast you in all four as a tree that’s their prerogative. The Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, is under no obligation to give me a single spoken line throughout the entire nineteen-week season. But hey – what’s nineteen weeks? Only another twenty-three more and I’ll have the forty I need to enable me to work within fifty miles of Marble Arch.

There are four plays – the season is starting with The Bed Before Yesterday by Ben Travers, followed by Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Twelfth Night, and finally Dick Whittington and His Wonderful Cat. I seem to be on something referred to as a special Equity ‘Low’, meaning I’m on a figure below the minimum agreed wage. When I shake the envelope a digs list flutters out, plus a stencilled diagram of a human body to which I’m supposed to add my relevant measurements and send back at once to the wardrobe department. I’m to present myself in the circle bar of the theatre at 2 p.m. on 7 September, for a get-together and read-through of the first play.

My train arrives in Canterbury at about noon. The journey from Brighton is impossibly romantic, involving changes at Hastings and Ashford, and wending its way along by the coast before meandering through the comforting contours of the South Downs and into Kent. Even the names of the stations seem to have been lifted from an Ealing comedy: Guestling Halt, Three Oaks, Appledore, and, perhaps more relevantly, Ham Street. As we lurch into Canterbury I half expect to find Will Hay waiting with a luggage trolley.

I’m so busy trying to pull my suitcases off the train and on to the platform that I’m utterly unprepared for the sight that greets me when I eventually turn round. It’s heart-stopping. I can almost feel the pupils of my eyes dilating as I take it in.

I’m staring at a poster advertising The Bed Before Yesterday.

It’s a cheap, badly drawn art deco drawing of a man and a woman locked in an embrace, all straight lines and sharp angles. Underneath are phrases like ‘forthcoming attraction’ and ‘uproarious comedy’. The poster is already peeling, and the pinks and reds that form the backdrop to the illustration have already faded under the assault of several weeks’ weather. It doesn’t matter. If I weren’t so exhilarated I’d probably be cringing with embarrassment at the cheesiness of it all. Gotta sing, gotta dance and all that crap. How clichéd can you get? Mickey Rooney would struggle to match the inane grin smeared across my features just now. One day I’ll look back and wince that I could have experienced such a tinsel town parody of showbiz excitement at the sight of my first theatre poster. But not now. Not yet. Knowing that I’m being paid to appear in something being advertised on the outside wall of the gents’ lavatory on platform two of Canterbury East southern region is bliss.

Bliss on a stick.

What’s My Motivation? by Michael Simkins is out now, published by Ebury Press.

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