“Everything you’ve ever slammed shut gets reopened here,” he said. “If none of you had auditioned and been accepted you would all have become cemented, cast in plaster and molded for the rest of your adult life. That’s what’s happening to everybody else, out there. In here you never congeal. You never set or crust over. Every possibility is kept open—it must be kept open. You learn to hold all these possibilities in your fist and never let any of them go.”
There was a silence. The golden boy smoothed the knees of his corduroy pants and said, as if he had just thought of it, “Remember that anybody who is clever enough to set you free is always clever enough to enslave you.”
October
Stanley was disappointed with his life so far. Here, on the eve of his eighteenth birthday, he stood in the rich dusty quiet of the shuttered foyer in a paralysis of bitterness and dissatisfaction. He was thinking about everything he was not.
Stanley had expected to be savage and dissenting and righteous as a teenager—he had yearned for it, even—and grew more and more dissatisfied as his high-school years passed politely by. He had expected to drink whisky from a paper-bagged bottle by the river, and slip his cold hands up a girl’s skirt in the patch of scrub beyond the tennis courts, and take shots at passing cars with a potato-gun from a neighbor’s garage roof. He had expected to drink himself blind and vandalize the bus shelters in the suburbs, to drive without a license, to retreat from his family, to turn sour, and to frighten his mother, maybe, by refusing to eat or leave his room. This was his entitlement, his rightful lot, and instead he had spent his high-school years playing gentlemanly sport and watching family television, admiring from a distance the boys brave enough to fight each other, and longing for every girl he passed to lift her head and look him in the eye.
Stanley heard the voice of the Institute tutors in his mind. “The real thrill of the stage,” they said, “is the thrill of knowing that at any moment something might go wrong. At any moment something on the stage might break or fall over; someone might miss their cue, someone might botch the lighting, someone might forget their accent or their lines. You are never fearful watching a film, because what you are watching is always complete, always the same and always perfect; but you are often fearful watching a play, in case something goes foul and you must then suffer the private embarrassment of watching the actors flounder and repair themselves. But at the same time, in the silky dark of the auditorium, you ache for something to go wrong. You desire it utterly. You feel tender toward any actor whose hat falls off, whose button breaks. You gasp and applaud when an actor trips and rights himself. And if you see a mistake that others in the audience miss, then you feel a special privilege, as if you are glimpsing a seam of a secret undergarment, something infinitely private, like a scarlet bite-mark on the inside of a woman’s thigh.”
Stanley stood in the foyer of the Institute and looked about him. Here was another possible life that was in his power to claim, another life he wanted, just as he had wanted, as a shy and useless teenager, to be unfeeling and disrespectful and casual and vile. Now, as then, he felt the weight of a terrible inertia pin him to the foyer floor. He suffered all over again the disappointing and quotable truth that the world would not come to him, or wait for him, or even pause: if he waited, this life would simply pass him by. Stanley thought about this and felt deflated and terribly short-changed.
In his sixth-form school production he had been cast as Horatio, a part which pleased him—Horatio was a memorable name, at least, the only one he had heard of before he encountered the play. Everyone remembered Horatio. It was a name that stuck. Horatio it was who endured, critical and strident in the cultural memory, as the less resonant, less pronounceable characters peeled off and dropped away. Stanley’s part was pared almost to nothing by the sharp-nosed drama teacher who said, “People don’t want to sit here for three and a half hours,” and in rehearsals remarked, “You are a bit of a Horatio, aren’t you, Stanley? You’re a Horatio through and through.” Stanley nodded and smiled and mouthed “Thank you” and felt a private happy-thrill, and didn’t truly apprehend her meaning until several months later when he realized that the comment had been less than kind. Even on stage as he trotted about in Hamlet’s brooding shadow, flaring his doublet and flexing his hose, he had not really understood that his part existed merely to throw other, more interesting characters into greater profundity and sharper relief. His mother called him “Wonderful,” and in the exhilarated lineup of the curtain call he had been close as he could be to the center: by Hamlet’s side, holding Hamlet’s sweaty hand.
At the end of seventh form Stanley had seen the ragged call for auditions stapled to the pin-board in Careers Advice and simply fished for a pen and written his name. He supposed that he had wanted to be an actor since he was a child. Acting was part of a child’s primary lexicon of adult jobs: teacher, doctor, actor, lawyer, fireman, vet. Choosing to become an actor did not require originality or forethought. It was not like choosing to be a jockey, or a greengrocer, or an events manager for a local trust, where part of the choosing meant seeking and creating the choice; it did not depend on opportunity or introspection. Choosing to become an actor was simply a matter of reaching for one of these discrete and packaged categories with both hands. Stanley did not think about this as he wrote his name. The auditions sheet was watermarked and heavy, and the emblem of the Institute was stamped in bronze.
Later, wishing to amplify the memory of this unremarkable decision, he imagined that it was this moment, when he lifted his pen up to the paper and pressed hard to unstick the ink in the roller-ball tip so that for an instant his fingertips were white and bloodless and hard—this moment, he imagined, was the moment when he seized an opportunity to transform from a Horatio into something utterly new.
October
“Welcome to the first stage of the audition process,” said the Head of Acting, and he briefly smiled. “We believe here that an untrained actor is a liar merely.” He was standing behind the desk with all his fingertips splayed upon the green leather. “As you are now,” he said, “you are all liars, not calm persuasive liars but anxious blushing liars full of doubt. Some of you will not gain entrance to this Institute, and you will remain liars forever.”
There was scattered laughter, mostly uncomprehending and from the ones who would not gain entrance. The Head of Acting smiled again, the smile passing over his face like a shadow.
Stanley was sitting stiffly at the back. He knew some of the boys from high school, but sat apart from them just in case they betrayed or encouraged some aspect of him that he wished to leave behind. The room was tense with hope and wanting.
“So,” the Head of Acting said. “What happens at this Institute? How do we carve up the strange convulsive epileptic rhythm of the days? What violence is inflicted here, and what can you do to minimize the damage?”
He let the question settle like dust.
“This weekend is a virtual simulation of the kind of learning environment that students at the Institute encounter daily,” he said. “Today we are holding classes in improvisation, mime, song, movement and theater history, and tomorrow you will extensively workshop and rehearse a text in collaboration with a small group of others. You are all expected to participate fully in these lessons and to try your hardest to demonstrate to us the level of commitment you are prepared to offer us should you be invited to study here.