Young Armitage, intense

The hitherto unknown picture of Richard Armitage at LAMDA popped up while I was driving, and I left it on my desktop while I thought about it.

Admittedly, today was the first day of the semester and so I am particularly fully immersed, enmeshed in the twenty-something spirit, twenty-something personalities. Universities are “young” places, despite the reputation of the dusty university office, and one reason professors stay young for so long is that we’re surrounded by the blossom and promise of youth at its very best. Classes started today; I lecture beginning tomrrow tomorrow and then I will meet the early twenty-somethings again, with their unbelievable naiveté and the accompanying bravado and insecurity and sheer unselfconsciousness. It has its charms, though it can be wearying, too.

But I met with both of my “extra” assistants today, in their mid- to late twenties, and re-encountered that insatiable drive to know and be and do, allied with the confidence that one can, that everything will work out, that one can make the world to suit one’s vision of it. I’ve written about this conviction before in light of the expected appearance of an old Richard Armitage photograph. After my meeting today, I thought to myself, oh, to be twenty-five again, to feel that enthusiasm. To care that much … to be that dismissive of all the potential obstacles that life will bring …

(Or maybe not. The hard-won lessons of my late thirties and early forties have given me a lot of power, too, and a surprising amount of liberation.)

But it brought me back to this:

Richard Armitage, 1998ish. Source on watermark.

The people who collected this image represent it as from the halls of LAMDA, which displays pictures of its famous alums. We don’t know if this is a picture taken from a student production, from a classroom, from a breakroom encounter.

(We only know it’s beautiful.)

What it captures, to me, anyway, is that moment of intensity, in a way typical of Armitage, in that it’s not necessarily an active intensity, although it could be that, but feels more like a responsive intensity — an intense listening and being listened to, a subjection to the presence of the other (not seen in the photo) that writes itself on Armitage’s face, a being poised to react, a pregnant (in the now slightly archaic sense of the word, in English) attentiveness.

A Richard Armitage signaling that something is about to happen.

[ETA: I wanted to mention, and forgot — the intriguing aspect of this photo for me is that this kind of intensity is not entirely how I envision the Richard Armitage of the late 1990s, at least not personally or individually. So one of the paradoxes of the picture for me is that on the one hand, this almost has to be a role; I read the young Armitage as someone who really preferred, individually, not to be captured or visualized in this kind of intensity. On the other hand, this doesn’t look like a picture from a production.]

~ by Servetus on January 7, 2014.