Theatrical Armitage

Theatrical, we say, and it’s not a compliment. Dramatic. Like it’s too much. Theatrical — not truthful.

Are some people most truthful when they’re being dramatic? Are you that person? Is that what it is for you, to be an actor, to tell the truth by making a version of yourself up? Being yourself by being someone else for other people? Putting together a sophisticated, plausible artifice, to tell us the truth?

I spend a lot of time wondering what it’s like to be Richard Armitage, what goes through your mind at any given time. What it was that made a boy from outside Leicester dream of the stage despite everything that spoke against it. Why and what you dreamed, with such devotion, for so long. What it was that kept you going when you decided to focus on television and what it was that kept you thinking of stages all these years.

Richard Armitage, photographed by Lefteris Pitarakis, Old Vic theater stalls, June 26, 2014. Source: AP Images.

What you think now.

What it is you think when you step through the stage door of the Old Vic before a performance? Will it ever be normal for you, just a thing you do? What it is that’s running through your mind every night, when you’re done with the play, with the stage door, with the trip home, when you slam the door and lock it behind you? Is there a memory you treasure for yourself, something you take out to look at every now and then, when you need it?

I wonder.

And then I saw this the other night, a photo no one should have taken. First a photo from far away.

The applause, John Proctor still there, bare footed, head slightly bowed — I don’t know where you are in your range of motion here, perhaps Richard Armitage has just bowed and John Proctor is disappearing. You seem to be inhabiting your body only gingerly, as if there’s something sharp under your feet, or you’ve simply resigned yourself to Proctor’s fate. The stoop.

And then this one, closer up:

The position of your head, the alignment of your legs and your arms with your legs, the fingers in your right hand. When you say you can feel the audience breathing Proctor’s breaths? I can feel you breathing in this photo, filling your lungs, the nostrils widening slightly.

I saw these photos and I thought, this complex choreography of movement and physical attitudes, of emotions, and words, and interactions, this hugely precise and yet emotional, always potentially spinning out of control dance, the simmering that leads to the explosion — this is what you were born to do, and yet how did you know? You inhabit the space with simultaneous humility and sovereignty, seemlessly fitting into what happens and controlling it through your presence.

Always being just a little bit outside of the margins of who you are? Is that where the thrill comes from?

Do your knees ever shake, inside those trousers?

I used to think you were all control, still before a camera, suppressing your energy like a charging missile — till I saw these pictures. It’s not just your face although there’s so much to be said about that, sorcerer. But that extra little bit of slippage of feeling that comes through the gesture that’s just a bit larger than normal? The extra layer you’re putting in? It’s all motion, kinetic energy — your arm extends and you burst, it penetrates through your person through the scene through the photo through the screen. I see it, that just a little bit extra that falls into the atmosphere and bounces everywhere.

In the extra little tension in your thumb that makes you look taken aback.

In the way your circular motion seems halfway to have left the ground

Or in the way that the same walk, that same strong left leg, ties you, farmer, firmly to the earth, the stride that mirrors the sneer on your face, the expulsion of those vehement consonants, the way you push and push at this girl with your mouth and your nose and your swinging neckcloth and with every line of your body. The way you spiral your body around its core, the way you draw out a crowded arc of tension.

And always the hands, the arms. The hands that hold something not quite there, something you wish you could describe or think you could touch, if you could only find it within their span. The entreaty, perhaps — or even just the explanation. It is here, you seem to say, your hands insist. Here! Here. Here.

even as John Proctor holds the thing he will reject, having found out what it is and that he cannot tolerate it, even as you encompass that thing so gently within your grasp.

It’s always just a little bit more — you show us always just a tiny bit more — theatrical. Dramatic — signalling without telling but always hinting at a truth that’s inside the gesture and outside of it, larger than it, somehow. More than we might need on an ordinary day, but not more than we need for the theater, these powerful signals, so energetic this time, so somehow unstill.

What dream did you dream, all those years ago? What dream did you dream for yourself, for us tonight? What truth will your artifice tell us, this time, next time?

***

[photos with watermarks found at The Geraint Lewis Collection.]

~ by Servetus on July 2, 2014.