Richard Armitage prone

Richard Armitage as John Proctor in Act Two of The Crucible at the Old Vic Theater, as filmed in September 2014. Cap of Digital Theatre video of the play. Source.

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Could the Old Vic theater floor have swallowed me whole — it would have happened the first time I saw you perform this scene, Richard Armitage. I still don’t know how badly I want to watch the Digital Theatre video, for the night I first saw you in the flesh was among the moments of my life I will always remember. When I am an old woman, gasping my last, my fever dreams will include flashbacks to you in that moment, to how I felt, how deeply I breathed, how I thought my body might explode, how I covered my face with hands in disbelief and dropped them again in belief, and how I felt. It seems more important now, a memory I pull out only at moments when I think that without that reminder I will drown, when I think I might lie down in sadness or exhaustion, drowning in the obstacles on the path you inspired me to follow that night.

Proctor’s chores are done, he has seeded the field. You stalk into that scene, Armitage, and your aura draws us ineluctably into breathing with you — as he exhales, as he takes off his coat and puts down his lamp and warms his hands and tastes the stew and salts it as if he is brewing a potion against an argument with his wife, each separate component discrete and unified into your Proctor, Armitage. When he strips and kneels down before that basin — Elizabeth, trancelike, has filled it with water only a few moments before — he shows that stoop of the farmer, the ache of the muscles, the thing I never believed you, Armitage, could know, the pain and the control that kind of daily, crushing physical labor engenders. He, too, must bow before this basin; he, too, must wash away the sweat and the guilt. He shows the body that the farmer builds, out of practice and habit, not out of intention, since time outside of memory, the strength, the confidence, the prostration, the defenselessness. How much it must hurt Proctor not only to find his marriage bed cold, but even more, that his wife does not come to help him pull off his boots, does not rush to massage his shoulders, to pour the water over his back, to towel him dry, as farm wives have done ceaselessly, without word, without sound, in happiness, in anger, in equanimity, over the centuries. Armitage, your Proctor does all these things alone and when he gives in to his fatigue, when he puts his hand in the basin, leans on his forearm, rests his elbow, and most of all, when he lets his head hang — we know just how lonely he feels, without a word.

So often, Armitage, I have enjoyed your beauty, I have diagrammed it, detailed it, discussed it, praised it, admired it, I have let it inspire me, the mere dream of it has jerked my body to attention and after a spell it has let me rise and face the day, and yet I find your naked vulnerability never more effective than it is here: Proctor’s round buttocks, the curve of his lower back, the concession he makes to dignity, the pure awkwardness of that splayed, bowed crouch, that prostration before the basin, that need to wipe his body clean so strong that he does not care about awkwardness, the tiny crease in his belly, the relief he feels when the water touches his face, when he lets it trickle all the way down his back. He needs to be clean, this is no triumph, he is muscular without shame and yet also without pride, the power of the farmer and the ache of his back — you know, you have learned, you know the power and the sheer grinding fatigue, and yet this frame convinces not least owing to your own odd comfort and discomfort with your body, Armitage, you expose your Proctor naked and open and yet neither ashamed nor proud, wanting and ashamed to want and not be wanted, and yet always still there, still present, still powerful, still exhausted, still unapologetic.

Tonight, unusually, I write from a wine bar. I ordered a bottle of Sonoma Pinot Noir in your honor, Armitage, and I drink the first glass, silently, to you. I have bread and oil and olives next to my screen and with this picture, I pour the brine from the olives onto the bread, I dip it into the oil, I bite, I swallow, I raise the glass to my lips again, the conversation in the room swells around me and I persist in punching these words into the keyboard. Do this in remembrance of me, you seem to say; I try to write, Armitage, it’s the only sacrament I can consecrate to the lessons you taught me.

~ by Servetus on January 27, 2015.