The Old Actor and the Single Line

There is a regional theatre in a smallish English city that, every three or four years, mounts a production of a certain long and rambling Chekhov play. The play has, near its end, a single-line role — the old servant, who wanders on for perhaps twelve seconds after everyone else has left, says his one sentence to the empty stage, and shuffles off. It is a devastating moment in a good production. It is nothing in a bad one. The theatre had, for thirty-eight years, cast the same man in that role: a local retired actor named Walter, who had never played anything larger than a supporting part in his entire career.

In the most recent production, Walter was eighty-one. The director, a young man newly arrived from London who had not previously worked with him, was polite but privately unimpressed. During rehearsals Walter did nothing visible. He arrived on time. He said his single line, in the same slightly muttered way, over and over. He asked no questions. He gave no notes to anyone else. The young cast, most of whom had trained in the modern manner of small physical experiments and improvisational approaches, quietly wrote him off as a piece of local sentimental casting.

On the second week of previews the director, who had been trying without success to lift the final act into something more than melancholy, sat in the fifth row and watched, for the first time, what actually happened when Walter walked on. He watched an eighty-one-year-old man cross fifteen feet of empty stage in the dim light. He watched him look, for perhaps two seconds, at the chair where the play's central character had, moments earlier, been sitting. He watched him deliver his single sentence with an inflection so ordinary that a casting director in London would have told him, kindly, to try something. He watched him leave. He watched, in row after row of the audience, people not moving.

After the preview he went backstage to talk to Walter. He asked, with the humility of a young man who had just realised something, how Walter did it. Walter thought about the question for a long time. Then he said, with some embarrassment: 'I have played this part four times. This time I am the same age the servant is meant to be. The other three times I was pretending. I think that is what you are seeing.' He paused, and then said, 'Also, I have known everyone who has died in this town in the last forty years. When I look at the chair, I am not doing anything an actor does. I am looking at a chair.'

The young director, who had been trained, expensively, in an approach to acting that assumed the actor's work was to construct the character out of technique, sat with this for the rest of the run. He wrote about it, later, in a small essay that appeared in an industry magazine, in which he said the following: there are certain roles in the theatre that cannot be constructed. They can only be arrived at. They require an actor who has, for reasons that have nothing to do with talent, simply lived enough years in a small enough town to have earned the right to walk across a stage looking at an empty chair. Nobody teaches this. Nobody schedules it. It happens, if it happens at all, to actors who have accepted, in their forties and fifties, that they will not become famous, and who have therefore continued to play the servant in the local theatre for four decades.

There is a general form of this. Certain kinds of work in any field cannot be done well by anyone under a certain age. Not because young people are less talented. Because the work is not really being done by talent. It is being done by accumulated ordinary time. If, in your own field, there is a piece of work you can already see is going to be waiting for you at seventy — a lecture, a novel, a role, a duty in your family — do not try to hurry into it. Do not envy the people who are given, at thirty, tasks that require sixty. Simply live, in your smallish town, the forty ordinary years between now and then. Show up. Play the servant. When the chair is finally empty and it is your turn to look at it, you will have, by then, the only qualification the part actually requires.