Playing wolf

Some time ago, I wrote about the horror of having to do an off-the-cuff “jive” in front of people who actually know how to jive.

Well, forget all that. I got over it. Having realised that making a complete divot of myself is infinitely preferable to figuring out the vagueries of firewalls, Windows This and That, 3rd-world ADSL lines, and just bloody computers generally, I am a keen(ish) attender at the various warm up sessions for the actors. Here are three of them:

When I was little I thought that, because I had a precocious steak streak, I could probably act. Last week we were acting at being wolves. We gathered, as you do, on top of a hill in the moonlight, interacted with each other in a wolf-like-way and then, (inevitably and rather cliched, IMHO) howled at the moon. So I decided to be a really old, cranky wolf. With what I considered to be excellent observance of my character, I hobbled onto the hill, (obviously there wasn’t an actual hill or moonlight or anything – sorry to state the obvious, but I know that one or two people reading this would wonder, mentioning no names) snarled a lot at a baby wolf, took up a rickety-wolf-stance, snarled a bit more then lauched into a mid-pitch, croaky-but-threatening howl as the moon rose. Then I hobbled off the hill whilst terrorising the baby wolf.

In the “feedback session” (I know, I know) it was suggested that I was playing a wolf who was “confused”. Confused! The cheek! No way. There’s no way my wolf was confused. It was quite clear in my portrayal that I was a pissed-off-aggresive-old-horrible-Alf-Garnett-wolf. Quite clear. Though, apparently not. No-one got this. I just looked “confused”. I can’t act. For me, this was almost as disappointing as my first attempt at showmanship was embarassing.