1. Acting - homepage
2. Theatre 1957-1978
3. Theatre 1978-1988
4. Theatre 1988-1998
5. TV & other work
6.  
7. Curriculum Vitae
8.  
9. Canterbury Tales
10. A Tale of Two Cities
11. Babes in the Wood
12. Twelfth Night
13. Treasure Island 3
14. Aladdin (2)
15. The Three Musketeers
16. To Kill a Mockingbird
17. The Merchant of Venice
18. Sleeping Beauty
19. The Gambler
20. Dracula (3)
21. Richard III
22. Happy Families
23. Our Day Out
24. Richard III (revisited)
25. Dick Whittington
26. Neville's Island
27. Canterbury Tales (2)
28. Dracula (4)
29. Second From Last In The Sack Race
30. Night Must Fall
31. Aladdin (3)

There are more photos from this production below. Selecting any of the small thumbnail images will show a larger version of the picture in the main part of the page. »

Night Must Fall by Emlyn Williams - Inspector Belsize

- Swan Theatre, Worcester. Directed by Jenny Stephens.

Inspector Belsize is a minor role in 'Night Must Fall', an trusty old pot-boiler by the actor/writer, Emlyn Williams. Some nice performances, excellent direction by Jenny Stephens, and a good set compensated for the shortcomings of the play. But there was nothing here to stretch anyone's abilities really. A lot of 'bread and butter' acting like this is actually deathly dull once the play has opened - just hanging around a darkened backstage waiting to enter that little lighted world of fake reality and utter some scripted banality or other. Of course, if you care deeply about the craft and you're conscious of your responsibilities to the paying audience and to your fellow cast-members, you try to 'inhabit the moment' and give the best performance you can, but frankly a lot of the time in parts like this one, the temptation is to just sleep-walk...

I managed to find some humour in the part by playing the Inspector as if he, himself, was consciously 'playing the detective' - lots of pregnant pauses and ambiguous reactions (the task of filling and lighting a pipe stretched one particular pause to almost comic proportions) all the while keeping a basilisk eye on the subject of the interrogation! You take your moments where you find them. My original (joking) idea to play him like Jack Carter in the Sweeney wasn't considered in keeping with the period of the play!

"What shall I do with this one, Guv'ner?"

"'It 'im, George!".

The trouble was, though, that I was increasingly feeling that I had fallen out of love with acting (or at least that it had fallem out of love with me) and that was a weird place to be. For all my life I had wanted nothing else than to be an actor. It was always how I'd defined myself, for God's sake. "I am an actor." That's what (and who) I was. And suddenly I wasn't! I wasn't enjoying it. I didn't feel I was any good at it any more...