Let Down

The Day of Reckoning, when we face our class tutors and hear their comments, was more or less what we expected. It started with a minor diatribe from the Prince of Darkness about punctuality; he has a point, but there are reasons behind some people being late and other issues about the tutors' punctuality that could have been brought up, so let's leave that aside.

The comments were mostly positive and basically fair, with two or three exceptions where the tutors were too harsh, criticising students for where they were now rather than complimenting them on how far they had come. In my own case, Tracy was less than complimentary about my Roy in The Odd Couple; she wasn't wrong, but, as I pointed out to the PoD afterwards in the restaurant afterwards, it was a play I would never have auditioned for and would never have felt comfortable in. His argument was that a good actor would have overcome the various hurdles of accent and inappropriateness of casting to turn in a good performance. That led onto a discussion as to whether I would be a good actor, to which his response was basically, only after a two year course (preferably at his school); which didn't mean I would never get acting work, only that I wouldn't reach the standard of acting which he defined as good. It's a point that I'll keep in mind as time goes by and I get others' opinion of my work.

In the meantime, Brendan, who had come up with the most cogent criticism of the course one evening in the pub, and who turned up at the Reckoning an hour late, dishevelled, with a fierce expression, and then spent most of the time scribbling on a notepad instead of paying the other students the respect of focusing on them. After the tutors' accurate comments on his performance he made a short, difficult-to-hear pronouncement on each of them, which had the effect, not of making coherent points about the shortfalls of some of the teaching, but of shutting down any discussion because his input appeared so off-the wall. At the end, Matt the drama teacher and I raised a separate issue about the structure of the course, which might have led back to Brendan's points if other students had joined in, but which petered out. And when most of us traipsed off for lunch with the tutors, Brendan and a few others stayed away, which meant that the issues could never be raised. At the end of the day it was disappointing that an intelligent likeable man behaved in a way that prevented us making the very points that were important to him, me and others.