Of Rabbits and Men

I have to be honest. I'm not a fan of Bertolt Brecht (yes, that's him in the pic). We had to study Mother Courage in German when I was at school and the effort of ploughing through compound words and convoluted grammar destroyed any pleasure in the play. (Why do Germans the verb at the end always put? When the sentence very long is, can you find yourself a lot of difficult ideas in your head until the very last word holding, which often you the first idea forgotten have before you the last idea at arrive means.)

Things didn't get better when I saw one or two of his plays. I'm a simple man and while I can deal with multiple plots on the screen, I prefer my stage productions to be linear, with no more than one beginning, middle and end. The more that's going on, the less I'm engaged in the story. And with Brecht there's more going on than most.

On the other hand, I can see that acting Brecht is a player's dream. The characters are big and bold and run the gamut (what is a gamut?) of emotions and styles. Which is why I've chosen a speech by Azdak for my upcoming audition. Azdak is the village clerk, a poacher, a man with a fondness for drink and a man whose mind often runs faster than his voice. Through a combination of circumstances and cunning, he starts off by hiding an aristocrat escaping the mob, finds himself on trial and ends up as the judge...

The monologue I've chosen is near the beginning of his scene, where he's harbouring the Duke and negotiating with the policeman at the door who has come to arrest him for poaching rabbits. Will he hand over the Duke to save his own skin? Azdak's one-sided, tipsy conversation veers from mockery to the serious, from sense to nonsense, from bonhomie to mistrust. It's a challenge and I look forward to seeing how well I do with it.

I now have the lines committed to memory and I'm going through the second stage - repeating them aloud (thank goodness the flat is empty) again and again. Each time I say them, my understanding of the speech and of Azdak's character gains in depth, which means that my performance becomes increasingly nuanced as I play with different emotions, different speeds and different emphases.By the time the audition comes, the piece should be ingrained not just in my memory, but in my personality, my gestures, my whole being.

This is only the second monologue I have learnt in depth (the third will be Berenger's final scene from Rhinoceros), but as with the first (Shylock's 'Signor Antonio, many a time and oft in the Rialto you have rated me...') I find it a fascinating and almost magical experience to find my way into a character. And while I will be disappointed if the audition does not get me onto the casting agency's books, the mere fact of learning the speech is reward in itself. This, for me, is what acting is about.