And although I haven’t exactly been acting on it (recently), I have been recording a host of voiceovers for an agency client – and it’s vaguely related.
Marking, rehearsing and reading from a script reminds me of my (early) teenage dream of becoming an actress.
I got bitten by the acting bug when I was cast as Peter Pan in a school drama competition at the age of 12. My class didn’t win, but I had a fabulous time teaching Wendy and her brothers how to fly, fighting Captain Hook with a plastic sword and strutting around the stage dressed in bright green.
It didn’t take long for me to realise my vocation was in writing and languages rather than acting, but that didn’t stop me from taking part in other productions throughout high school, university and even in my ‘grown-up’ career.
Further up the school I acted in Latin, playing the Cyclops in a short play for our Classics Day, and in French, as Cyrano de Bergerac, re-enacting the famous balcony scene in which Cyrano woos Roxane on behalf of the smitten Christian. I wore a Silly Putty nose that almost fell off, and a red beret. Learning all those rhyming couplets by heart in 17th century French was quite a feat.
My final part at school was in the lower sixth, playing the enamoured but murderous school teacher Bradley Headstone in an epic production of Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, performed as part of my school’s centenary celebrations in 1993.
It was thrilling to be in such a big production – 116 pupils took part – and I remember actress Nerys Hughes, whose daughter was also in the play, coming up to me after one of the performances and congratulating me!
At Exeter University, I joined the German Society and acted in two plays auf Deutsch, playing a pimp in Arthur Schnitzler’s comedy Der Grüne Kakadu in my first year, followed by a (toilet roll) gun-toting, squirrel assassin in a montage of short plays about love, entitled A Propos Liebe, in my second year.
After graduation there were no more chances to act, but just over a decade later, not long after starting my job as a reporter at Waitrose, I discovered that the John Lewis Partnership Dramatic Society was holding auditions for Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
It was to be set in the 1920s and performed in the grounds of the Odney Club, one of the John Lewis hotels (yes, they have their own hotels), on the banks of the Thames in Cookham, Berkshire.
I auditioned and got the part of Celia – cousin to the heroine, Rosalind – the second biggest role in the play. It was certainly a challenge learning all those Shakespearean lines – and we also had to sing (and dance!), but at least it was in English, not French, German or Latin. It was so much fun and definitely rekindled the acting bug in me.
So much so that I auditioned for their next play, Alan Bennett’s trouser-dropping farce Habeas Corpus, and was cast as an upper-class, pregnant young lady called Felicity Rumpers. This time we performed it at RADA, in their studio theatre in Bloomsbury and again, we had a lot of fun.
Two more open-air plays followed at Odney: Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, in which I played a flirtatious maid, Dunyasha, and Pride and Prejudice, in which I was delighted to be cast as the deliciously scheming Caroline Bingley.
My final part with the JLP Dramatic Society was as a mysterious, jilted typist in The Hound of the Baskervilles in April 2010, which saw us back in the studio at RADA. I had to retire after that, as I was pregnant with my son and my bump was already starting to show by the time we performed it.
I look back with nostalgia at the camaraderie of taking part in a production, and of course the adrenaline rush that comes with it, but I’m not going to be treading the boards again any time soon. My voiceover work is as close as I’m going to get to doing any acting.
The material I work with now might be rather more educational than literary, but I’m enjoying reading from a script and ‘acting’, even if it’s in my office at home and not in front of a live audience (which is a lot less nerve-wracking anyway!).
What about you – have you managed to bring an old hobby or passion back to life in your work? Leave me a comment below!
Judith Zerdin 