My Acting Update
Hello Folks, yes I know it’s been awhile. I have been very happy to move into more productive work circumstances of late, and it’s been challenging and rewarding.
I am increasing my work as an Actor by training recruits in role-playing, sort of like a consultant. I’ve done this in the past but the hours are a little more frequent, and I’m also branching out into Acting in the area of tourism.
It goes like this -
There is a very historic precinct in Fremantle, Western Australia and we have quite a thriving tourism industry there. I’ve secured a job in an amazing old building called The Fremantle Prison.
This building is on the National Heritage List and has been entered for application to World Heritage Listing. It’s pretty old in Australian colonial terms, and was build by the first convicts arriving from Old England.
The Prison has a particular personal significance for me (no, I’ve never done jail-time) because my father and an older half-brother worked there while I was a child. In fact, my dad was there as a junior officer from 1965 and continued right up until the 1980’s. He moved to another Correctional facility and when he retired, was a Superintendant in the late 1980’s.
When I was a kid, seeing him dressed in his uniform, going to work there, I suppose like most little boys, I was in awe of my dad, and whenever we passed those great limestone walls, even in my adult years, I always thought of him. The prison closed it’s function as a prison in the latter part of the century, and later became a tourist attraction. For me, it was never such a thing. It was the place my dad worked. Very big stuff.
So now, I’m working there, not as an officer, which my dad suggested I try, but in the best way I could – as an Actor. I could never have been a prison officer, and if you knew me, you’d agree that I wouldn’t last very long.
On my first night, last Wednesday night on Remembrance Day, I experienced a solemnly profound sensation. I crossed the main grassed exercise yard to the cell I’d be spending a few hours in ( I should explain – I play a scripted piece as a prisoner, talking about the cell that I’m in, which is called “Solitary Confinement”. This is the cell where the really troublesome characters ended up, and as the tour comes through the block, I pounce out and do my scripted monologue. As there was a history of Irish convicts, I’d taken the decision to play an Irish convict, which has gone down very well indeed ). Walking along the grounds was truly enormous for me, in ways I never expected. Firstly, I never thought I’d ever be in there; secondly I was walking in the very place where my dad spent so many years working to feed 7 kids; and thirdly, this is a place that when I passed as a kid, was always filled with such mystery and foreboding.
My dad died in 2006. It felt important being there, not just because I was working in a historically significant place, but because I felt somehow closer to my dad and I hoped that my dad would finally be proud of me. Of course I didn’t enter the prison the way he wanted, as an officer, and I didn’t end up there the way he sometimes expected, as an inmate – I ended up there my own way, using my skills as an Actor, pleasing the audience and my employer and earning my money in the most noble of professions. This is really very important to me.
I’m really doing very well and am very happy with the reactions from the employer and, most of all, the audience. It’s an awesome thing to be sitting where so much history has passed personally – to say nothing of it’s significance culturally.
This, above all, to thine own self be true – and it must follow as the night the day, though canst not then be false to any man. Polonius to Laertes, Hamlet by William Shakespeare
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