Keeping up with Jake in December

It only just dawned on me on this, the 25th anniversary of Indian Ink, that this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to work for somebody else’s theatre company.

I’m into the last week of The Jungle and the Sea at the Belvoir St Theatre here in Sydney. All us out-of-towners are desperate to get back home and see our families again, but of course that is tinged with the sadness of having to say goodbye to the family we’ve created here.

The theatre is such an odd workplace. We’re asked to do the most intense things, build a world and destroy it, night after night.

Good plays, by their nature, put people in extreme situations. They amplify human experience to feed an audience’s imagination. As actors, we have to build trust with each other in a very short space of time so that we can feel physically and emotionally safe.

We had a session with a performance psychologist (the kind that works with elite athletes – for an hour I felt like an All Black) who said that our difficulty sleeping after the show was due to the high amount of cortisol (stress hormone) that floods our bodies during performance. The play literally whirls a family through the ravages of the Sri Lankan civil war.

At the end of a 11 weeks of rehearsal and performance it’s not that we’ve been through a war together (that would be a ridiculous thing to say), it’s actually the opposite: we’re bonded by a communal act of creation. We made something together which although, ephemeral, leaves its imprint on us and connects us. It’s a beautiful thing.

But don’t take my word for it, ask Oscar Wilde:

“I regard theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.”

Merry Christmas my friends.

 

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