The other day, when I was talking to my hippie-dippy earth-mother anthropologist friend, I told her I’d never expected to become a teacher. She smirked at me and told me it was a great fit: “You like rules and you like stability.” She’s also told me I had a “grown up house” (hers, by her own admission, is a pigsty) and I, in turn, am horrified by her happy-go-lucky attitude of quitting jobs if she doesn’t like them. She lives with her Aryan Jesus-lookalike of a husband (beard, long hair, occasional sandals) and her happy little accident of eight months; I live with my boyfriend of seven years and our cat, around whom we planned our holidays before we got her from the shelter. But there was a time, in secondary school, when we both wanted to become actresses. We’d seen The Mask of Zorro and we’d wanted to be Catherine Zeta-Jones swanning around in fabulous dresses and kissing Antonio Banderas as he swash-buckled his way through the film. They weren’t any serious plans, of course, but it’s what teenagers do.
I was reminded of this as I read Esther Freud’s Lucky Break, which describes the lives of three students from their first day at drama school to the first decade or so of their career. There is Nell, who’s plump and homely and afraid she’ll never play anything but maids and schoolmarms; Dan, moderately good-looking and in desperate search of a work-life balance; and gorgeous Charlie, talented but vacuous and flighty. Most of the novel focuses on their struggles to land roles. Charlie, at first, makes a nice living taking the lead in BBC detective series and arthouse films, whereas Dan’s success fluctuates wildly in spite of his small but devoted fan base; Nell, meanwhile, gets her equity card by playing a penguin in a children’s educational show.
What Freud does well is describe the highs and lows that come with a profession that is notoriously difficult to break into. It’s hard not to sympathise with Nell when she’s kicked out after the second year of drama school and struggles by on odd jobs in dreary theatres, or with Dan as he struggles to provide for his family while still trying to do what he loves, or Nell’s roommate Sita, whose Indian background only gets her parts where she plays a variety of nurses and teachers about to be forced into an arranged marriage. There are careless agents, pompous writers, overbearing directors, auditions that don’t pan out and plans that fall apart. Some characters abandon the profession altogether. Only one person, in the end, makes it big.
As a big fan of stability, normalcy and the median, this book was akin to a horror-novel to me. Low job security, no fixed income, people who renege on their promises – basically, it’s my nightmare. Then there’s the pomposity displayed by, for instance, the drama school owners, which had me curl my toes in abject horror. But I have always been curious about acting as a profession: we see so many actors every day, and it’s sometimes hard to remember that for every success story there are dozens, if not hundreds of people who were significantly less lucky. The ones we see in interviews often talk about their craft with such gravitas that it becomes awkward, and I’ve never understood where that came from (and I still don’t; the novel’s main characters are, thankfully, relatively down to earth).
Generally, I liked this book, but it was a quickie read for me. It provided a welcome insight into the background of the people who grace my TV every day (the author trained as an actress and is married to an actor) and I got a few good laughs out of it. Generally, though, it fell a little flat. I wasn’t sure how to feel about Jemma, Dan’s high-strung wife: are we supposed to find her sympathetic, being stuck at home with four small children, or are we meant to be annoyed with her because she keeps ragging on her husband, who, in all fairness, is working very hard to provide for them? Likewise, Charlie is a bit of a mess as a character: arrogant and callous at the beginning, she suddenly transforms into a zen-like reiki goddess and certified Good Friend, which I don’t buy for a second. Many of the secondary characters, such as the school’s cafeteria lady, the school’s directors, and a bunch of casting agents, are little more than caricatures that don’t really seem to belong in the novel.
I will say this, though: tomorrow, when I’m at work teaching bratty teens, I won’t regret my choice.
Even if I never got to kiss Antonio Banderas.
