Eyes ahead

Husband-and-wife comedians and commentators Jeremy Elwood and Michele A’Court share their views.

Way back when I first started out on what passes for my “career path”, I picked up an invaluable lesson relating to auditions. If you haven’t been there, auditions for young actors are generally horrible things, especially if you either really want, or financially really need, the gig. (I’m sure “proper” job interviews are exactly the same, but I never did any of those, so bear with me.)

You spend all day obsessing over your lines, your outfit and your attitude, only to arrive in a small room filled with a dozen other performers, to wait. And wait. Until you finally get five minutes to try and make what, in your inexperienced mind, is an absolutely life-changing impression on a casting director who has been watching fools like you do exactly the same thing for about seven hours already.

So this piece of advice has stuck with me. I can’t remember where I heard it, so I apologise to its uncredited author for inevitably paraphrasing it as this: “Don’t make your whole day revolve around one probably stressful (and almost certainly unsuccessful) audition. Plan to do something you enjoy afterwards.”

That’s something that Michele and I constantly try to do in our lives, although we’ve given it a longer lead time and rephrased it as: “Always make sure you have something to look forward to.”

For us, it usually involves travel. We just came back from a long weekend in Melbourne which we booked after looking at our diaries and assuming (quite rightly) that the month leading up to it was going to be more stressful than usual. Now that we’re back, we’ll start planning our next sojourn. It may be in a month, it may be in a year; the point is we’ll have something up our sleeve that we can count down to when life’s tediums become a bit too much.

We’re very lucky that our schedules and incomes allow us to do it this way, and that we can do some of our paid work (say, writing a weekly newspaper column) from anywhere we may be.

But it’s the general concept that I’m enamoured with.

The idea of looking ahead and thinking: “Thursday looks like a dog’s breakfast,” and planning a walk on the beach, or meeting an old friend for a drink, once it’s over.

Or retrospectively thinking: “Well, yesterday’s deadline/ unexpected bill/health issue/election result did my head in.” And deciding to treat yourself to a night at the movies, or fish and chips, or a nap.

It isn’t always easy to see, but there will be other days, and other auditions, for better roles, in better stories. May as well rehearse for them now.