The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
How To Act
Byre Theatre, St Andrews, March 23
When it first appeared at the Edinburgh Festival last year, writer and director Graham Eatough’s How to Act was acclaimed by press and audiences, but in the few months since then it’s taken on a whole new level of meaning.
After the #MeToo movement and the charities scandal, his piece about an older theatre actor conducting an acting masterclass with a female, African woman, taps into the mood of its times.
“The play is about the relationship between older figures of authority within the arts and younger female actors particularly,” says Eatough, “and about people from the West going to poorer countries, purportedly to do good, but ending up in more problematic situations.”
This show at the Byre is part of a short Scottish tour with the original cast; Robert Goodale as Anthony Nicholl, the elder performer, and Jade Ogogua as Promise, the younger, Nigerian-born actor whom he seeks to have open up her psyche and history for the benefit of the audience.
“This is a director who has built his reputation on work that he’s done in lots of different countries with lots of different cultures,” says Eatough.
“He has particular ideas about what theatre can achieve and what it’s for. What happens through the course of the play is that the actress starts to challenge some of the director’s ideas, and his whole idea of himself and what his formative experiences have actually meant.”
For Eatough, Greek tragedy was a starting point. “Being somebody who works in and teaches theatre, I thought I knew what Greek tragedy was,” he says.
“But actually, as I found out more about it, I discovered it was a much more radical, exciting form of theatre than I had supposed, and very political in a complicated way, in that it didn’t offer easy answers to huge questions. It got me thinking about what types of issue that approach might deal with today.”
Inevitably, the piece is also about theatre.
“A lot of people in theatre, me included, like to think of it as an artform that can build bridges, that can communicate beyond different cultural reference points,” says Eatough.
“But the opposing point is what the character of Promise represents, that rather than trying to transcend difference we need to acknowledge it, like the differences between the UK and Nigeria, for example.
“It was this idea that reminded me of Greek tragedy, that there may be people acting according to their own ideas and ethics, but that they’re still subject to these bigger forces – back then it was fate or the gods, but today it’s more to do with ideology, economics and geopolitics.”