A shrewd look at actors
By Caryn James |
October 28, 2011, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
ESTHER Freud was an actress before she became a novelist, and as we can guess from the title of a droll essay about her acting career's high point, "I Was an Alien in 'Doctor Who'," the change was an excellent move. She's a superbly gifted writer, with a touch so light she's often undervalued. Freud's seventh novel, "Lucky Break," which follows a group of actors for nearly 15 years - from their first day at drama school until they're ready for Botox - may not be her most ambitious, but it's her most breezily charming and typically shrewd, and it comes with a new satirical edge.
The first pages display her glittering style as we meet the central character, Nell, "plump and freckled" (no surprise when she's cast as the nurse in "Romeo and Juliet"), "smudging a line of black under each terrified eye" as she prepares to head to Drama Arts. With fluid ease, Freud crams a lot into a few phrases, her contents chiseled down to beautifully observed essentials.
Through the perspectives of Nell and her new friends, we share a view from inside the actors' circle: of their jealous competition, raging insecurity and rock-bottom sense of calling. "I've been chosen" are the words that propel Nell to school that first day. There, she meets a black woman of "intimidating beauty" called Charlie. We know her type: Utterly selfish, she is Nell's best friend until a man shows up. Dan, Nell's major crush, is interested in conventionally pretty Jemma. Freud also creates scathingly witty portraits of the pompous, manipulative gay couple who run the school. Their Stanislavskian Method rests on a rigid menu of character types, an approach embraced so earnestly the students feel sorry for anyone not trained at Drama Arts.
They will soon grow out of that. Nell gets her Equity card by playing a penguin in educational theater. She and her roommate create a revue and head to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (as Freud herself once did). Nell's show, "Two Lobsters and a Prawn," features the women as crustaceans on roller skates. As Charlie questions whether to do a nude scene and Dan whether to head to Los Angeles, Nell worries she may never get her lucky break. In one of Freud's most exuberant episodes, Nell recalls a childhood experience watching actors in a touring production, feeling her heart might burst and thinking, "I'll do anything," even "dress up in sacking, play an old woman, sweep the stage, if it means that one day I can be like them."
Mining her own life for material is nothing new for Freud. "The Sea House," dedicated to her father, the painter Lucian Freud, draws on letters her grandfather (Sigmund's son) wrote to his wife. Her most ambitious book, "Summer at Gaglow," moves between the past, when a German Jewish family is about to be uprooted by World War I, and the present, when a pregnant acting student is being painted by her father.
In these books, Freud creates relationships so fraught and delicate that at times the characters themselves can hardly bear to examine them. It's as if those earlier characters also have the souls of actors, more willing to leap into other people's minds and skins than to consider their own. Freud explores them with a dazzling clarity that displays her true, writer's calling.
The first pages display her glittering style as we meet the central character, Nell, "plump and freckled" (no surprise when she's cast as the nurse in "Romeo and Juliet"), "smudging a line of black under each terrified eye" as she prepares to head to Drama Arts. With fluid ease, Freud crams a lot into a few phrases, her contents chiseled down to beautifully observed essentials.
Through the perspectives of Nell and her new friends, we share a view from inside the actors' circle: of their jealous competition, raging insecurity and rock-bottom sense of calling. "I've been chosen" are the words that propel Nell to school that first day. There, she meets a black woman of "intimidating beauty" called Charlie. We know her type: Utterly selfish, she is Nell's best friend until a man shows up. Dan, Nell's major crush, is interested in conventionally pretty Jemma. Freud also creates scathingly witty portraits of the pompous, manipulative gay couple who run the school. Their Stanislavskian Method rests on a rigid menu of character types, an approach embraced so earnestly the students feel sorry for anyone not trained at Drama Arts.
They will soon grow out of that. Nell gets her Equity card by playing a penguin in educational theater. She and her roommate create a revue and head to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (as Freud herself once did). Nell's show, "Two Lobsters and a Prawn," features the women as crustaceans on roller skates. As Charlie questions whether to do a nude scene and Dan whether to head to Los Angeles, Nell worries she may never get her lucky break. In one of Freud's most exuberant episodes, Nell recalls a childhood experience watching actors in a touring production, feeling her heart might burst and thinking, "I'll do anything," even "dress up in sacking, play an old woman, sweep the stage, if it means that one day I can be like them."
Mining her own life for material is nothing new for Freud. "The Sea House," dedicated to her father, the painter Lucian Freud, draws on letters her grandfather (Sigmund's son) wrote to his wife. Her most ambitious book, "Summer at Gaglow," moves between the past, when a German Jewish family is about to be uprooted by World War I, and the present, when a pregnant acting student is being painted by her father.
In these books, Freud creates relationships so fraught and delicate that at times the characters themselves can hardly bear to examine them. It's as if those earlier characters also have the souls of actors, more willing to leap into other people's minds and skins than to consider their own. Freud explores them with a dazzling clarity that displays her true, writer's calling.
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