fear and plays and the habit

Actors are like soldiers. The soldiers fear the enemy. The actors fear the audience. Fear of failing. Fear of forgetting, fear of art. Olivier ended up terrified. If you sat on the front row you could see him trembling. And besides all that, there's the fear of this building. I worked once or twice with Ronald Eyre. Difficult man and, like all the best directors, an ex-schoolmaster. Ron knew what fear was...he'd worked at the RSC and he was here not long after it opened. The opening, was, of course, disastrous. Ron said they should have moved out straight away, gone back to the Old Vic and rented the place out, made the Olivier into a skating rink, the Cotteslow a billard hall and the Lyttelton boxing. Then after twenty-odd years of ordinary unpretentious entertainment, when it's shabby and run-down and been purged of culture, and all the pretension had long since been beaten out of it, then with no fanfare at all they should sneak back with the occasional play and nobody need be frightened any more. Except, of course, the actors. 

He was wrong, though, Ron. Because what's knocked the corners off the place, taken the shine off it and made it dingy and unintimidating- are plays. Plays plump, plays paltry, plays preposterous, play purgatorial, plays radiant, plays rotten- but plays persistent. Plays, plays, plays. The habit of art. 

--

B: you once told me that was what I wanted. To be loved. 

A: Did I? At twenty I tried to vex my elders. Past sixty it's the young whom I hope to shock. 

B: Still we cling on. 

A: That's a misconception. Clinging on. 

B: I'm sure. 

A: We do not contain life. It contains us, holds us sometimes in its jaws.