Who would be an actor? The pay is crap, there are few opportunities for promotion. You might spend most of your time out of work. You’d have to be crazy, right?
Actually, no. Or so says Elaine Jordan, a 20-something former student of UCD, and now an enrollee at Dublin’s Focus Theatre.
In addition to earning her stage chops, she is in rehearsals for Stop The Tempo, an acclaimed play by Romanian writer Gianina Cãrbunariu.
Acting, she says, is not for the uncommitted.
“You would have to be nuts to give your life to this profession, unless you had a vocation for it,” she suggests. “Acting is, I believe, a vocation, whereby you only do it because you can’t not do it. It’s something, if you leave it, you just keep coming back to.”
Acting, she says, is in her blood. “That’s how it is for me. When I was at UCD I got involved in Dramsoc productions and so on,” she explains. “After I left college I went to live in Spain. I got involved with a theatre company there. Before that, I’d thought acting was something other people did. But I realised it was actually in my blood.”
A deep love for theatre underpins her dedication to the craft, she says.
“You do have to have the love for theatre. I honestly believe that. You’d have to be bonkers or stupid to do acting if you didn’t really, really love it.”
Jordan also enjoys training at Focus. She describes it as “one of the most fantastic things I’ve ever done in terms of theatre”. She signed up after returning from Spain.
Among the plays she has appeared in at the theatre are Sweet Bird Of Youth by Tennessee Williams, as well as A Midsummer Nights Dream, M. Butterfly and Torch Song Trilogy. So what of Stop The Tempo?
“It ran in Romania and played in lots of night-clubs and jazz venues all over Europe and was hugely successful,” she says.
Set in the Romanian nightclub scene, the play casts a skewed glance at contemporary life, she says.
“It’s basically about three souls who come together and bond and have a common understanding that something here just isn’t doing it for us, something here doesn’t work.”
In other words, they suffer the classic 21st century malaise : lack of personal fulfilment.
“They all feel that the lifestyle is all very vacuous and superficial,” she says. “And I play Maria, which is a great part because of her own personal story. She’s a success, has three jobs. She’s the good girl. She provides for her parents. She does all the right things. But still she feels that, though everyone may envy here, what she has means nothing to her.’”
Maybe Maria should take up acting!
“Maybe she should, that might do it for her” she responds, laughing. More soberly, she adds “Then, she could also learn to live with no money!”