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Thin Ice
By Alan Ford
Weidenfeld and Nicolson £9.99
184 pages
Dateline: 16th April, 2006
Charles Harwood, the hero of Alan Ford's debut novel, is not so much
an out-of-work actor as just plain out of work.
Although around twenty years younger, this thespian is, like his author
who has played parts in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,
The Long Good Friday and EastEnders, a cockney actor who
has made a career out of bit parts in movies.
He scrapes by on repeat fees and remarkably has managed to avoid a
West End stage appearance. Taking up the theme of the introduction provided
by William Hazlitt from In Defence of Actors, Harwood will use
his profession as a justification for any excess.
After three months out of work, the resting actor, in true soap-opera
style, packs in enough action on the final day of his 50th year to make
up for the whole of the previous quarter.
He is a Londoner through and through, seems to know everybody in the
acting business, and meets most of them on this auspicious day.
The book combines the life of an impecunious East Ender with illumination
about London and what is like to be an actor, even one who doesn't work
all that much.
By the end of Thin Ice, such are Ford/Harwood's obsessions that
one feels eminently qualified to operate as a high-class menswear salesman
or do The Knowledge and become a cabbie.
The real value and the entertainment in Thin Ice is to be found
in the affectionate pictures that its author draws of the rogues and
vagabonds who make up London's acting profession today.
There are the successful, for whom every rival must have the knives
out, the pretty of both genders for whom our heroes are eager to get
something else out, the raging Queens, the young, the old and, in one
sad case, the down-and-out.
What all of them have in common is a desperate need for respect (and
generally for cash). There is also a remarkable empathy that shows itself
both in attitudes at an audition for a silent part in a TV commercial
and on the opening night of the play at the Comedy Theatre.
If you have ever been to an opening night this episode will ring true
and you will understand why almost every face present is familiar, if
not always to the extent of remembering their names.
Ford mixes in the real with the fictitious so that Harwood and his
gay chum Jago rub shoulders with Sir Richard Eyre and others whose names
had been changed to protect the guilty, although in the case of Evening
Standard critic Nicholas de Jongh, dropping the final H may have been
more accidental than an attempt to hide his identity.
This is a sensational life in a day that provided welcome comfort to
a flu sufferer who was not in the mood for anything overly demanding.
It looks at an area of acting life that is rarely covered in print and
doesn't worry too much about plot, concentrating on character instead.
While some of the writing, with concentration of its sex and drugs
and rock and roll ideas, goes too far over the top, it will provide
wry entertainment for anyone in the profession or wannabes. It may also
prove a useful cautionary reminder for future Mrs Worthingtons who wish
to keep their daughters off the stage.
Philip Fisher
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