Actor and Audience: Awkward Encounter

I recently went to the Arts Club Theatre on Granville Street to see a wonderful performance of a play called Red Velvet, a historical play about a black actor, Ira Aldridge, in the early 1800s who plays Othello in England, around the time England was trying to make the slave trade illegal, and the fallout surrounding it.

It was in turns funny and thoughtful, and made me think of the parallels to modern day–the criticism Aldridge faced and the justifications surrounding them often put me in mind of the kind of people who attack “woke” Hollywood and their rationalizations for it.

A great play, but I had an awkward moment afterwards when Gillian and I ended up on the same bus as the lead and two of the other actors.

Awkward for me, that is.

See, part of me wanted to give them an acknowledgement. “Great show today!” kind of thing.

But, well, let me tell you a quick story about my brief encounter with Stephen Fry. See, I was biking to work one day in London, going through some quiet residential streets, when, lo and behold, I saw Stephen Fry coming out of a black cab. His gaze locked on mine as recognition dawned on me as to who this was, and my jaw began to drop.

And then he rolled his eyes to the heavens, as if to say “Oh, God, not now!”

And I kept on biking.

Now, I don’t want anyone to ever take this as some kind of “what a jerk!” anecdote because it couldn’t be farther from that. See, I had been biking past his home at the time, and the black cab wasn’t dropping him off, he was driving it (he does that to avoid traffic by using the taxi lanes legally).

So basically, I had stumbled on him just as he was getting home, and he’d probably just had a long enough day dealing with the public elsewhere and just wanted it done with.

However, that plea to the heavens hammered home in a millisecond something that has never left me since.

So when I saw Quincy Armorer dressed in his civies, getting ready to board the same bus as me and Gill, I did nothing. For pretty much the same reason. This guy was done for the day. Off the clock. Best to let him be.

But it was also just a surreal moment to see a guy (and two of the other actors as well) getting on a bus with us to go home. Certainly placed the whole actor mythos into something a lot more grounded.