The Acting Diaries – A Most Dramatic U-Turn

In June I received an email. It was from David Hare, the playwright of The Judas Kiss, and it read something along the lines (not a direct quote) of 'Hi Tom, we are performing the play in Toronto and New York next year, and I hear you've had a change of career path, but if you change your mind the role is yours.

David.' I had rejected the offer some months earlier, but now after the selection process had been and gone I had got to wondering again about this 'career change.' Was this u-turn really for me? I remembered on the final night in selection where we camped outside in Devon under tarpaulin sheets, alternating shifts in taking watch.

I couldn't sleep and I looked up at the stars as I lay underneath my little bit of plastic and thought, 'Can I really do this? Can I kill a person? Can I see another soldier dying next to me?' After all I was about to join the Royal Marines, a fighting force that is very much on the front line of global conflicts. I brushed those questions off quickly at the time, but they came back and with a fuller force occupied more of my headspace. I decided to leave it for a while, a week or so at least, then come back to it. After only a few days I had to re-read David's offer. Broadway was on my bucket list, a life to-do list that I first comprised at the age of 18.

After a gruelling 14 hour day on site I came back and sat at my laptop with the email in front of me once more. I typed an acceptance draft, saved it and had dinner with my parents, where I told them about the offer and the subsequent dilemma. Mum breathed a sigh of hopeful relief. Dad looked concerned. We talked a while, into the evening and then the night.

'I think I'm going to withdraw my application to the Marines,' I said. That was the first time I uttered it out loud, feeling strange yet right. 'Then that's what you should do,' Dad replied. The decision was made. I phoned the recruitment office and put in an official withdrawal, and sent that saved draft. Back to square one then, I thought. Never a dull moment.

I stayed in Essex and continued to work as rehearsals for the transfer to America were to begin in February. I worked relentlessly through the Summer and Autumn months until my travelling compatriot and I booked to go for a month to Andalucía and pick olives in the Spanish mountains. At the time he was working on an idea, and I had an idea of my own; a play demystifying the male working class in rural England, giving a voice of truth to a world often under and misrepresented by the mainstream arts.

I worked with these people on and off for years, and so felt I had an understanding of the trapped nature of their lives. I wanted to present this onstage. We boarded the plane with a couple of backpacks and our laptops and were met by a grizzly yet charismatic middle aged man who had a striking resemblance to aging Hemingway. He was English, formerly worked in finance, left his whole life to set up a bed and breakfast and a working olive grove in Southern Spain. The deal was that we would work the fields five hours a day, five days a week, and in return he would provide food and accommodation.

It worked a treat, at first... We were surrounded by cats, a pig, donkey, chickens and a beautiful Spanish mastiff named Max, who loyally followed us up to the olive grove as we cultivated the ground and handpicked the olives. Our host would collect eggs from the hens every morning for our breakfast, and then cook us a rustic local dish for lunch. In the evening we would sit on the veranda as the sun bled into the Andalucían mountains and tap away on our laptops until it was too dark to see the keyboard. After that, there was some time had in the make shift brewery adjacent to our living quarters, sampling the beer that was being brewed by the host's friend, accompanied by philosophical debates until we couldn't ignore the heaviness of our eyelids and had to retreat to the outhouse to sleep.