Getting Personal - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 72

Attempts at acting
It is my major regret that I am and have always been a terrible performer. I can't act, I can't sing,
I can't do accents, I can't dance, and have a resonant voice with little range. Not ideal for a
would-be thespian! I have relied on a certain presence rather than any skill. I started early,
being the Raven (people as animals again) in our Nativity play. I was grumpy as my sister
Amanda played the Dove and got a second entrance, while I sulked backstage, tempted to
rewrite the scriptures. An unmusical Babe in the Wood in the village panto followed (my darling,
supportive Ma probably overestimated my talents; still, I was a cute Babe). A succession of bad
performances such as a Gossip in Britten's Noye's Fludde , bits in Yeomen of the Guard and She
Stoops to Conquer should have put me of , but I felt comfortable in a theatrical environment,
where costume, lighting, movement and all that seemed so important. This was never about
being the centre of attention (something that I hate unless hiding behind a professional façade);
it was about telling stories by being someone else. Studying drama at university, where a talent
for acting failed to emerge magically, a stinker of a review for a play I was in and the humiliating
experience of saying 'pardon' to a prompt conspired to make me have other thoughts.
Three reasons why I became an animator.
How frustrating, then, to understand the whole business of performing, and
to love the craft with a consuming, almost obsessive passion. Although I never
grasped the complexities of iambic pentameters, I loved unlocking the puzzles
of Shakespeare's language and relished his themed palette of words for certain
situations. Being a man of a thousand voices and all of them the same, I envied
others as they controlled their diaphragms and fretted about thirds and semitones.