Offical film poster for Sexy Beast (2000, director Jonathan Glazer)

What determines someone’s, that is to say, anyone’s career?

Needs, circumstances, skills, ambition, luck. That’s five bullet points, granted not presented as such, off the top of my head, so don’t take that as the definitive answer, don’t pack it all in if you are generally unlucky, have no ambition, are bereft of any transferrable skills, lead an uncircumstantial life or cannot quantify your needs. There is no definitive answer here, I should know.

I never became a professional actor because I lacked a required and important skill: I cannot remember my lines. I was planning on attending an open mic night this week to perform a short piece, something I’ve never done before. Now, admittedly there’s nothing to stop me simply reading what is essentially a short story, 700 words, takes me 4 minutes 30 seconds to read including dramatic pauses. But ideally, in a performance situation, I want to, well, perform, using the 3 sheets of A4 paper only as an aide-mémoire. It shouldn’t be beyond me, after all, 690 of the words were written by me, the remaining 10 by Dexys Midnight Runners singer, Kevin Rowland, no surprise there. I’m kind of struggling with this.

I’m convinced that in an interview published in The Scotsman sometime in the late 1980s, Dundee’s greatest actor Brian Cox was quoted as saying that acting was simply standing on the stage and shouting. Certainly, when I saw him 10 years ago at the Lyceum in Edinburgh as Vladimir in Sam Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, there was a fair bit of shouting but he, and Bill Paterson as Estragon, demonstrated a wide vocal range all the way down whispers. We can assume then that either I completely misremembered that interview (or perhaps dreamt it) or, if Cox did say that, he was having a laugh. A bloody good laugh.

There is a lot of shouting in Jonathan Glazer’s black comedy Sexy Beast and a lot of bloody good laughs. Quite a bit of actual blood too. I saw the film when it was first released in 2001, noticed it was being shown at the Cameo last Sunday afternoon but opted to see A Complete Unknown instead. But Sexy Beast is currently free to view on Channel 4 so gave it a second spin last night.

It's difficult to know when the film is supposed to be set and it maybe doesn’t matter. It pre-dates mobile phones, but I think maybe only just, the plot is a simple one, but would fall apart if the protagonists had mobiles. Ray Winston plays an ex-criminal Gary ‘Gal’ Dove whose blissful retirement on the Costa del Sol with his wife DeeDee (Amanda Redman) is shattered by the arrival of an old criminal associate Don Logan played by Ben Kingsley. Logan is under instruction from London crime lord Teddy Bass (a don’t trust him an inch Ian McShane) to enlist Gal for one last bank robbery.

All four actors are superb, as indeed are Cavan Kendell and Julianne White (weirdly underemployed throughout her career) as Gal and DeeDee’s friends. But Ben Kingsley’s performance is off the scale, as is the language that his character uses. I’m not complaining, unlike this reviewer of the soundtrack on Amazon:

FIRST OF ALL, THE MUSIC SELECTED FOR THIS FILM WAS GREAT......BUT THE LANGUAGE WAS TOO MUCH - FOR ANYONE - ONE IS OVERWHELMED - IN A BAD WAY -- BY THE ATROCIOUS LANGUAGE.

(And the music from electronic outfit UNKLE is superb.)

No, what astounds me is Kingsley’s ability to memorise and speak his lines because for much of the time in Gal and DeeDee’s house his character Don is in a psychotic tirade where every second word, sometimes every word is an expletive. I know if it was me, I wouldn’t be able to recall the actual script at all and would end up just swearing at Ray Winstone. And he’s always struck me as a nice guy, I wouldn’t want to do that to him.

Which brings me back to trying to break my open mic duck …

Where there's a will - and there is a fucking will - there's a way - and there is a fucking way.

Where There’s A Will

Große Freiheit

VHS