Seeing Double: Uncertainty and Choice

Anyone who has worked on a theatre production will have a keen understanding of failure. As an actor, you can be left with ‘egg on your face’, stripped of all pretence, alone and exposed to the audience, perhaps laughed at, mocked, or sent off the stage. An author may have to listen when words fail to hold attention or make no sense at all, while an actor struggles to ‘make them work’. A stage-manager or, as Elizabethans would say, a bookkeeper will sometimes be unable to prevent the wrong person entering or a technical device failing to function. Sometimes an entire company of actors must face an audience that has lost interest or become hostile. Behind any success in theatre lies the possibility of failure, when the only recourse is to recognize what has happened, try to ride the unmanageable beast, and learn from the experience.