A Blessing and a Curse — On Being Too Individual

This is a continuation of "It Was You and It Wasn't You" — part of an ongoing series about finding my way as an artist.

After the premiere of Circus of Emotions, I had one short, difficult stint at a theatre in Camden — not the greatest experience, but I survived it. I know now what it feels like to perform in front of just one person (don't worry, I asked beforehand whether he was okay with it; he was there from another theatre, some kind of opportunity).

A couple of months later, I moved to Hamburg for love — following my heart once more, and taking a real risk doing it.

I'd also known for a while that I didn't want to stay in London much longer, even though I'd never want to have missed that time either.

Still, I was ready to jump into another experience and see what it would bring.

Funnily enough, I'm the kind of person who's willing to jump straight into cold water, but who gets terrified afterward, once it's too late to back out. Maybe that's a way of tricking myself — otherwise I wouldn't do it at all.

Apart from my boyfriend, who came from Hamburg and had long-time friends there, I had exactly one friend of my own — which was for sure better than none. I found a few fringe theatres willing to put my show on for a couple of nights. Getting into these places felt exciting, and I was full of hope.

Of course, I soon found out how difficult it was to draw an audience once I'd used up all the friends and acquaintances willing to come.

I remember one theatre in particular that charged me for electricity after the fact — never part of our original agreement — and whose manager, when I arrived to set up, asked me in the most nonchalant way: "Do you mind if we leave the sofa and the props from the last show on stage?" I was speechless.

Around the same time, I stumbled into coaching, which was still fairly unknown then, and ended up doing a training in it.

I went to a lot of networking events, coaching businessmen on presenting themselves more authentically, drawing on all of my theatre background. It was fun — but at the same time, it felt like it was pulling me away from my art. I didn't know how to bridge those two very different worlds. It felt like a tug of war, a push and pull that couldn't be resolved.

What also puzzled me at the time: some people close to me, who'd seemed genuinely supportive of my art before the training, had a problem with it once I came back.

I'd become more instinctual in my expression, and even though none of them would put it this way, it felt like I'd suddenly become too much. My aunt, who ran a small gallery and had always loved my performances at her openings, didn't like the one I did after I got back. Too aggressive, she said — which it really wasn't. It just didn't fit anymore, in her mind. And that was that.

My best friend at the time came to see the show, and it got too far under her skin — too emotional, too intense, too uncomfortable. I'm not sure whether it affected our friendship, but my guess is that, on some invisible level, it did.

I kept sending my demos to different places, too. One went to a stage for new shows, run by an actor who'd been the main act in the hit show Cavemen. He seemed very nice.

His response: "Your show is too individual."

But there were surprises too, the kind that warmed my heart right back up. My boyfriend's dad came to one of my shows — nearly eighty at the time. I was certain he'd hate it; I almost wished he hadn't come at all. When it finished, he came over with a huge smile and told me how much he'd loved it. You just never know — that was a real lesson. I have absolutely no control over who takes to my show and who doesn't. There was a woman, too, a stranger, who came up to me afterward and thanked me profusely. She said it was the first time she'd truly felt seen in a show — that it was as if her own experience had been put on stage.

So there were people for whom this mattered, even if they were few and far between. Mostly, though, I felt entirely alone in a sea of conventional, commercial theatre, holding an original show that was so very different.

Where to go from here? I felt caught between a rock and a hard place.