Team spirit ... Trevor Cooper and Flaminia Cinque in The Late Henry Moss at the Almeida, London. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
What drives an actor to drink? I began to mull this over while watching The Late Henry Moss, the newest play by Sam Shepard to make it across the Atlantic.
Like most Shepard plays, this one is about as liquor-sodden as it seems possible to imagine: the tale of two brothers brought back together after the death of their overbearing, alcoholic father (the deceased Signor Moss of the title), it's set in a squalid New Mexican hovel filled with empty bottles and boozy, nauseous memories. Most of the characters present are already drunk or well on their way; in Shepard's world, it seems, the only way of staying sober is to be hungover, or perhaps dead. As a bottle of paint-stripper bourbon is passed around the cast, it becomes the most tangible link between present and past, an alcoholic umbilical chord connecting everyone on stage.
But all this made me think about the peculiar mechanics of alcohol as represented in the theatre. First, what are the actors actually glugging? Is it cold tea and apple juice, or do the props people have endless fun concocting alcohol-free liquids that look unnervingly like whiskey but aren't? Second, how difficult is it to keep pretending to be intoxicated for two or three hours at a stretch? Do psychosomatics start playing a part, and actually make you feel tiddly? Third, er, don't you need to go to the loo? Quite a lot? (Any thesps reading, feel free to correct my lemonade-sipping inexpertise.)
For all these reasons and more, I was reminded that acting drunk must be a bit of a sod - not least because when you're actually drunk there's no way of knowing how to recreate it while sober, unless people sit around at drama school and earnestly watch videos of themselves getting blotto. Perhaps that's why actors playing drunks often look nothing like real drunken people. In this particular field, imitation of life-as-lived somehow gives way to a series of familiar gestures - that slurring, that wobble, that deeply fake wince at the first sip of spirits - which mime the idea of drunkenness without ever quite touching it.
And then there's the other oddity: if actors are stone-cold sober but obsessively trying to be otherwise, audiences, on the other hand, are doing the exact opposite, via a desperate combination of early starting times (7.30pm? Can someone explain?), rapid necking of drinks in the bar and a suicidal lack of food. Returning after the interval, you can practically smell the alcoholic fug in the theatre - as good a reason as any, I guess, why second halves go much faster, and get many more laughs, than the first.
Or maybe I've got this wrong, and that the boozy days of Burton, Hopkins, Harris, Reed and the rest - and their slugs of super-strength Dutch courage at curtain-up - aren't so far behind us. In which case maybe pissed thespians are pretending to be sober in order to pretend to be drunk. Now that's what I call acting.
