Cocooned in the faded splendour of London’s Café de Paris, actors Ian Hart, Lucy Brown, Ray Panthaki and Richard Schiff read stories by (respectively) Adam Marek, Rose Tremain, Gautam Malkani and Michel Faber.

What these very different stories have in common is their appearance in the cultural and current affairs monthly Prospect. Alex Linklater, associate editor of the magazine, is a tireless champion of the short story in Britain – indeed, he is one of the driving forces behind the National Short Story Prize – and it is his collaboration with the UK-based arm of WordTheatre that brought these actors together.

WordTheatre is a nonprofit organization dedicated to keeping the love of language and literature alive through the ancient tradition of oral storytelling. Single-author readings in Los Angeles have featured Ha Jin, TC Boyle, Aimee Bender, Mona Simpson, Tobias Wolff and Rick Moody; theme-led group author events have featured ZZ Packer, Julie Orringer, Mary Yukari Waters and Arthur Miller among others. In New York, James Salter has read from his work,and actors have taken to the stage to reenact the lives of Dr Johnson and Hunter S Thompson (not at the same time).

The London event, not inappropriately, had a distinctly British feel (even though one of the readers was American). The title for the evening, Love, Hate and Race in the UK, pretty much summed up the themes in the performed stories, the first two of which were wincingly apparent in the opening story, Adam Marek’s surreal ‘Testicular Cancer vs the Behemoth’. Ian Hart, well-known for his roles in the films Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Finding Neverland, gave a full-pelt rendition of Marek’s tale, in which a man diagnosed with the cancer of the title ends up machine-gunning in the groin a Godzilla-type monster that has invaded the city. Lots of love and hate. And very phallic.

‘21st Century Juliet’, read with passion by Lucy Brown in a cut-glass accent that should have smashed the Café’s mirrors to smithereens, was a love story of a different kind. It is Rose Tremain’s tale of a posh girl’s dilemma: save the family estate by marrying unhappily into money, or take up with her lover Romeo, a Moldavian builder. A tragedy brings Jules’s trivial life down to earth with an enormous bump, forcing her to grow up and face the consequences of her silliness.

The audience had been warned that Ray Panthaki’s voice might not be up to the task of reading after a gruelling few months filming in Wales, but the gusto with which he got stuck into Gautam Malkani’s ‘Paki’ (an excerpted chapter from his debut novel Londonstani) put paid to any thoughts of throat pastilles. Some would argue that there is little to laugh about in the story of a Pakistani teenager cold-bloodedly beating up a white boy while his gang of three uncertain friends stands by trying to be as hard as their leader, but there is real humour and pathos in Malkani’s writing and Panthaki (pictured) was pitch-perfect (and very funny) in his evocation of the narrator’s conflicting emotions.

The final performance of the evening was by the American actor Richard Schiff, much admired for his role in The West Wing. He read Michel Faber’s deceptively simple story about an American family holidaying in Scotland. On the train to Inverness, Don, the father, thinks back to the earliest days of his relationship with his wife, and ponders the recent conflict with his son over his Eminem-style haircut. As his daughter reaches over to tenderly comb her sleeping brother’s ‘Vanilla Bright’ hair, Don realises that this is one of the happiest days of his life.

Schiff read beautifully; although his accent is different, he was a little like Richard Ford in the way he paused for slightly longer than one would expect between certain words. This may be a more common way of speaking (or reading) in the US, but it had the effect of introducing a langorous tone to the sentences that both summed up Don’s reveries and the torpor induced by a long train journey.

So: four very different stories, read by four very different, but equally passionate and intelligent voices. But what makes an evening like this successful? Is it the actors’ ability to breathe life into their texts, no matter how good – or bad? Is it the writing upon which the performance is based that is crucial? Is it better for the listeners not to have read the stories they hear beforehand?

Reading is such an internal and personal process that to have another voice interpret something one has already read can seem almost like a violation. On the other hand, a different voice can bring a new and probably unconsidered interpretation to a story. Crucially, though, the story itself simply has to be good enough; actors are trained to do their best with words, but no matter how good they are, their material has to be sound. Audience tastes will vary from author to author (and actor to actor) but what WordTheatre UK’s event showed was that an exciting range of short stories is out there for the consuming, and that there are many ways in which this can be done.

(James Smith, 12 March 2007)

Photo reproduced by kind permission of Buster Turner @ Christian Banfield Photography

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