"The half, the
half, it all takes place in the half. It's the countdown quality of
the half that calls forth Simon Annand's urgency as a photographer.
There is no time for the artifice and poised lighting of a Cecil Beaton
or an Angus McBean. Annand is shooting from the hip - he's the action-painter
of these performance artists."
Michael Kustow
For the past 25 years, photographer Simon Annand has been granted
unprecedented access to actors' dressing rooms during the sacrosanct
period of "the half"; the thirty minutes before curtain
up.
The result is a series of portraits that catch the moment in which
the daily self is shed and the actor slides their way into a role.
Though almost every face is familiar - from Antony Hopkins to Tilda
Swinton, all theatre's royalty is here - there is something acutely
vulnerable about these images. Annand's cast are caught in the midst
of private rituals: putting on make-up, smoking, limbering up or
staring into space.
The best portraits are the most unguarded: Billie Whitelaw in Rockaby
gazing at her cadaverous reflection in a mirror, all pancake-white
and haunted eyes; Saffron Burrows perched in a sink, her feet immersed
in water, a dampness that might be tears glazing one cheek.
As a piece of theatre history, The Half is astonishingly rich.
But its real value is to reveal the agonising, magical process of
transition an actor must undergo; to show, as William Hazlitt had
it, the 'studied madness' of becoming, daily, someone new.
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