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'The half' is theatre language for the 30 minutes before curtain up, in which actors prepare alone for their transition to the stage. As Michael Kustow explains in his introduction: 'The half is a tense and vulnerable time; if acting were a religion, you might call the half the ascent toward a part.'
- The Half
- : Photographs of Actors Preparing for the Stage
- by Simon Annand
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- Buy it from the Guardian bookshop
For the past 25 years, photographer Simon Annand has been granted unprecedented access to actors' dressing rooms during this sacrosanct period; 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 Joan Plowright to Daniel Radcliffe, 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.
