Review: All the World's a Stage
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 16, 2014
While all of us can look back at the choices we made in our lives and contemplate how things might have turned out differently, in most cases, the results are only apparent to a relatively small number of people. On the other hand, in Hollywood, the outcome of an actor's career decisions often becomes known to millions. Molly Ringwald had a fair run of success in John Hughes teen comedies, but she decided against playing the lead in "Pretty Woman." Soon afterwards, Ringwald's career faded, and the actress who got the role, Julia Roberts, had a considerably different career path.Duncan Whitehead looks at the career choices of two actors, and how they play out, in a deliciously wicked short story, "An Actor's Life." One of the two actors is Sir Michael Brookes, somewhat of a cross among Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, and Michael Caine, who has won multiple Oscars and is now poised to win both the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor awards on the same night. The other is a contemporary of Brookes, Terry Sparkes, who has spent the last couple of decades doing obscure theatrical productions and getting government assistance to make ends meet. As Sparkes sits in front of his TV watching Brookes prepare to make history, he reflects on his own career.Ironically, at one time, Sparkes was on a better career path than Brookes, having landed a plum role on a British TV soap opera and becoming quite popular. However, fame is fleeting, and a combination of fickle public tastes and incompetent show production, along with a spectacularly ill timed outburst on live television, and Sparkes' career was in far worse shape than Molly Ringwald's has ever been. I can't really go into detail about how things went wrong (because that would spoil a reader's enjoyment), but it's safe to say that his career proves the old proverb, "As ye sow, so shall ye reap."Trying to sum up a 30-year acting career in less than 30 pages is a difficult task, but Whitehead's story is masterfully constructed. Show business is an ugly business, as Whitehead demonstrates, showing the mindset that led the soap opera producers to change the direction of the show, with disastrous results, and how Sparkes and the other actors on the show contributed to their own creative demise. It's a tale that easily could have formed the basis of a novel, but readers of "Actor's Life" won't feel shortchanged, because Whitehead distills his analysis of the doomed soap opera to the bare minimum needed to tell his tale, and he does so with a distinctly dark wit that permeates the entire story. In fact, it's the humorous touch that makes the story so enjoyable; a serious disaster tale wouldn't have worked nearly as well.Most readers will probably figure out what's going to happen in "Actor's Life" well before the story's conclusion, but that doesn't spoil the ending. In fact, readers who can guess what's going to be revealed at the final curtain call will get even more enjoyment at seeing how Whitehead spins his "surprise" revelation in a rather unexpected, and deliciously ironic, manner.Whitehead also does a bit of clever cross-selling that I've never seen done in quite this manner. Often, characters in one story will talk about events that occurred in one of the author's other books. However, Whitehead takes this one step further. In his discussion of Michael Brookes's career, Whitehead reveals that Brookes has been nominated for Best Supporting Actor for a film entitled, "The Gordonston Ladies Dog Walking Club," based on a novel of the same name by, you guessed it, Duncan Whitehead. The author even includes a link in the Kindle edition of "Actor's Life" to the Amazon page on which "Gordonston" is for sale. It's a blatant plug, but Whitehead pulls it off with such panache that it adds to the story, rather than detracts from it."An Actor's Life" is a good character study of a somewhat unlikable actor, combined with a hard look at television production and show business in general, and a good old fashioned morality tale to boot. It's hard to combine all these disparate elements in a 300-page book, but Whitehead has done so, seemingly effortlessly, in only 30. It's a shame that the TV shows and movies mentioned in the story are fictional, because Whitehead managed to make me wish I could pull them up on Hulu. Instead, readers will have to make do with this consistently clever, well crafted story.