When I last wrote, it was beside a lone electric lamp in my hotel room in Budapest as the dawn was breaking over the Buda hills. Now I am home again and a candle burns by me as usual. Our little Drama tour has been successful with excellent performances and enthusiastic audiences. Since I came home, I have been missing my colleagues and students. It has been an intense six days of company and good company at that. So it is understandable that I have been feeling a little flat now I am home alone.

When I was in my hotel room that morning, I was apprehensive about the performances of ‘A Christmas Carol’ in the afternoon. It was director’s nerves. We had a long day ahead of us: arriving at 10 followed by setting up the show and quick rehearsals before curtain up at 2, a break, then curtain up again at 6. It all seemed quite daunting. It had been a long time since we had performed twice in one day.

As soon as I got to the theatre, my nerves dissolved. I was back at the Kolibri Theatre and among friends to help set up the show. We have been performing there for so long that it really is like coming home to me.  I was also forgetting how committed and determined my cast were. Arriving at the theatre galvanized them and, once we had been through the play in the first performance, they virtually ran the second one themselves. They were truly a magnificent cast. And the audiences were wonderful too. Once again, actors and audience became a circle.

I had forgotten too how much energy my students have and how much youthful generosity of spirit, the ability to throw themselves into their performances without reserve, to give without counting the cost. This is a quality we lose as we grow older: we are prudent, we think twice, we hold back and yes, that is the wisdom of age. But, in the process, we lose the innocent ardor, the passionate enthusiasm of youth. How fortunate I have been to work with young people and to have been surrounded by that enthusiasm and ardor, which has, at times carried me along with it.

I must confess that, as I watched the sun rise over the hills that morning, I was also feeling old. This made the prospect of the day ahead even more daunting. Over the first few days of the tour, being with much younger colleagues and even younger students, I was very much aware of my age. That was nothing to do with my colleagues or students. They were, as I have mentioned, very good company. But I realised I can’t rush around Budapest like I used to!

Again, once I got into the theatre and started rehearsing, my sixties’ ennui dissipated. I suddenly had enough energy to power the national grid! As I used to say in lessons: I was neon lights, I was Broadway.

In January, I was back at the Royal Opera House, this time to see their wonderful production of Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’. In the cast was the legendary Placido Domingo, still singing (and in fine voice) at the age of 78. And an exemplary actor. Once he would have played the tenor role, the youthful lover, Alfredo (and I have a recording of him in that role). Now he was playing the baritone role of Germont, Alfredo’s father. Once he was one of the famous Three Tenors, but now he has re-trained his voice to the lower register of baritone and in the process has learnt a whole new repertoire and keeps on learning more roles. I have learnt from him. He has adapted his prodigious talent and taken a new direction. However, that new direction follows on from what he did before: he is still singing on stage.

Without wishing to compare myself to such a great musician and actor, my life has been similar recently: I have taken a new direction: I am no longer a teacher, I am retired. But, as before, I am still directing young people. What a lucky man I am!

I have also learnt that, though I am growing older, I still have much to give (as has Domingo). Infact, becoming old is not an excuse not to give.

I have visited relatives on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada for several years and as a result have become a great fan of the B. C. artist Emily Carr. Emily was a revolutionary. She was a rare female artist in that part of the world at the start of the twentieth century and decided not to marry because her art came first. She loved the primeval forests and had a great appreciation of the art of the First Nations indigenous tribes, even taking boats and canoes to paint their scattered coastal villages and desolate totems. They christened her ‘Klee Wyk’ – ‘the laughing one’ – because she was always smiling. For a long while, Emily had to abandon her art to give classes and run a boarding house in her native Victoria. Eventually she went back to her art but was not understood, appreciated or recognized until she was well into middle age. Eventually in her old age she wrote books about her childhood, her travels and some of the strange guests in her boarding house. Like Placido, she adapted.

She once compared her later years to a bucket of water. She wrote:

‘I don’t want to trickle out. I want to pour till the pail is empty, the last bit going in a gush, not drops.’

That is how I want to be too.

Ave atque ale until the next blog.

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Neilus Aurelius