Lucky Break, Esther Freud’s seventh novel, charts the diverging fortunes of a group of actors who meet as students at drama college. Basing an entire book on the professional tribulations of a group of self-involved thespians and then attempting to make their characters sympathetic to the casual reader is, it must be said, something of a challenge. If the popularity of the Luvvies column in Private Eye is anything to go by, most people view the tortured actor as something of a comic stereotype and certainly not one worthy of 300 pages penned by one of Britain’s foremost female novelists.
But Freud’s talent lies in her ability to make us care about characters with whom we might superficially have little in common. In Hideous Kinky, her semi-autobiographical account of a Moroccan childhood in the 1960s, we found ourselves empathizing with the hippieish mother in search of enlightenment precisely because of the flaws that made her fallible.
Similarly, in Lucky Break, Freud cleverly manages to immerse us so fully in the actors’ claustrophobic world that our own perspective merges with theirs; all at once, it seems perfectly normal for someone’s happiness to be shattered by a bad audition or for their self-worth to be demolished by an outbreak of acne. It is to Freud’s immense credit that she has made a profession threaded through by fakery appear so indelibly and excruciatingly real.
As with Hideous Kinky, Freud mines her own experience for inspiration. She trained as an actress before becoming a novelist (even playing an alien in a 1985 episode of Doctor Who) and is married to the actor David Morrissey. There is, then, a sureness of touch when, in the opening chapters, she notes the youthful pretension of drama students, determined to embody the “Inner Attitudes” taught in a method-acting class. “Well, Adrift is sensing feeling,” one of them explains earnestly in the pub afterwards. “With Inner Participations of Intending and Adapting.”
Freud’s narrative, which spans 14 years, centers on three characters: Nell, who is kicked out of drama school after her second year for not having the requisite talent and who gains her Equity card by appearing as a penguin in a touring school production; Dan, the heartthrob who has to balance burgeoning professional success on the small screen with the demands of a wife and children; and Charlie, the stunningly beautiful young woman catapulted into the A-list as soon as she graduates.
By tethering the plot to these three fixed points, Freud is able to chart the ebb and flow of unpredictable success without ever losing our interest. She never forgets that her prime duty to her readers is to tell a gripping story, and although capable of lyricism and insight — a pint glass is “slippery with wet”; a girl’s eyeshadow is made up of “variegated blues” — her writing remains sparse and unpretentious.
She conveys both the elation of a first night and the anguish of a failed casting with such precision that your heart thuds along with the characters’. Every time kind-hearted Nell thinks she is on the verge of a breakthrough, you find yourself believing along with her, until it becomes painfully obvious, after a string of unreturned phone calls, that once again things haven’t worked out. “Maybe,” Nell muses at one point, “there is no such thing as a lucky break. Maybe you do well, or you don’t do well, and that’s how it is.”
And yet, although Freud writes with passion and feeling about this peculiar world, she is able to keep a clear-eyed distance from some of its more ludicrous excesses. In places, Lucky Break is extremely funny. After a first-night production of Hedda Gabler, Charlie understands why actors talked “with such intensity. How could you not say ‘darling’ when you’d journeyed through a lifetime with a person, bared your soul, wept tears, exchanged kisses, borne heartache, reached the heights of unimagined bliss?”
Later, Freud trains her crosshairs on Amanda, Nell’s big-shot agent who conspicuously fails to deliver. Amanda is forever draped in cashmere and twinkly smiles, her desk covered by vast bouquets sent to her by her boyfriend. Standing next to her in a lift, Nell notices Amanda’s “whole self gleaming, her hair bouncing, her nails buffed.” Outside, Amanda hails a taxi, leaving Nell standing dully on the pavement: “’Golden Square,’ she ordered and she was gone.”
Lucky Break is full of these pitch-perfect observations, spiced with wry humor. It is also a terrifically absorbing book, as authentic an evocation of the acting experience as you’re ever likely to read. After you have turned the last page, the Luvvies column in Private Eye will never look quite the same again.
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