Treading the Board 2
“Eight shows a week is getting tougher,” confesses Geoffrey Rush, still punch-drunk from the night before. “You don’t bounce back as quickly.”
The trouper is a trooper of the first degree. Rush is looking a little ragged from a month onstage at Melbourne’s Malthouse, playing the potty King Berenger in Ionesco’s farce, Exit the King. The show finished two nights before, with a cast party, and director Neil Armfield’s birthday bash since. So the idea of Scrabble at 11am is profane.
But Rush obliges. Briefly. He digs out his tiles and smirks at the word he sees in his rack. It’s eerie – no the word, the coincidence. He lays down DRIVEN.
Neither of us can believe it. Story Scrabble is designed to elicit haphazard confessions from the player in the spotlight, and what better word for an A-list actor to confront than driven?
The fluke suggests the gods are smiling on the formula. Imagine if Geoffrey played TAPIR or PRONG or RIND. Where would they take us? At least with ALGAE I might inquire about microculture, but DRIVEN?! It’s a gilt-edged moment. I quiz the star’s ambition.
Such was the format I tried to build into the magazine profile, but best-laid words of mice and men can go pear-shaped. Two factors jeopardised the gimmick.
One, the opening quote: “Eight shows a week is getting tougher…” For all his bonhomie, Scrabble was likely to be Geoffrey’s game du jour, even with no score-pad. Even when chat was the contest’s aim. Far too much brain-strain before a second coffee.
And two, the global curse of the downsized feature. The very fact you’ve reached this paragraph, Number 8 in a windy posting, suggests you belong to a minority. A [very long] feature in the Columbia Journalism Review http://www.cjr.org/ entitled Does Size Matter marks the shift from grey-slab narratives, once the guts of all gazettes, to the busy, bitsy page we know today in MagLand.
“Chances are you won’t bother to read this article,” writes Michael Scherer in the December 2002 edition. “It is just one long block of text, after all, unbroken by alluring pictures, snappy captions, or eye-grabbing infographics. You can’t click it. You can’t flip it. All you can do is read it.
“And reading a full magazine article — as opposed to scanning, perusing, surfing — is so twentieth century, so retirement home, so William Shawn.”
So where does this leave me and Geoffrey Rush, hovering over DRIVEN, one latte into our encounter at the Buena Vista aerie? Damn it. I’m worried about your attention span – I’ll post Part 3 before you can say Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End.