I saw Sam Shepard's Buried Child at the Trafalgar Studios last week.
It was an exceptional experience.
There was no acting. Only being.
In the play, Vince, played by Jeremy Irvine, gets angry. Very angry.
This emotion, anger, is not shouting, because that would not be anger, that would be shouting.
Irvine found his anger, his rage, somewhere inside himself way before he started and allowed the emotion to bubble on the surface ready to be unleashed.
I am angry. I have anger inside of me.
This week saw a GP who congratulated me on surviving a brain haemorrhage.
She went on and said "I can't believe that the AVM in your head wasn't picked up by someone."
I have contemplated on this thought too.
Not picked up by my family, not by my friends, not by other actors, not work colleagues, not by teachers, nor from routine visits to the GP.
By no one. Nobody.
I also wonder too, maybe, if someone had said something, then maybe I wouldn't have suffered a brain haemorrhage and spent several months in hospital.
Maybe the AVM in my head has been effecting me all my life?
I am told I didn't speak until I was near to 3 or 4.
I wasn't good at sports. I didn't have the power.
I couldn't focus and concentrate on school.
I found reading hard.
I was appalling when it came to homework.
I had no focus.
I was useless in exams.
I didn't stick at anything.
The same with my career before acting.
The same in relationships.
In the year before my haemorrhage I had a period of unemployment. I could get interviews but never the job.
I looked good on paper, just the man, but when it came to being interviewed I didn't make it.
I was looking old, skanky, bloated. I was rotting on the inside.
I went out with friends a couple of times and I have absolutely no recognition of those evenings. Microscopic drops of blood were seeping into my brain switching off my working memory.
All of this, maybe a lifetime of this, all because of this abnormality in my head?
A sinister abnormality.
Sitting there, hiding deep in my brain, breathing quietly, waiting for it's moment.
Who knows?
All these houghts are neither useful or helpful to me, or anyone else. But, these thoughts drive my emotions which, make me angry.
They make my anger rise to the surface.
Unlike Irvine, for the moment, I don't have a character, their thoughts and a stage to unleash my rage.
Perhaps, Marcus Aurelius has the answer for me?
His stoic view would be to keep in mind the broader scheme of things, reminding ourselves that whatever is angering us right now probably will not last, and is inconsequential on a cosmic scale.
The AVM in my head has been treated with radiation and the hope is to obliterate it.
If I take Aurelius's view, in the greater scheme of things, and in relation to the bigger picture, it is then a very very very small abnormality indeed.
An annoyance.
David can be reached via his agent Sam Brown at Brown and Mills. London.