Comedians

A few people have recently shown an interest in a one-man play of mine called "I'm on a Train", a play about a man using a mobile phone and how he.... but it'll take too long to tell - send to see the play instead - FREE by e mail.
When I wrote it, a couple of years ago, I thought it would be an ideal piece for Seinfeld. Then, pondering on it a bit more, I thought "No, not Seinfeld but George!" Though the man who plays George is an actor, he is also a comic. Sometimes you can be one and not the other: a comedian can act of course but usually he plays the comic character he has developed over the years; and an actor, good as he may be at entering into the personality of a character, may not be able to be a comedian - he may not get a laugh.
And this might apply to my play "I'm on a Train" more than to many others. I think the play needs a comedian to have success with it because if he doesn't get a laugh pretty well straight off he could, as they say in theatre-land "die a death".
An actor with a Welsh theatre comapny a long time ago said to me one day (or, rather, one evening in the bar) "You know? You've never given me a good review." I can't remember how I flannelled my way out of that accusation but it was true. Not that I'd ever given him a bad one. Probably he felt that he was, sort of, invisible to me.
This same actor in a sort of college show, did a stand-up comedian act and failed dismally though he did elicit from the studentish audience the sort of hollow laughter that might have been polite but was probably a result of them wanting to have a good time and, damn it all, "we're going to laugh even if it isn't very funny."
In a review afterwards I think I wrote something about comedians having to grow over the years, having to bear the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" in such places as Glasgow where, as one comedian put it "they didn't leave a turn un-stoned." You can, of course, stand up and imitate a comedian but I think you'll be lucky if anyone laughs.
Now, today, I've had an e mail from someone who'd like to read the play "I'm on a Train" and I wonder if I should tell him that if he's not a comedian or if he has never known what it is to die on stage then probably he'd be better off not doing it.
But I think I'll let him make his own mind up about it.
Incidentally, the actor I mentioned who'd never received a good review from me went on to greater things; the next time I met him he said he'd just landed a part in a TV production of Emlyn Williams's "The Corn is Green" - the part of the young man who is on his way to Oxford, the one who is tutored by the local teacher. "Well done," I said. "And who's playing the part of the teacher?"
"Katherine Hepburn," he said.