Unity

by Michael Arditti

Genres: World War II; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The story of a lost film about the relationship between Adolf Hitler and the English aristocrat Unity Mitford

'A wonderful novel, written with exceptional knowledge and understanding of past and present Germany' Gitta Sereny

'The most intriguing and thought-provoking novel I have read this year' Daily Express

'A remarkable, unsettling book' The Times

'A gripping read packed with intrigue, sex, politics and death. What more could you possibly want?' Attitude

Unity tells the story of a lost film about the relationship between the English aristocrat, Unity Mitford, and Hitler, set against the background of the Red Army Faction terror campaign in 1970s Germany. Shooting has to be abandoned when the leading actress, Felicity Benthall, joins in the campaign, following her affair with a charismatic Palestinian.

The author himself features in the narrative when, almost thirty years later, he attempts to uncover the truth about Felicity and another university friend, Luke Dent, who wrote the film-script. He consults Luke's letters from the set and the diaries of the former Hollywood child star and revolutionary socialist, Geraldine Mortimer, who played Diana Mosley; interviews two of the German actors and the film's producer, Thomas Bücher, an Auschwitz survivor turned high-powered pornographer; reads a revealing memoir by the director's widow; and corresponds with Carole Medhurst, a British actress turned Hollywood mogul.

Their testimonies set up an intricate chain of associations from 1930s Britain to post-war Germany, painting a disturbing picture of corruption and fanaticism, and casting light on the nature of evil.

Release date: May 1, 2005

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 384

Sample

 

For a writer to have gone to university with an international terrorist is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, he feels pressure from both his publishers and himself to provide his unique slant on the story, on the other, a reluctance to reopen old wounds. So much nonsense has been printed about Felicity Benthall that I would dearly like to set the record straight. And yet a fear of what my investigations might uncover has so far restrained me. What if a chain of complicity reaches back to the chance remark of a college contemporary’s – or, worse, of mine? What if an old acquaintance reveals Cambridge to have been as fertile a breeding-ground of fanaticism in the 1970s as it had been forty years before? I am caught between conflicting abstractions. Commitment to the truth contends with the determination to spare my friends – and, indeed, my whole generation – from further attacks.

The facts of the matter are plain. In October 1977, Felicity Benthall, a twenty-three-year-old English actress, attempted to blow up the diplomatic representatives of most of the United Nations at a service to commemorate the eleven Israeli athletes murdered at the Munich Olympics five years before. She succeeded only in killing herself, her uncle the British Ambassador, his deputy, two secret servicemen and the Polish chargé d’affaires. Immediately after her death, a statement was issued in Beirut by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claiming her as a martyr to its cause. Meanwhile, in Stuttgart, the Red Army Faction (otherwise known as the Baader-Meinhof group), the small band of revolutionary Marxists whose campaign of terror over the previous decade had plunged West Germany into its greatest political crisis since the end of the Second World War, also claimed that she was acting on its behalf.

Nowhere was the shock of the atrocity more deeply felt than among those who had known – or who thought that they had known – Felicity best. Try as we might, it was impossible to square the cynic who had drawled that all ideology was a bore with the fanatic who died for a principle that was, in every sense, foreign to her. Like any other observer – but with an added sense of frustration – we were left to wonder whether her behaviour had been driven by idealism or nihilism: whether she had been malevolent or mad. Moreover, by a coincidence which I decline to call an irony, she had been playing the role of Unity Mitford, the English aristocrat whose extremist views led her to fall in love with Hitler. The film, by Germany’s foremost post-war director, Wolfram Meier, was then abandoned. Like Sternberg’s I Claudius and Welles’s Don Quixote, Meier’s Unity has become one of cinema’s most celebrated might-have-beens. The untimely deaths of many of the leading players have contributed to its legendary status, creating the cinematic equivalent of the curse of Macbeth.

That was clearly the opinion of the film’s writer, Luke Dent, who, in the immediate aftermath of the attack, declared: ‘I know now that a writer must take full responsibility for his ideas, like a scientist with the H-bomb. There is certain research that is too dangerous to publish. It should be left in the study or the lab.’1 My own reluctance to engage too closely with Felicity’s story stemmed from a similar unease. But, with the discovery of Geraldine Mortimer’s diaries and Luke’s subsequent – or, indeed, consequent – suicide, it became a task that I could no longer shirk. To which end, I have gathered together the varying – and often conflicting – records of events surrounding the film, in the hope of casting light on both Felicity’s actions and the social, political and metaphysical issues that these raise.




 

i. Credo


I should say from the start that I have never believed in evil. I take an innocent until proven guilty attitude to the human race. Even in guilt, there are mitigating factors. At prep school, I was taught that ‘evil is good gone wrong’. And, although I soon came to realise that that left much unanswered, the loss of credulity did not lead to a loss of faith. I have been sustained all my life by the figure of Christ and the knowledge that God’s love was embodied in a man – and, by extension, in every man. This, together with my fervent conviction, often held in the face of all the evidence, that people are fundamentally decent led me, first instinctively, and then intellectually, to reject the concept of Original Sin. Later, Marx and Freud, two philosophers who in both appearance and stature came to resemble the prophets they had displaced, added secular authority to my belief that what was commonly called evil was simply the behaviour of people in the grip of social and psychological forces that they could not control.

‘What? Even Hitler?’ is the automatic response of my critics. Hitler is, after all, a byword for evil (and a not inconsiderable presence in the account that follows). ‘Yes, even Hitler,’ is my reply. The nature of the forces that shaped him may be open to dispute – and was, indeed, the subject of several on the set of Unity – but that is hardly surprising when it is impossible to reach agreement on something as uncontroversial as his favourite film.2 I am convinced, however, that such an interpretation is possible (in my amateur way, I made the attempt at Cambridge). Explanation is extenuation. After all, what is the alternative? Are we going to make him such a symbol of evil that he moves beyond the realm of human responsibility? In demonising Hitler, we are employing the same imagery that he did of the Jews.

A comparable danger awaits those who try to draw parallels between Unity and Felicity. I admit that the idea has its attractions. They were both young Englishwomen (Unity was twenty when she first met Hitler; Felicity twenty-one when she first met Wolfram Meier), who sprang from a similar upper-class background. Both loved to shock: Unity took her pet snake to deb dances and gave the Nazi salute at the British Embassy; Felicity played a record of Spirit in the Sky from the belfry of her college chapel and claimed that her family motto was ‘Spit, don’t swallow’. Both were seduced by a cause of which they knew only the trappings. But there the comparisons end. To suggest that history was repeating itself is almost as crass as to suggest that Unity’s spirit had entered Felicity. There is no store of primal evil working itself out down the generations, nor was Felicity the victim of diabolic possession.

Such lurid speculation3 was much in evidence in the months following Felicity’s death. Talk of the over-identification of actor and role has become a staple of newspaper arts pages, fostered by actors themselves in an attempt to authenticate their performances by reference to their psychic pain. But, unless we are to believe that the profession is made up of intrinsically unstable people – a view which, admittedly, the ensuing pages do little to refute – we would do well to search for our explanations elsewhere. Or is every Othello a potential wife-murderer, Faust a necromancer and Dr No a menace to the world?

My resistance to writing about Felicity stemmed from practical as well as psychological causes. I am a novelist, not a journalist or a historian, and yet any attempt to fictionalise her story would be bound to provoke accusations that, far from trying to establish the truth, I had something to hide. Added to which, the more I reflected on events, the more I grew convinced that it was in the sheer incompatibility of the different interpretations that the truth lay. This distinction would be lost if I tried to tell the story in my own voice. Moreover, I myself was present only at the beginning of Unity’s life and, although I was the recipient of a first-hand account, my experience of the filming was one of distance, which I cannot believe is of interest to anyone other than myself.

Gradually, my doubts were whittled away. After completing my third novel, I resolved to take a break from fiction. Instead of giving interviews, I would conduct them. By tracking down the remaining participants, I would make up for my own absence from the set. I am grateful to Thomas Bücher, Liesl Martins, Manfred Stückl and Carole Medhurst for submitting so graciously to my questions. My thanks are due to the trustees of the British Film Institute and to the executors of the late Lady Mortimer for allowing me to reproduce Geraldine Mortimer’s Munich diaries.4 It was Lady Mortimer’s bequest of her husband’s and stepdaughter’s papers to the BFI that sparked off this inquiry, and I am obliged to my friend, Ralph Waller, for alerting me to the material. I am likewise indebted to Renate Fischer for allowing me to quote from her monograph on Wolfram Meier, which, for reasons that will be touched on later, has yet to find a publisher in her native land.

My literary priorities have changed to a greater degree than my writing practice. I may not have invented the narrative but I am still shaping it, not least in the arrangement of the various contributions. There is no reason for my placing Luke Dent’s letters before Geraldine Mortimer’s diary other than my desire to give them pre-eminence: to make them the template for all that follows. They were my own introduction to the story. Those who prefer to read the book in the order in which it came into being should read Geraldine Mortimer’s account first. Those who prefer to read it in chronological order should read Renate Fischer’s. Before reading any of the others, however, I hope that they will read mine.

 

ii. Cambridge


Although it later became a cause of contention and now seems a dubious honour, I still claim credit for conceiving the Unity play. Its genesis was at Cambridge, which Felicity, Luke and I all attended between 1973 and 1976. It was a golden age. When I was asked at a recent reading to define the purpose of a university education, my instant reply was ‘the pursuit of knowledge in the company of friends’. The students looked blank. Their overriding purpose was the pursuit of qualifications with a view to a job. There could be no clearer indication of the passage of time. Twenty-five years ago, we had invested all our efforts in college entrance … it would not be too fanciful to see our passion for the 1920s as a reflection of our own sense of miraculous survival and licence to have fun. In any case, we gave no thought to the future. We had passed the test (which was something far subtler than the examination). We waltzed through the portals of privilege with our destinies assured.

After a first term still imbued with the ethos of school, I focused more on friends than on knowledge. The two who came rapidly to dominate my life – indeed, to define it – were Felicity and Luke. We met at an audition and our subsequent relationship was, in varying measure, tinged with the theatrical. I was the only one to be cast, which immediately set me apart. The real distinction, however, came later that evening when Felicity stayed in Luke’s room. ‘Placing Girton so far out of town, what do they expect?’ she asked, in defiance of the college’s founders who believed that distance would be a safeguard of virtue. I met them for lunch the next day. I had not yet alerted them to my sexual preferences (I had not yet articulated them to myself), but Felicity’s casual assumption conveyed instant approval, while Luke’s grammar school background left him with no residue of guilt for which to atone.

Such a tight-knit trio inevitably gave rise to gossip, but our relationship was far more conventional than it appeared. Felicity slept with Luke and I slept with no one. When Felicity joked that I should be called a homosexless, I laughed because I thought it was funny. At least I think that I did. Felicity and I slept together once – with Luke’s bruised blessing – but it was more of a biology lesson than a romantic tryst. At the time, my heart was still set on acting. Stanislavski was king and Felicity insisted that I required a heterosexual experience to store in my emotional memory. Needless to say, I never slept with Luke. I sunbathed with him in Naxos, showered with him in Scotland and rubbed make-up on his back in ancient Rome. But I never slept with him. I am, however, the one who wrote the inscription on his grave.

The attractions of the arrangement for Felicity and myself were clear. I was able to cast my adulthood in the mould of my childhood, while she was able to swathe herself in an aura of mystery as thick as the fug produced by her trademark Black Russian
cigarettes. Too fastidious for orgies and too indolent to sleep around, she looked to us to save her from the bourgeois (the dirtiest word in her dictionary). We brought a touch of Truffaut into a world of E. M. Forster, even if the triangle were less elegantly balanced than that of Jules et Jim. Above all, she feared commitment. Just as her chronic procrastination derived less from inefficiency than from a sense that something more exciting must be about to happen elsewhere, so she loathed being tied down. A third person provided the prospect of release even if, in my case, it was more symbolic than real.

For Luke, the attractions were both less obvious and the subject of constant speculation on my part, as I attempted to reassure myself of his commitment to the trio. I was convinced – wrongly, as it turned out – that any rupture would be brought about by him. My self-lacerating conclusion was that Luke was a liberal who saw me as a potential cause. He pictured himself defending me from the repercussions of a scandal, waiving private distaste for the sake of a general principle. At times of greater self-confidence, I cast myself as his soul-mate … the friend for whom he used to yearn when he was growing up in Africa and forbidden to mix with the local boys: the friend for whom he used to yearn when he returned to England and found that all the significant allegiances had already been formed. His primary motivation, however, was the desire to please Felicity, his first proper girlfriend, to whose personal volatility was added all the enigma of her sex.

 

iii. Felicity Benthall & Luke Dent


Contrary to my method with fiction, I find myself needing to describe Felicity and Luke. In no other area is a novelist so despotic as in his allocation of physical traits. Conscious of my power to dye a brunette blonde, make a hook-nose snub and pluck beetle brows at the stroke of a pen, I prefer to leave such details to the reader’s imagination and concentrate, instead, on my characters’ inner lives. In this case, however, the protagonists exist not only in my mind but in my memory. My task is not so much to make them well-rounded as to make sure that they are clearly defined.

Felicity was a large girl – nothing in comparison with Unity, who was six foot with enormous hands and feet – but tall and big-boned. Height was neither an encumbrance nor an embarrassment and she had long since dispatched her mother’s attempts at camouflage to the Oxfam Shop. Her hair was the colour of Harvest Festivals. Her pale eyes stared straight from an Arthur Rackham edition of an Arthurian Romance, while her creamy complexion evoked a world of cowslips and Cornwall and antique lace.

Luke matched her in both stature and presence. He was broad-shouldered and so lean that, when he sat down, his skin did not even crease. He had a mass of sandy curls with surprisingly dark roots that, when Felicity and I ganged together, we would suggest were in need of attention (his utter lack of vanity prevented his taking offence). His long lashes gave him a hint of ambivalence, but his expression was far too guileless to be gay. His high cheekbones were prone to flush at the first sign of either a compliment or a rebuke. His smile would make sense of suicide pacts.

A unique blend of good looks and good nature made him as attractive to men as to women. His own warmth was reflected in a universal welcome which, Felicity and I were agreed, gave him an unrealistically rosy view of the world. He had a childlike openness which, according to circumstance, I regarded either as admirable or naive. A perfect example occurred when he interpreted his German supervisor’s departure on ‘a busman’s holiday’ to Greece as a coded confession of a taste for rough trade. He expressed his support with a theory, largely culled from me, that gay men needed differences of caste to make up for their sameness of sex, only to face the full fury of a closeted don who was leaving for a United Nations conference on developing literacy. It is fair to say that even Luke’s hyperactive cheekbones had never flushed so fast.

They could not have come from more dissimilar backgrounds. Felicity was the granddaughter of a baronet – and the daughter of a younger brother, as her mother never let her father forget. They lived in the dower-house on her uncle’s estate. As a young man, her father had raced cars, now, he drank. Her mother bred roses – her daughter maintained that she preferred not to think of anything higher up the reproductive chain than a flower. She had a brother in the city and two sisters ‘at stud’. She was the youngest by ten years (‘not so much an afterthought as a reproach’). For all the obvious precedents, her affair with Luke was not meant as an act of rebellion, since one of the banes of her life – and, I feel sure, a primary cause of the disaster that ended it – was that she had nothing against which to rebel. Her father showed himself a democrat in that he spread his contempt evenly across society. Her mother showed herself an aristocrat in that she modified her morality to suit her own needs. Far from wishing to shock her parents, she had long ceased trying to attract their attention. I have no doubt that, within the limitations of her egoism, she genuinely loved Luke.

In its very different way, Luke’s upbringing seemed to exude the same glamour as Felicity’s – at least from my privet-hedged perspective. His father’s post-war disillusion prompted him to leave England for the Sudan where he worked in the embryonic oil industry. He met Luke’s mother, a nurse, when she flew out on a year’s contract. Luke and his brothers grew up in one of the most volatile regions of Africa. As children, they picked bullets out of the sofas at the airport after it had been used by a firing squad. On another occasion, the violence edged even closer when a gang of rebels murdered a security guard in the European compound. The following day, his colleagues randomly rounded up a group of Africans, chopping them into pieces which they then placed, as a warning, on the compound walls. When the eight-year-old Luke cried at the sight, his father told him to be a man.

In the late sixties, the family lost everything, having been forced to flee the country overnight after Luke’s father found himself on the wrong side of a coup. They moved to Hastings, from where his father sold encyclopaedias for an old army friend. His parents never addressed a further word to each other from the moment that they boarded the plane. Luke dated his interest in theatre to that day.

It is unnecessary to say anything about myself. I am merely the Prologue. It falls to me to set the scene for the action that follows. I have published three novels and a collection of stories. Anyone interested can look up the biographical details in a stack of interviews, although I would not vouch for their unalloyed truth. As regards my appearance, I shall no doubt succumb to the traditional authorial vanity of a photograph on the cover. I trust that more dispassionate observers will not share my difficulty in chipping out the fresh-faced undergraduate from the granite-faced middle-aged man.

 

iv. Unity in Cambridge


Unity was born out of pique. In spite of her startling performances at several Smokers5 (I still chuckle at her impersonation of a suburban matron whose ‘husband has never been a handful in the underwear department’), Felicity failed to be cast in the annual Footlights revue. She fell victim to internal politics – specifically, one of her rivals bedding the professional director first. Her fury erupted in a flurry of sanctimonious slurs. All her dreams of glory – and, more pressingly, an answer to the question of what to do come June – had collapsed. Luke, in a valiant attempt at consolation, offered to write her a play that we would put on ourselves. It was pointless her tackling Millament or the Shrew (‘or Cleopatra,’ Felicity interjected), who would simply be drowned out in the usual classical clamour but, if we could choose the right – that is, controversial – theme, the Footlights would be put in the shade.

The primary requirement was a peach of a part for Felicity … ‘One that will showcase all your many facets’, I fawned. ‘Not possible!’ she retorted. My rudimentary knowledge of marketing – I was on the theatre-hiring committee – combined with Luke’s literary tastes to favour the historical. Our collective self-image narrowed the field to the 20s and 30s. The choice fell on Nancy Cunard, the tempestuous heiress whose drift from Belgravia to Bohemia seemed to be the perfect fit for Felicity, but we found ourselves unable to do justice to her advocacy of black power from the ranks of our Cambridge friends. It was then that I – or, possibly, Luke (as in so many relationships, paternity only became an issue after the split) – hit on Unity.

The timing was perfect. A brilliant account of her life had appeared the previous year.6 The Mitfords were beginning to establish a hold on the national consciousness as a madcap sorority who stood, as one of the Edinburgh reviewers neatly put it, midway between the Brontes and the Beverleys.7 Moreover, the subject tapped deep into Luke’s rich and hitherto unexposed vein of social unease. This stretched all the way from Felicity’s Leicestershire home where, he confessed, confusion over the phrase ‘gun-broken’ had caused him more anxiety than the knottiest French or German translation, to Cambridge itself. I had failed to grasp how alien he felt from the dominant undergraduate ethos: the effortless assumption of superiority with which I, ever the chameleon, contrived to blend. It was as if he identified, in the gilded immaturity, a moral vacuum that could so easily be filled, like Unity’s, with salutes to the ‘divine Storms!’8


 

v. Unity Mitford


Unity, the fourth of Lord and Lady Redesdale’s seven children, was born in 1914, having been conceived when her parents were prospecting for gold at a place called Swastika in Canada, thereby providing conclusive evidence for those who view geography as fate. After an unconventional upbringing, overtly fictionalised in her older sister Nancy’s novels and covertly fictionalised in her younger sister Jessica’s memoirs, she attended finishing school in Munich in 1934, where she honed her fascist sympathies. A year later, she attained the pinnacle of her desire when Hitler summoned her to join him in the restaurant where she sat, day after day, hoping to catch a stray glance. During the four years that followed, she was to enjoy a further one hundred and forty such meetings, mainly for lunch and tea and mainly in Munich, although he also invited her to his mountain-retreat at Berchtesgaden and to the Chancery in Berlin.

So close was their friendship that, on one occasion, Lord Redesdale was obliged to place an announcement in the Sunday
Pictorial denying that they had plans to marry. It was a friendship that exposed her to equal suspicion from both British diplomats and the Führer’s own staff, many of whom were convinced that she must be a spy. Her political influence was nil, although she may have confirmed Hitler in his belief that England saw Germany as a kindred spirit and would not oppose its territorial ambitions. After the Anschluss, he declared: ‘They said England would be there to stop me but the only English person I saw was on my side.’ That person was Unity, who had rushed to Vienna in order to hail her hero at his moment of triumph.

At the outbreak of war, Unity shot herself – in another geographical quirk, the place that she chose was Munich’s English Garden. The bullet lodged in her head and she was taken to a nearby hospital, where Hitler visited her for the last time. As soon as she had sufficiently recovered, he arranged for her to be transported

to Switzerland, where she was collected by her mother and brought back to England. She lived on until 1948, incapacitated and incontinent and, according to her nephew, with a mental age of around eleven.9


Felicity’s portrait of Unity was based on sibling rivalry. Strongly influenced by a supervisor who had achieved broadsheet fame with her monograph, Shakespeare on the Couch, she saw the key to Unity’s malaise as ‘middle child syndrome’, exacerbated by membership of such a competitive family. She was a bundle of negatives: neither as witty as Nancy, as beautiful as Diana, as clever as Jessica nor as cosseted as Deborah. She was a romantic without a cause – until she found one in Hitler. Her intellectual flirtation with Mosley had been compromised by his marriage to Diana. Through her friendship with Hitler she became, for the first time, the dominant sister, putting Diana’s parochial conquest to shame.

To Hitler, Unity’s attraction seems to have been that she was the one person who spoke to him freely. The same lack of imagination that rendered her insensitive to the horrors of Nazism blinded her to the character of its leader. To some extent, we were guilty of a similar misjudgement. For all our awareness of the Holocaust, our approach remained studiedly superficial. Not only did we fail to look seriously at Unity’s politics, we cited her as proof that we did not need to take politics itself seriously. In our hands, extremism became eccentricity: glamour conquered all. Now, I see her as the perfect representative of a nation that prefers its fascists dressed in frou-frou and tulle than in greatcoats and jackboots. At the time, I saw her as the heroine of a real-life Beauty and the Beast. The fact that Luke later wrote me such a detailed account of his months in Munich attested, I believe, to  his own desire to redress the balance. Unity was not the only one deserving of blame.

 

vi. The Author as Hitler


I played Hitler, although I trust it is superfluous to state that, unlike Felicity, I was not typecast. Physically, I was hardly ideal, although it is surprising how much can be achieved with a well-judged moustache. My claim to the role was assured when I not only gave up the part of Cyrano de Bergerac, but persuaded Cambridge’s leading director, Brian Sterkin,10 to scrap his whole production and take on ours. As one whose school syllabus stopped short at the Glorious Revolution, I date my interest in twentieth century history to that summer. Had I put the same effort into reading my set texts as I had into researching my character, I might have emerged with a better degree.

It is my deep conviction, reinforced by thirty-five years of theatre-going, that no actor can play pure evil. I call it the Edmund syndrome, in which Shakespeare’s most gratuitously malevolent character is endowed with a boyish swagger or a winningly self-aware smile. An actor needs a motive as much as he needs an audience. So Richard III is driven by his disability, Macbeth by his lack of an heir and Edmund by the stigma of illegitimacy. Indeed, I suspect the reason that actors in previous eras were excluded from society (all those dead-of-night burials that fired my childhood imagination) lay less in their sexual laxity than in the fact that their artistic practice refuted the simple pieties of the Church.

I was no exception, my dramatic instincts and philosophical insights leading me to the same place. I played Hitler as a frustrated  painter, the key to whose character could be found in his failure to be accepted into the Vienna Art Academy and his subsequent discovery that four out of the seven members of the Jury who rejected him were Jews. He wrote a letter to the Director which ended with the threat ‘For this, the Jews will pay.’ And, if nothing else, he proved true to his word. I still stand by the basic interpretation. As Chancellor, Hitler liked to surround himself with artists and, indeed, to be regarded as one himself. When Eva Braun pointed out that he was whistling an operatic air out of tune, he replied ‘I am not out of tune; the composer made a mistake here.’ He took an active role in the infamous 1937 Exhibition of German Art. Even holed up in the bunker, when Allied bombers were effecting his squalid Götterdämmerung, he sat for hours staring at a model for the rebuilding of his home town of Linz.

This was the aspect of the man with which I found it easy to identify. I too was fired with the desire to become an artist: an actor, working in the one medium that would perfectly combine my need for self-expression with the ineluctable fact that I had nothing to say. Since my schooldays, I had spent every spare hour projecting myself into the personae of people more passionate, articulate, clear-cut and, paradoxically, more alive than myself. But I was increasingly aware that a serviceable talent was too flimsy a foundation on which to build a career. As I sat, in mid-performance, listening to the voices of actors who effortlessly scaled the heights up which I sweated and strained, the name green room took on a new meaning. With my dreams of a worl