The Water Engineer

The tables for hotel breakfast were all occupied so I chose to share a table with a Japanese gentleman, as my one visit to that country had been a life-affirming experience. As he took trouble to create more space than was necessary to accommodate my breakfast tray, I remembered the studied courtesy and hospitality I encountered in the Japanese people.

We were both in Cambridge for the rest of the week, it seemed, and having respectfully acknowledged my claim to be an actor with a slow nod of his head, he explained that he was a water engineer. Seeing my bemused curiosity, he said: "We learn by watching. Observing how the rain falls on a roof, for example, we can follow its natural gravitational path and, by a minimal diversion of that course, conceive a drainage system which is created simply by the water itself. It's not about the engineering: it's about the water."

"When we prepare a play,' I said, after a respectful and appreciative pause, and aware that I was trying to emulate the imagined tone of a Zen master, 'our work is perhaps like yours. We must guide the course of the story to the audience as one would guide the journey of a river to the open sea: we must shape its path by digging the earth around it's banks to maximise natural confluence to the running stream, taking care never to step into the water or put rocks in its way, but letting the flow of the story take it's most simple and unobstructed course to the audience. It's not about the acting, it's about letting the narration do it's work."

He gazed back at me with a look of both serene respect and unsettled incredulity in equal measure. I never saw him at breakfast again.

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©2016 David Shaw-Parker