Suitably handsome

Dance Magazine has this article on Reviews entitled Knocked Sideways

It’s about receiving bad reviews and how they hit us. All of a sudden I was floating down memory lane. It’s funny how some bad reviews are just kind of fuzzy in my brain. And trust me I don’t really want anyone to dig up the reviews of my Othello from the Arts Club Theatre. I already have my excuses in place for that.

The one bad review I really remember was from a production of Absurd Person Singular that I was in at the Globe Theatre. Ah those halcyon days when my hair was still black. This was unlike the production that I had previously been in at the Globe where I played the spunky runaway slave to the sage Richard Greenblatt’s Thoreau. Of course in this production I did indeed create my theory of “Natural Savagery Acting”. But perhaps that excursion should be left to a late night revel with much scotch.

Ok avoidance over. In the review of my work of Geoffrey the Architect that has that wonderful 2 page monologue as his wife tries to commit suicide in front of his oblivious self the local paper said “ And Philip Akin was suitably handsome”. Suitably Handsome? Like taupe, dry concrete, spam or bad adolescent rhyming couplet poetry?
I was crushed.

But in a wonderful kind of way it became an insulation for whatever reviews followed. No matter what critics thought of my work, in my heart I could always know that to that one critic years ago I had been.....suitably handsome.