There is method to Gillick's seeming madness

ATHLETICS:WE'RE COMING to the end of our first term at the Gaiety School of Acting. Frankly, the only lesson in there for me so far is the best actors, just like the best athletes, are essentially mad. As in bonkers, cracked, bananas, crazy as a loon, nutty as a fruitcake – and all in a good way. Daniel Day-Lewis always said the main reason he feels so at home living in Ireland is that whenever people here accuse him of being mad they mean it as a compliment. Most athletes I know are no different. Call them nuts, call them insane, and they take that as a mark of approval.

Jonny McQuaid travels down from Monaghan every week, and is, by his own admission, completely mad. From day one he stood out as one of the best actors in the class, and if he doesn’t go on to make a name for himself on the stage I’ll be terribly disappointed. There is no strict admission policy at the Gaiety, but this is no place for the sanely-hearted. Over the past couple of months I’ve seen the best minds of the class slowly lose their minds. In the beginning most of us were questioning the sanity of even being there. In more recent weeks, the creative madness has been disarming – and that appears to be the secret of all the best actors.

Allen Ginsberg said he’d seen the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. Thespians would read that line differently, that the best minds are broadened by madness. Or to paraphrase Frederich Nietzsche, madness is rare in individuals, but in actors it is the rule. Same goes for athletes. Not that this streak of madness is limited to the stage or to sport: artists, poets, painters, writers . . . the list goes on. The successful ones are constantly pressing on the accelerator of creativity. The ordinary ones are constantly easing off it.

We have our own Stella Adler of the Gaiety, too, in Gene Rooney, our inexhaustible teacher, who with her mad acting games has been celebrating our descent into a life less ordinary. “To be the best, one does not necessarily have to be mad, but definitely it helps,” declared Percy Cerutty, trainer of several Australian Olympic medallists.

Behind all the best athletes there’s nearly always the best coach, and the same goes for the best actors. Without Lee Strasberg there’d no Al Pacino. Without Konstantin Stanislavski there’d be no Robert De Niro. To submit to any coach requires sharing their essential folly, and it still amazes me how few athletes realise that. Few athletes are mad enough to succeed on their own.

“You’re only as good as the chances you take,” says Pacino. “And you learn the most from your failures.” The best athletes have always known that. All this week I’ve been hearing people say David Gillick was mad to adopt the tactics he did at the World Indoor Athletics Championships in Doha last weekend, and that he’d have got the bronze medal, at worst, had he run more conservatively. Perhaps he would, but that sometimes crazy desire to succeed is what won Gillick two European Indoor titles in the past, and got him to a World 400-metres final last summer.

Truth is Gillick is not an exceptionally talented athlete. He is talented, for sure, but what has made him an exceptional athlete – the first and only Irishman to run 400 metres in under 45 seconds, etc – is his bravery, and courage, which some of us may perceive as madness, if only to make up for our own safeness and timidity. Gillick will only ever be as good as the chances he takes. He went for the gold medal in Doha last weekend. Maybe his tactics were essentially mad. But that’s just how he is, “so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat”, as Gillick himself quotes from Theodore Roosevelt.

Charles Bukowski, voice of the mad man, wrote a poem with the lines: Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead. In acting, just like athletics, nothing impresses more than unpredictability, which essentially means abandoning the sane approach. This doesn’t mean going completely crazy and ending up on Shutter Island with the criminally insane, but too often athletes play it safe, particularly when it comes to competition. There is nothing worse for an athlete to work off the track knowing they didn’t give it their all, and the same with actors walking off the stage.

Aristotle quoted Plato, “no excellent mind is without a tinge of madness”. They knew what they were talking about. Philosophers have always preached the thin line between genius and madness, and turns out this is scientifically true. Three years ago, scientists isolated a particular gene – known as DARPP-32 – which enhances the brain’s ability to think, and at the same time contributes to schizophrenia, the most common form of clinical madness. You might remember Russell Crowe portraying this thin line in the film A Beautiful Mind, playing the Nobel prize-winning schizophrenic mathematician John Nash.

The best actors take things as far as they can. There is some method to their madness. Same with the best athletes. When De Niro gained 60lbs to play Jake LaMotta in the film Raging Bull, he refined acting in his own way, and at the same time redefined it for everybody else. The best athletes have done likewise. Emil Zatopek trained for hours in his army boots in the forests north of Prague. Haile Gebrselassie still runs 30 miles a day in the mountains outside Addis Ababa. Throughout her long and extraordinary career, Sonia O’Sullivan frequently tore up the training manual, performed on impulse, and set herself crazy aspirations – none of which are incompatible approaches to the acting craft.

When I heard Martin Fagan was running the Los Angeles Marathon tomorrow my first thought was: “Is he mad?” And maybe he is, given he’s only been back to full training, after injury, for a few weeks. But two years ago, Fagan ran 2:14.06 to qualify for the Beijing Olympics – and that was the first new addition to the top-20 Irish all-time marathon list since Mark Carroll ran 2:10.54 back in 2002.

In fact, of that top-20 list, five of the fastest marathons were run in the 1970s, six were run in the 1980s, and six more in the 1990s. Which means only three of that top-20 list have been run since 2000. There are several reasons for this, but my suspicion is our top marathon runners aren’t mad enough anymore. Fagan is at least breaking that mould, putting some madness back in the method.

Looking at that top-20 list: Neil Cusack ran 2:13.39 in 1974; Jerry Kiernan ran 2:12.20 in 1984; and John Treacy, the fastest of the lot, ran 2:09.15 in 1988. I don’t think Cusack or Kiernan will be too offended if I suggest they did some mad training in their day.

Treacy, I know, definitely did. It doesn’t matter if you’re training for the London Olympics 2012 or training for your first Dublin marathon later this year. To be your best in any athletic event, one has to occasionally surrender to madness, because it does definitely help. The best actors have always known that.