Playing a corpse, like mime or swordplay, is entirely physical.You mean, it is very difficult to think your way into being a corpse? A Very Famous Actor writes: No, I mean it is very difficult to seem not to breathe. It is a long time since I played the part of a corpse – not since I was in repertory in the old days – but I can still remember that when a person is playing dead on stage and is therefore theoretically out of the action, still more people in the audience are looking at you than at anyone else in the cast. And you can always hear a child saying: “Mummy, he’s still breathing!” The trouble is that just before you die on stage, you have been doing something energetic – indeed, most actors like to fall dead rather dramatically – and the temptation is always to pant afterwards One thing a corpse must not do is pant. Or breathe at all, if possible.Is there a technique for stopping breathing? A Very Famous Actor writes: Yes. It’s called dying.Are there any other techniques for stopping breathing? A Very Famous Actor writes: Well, there’s hibernation, but unfortunately human beings can’t do that There’s meditation. There’s mentally transporting yourself into someone else’s body.

There’s self-hypnosis…Which one did you try? A Very Famous Actor writes: None of those. I tried reciting poetry to myself.Did that work? A Very Famous Actor writes: Not really. I get bored by poetry very quickly, and I tended to drift off to sleep. Well, sleep is very like death in a way, but unfortunately I tend to snore, and once or twice another actor would have to kick the corpse discreetly to wake me up and stop me snoring.

Once, apparently, when I had been playing the corpse for 15 minutes, I woke up and said very loudly, not knowing where I was, “Come to bed, darling! And bring a glass of water when you do come!” Then I went to sleep again. Normally the other actors can work an unexpected line into the action, but not when a corpse says it. And not a line like that.Next week we shall have a Very Famous Explorer in this spot Get your questions in early!
More from Miles Kington. I once made a teenage girl backpacker cry, on a moonlit beach on Mykonos in 1973, by singing, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” in my light and appealing tenor, accompanied by a bashed-up steel Yamaha. I thought, at first, she was simply moved by my tribute to her homeland. It was only when her flaxen boyfriend leant forward, put a comforting arm around her shoulder and said, with as must patience as he could muster, “Please shut up.

We do not sing that any more,” that I realised what I’d been warbling was a forbidden Nazi lyric – the satanic verse of the German national anthem. I once made a teenage girl backpacker cry, on a moonlit beach on Mykonos in 1973, by singing, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” in my light and appealing tenor, accompanied by a bashed-up steel Yamaha. I thought, at first, she was simply moved by my tribute to her homeland. It was only when her flaxen boyfriend leant forward, put a comforting arm around her shoulder and said, with as must patience as he could muster, “Please shut up. We do not sing that any more,” that I realised what I’d been warbling was a forbidden Nazi lyric – the satanic verse of the German national anthem.
Now, 27 years later, it has resurfaced as a political hand grenade, as German right-wingers demand the right to sing once more of how Germany is the world’s Top Nation.”Deutschland über Alles”, in case you’re as ignorant of these things as I was, has been the German anthem since 1922, words by August Hoffman von Fallersleben, music by some guy called Haydn.

It was always a vainglorious and triumphal work, but it gained an extra dimension in the Thirties, when its first verse seemed like a prophecy the Third Reich was about to fulfil.”Germany above all,” ran the lyrics. “Above everything in the world/ When always, for protection and defence/ Brothers stand together/ From the Maas to the Memel/ From the Etsch to the Belt/ Germany stands above all/ Above all the world.”You can imagine how much the Nazis liked singing that. Not only did it play to their notions that everything from ancient Prussia to the south Tyrol was their territory; it also let them imagine that they were technically only keen on “protection and defence”, not anything hostile such as expansion and invasion – the classic self-exculpation of the tooled-up mugger.After the war, the Federal Republic adopted the bland third verse (“Unity and rights and freedom/For the German Fatherland”) as the national anthem, and that’s what the Euro 2000 team was failing to sing last week. Now a politician, Gunther Ottinger, parliamentary leader of the Christian Democrats in south-west Germany, was found singing the troublesome first verse at a duelling club dinner in Tübingen.”Why shouldn’t one sing the first verse if one truly loves one’s fatherland?” demanded Wolfgang Zeitlmann of the Bavarian Christian Social Union Oh, because it’s a rallying-cry for neo-Nazidom, Wolfgang. And because it upsets liberal Germans who’d rather forget their grandparents’ allegiances. And because the territory represented by “from the Maas to the Memel” etc now takes in a lot of Poland, Kaliningrad, Austria, Italy and Lithuania.But maybe it’s time we did away with anthems For they’re terrible things. In their raw state, they’re naked calls for aggression, or cries for national defence.