The Actor, Blair James

The Actor is an experimental novella which grapples with the canonical figure of the fallen woman through satirical, tragicomic metafiction.

Set around a contemporary production of Shakespeare’s Othello, it follows Andrea Dalton, cast as Desdemona and increasingly preoccupied with the literary and cultural scripts that have historically rendered women either innocent or guilty, virtuous or fallen, comic or tragic; the different roles and corresponding outcomes that women are permitted; and the strange fact that women are so often required to be either good or bad while male characters are allowed to be nuanced and complicated.

As Andrea negotiates an affair with her married co-star, an emotionally vacant marriage, and an unimaginative theatre production, the boundaries between stage and life start to collapse. She compares herself to the long literary tradition of the fallen or unfaithful woman, but has no particular interest either in dying or in being redeemed into innocence.

She decides to write herself a different ending.

The Actor is “a comic dance in tragic circumstance”.