“To Know That We Are Not Alone.”

One of my earliest memories is being crammed into the back seat of the car. Dad driving. The sweet smell of his café creme cigars drifting back towards us. Mum beside him. A road map on her lap. Us sardined into the back as we drove the four-and-a-bit hours to where we would spend the summer by the sea. If you were lucky, you got a window seat.

It was a small car and a long drive, but I never asked, “Are we there yet?” because I had already arrived in Narnia. Or Middle Earth. Dickens’ London or Austen’s countryside. While the audiobooks played over the tinny speakers, I never wanted those drives to end.

Years later, when I would tell my parents that I wanted to be an actor, my Mum would smile and say that she’d had a feeling. That I was always fascinated by listening to, watching or reading stories, and that being a part of telling them seemed only natural.

From where I was standing, I couldn’t believe anyone would want to do anything else. As the saying goes, “Art is life warmed up.” And I just wanted to be where it was warm. Intense. Where people gathered together and shared in something. Where things had meaning.

It seemed to me that telling stories was at the centre of what it meant to be human. That a family, a group of friends or a theatre full of strangers would collect together to share someone else’s experience of being alive. And then afterwards we would sit over a drink and a packet of crisps and talk about how that story was told, how it had or had not moved us. What better way to explore and understand this experience of being a person in the world?

When I moved to London to begin training as an actor, my world was blown open to the sheer volume of stories and experiences that there were on offer. I read and watched more plays and films than I could ever imagine. I met a greater number of and more interesting people than I even knew were in the world. My cup ran over. And I licked every drop that spilled from it. To me, it all seemed connected by the web of stories. The ones we told each other. Told ourselves. Performed and witnessed. They were everywhere. And I couldn’t get enough.

On one of my first evenings in London, I decided to walk back along the river after seeing a play. I noticed a small man who was lighting candles and hanging pieces of paper along the railings of the Embankment gardens. I remember he looked a bit like my Grandpa Robin. I approached him and saw that the pieces of paper had writing on them. This man wrote and sold poems. He’s passed away now, the railings empty of his words, but I was one of many lucky people to stop and hear them.

I gave him some money and chose a piece of paper that hung in the candlelight. He smiled as he looked at my choice and recited the poem to me from memory. There were hundreds. They were all a part of him. An extension of him.

As I walked away from him, I remember thinking that this man, this writer of poems and stories is a story himself. And I was a part of his, now. A character who appeared one night. And he was a part of mine.

In a city that could appear lonely, unwelcoming and cold to a 19-year-old from Oxford, I suddenly felt like I was connected to somebody. That I was not alone.

“We read to know that we are not alone.”

The power of this C.S. Lewis quote has continued to echo and resonate with me throughout my life. I can feel these simple words on words and the writer who formed them reaching through time and taking my hand every time I open a book. Watch a film or a play. Listen to music or look at a painting. Or talk to a poet outside Embankment gardens.

Stories are the fabric that not only make up our lives but make sense of them. They connect us and help us to understand one another. Not only to those around us, but those who have gone before. They offer a chance to reach out to those that will come after us to proclaim that “I was here. I lived.” In this way, I have often thought of stories as a type of magic. Transcending space and time. Bridging the unbridgeable.

To be a part of that magic, of casting those spells, is one of the many ways in which I count myself so lucky. To have been fortunate enough to have built a life around this communal and ancient tradition.

Acting has been one of the greatest loves of my life, because it put me right at the centre of telling stories. To stand on stage or a film set, speaking words that have moved me in the hope that they will move an audience has given my life poetry, meaning and depth. No matter what part of the world my career has taken me to, I have felt a constant connection to those around me, because acting, by definition, requires an audience. It requires communion with another human being. I am never alone.

Such reverie and love for the profession has at times filled me with a deep insecurity. I spent more than the first half of my life looking up at these stories with awe and wonder, so it felt audacious to step up onto the stage and participate. Like taking a seat among the Gods. Or, as a lover of food, being asked to put on an apron in a restaurant kitchen.

However, through training and working alongside some of those actors that I most admire, I have learned the valuable lesson of being humble. Of focusing on none of the noise outside of the work, but giving the story and its creation the respect and focus that it deserves. And slowly, I have felt myself settling into my seat at this wonderful table.

Now, with Magpie, my first produced screenplay, I find myself – after 15 years of acting – taking a seat at a different table. It feels like I’m starting that process all over again.

I have always written. In private. Short stories and poems. Songs. Plays and screenplays. I know that every human life is a story and one that is worth telling. There is a voice inside everyone. But to share that voice with the world can be a very vulnerable feeling. Being the face and voice of a story is one thing, being the heartbeat and the soul beneath it is quite another.

This year brings to the world some of my writing for the first time. And sharing it can feel overwhelmingly daunting. Even as I sit and write this essay, these words that you are reading now, it makes my head spin. But, sitting at my desk, I cannot help but smile at the feeling that another spell is being cast. Another bit of magic. One that I am conjuring alone in my office. It is an extension of my hand, reaching through space and time to you, dear reader. And I am truly grateful that you are there. For what are words without a somebody to read them? What is an actor without somebody to witness? What are any of us without another person?

We read to know that we are not alone.

And so this is what I wanted this essay to be. A deep reverie and a love letter to the ancient tradition of storytelling. Its power to entertain. To educate. To challenge. To comfort. To move the needle. To connect and unite us. To hold a mirror up to ourselves and reflect not only who we are, but also who we have the power to become.

Particularly in this world that can feel so divided, to be told a story is to be placed into someone else’s shoes. To see the world from a different point of view. To be moved from where you are to a different place. And to be given the chance to return, should you wish. A chance to explore the world around us and the universe within. All in the safety of knowing that the book will end. The curtain will come down. The credits will roll.

But even after they do, to know, “We are not alone.”

Featured image shows (left) Tom Bateman as photographed by Lee Malone and (right) a still taken by Rob Baker Ashton of Daisy Ridley in Magpie.