It didn’t say cult in the brochure. It said, We will make you the best actor ever, or some such s**t because he was full of grand claims, the man who ran it. He’s dead now, of a cancer that had any student brought to the table, he would have ridiculed and shamed. He was like that. He believed in breaking you down. He’d been trained through Est, a psychotherapy system that was watered down into The Landmark Forum but he knew it in its purest form. He had not an inch of kindness to him. Let me zero in on this word, cult. A Svengali leader. A place to belong that requires you cut off from the outside world. A doctrine that dictates they are fucked and you are saved. A requirement of absolute, unquestioning devotion. A list that grows of do’s and don’ts, built by the leader’s capricious whim. Mandatory daily rituals and punishments for failing. Cold baths every morning. Our hair a certain length, how we dressed dictated by him. If anyone ran away, they were fined £10,000 to come back which, crazy as it sounds, actually happened. If you walked down the corridor in a way he didn’t like, or creased a piece of paper by the way you held it, he punished you with public ridicule and demands for money. He said to be someone else you had to think their thoughts and this was his excuse for the morning confession, the acting, drama school part of his tyranny, our chairs in a horseshoe around him, spilling in turn our darkest secrets about ourselves and others. He said our shame described us and that’s the trouble with these things, the method of cults, because he did have truths which at first lit me up into thinking I’d found something brilliant. Wait. I have to stop here. I feel sick. I thought I could write this quickly because nothing in me wants to give this man and that place more than a page or minute more of my time, but I can’t. I had forgotten how vulnerable I was to him. Like so much else I had buried it, filed it under another funny story. But now I’m looking, I find I cannot pull it out in one shot. I am too angry.
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