theatrecreation

Some Notes on Acting and Directing

It has become very fashionable, nowadays, to have a ‘concept’ for a play. A concept is that mesh or filter of ideas through which the director and/or designer see the play and which they wish to impose upon it. This is also known as an ‘interpretation’; it brings us such novelties as All’s Well That Ends Well in the Second World War etc. This is an obvious example of ‘concept’ but it can be subtler, more incidental, more insidious than this: it arises wherever the director seeks to colour the text with his own particular vision. It is often inconsistent and changing, since it is difficult to find a single interpretation through which to see a whole play.

‘Business’ is the kind of superfluous activity, misguidedly inserted in an attempt to entertain an audience, sometimes with the intention of clarifying or enhancing the text, sometimes for spectacle or humour value, that stretches out the performance beyond its own necessary parameters. Example: Oberon finishes speaking his soliloquy and there is a pause, he taps his foot, looks at his watch, there is a back-lit projection of a meteor falling from the sky, Puck crawls through a hole in the scenery at the end of the meteor’s trajectory (he was that shooting meteor), presents himself to Oberon, shrugs apologetically and, finally, speaks his entrance line thirty seconds late. Audiences often like bits of business because they lighten up the tone of some boring productions, and they must feel that their thirty pounds have been well spent. I would argue that they serve to confuse and obfuscate the message of the play which may be said to be ‘embellished’ but could just as well be said to be polluted.

Plays could be stripped back to the bare bones of believable human interaction, getting rid of ‘concept’, ‘interpretation’ and ‘business’. These ‘affects’ are signs of arrogance on the director’s or designer’s part: a play needs no embellishment or, rather, only as much as naturally arises in performance from the text and the line-to-line interaction of the actors. All else is frippery:

Every object tells. In a properly created on-stage world, nothing is extra and nothing is missing…To paraphrase Chekhov, ‘Never hang a musket over the fireplace in Act I unless someone gets shot in Act III.’ That is, do not create visual anticipation without exploiting it. Playwright Romulus Linney stated this same idea more strongly: ‘Everything on the set should be used up, burned up, blown up, destroyed, or otherwise completely chemically altered over the course of the story or else it didn’t belong there to begin with.’[1]

The same is true of acting and action. This may seem a silly question to ask but when we employ a plumber do we expect him to embellish his work unnecessarily? The notion of ‘concept’ or ‘interpretation’ has only arisen because of that other demon word ‘entertainment’. Theatre is not entertainment. It is an action upon the soul. It is a catalyst for change. Some theatre may be for entertainment, but then – that is not the kind of theatre I wish to discuss. It’s weird that, even though Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares was first published in Britain in 1937, and his ideas were set down much earlier, actors, directors and designers are still acting and creating untruthful theatre experiences seventy years later. The ideas that make up this document follow Stanislavski in that they strive for truth, but they also may be said to respond to Brecht’s desire to cut through the façade of the theatre mirage. By ‘truth’ I mean performances that are wholly believable, not because they simulate reality, but because they rest firmly in the reality of people in a space at the same time – something which the theatre event cannot avoid: two actors meet just as two characters meet – there need be no artifice in that, at least. When performers take this as their real starting point we begin to approach a theatre of honesty, not falsehood. Bad theatre is usually ten times worse than bad film but good theatre can be ten times better than good film – simply because it is a live event. For theatre to work it needs to capitalize on that very aspect that makes it theatre – its aliveness. Detractors say you can do so much more with film. And this is true if you try to use the theatre medium as if it were film or TV. What makes theatre more valuable is its potential to change and alter in response to its audience. Film can, of course, never do this, yet so many theatre directors attempt to create film on stage – a fixed artefact. Often, if an audience member shouts something out, actors will ignore it and continue as if they were on screen, on an unstoppable roller-coaster. They do this at their peril. Some theatre relies on spectacle, but in this realm it can never live up to the visual novelty attained by modern cinema. If theatre is to re-find its position as the highest art-form it needs to re-find its continuum with the living audience and be affected by it. Actors and audience are twinned breathing lungs of a single organism, elements in symbiosis, responding to each other sensitively, empathically.

The essential component of theatre is the act of receiving and giving spontaneously. Reciprocity, play and spontaneity are paramount. Actors must be taken back to a pre-thought, childlike space of free play. The Game Game shows that the boundaries between ‘real life’ and play are barely drawn if not non-existent. It is about being open, permeable and responsive. The emphasis can be on exploration rather than entertaining an audience – and particularly that audience formed by the actor’s ‘third eye’, that watches and critiques.

The Game Game
Two actors stand in front of each other, looking at each other. Sooner or later (and it is invariably sooner) one of the actors will have an impulse to do something: scratch his nose, look away, fidget in some other fashion, say something or laugh. (Actually, a laugh is an excellent way to start as it betokens a true response to the situation: ‘This is stupid’, ‘I don’t know what to do’.) How then does the second actor respond to the impulse given by the first? It may trigger another movement, another sound, words or physical contact. How does the first actor respond to the second? The Game Game is really the prototype game; it is a totally open container in which to play like children. There are no rules and it can go on for as long as the participants wish. It can be played with any number of actors. The only structure that could be added is the idea that all participants should mutually agree when the game has come to its ‘conclusion’.

In fact, how children play is your guide for everything on the stage. How should I stage this? How should I organise that? The answer: how would children deal with it if they were pretending? This ensures simplicity and economy. When children play, contingent objects create a reality as convincing as the real thing - if not more so, since four-year-olds stop pretending to be ‘just’ four-year-olds and become the wise, courageous and powerful souls they really are.[2] Not many have encountered a ghost more believable than the one they created themselves with an item from the laundry. Our home-made spooks can cause very real goose-bumps on the skin of our play-mates and actually make our hair stand on end. I wish to re-envisage the process of acting and theatre-creation as an agreement to pretend, taking as a model the power of child-like play. Plays can be stripped of the trappings, assumptions and associations accrued by layers of interpretation and reinterpretation, we can look once again at the minutiae of human contact. Nothing superfluous, but plenty of real people interrogating the junction where the momentary meets the playwright's proposal head on. Fiction and fable can become incarnate in authentic utterance and action; the unreal can be realized. We can insist on the authenticity of our mutual presence; we can listen to the breathing of the audience. Magic need not be affected.

The Tea Game introduces actors to a short piece of text that can be learnt in a matter of seconds. This game explores how each act on the stage can be completely motivated by somebody else’s action. This is an emancipating truth that frees up actors’ acting: when actors give up control, relinquish the impulse to ‘do’, and allow themselves to respond, the first action, utterance or impulse on the stage can truly ripple outwards and inform the whole play.

The Tea Game
Two actors quickly memorize the following dialogue:

Would you like a cup of tea?
Yes please.
Sugar?
No thanks.

A stage space is set up with areas at the two sides to act as the wings. The actors stand in the wings at opposite sides. One actor enters and stares out of an imaginary window in the ‘back wall’ (this is just to give his entrance a purpose). The other actor enters from the opposite side and asks her question ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ – and the dialogue is played out. It is a good idea to get actors to do this first without priming them in any way: it is interesting to see what buttons are pressed when you ask two actors to act – they may posture, they may exaggerate, they may simulate reality rather convincingly, but several shades away from simplicity and honesty may be observed depending on the actors’ experience. (Those who have the most experience are often the worse culprits for acting.[3])

The next stage is to explain that the actors will repeat the exercise but, this time, how the second actor says ‘Yes please’ is going to entirely depend on how the first actor says ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ and how the first actor says ‘Sugar’ will entirely depend on how the second actor has said ‘Yes please’ (and so on). This means that the actors are now forced to listen to how their partner has said their cue – otherwise they will not know how to speak.

If this rationale is followed, the only actor who may be stumped is the one who speaks the first line. On what do they base it? This individual can ‘read’ or ‘feel’ the mood of the audience, the theatre space and the other actors’ presence to inform this first utterance. (And, indeed, the first entrance and action on stage must be informed by these factors too.) The way in which a line is spoken can be entirely determined by non-verbal material – it can be ‘laid’ on whatever atmosphere the actor senses and perceives.

Exercise
Actor A leaves the room. Actor B is instructed to feed actor A, when he returns, with non-verbal cues. She will make a gesture or physical posture that suggests chaos, violence and aggression: this will be the cue for actor A to say ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Actor B will then physicalize the words ‘love, calm, gentleness’ and actor A will try his line again.

This is a very revealing exercise because the hard-core actor will attempt to include some of the flavour of B’s emotions in his line when, actually, the only difference that can be honestly inflected is that which suggests that the first time was the first time he said the line, while the second was the second. After ‘receiving’ a gesture that represents ‘calm’ or one that represents ‘chaos’ we must respond with an honest reality in each case – an utterance that is grounded in a genuine feeling response. If we are punched in the stomach, the way we say ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ will be significantly altered. If we are sensitive we don’t need an act of violence to let the environment we perceive through our five senses inform our physicality and voice.

If the actor resolves to respond only, all aspects of her performance will be, necessarily, the result of conditions on the stage, the energy of the audience and the impulses given by the work of her fellow performers. We can see her performance as the effect of that which everyone else in the theatre does. It will fill the space created by others – a vase created by two profiles. A good exercise to try is to have two actors start in frozen positions, two people using their bodies to fill a small space. One moves and the other must move accordingly – not mirroring but sensitively complementing the other’s movement. The actor needs to be a sensitive antenna to pick up subtle differences in the performances of the other actors around her and the audience who watches her.

It is possible to base our performance on that which comes immediately before. This consists of our journey to the theatre (during which, if we are open, we will begin to feel the adrenalin rise), our conversations with our fellow actors and stage managers on arrival (the actor’s experience backstage is extremely important in informing the freshness of his performance; the latter is based on the former), our sense of the audience as we wait in the wings, and our impression of the stage space once we have made our entrance. There needn’t be a ‘join’; the one can arise naturally from the other and we can remain sensitive throughout each line and action, throughout the whole play, to the energy we receive from the audience and fellow performers, adjusting our performance accordingly. The idea is to stay responsive and allow the energy we receive to inform our moment to moment choices, in terms of quality and inflection of voice, gesture and emotion. I envisage this sensitive physical and vocal score as being unique each night, since it ‘rests’ and depends, in part, on the unique audience. The actor must give weight and value to what he gets from the audience – responding honestly. I once heard about a performance at the Globe when there was a disturbance in the pit – someone had fainted. Mark Rylance simply stopped, held his fellow actors gently in the space with an outstretched arm and open hand behind him, and looked out into the crowd until the disturbance was over, when he returned to the script. For this kind of sensitivity to work, however, the story of the play must be an equally strong magnet that has the energy to pull the actor back into its reality (when the vibrations of the interruption have receded). Whatever the audience does the actor must respond with child-like innocence – not in the spirit of antagonism. A good way of helping actors to sensitively feel the energy they receive from an audience is to have all the cast on stage throughout the play, then, in rehearsal, the actors in the acting space can practise being responsive to those in the ‘circle’ – the on-stage audience.[4] It is important that the actor stay responsive rather than constructive (by which I mean that we don’t need to construct a reality). I am interested in actors taking their vulnerable selves into the space, not a construction (which can only ever be a significantly diminished self – a part of the whole being). It is interesting to note that this responsive ‘score’ need not necessarily correspond to naturalistic reality. I’d rather have an honest unrealistic moment than a dishonest, constructed moment that simulates reality well. In fact, an honest moment can never be unrealistic – though it may not tally with the reality the lines suggest. In other words: it’s better to have an honest moment that doesn’t tally with the circumstances of plot and dialogue than a false moment that does.

Text doesn’t need to be explained. The words that will be communicated will be communicated despite any of the actor’s efforts. If an actor says: ‘Give me your hands if we be friends’ he will be requesting someone’s hand whatever intonation he may try to lay on top. The actor playing a role in a play by Shakespeare needn’t try to squeeze the meaning out of the text or explain the words with his intonation – he can speak naturally. If the audience gets some of the meaning – all well and good. If they don’t, they don’t.

The actor doesn’t need to imagine that she is in a wood (or wherever the scene is set) – it’s better to know for sure that she is in this theatre space. The audience can’t see the wood the actor imagines, so any subtle modulations in the behaviour of the actor, intended to convey this setting, will only confuse the audience. It is the interactions between the people present that are important. These generally carry such weight that they supersede relations between individuals and imaginary constructs.

When giving instructions to actors never say ‘He’s very…’ or ‘He’s feeling…’ – the reproduction of states (adjectives) only leads to falsehood. Stanislavski redirected our attention on to actions and objectives (verbs) while Declan Donnellan focuses on the ‘target’ (nouns), and these are more helpful. To counteract the playing of states, which is endemic among actors and an easy trap to fall into, the director can say: ‘I want you to return to centre.’ (By which we mean a return to the reality of the actor’s true emotions triggered by their response to whatever has previously occurred.) Then we can say: ‘She’s not so (adjective) as that – she wants to (verb).’

Actors do need to be encouraged to fill in as many of the gaps the script presents as possible. Help them to figure out what’s going on for their characters: ‘He’s trying…’, ‘She’s making…’; fill in the gaps and help to answer the questions the text poses. I believe we can learn much about acting by noticing how we go about pretending and fantasizing as children. One of the processes of my acting during childhood was to ask questions - I was called ‘Dan Dan the Question Man’. I used to fill in all the gaps my imagination couldn’t fill in alone by asking other people questions about the reality of the play: ‘How do Toad and Ratty find the secret door?’

It is important to explore what we take onto the stage – a fixed idea of our role or our vulnerable selves. There are both advantages and disadvantages to preparation. The process of rehearsal repetition often makes acting lifeless (‘dead’ in Brook’s terms) and new ways must be found to halt the process of fixing and freezing on a particular interpretive ‘score’ (by which I mean a set of gestures and intonations that, by the actor’s second use, have lost their connection to truth and reality). A director should not make actors repeat unnecessarily. As soon as they’ve got what she means they should be interrupted and encouraged before being directed to look at something else.
A fly resting on a cake will see the swatting hand slowly looming over it at a snail’s pace and will leisurely shift itself. In the cartoon Over the Hedge there is a manic squirrel called Hamish who zooms around like a dynamo. In the final scene the animals are being attacked by a pest-control agent who has booby-trapped the garden. The racoon hits on the idea of giving Hamish a can of fizzy pop so that he gets a sugar high and is even more hyper than usual. At this point the film shows the scene from Hamish’s perspective. In his eyes, the angry pest-control agent is completely still, caught in mid-action while he, on the other hand, is able to leisurely dilly and dally, tripping lightly with comic ballerina-style steps around the garden, setting off the booby-traps so it’s the antagonists who are caught, with all the time in the world. The point being that time is relative to one’s inner tempo. If the actor learns his lines at speed, he will not only be able to pick up his cues super-fast, he will also be able to leisurely select which nuance to give each performance. It is important to learn one’s lines at speed to avoid ‘recording’ a particular interpretation. I have exhorted actors to learn their lines sans interpretation – to find the ‘pure’ meaning – because patterns of intonation, once repeated, soon become dead. This is a difficult task to achieve, however, if one delves with deliberation into the meaning of each individual word, but it can be a goal – one which the process of learning at speed approaches more satisfactorily.

The theatre space presents a dichotomy. What happens when we assume it to be a magical space subject to different laws to those which operate in ‘real life’? And what happens when we do not take a partial construct on to the stage but our whole selves with all our vulnerability? We get nervous because we don’t know what we are going to do there. We are not prepared. This is what makes us so human and so fascinating to watch. The rehearsal process allows us to make an arrangement with another actor to meet in the space. That is the ‘given’ – a meeting we repeat. How do we stop the insidious force of rehearsal repetition from making our stage action dead? We must find new processes, practices and techniques to counteract its pull. One way is to try out radically different ‘meetings’ in rehearsal so that we don’t ‘fix’. When we try a meeting with an actor or the space the second impulse can be to do, as far as possible, the opposite – and then a third ‘opposite’ and a fourth, each time re-envisaging the parameters of the meeting contract and exploring just how different it can be. It is important that, during rehearsal, we still play.

The text can be tackled and learnt without ‘fixing’ a performance. One can stay rooted ‘in oneself’ – true to the minutia and fluctuations of one’s actual emotions in the moment, as opposed to any constructed, interpretive emotions – and hence stay impressionable and soft with regard to the text. Actors can be encouraged to allow themselves a moveable, ‘fledgling interpretation’ of their lines that dallies between their comprehension of the role and their own true feelings in the rehearsal room (e.g. ‘I don’t know what I’m saying here’).

Emotion required by the plot [He cries] presents a perennial problem for the actor. Sanford Meisner claims that Stanislavski, late in his career, rejected the ‘emotion memory’ technique as a way of conjuring up appropriate emotions. Meisner proposed his own ideas about how this difficult task could be achieved. My own perspective on stage emotion is this: one cannot guarantee that one will genuinely experience one’s character’s emotions on cue. One thing is for sure – if one tries to create, construct, portray or simulate those emotions they will only elude us. The only thing we can do is to carefully prepare the ground as best we can and hope that, on some nights at least, the ‘right’ emotions will arise. This may seem woefully inadequate, but not so much if we propose a breed of theatre wherein contiguity of performance and text is not so important, where honesty is more desirable and the actor is appreciated for bringing his truth to the stage, regardless of its ‘appropriateness’ or relation to the text. Essentially, it is this truth I am interested in. The truth of the actor has value and will be communicated along with the truth of the playwright even if there is some sort of disjunction between the two. The truth will have impact and resonance even if it has an unusual inflection. In practice, performances following this method do not spiral into surreality, but actors need to stop fearing that this will happen and be open to embracing it, in order to be free.

Theatre has become marginal; my wish is to earn for it the place it deserves. Good theatre may have the answer to many of society’s ills; it once had the function of promoting the health and well-being of the group. It has the potential to facilitate an important reaction and positive change in its audience members and, as a knock-on effect, society as a whole. It can have immediate emotional effects with potentially life changing results. I believe that, if we are exposed to powerful live enactments and storytelling from an early age, through adolescence and into adulthood, we will establish healthful communities. If it is coupled with the work of good writers, theatre can act as the catalyst for positive change it has the potential to be. That is not to say I’m interested in theatre with a ‘message’. I’m not thinking of high-minded issue-based devised works, or of adapting older plays and forcing meaning and an issue on to them. Theatre can have its effect whatever the style, whether playful or serious, but it must be well acted.

David Mamet dismisses Stanislavski’s notion of an ‘arc of a character’, but what the latter noticed when he coined this term is that characters in works of fiction are almost designed to go on a journey – a journey we can chart since it takes place within the parameters of, say, a two hour period. Our own life journeys may be obscured and invisible to us much of the time. The value of theatre lies in the witness of on-stage journeys, whether they are the grand ones of ancient tragedy, or the subtler, more incidental ones of modern comedy. Seeing characters struggle towards resolution on the stage can trigger something in the mind, heart and soul of the viewer – something important and necessary. The intention of theatrecreation is to animate crucial stories with a rejuvenated and powerful theatre practice.

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