Stanislavsky's formula is based squarely on the concept of Action: that everything in a play is done in order to achieve a want of some kind. OBJECTIVE (What do I want?); ACTION (What do I do to get it?); OBSTACLE (What stands in my way?). The ACTION subdivides into ACTIVITIES, the separate means that I use to get what I want. There are INNER ACTIONS (which I use on myself) and OUTER ACTIONS (on other people), INNER OBSTACLES (my problems) and OUTER OBSTACLES (the problem of the other people). The whole sequence of actions in a play adds up the character's SUPER OBJECTIVE (their whole thrust in the world of the play). I don't think I've over-simplified.
"In order to WHAT? What MEANS are you using?'
I couldn't have learnt what I learnt there at drama school. It's only doing it that teaches.
Interesting to hear Simon note that older, more experienced actors gave him helpful notes and that he was grateful for it. Goes counter to the "never give a fellow actor a note" thing I've heard. I guess it's all intention though.
An actor who performs in a certain way because the director told him to, is not really there at all. He's in the past, his mind always harking back to the rehearsal room, thinking desperately: 'What did he tell me to do now? Oh, god, I'm sure that's wrong,' and so on. The performance will never grow, the actor's tension will block off any real expressive vibration because another, irrelevant person has clambered on to the stage between the actor and the audience: the director. The actor must own his performance, and the director must make sure he does.
Every failure is your failure; and every failure, as Christopher Fettes used to say, destroys the power of the theatre, kills to however small a degree its capacity to pierce the audience to the heart. Enough dreary performances, and people will stop looking to the theatre for revivification. As, to the large extent, they have.
Comedy: less funny the actor's find it, the more the audience will, runs the old adage.
It's an ugly sight to see an actor use the character (who after all, represents someone, something, from life) to entertain or to divert the audience. I'd been doing it all my acting life.
He was ruthless with us as actors, deploying his satiric tongue to erase the enemy, generalization. Over-acting, whether actual or incipient, he regarded with dread.
Noel Coward: Do what pleases you, and if it doesn't please the public, get out of show business.
To act thinking is hard; impossible, in fact. You must think - that's all there is to it. In this sense, all acting is wrong: acting feeling, acting sensing, acting intuition, are all bad, if not impossible. Thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting: they must be present, not the imitation of them.
Shakespeare: I discovered that it was like surfing. Unlike most modern writing, the words, the meter and the rhythm contain their own energy. Once you've liberated it, it carries you forward effortlessly. It's a question of putting one's brain into the words and one's emotions into the rhythm.
I have to confess that in these matters, as with Shakespeare in general, I have found the Stanislavsky system of no use.
Laurette Taylor said to Tennessee Williams's mother on the first night of The Glass Menagerie, "Well, dear, how do you like yourself?
It is, in my experience, impossible to learn words: you learn the thought patterns of the character, of which the words are the inevitable expression.
One doesn't find oneself planning a voice, it simply pops out. I agree and disagree with this based on my experience playing Henry in The Fantasticks.
John Gielgud remarks somewhere that the problem in playing
The Importance of Being Earnest is to stop the audience from laughing at every line, so as to enable them to laugh much more every four lines.
Real virtuosity in acting is passed over in favor of mere flashiness. I know, because I've done both.
Ethel Merman story. On the first night of Gypsy she'd been asked whether she was nervous: 'Noivous?' she asked. 'Why should I be noivous? If dey could do it as good as me, dey'd be up here."
To me, a technical problem is always the symptom of another deeper one. When the inner questions are solved, the others disappear. The brilliant director for me had always been the one who spotted the inner problem, or, more commonly, who created a rehearsal atmosphere where those problems came easily and naturally to the surface.
Never at any point were any of us consulted on the meaning of the play or the gesture of the production. Forty intelligent and gifted people were committed without choice to embodying John Dexter's view of the play. The design decisions have been made long before any actor is hired, the music commissioned, and most elements of the production finalized before the first read through.
Until actors are accorded equal responsibility with the director, the theatre will always be the fitful expression of one man's understanding.
A play needs to be discovered, uncovered one might say, liberated.
The greater the honesty, the greater self-exposure, was to offer myself as I was, just as attractive and charming as I actually was, not trying to be more or less. It had taken eight years to learn this simple thing.
Shakespeare language:
*Poel tradition - spotting antithesis, apposition and alliteration; realizing the metaphor; sensing the pulse of the meter, which is such a clear guide to meaning, too.
*The meaning of the line very often resides in the second half, so go towards that, which has the additional advantage of sustaining the forward movement of the verse.
*Giving the metaphor its life is the secret to the whole undertaking.
*Phrase by the line instead of the word.
*Any kind of heightened language, I discovered, has a pulse which compensates for the richness of texture, which would otherwise tend to drive the play into the past, lingering over its beautifies. The forward motion of the pulse counterbalances it and brings it where it should be: the present.
What animal is he like? If I could find the man's shape, it would be something. ...what I needed was something much simpler, something concrete, something which would give me a sensation.
In order to play the character the actor must experience the life in him, must let that life fill his consciousness. Writers are often proprietorial about their creations: what in fact has happened is that they've given birth to someone who has an independent existence.
You're breaking down your own thought patterns and trying to reconstruct them into those of the character, pushing into emotional territory which may be strange and difficult for you.
Vakhtangov said: 'Acting is to want, to want, and to want again.
Auditions:
*Eventually they stop laughing at each other's jokes, which you can't understand but laugh at louder than anyone, even gurgling for a few minutes after the main body of the laugh, as if the joke were repeating on you like breakfast.
*"I'd like to see a little more vulnerability." (Or majesty, or fun, but it's usually vulnerability. Hilarious that in this firing-squad situation, that's the one thing you can't produce at any cost."
*You have no partner of course, so somewhere in the middle-air you fix your eye on an imaginary interlocutor.
*What you are aware of is waves of restlessness coming from behind the trestle table, and no, absolutely no, laughs.
*I have never got a job from an audition, and only rarely from an interview. The audition system is one in which I can never give anything like my best, the falseness of the set-up striking me so forcibly that I'm unable to commit myself to it in the least. It seems to me that auditions, like examinations, only prove that you can audition. It reveals little about your acting capacity.
Preparation:
*Until ideas become translated into sensations, they're of no use whatever to acting.
*When you're reading your own part, you do it with your inner ear wide open. Eventually, a certain voice will insist. Who is this? You strain to hear (it's like sitting round a ouija board). Oh god, yes! It's X! Well, is the character anything like X? In what way? That's the ideal state in which you should arrive at the first read through: imminent.
*The amount of work needed on such a role requires every second of the rehearsal period, and time spent clutching the book - I believe, contrary to the Edith Evans and Staniskalvsky schools - is time wasted. It merely delays the moment at which the through patterns of the part become your thought patterns, at which the impulses of the character become your impulses.
*It's unrealistic to expect to be word perfect on the first day of rehearsal. The reality of being on the floor with the other actors will throw you completely - and quite rightly.
*Bill Gaskill has said that his definition of a great actor is 'one who comes to the first read through with his lines learned.
*For me, the whole point of learning the lines is to be as free to offer alternative possibilities as can be.
*Work, in the sense of labor, isn't quite the word: the preparation period is more like dreaming, relevant dreaming.
Whatever sort of an actor you are, the play and the part will invade you twenty-four hours a day. You will hardly be able to say where or when the work is done.
Character:
*A play is nothing but characters in action.
*The character must be construed from his words (and things said about the character by other characters).
*What kind of man talks like that?
*You may know more about the character you're playing than the writer does.
*Pam Gems was mildly surprised, when she went to see her play Franz Into April, that Warren Mitchell (Franz) uttered a number of lines that she couldn't remember having written. At the end of the performance, she mentioned this without rancor - she thought they were rather good lines - to Warren, who replied: 'Look Pan, you only wrote him - I've been him.' - but it is a sure sign that the character's blood is flowing through your veins and that you have discovered the iceberg of which his words are the tip when you can put him in any situation and speak as him. This fusing of lives - yours, his, and the author's - is the vital anarchic energy.
*To begin with you'll probably conventionalize him, see him as a type. You must do this, simply to separate him, stake out the territory. Then day by day, you particularize.
*Now I know that unless it's me speaking - some version of me - no one is. When you've defined, by analysis or intuition, those parts of yourself that coincide with the character, you let them rip, while consigning the parts which are irrelevant to temporary oblivion.
*Olivier has made famous a remark of Tyrone Guthrie's: 'If you don't love the character, then you can't play him.' This is surely not true. If you don't love BEING him, you can't play him. (Eichmann in Good was this way for me - pure evil 'architect of the holocoust' - but he was fun to be.)
*I tried to play Orlando like Berlioz instead of the way he's usually played: like Puccini. He thought it was the most pretentious thing he'd ever heard, and it possibly was, but it meant something to me WHICH TRANSLATED TO ACTING. Describing it differently wouldn't have had the same direct effect on him versus his musical description.
*Picasso says: 'To imitate others is necessary. To imitate oneself is pathetic.'And of course acting is an art of imitation, of taking on the qualities of another, to find where they match yours, to what extent it would be possible for you to look like/talk like/ walk like/ feel like that man. The actor, talking got another man, often begins to assume his accent. He is in a state of ontological flux.
*often the belief is a matter of summoning precisely the right sensation. Then you simply act under its influence. We've all had regal moments. Re-invoke them, and you're a king.
*You contain within you a memory bank, comprising thousands and thousand of memories of WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE...whatever. You never stop observing and trying out for size the behavior of your fellow human beings.
*MacLiammoir had a story about this: he and Hilton Edwards went to Morocco in the thirties. Hilton went off sightseeing for the day. That afternoon a message reached Micheal that he'd had an accident and was feared dead. He burst into tears and ran downstairs to the reception desk. On the way down, he passed a mirror and caught sight of himself in it. 'Oh,' he thought to himself, 'that's what one looks like when the person dearest t on in the whole world has just died.'
*An actor, like any other artist, is someone who can't forget. A painter's medium is paint, a writer's words. An actor's medium is character.
*You need a lot of memory for a role. Every line, every moment, every impulse has to be made particular and grounded in some sensation because it was so for the character.
Rehearsal:
*If character is supremely the actor's responsibility, the other three thrusts of rehearsal work fall into director's province: narrative, meaning and style. Narrative is only what the characters do, so if the character is unclear or misconceived, so will the narrative be. And if either of those are in trouble, what chance does the meaning of the play (or its super-objective) have of being articulated? As for the style, that being the whole expressive gesture of the piece, it consists almost by definition of the sum of all other elements.
*What is hard for some directors, as for some parents, is that the whole object of the exercise is to give the actor-child his freedom and independence, to phase themselves out and hand over the reins unconditionally.
*Style - what is the technique, the flavor, the personality of this play, as opposed to any other?
*The most important objective of rehearsals is to achieve a clear mind: to have resolved the areas of doubt, cleaned out the mud.
*Action. Every moment of the play must become active: you must always be doing something to another character - or yourself, if you're alone - and you must find a million ways of doing it; a million characteristic ways, that is.
*Curiously, many things which appear not to work at all fall into place once a degree of speed has been attained.
*Into the theatre - For me these moments, not rehearsal at all , just wandering around, picking up a prop, sitting in a chair, pottering about on the set, are as creative as anything that's gone before.
Performance:
*It's said that Anna Magnani, whose emotional vitality was never in need of stimulation, used to do a crossword puzzle before every performance because it was her mind that needed waking up.
*It's well known that long runs are a relatively recent innovation. The accusing finger is generally pointed at Oscar Asche whose Cu-Chin-Chow ran for five years from 1916 to 1921; but of course the phenomenon grew out of social and economic factors.
*Most of our 'classics' had initial runs of three or four performances and would then, if lucky, be revived as part of some touring company's repertory.
*Comedy - the business of playing comedy was not to make the audience laugh, but to let them laugh 0 to make the audience witty; not to bludgeon them but to awaken them; to tickle and not rape.
*Time is the crucial dimension. The nearest expedience in daily life to what an actor feels in performance is the successful time of a joke: the sense of inevitability about it, the way in which space seems to exist around it, the waves of emotion that it releases in its audience the sort of halo that descends on its utterer.
*The is a story of Laurence Olivier which bears on all this. He gave a performance of Othello one night long into the run so brilliant that the cast applauded him at the curtain call. When it was over, he tore back to his dressing room in a towering rage and slammed the door behind him. One of the actors timidly knocked on the door and said: 'What's the matter. Larry - don't you know you were brilliant?' And he said, 'Of course I fuckin' know - but I don't know why.'
*And you never do: no matter what you do, the performance can go one way or the other and as you rake the embers looking for reasons, the evidence is all contradictory. For actors as for farmers, nothing's ever right.
*I discovered the secret of acting. This is it: acting demands the suspension of will. Everything that is will-full in a performance comes between the actor and the performance because it is inherently future-stressed. The actor must simply be. The character must want, the character must will. But the actor must be, with the totality of his being, in front of the audience at this moment.
*The essential attitude to the audience is one of compassion. Let the audience laugh, don't make them laugh. Make them witty. Our job is to restore them, to massage or tease or slap the sleeping parts into life again.
What needs to be broken down completely is the concept of the theatre as an exclusive club with rules of behavior all of its own. It's neither lack of money nor lack of interest that maintains the theatre as a minority art: it is the lack of accessibility in every sense. These huge journeys which have to be made! Why is there no theatre in the whole of the South of London, for example? I'm not however pleading for community theatre. The essence of theatre is to be particular and general: it must belong to its community, but it must also belong to the whole community. It must, as it were, bring news of (Iowa) to the outside world, but it must also bring news of the outside world to (Iowa).
Performance days:
* Wake up. A merest 'mmm' will reveal the state of your voice.
*You never feel that the day is really your own.
*Personally, I avoid the theatre for as long as possible, all in a desperate bid to preserve the freshness of the show.
*Curtain call. The Guthrie-esque, choreographed call is the best, summing up the play and the characters and leaving the audience on an upbeat. On the other hand, these calls can be very embarrassing, (a) if they're not very clever, or (b) if the show's a flop.
*There is, you see, no doubt that climaxing at night is not the natural metabolic pattern, and certainly not the natural social one. You long for evenings off, just to have a meal at a normal hour, and not to have to regulate your day as if you were a champion athlete. But they don't run every night. No one, in fact, runs every night except actors, who run and run. Opera singers and dancers never perform the same piece on consecutive evenings, never preform at all on consecutive eventing. Imagine a pianist playing the 'Emperor' Concerto eight times a week for nine months. Hamlets and Lears do.
*Self-consciousness is death to a performance.
Director-cratic society:
*Actors, quite clearly, have been stripped of imitative and responsibility. They wait to be hired; have been hired, they wait to be told how to play their roles (how, that is, to fit into the director's 'concept); and in the execution of the role and their conduct during its realization, they strive to please the director in order to be allowed to exercise their craft again. All important decisions about production have been taken before their involvement.
*Before the war: to manipulate the actor into giving the performance that he couldn't or didn't ant to give.
*Since the war: the director who has manipulated the writer into writing the play that he either can't or doesn't want to write.
*Actors and writers are both warned against the other, as potentially misleading. Moreover, the assertion of the supremacy of 'the text' (as plays have recently become) has provided a stick with which to beat actors.
*The idea of a director's style or indeed a company's style seems inherently to threaten the individuality of the work itself. It is also easier and less interesting to impose such a style than to undertake the enormous task of entering the mind and hearts of people of another time - and as far as plays are concerned, any time before yesterday is another time.
*The style of the eighties is a playing style, not the style of the plays. The result is MORE OF THE SAME. (Style is something I don't think about enough. Recently I find I'm aiming for naturalism in everything, when naturalism probably doesn't work for certain Shakespeare, Moliere, or other stylized plays. Good lesson.)
*About the ironing out of the individual features of individual authors: Firstly, the theatre seems to claim the right to use existing material to reflect modern life and needs; secondly, it seems to say: plays are about people, people's psychology doesn't change, therefore, we interpret the plays in the light of psychology as we understand it. This is false. People, their psychology and perception of the world change radically from year to year, let alone century to century. (Really stresses the importance of dramaturgical work - to be able to understand how people thought and what they believed throughout history. Freud didn't exist in Shakespeare's day.)
*Good questions to ask: What was the authors world? What made it tick? In what ways was it different/similar to our world? What was 17th century about a 17th century play? German about a German one? Above all, how do those particulars find expression in the play itself? And how is the play expressed by its playing style? These questions and their answers are habitually confined to the Program Notes. If they were the whole quest of the rehearsal, our stages would be filled with the most extraordinary, surprising and disturbing visions.
*It is the life in the play that we must go after.
*Instead of the director as the "be all end all" of the entire enterprise, he would have been chosen - employed, to be blunt 0 by the actors specifically for his knowledge of the world of the play and its performing traditions. It would be more like a symphony orchestra, who is self-governing.
*The important thing is to restore the writer - whether dead or alive - and the actor to each other, without the self-elected intervention of the director, claiming a unique position interpreting the one to the other. We don't need an interpreter - we speak the same language: or at least we used to.
The purpose of training is not to acquire polish and skill; those things come all too easily and quickly of their own accord. Its purpose is to inculcate habits of mind which will equip you to work in depth and with the fullness of your imagination whatever the circumstances.It will mean that your contribution to the theatre 0- and to society 0 will be infinitely richer and more valuable. So yes, we do need training.
Because they desperately need the income from fees, the schools now have to think very hard before turning anyone away, and even harder about dropping someone from the course once they have started, an essential feature of the process. This natural wastage identifies those with the stamina, the self discipline and the will for grueling business; talent is only a beginning.
Acting is not a liberal art. It is a craft; it prepares you for the job.
To interpret human life requires unending observation, profound sympathy, wide reading, the ability to open yourself to strange and unexplored areas of your personality and to penetrate deep into the lives of others. It requires, above all, work on one's own self. That, in the end, is one's medium.
Thirty Years On
Almost all of the so-called tragic roles in Shakespeare, and the heroic ones, are centrally concerned with power.
At the end of his life, Orson Welles used to lament that movies were no fun anymore because of the delay between getting the impulse to make a film and actually making it.
The learning of lines in advance had by now become a matter of policy with me.
The act of committing the words to memory demands constant questioning - Why does he say this after that? What is he trying to achieve?
If I know what I'm thinking, I can have no fear, no anxiety.
Re: discovering a role. The voice is almost invariably the starting point for me: until I hear the right sound coming out of my mouth, everything sounds false, out of tune, and my body ceases to behave as it should.
Re: Chekhov with bad Russian accents. How well are these people supposed to be able to speak English in their foreign accents? Do they from time to time grope for words, as almost anyone who is not wholly bilingual will do? But if the character is highly articulate, what then?
I can put up with anything in the theatre as long as the acting is compelling.
Seeing actors from the side of the director's table, I saw how pointlessly obstreperous (difficult to control and often noisy) I had often been in the past, how frequently I had come to rehearsals ill-prepared, how lazy I sometimes was. Perhaps some of this was due to the erosion of individual responsibility in a structure where the director believes that everything must come from him.
But I was struck by how often actors simply didn't seem to think that it was up to them to open their imaginations, to lose themselves in their characters, to volunteer alternatives.
Re: imitating Maggie Smith's phrasing. Imitation is a widely underrated technique of learning: it activates certain muscles, vocal and mental, which you might never deploy. (Jack O'Brien just brought this up in his book. How imitation can really help one understand the way a person talks or thinks.)
Re: Maggie Smith. There are other aspects of her technique which are quite specifically to do with engendering laughter for its own sake. One of the most moving sights in my career was catching Maggie, in occasional spare moments during rehearsals, sitting in a corner of the room, chanting her diction exercises: this great actress, at the peak of her fame and her powers, saying over and over again at speed 'what a to-do to die today' and red lorry, yellow lorry, red lorry, yellow lorry.'
Engage with consonants as a creative act. Our tongues and our lips are what fingers are to pianists, and we need to practice, and to be acutely aware of the impact of the different sounds. The consonants so often drive the sentence, give it buoyancy, stop it from dribbling to a halt or crawling along evenly like cold porridge.
Re: having been told you have a great voice. But this failure was compounded by my secret conviction that all the lessons were directed at the others, not at me. I scarcely grasped that unless you can breathe, you can't phrase - that is, you can't shape your text, easing it into vivid meaning.
There is no better way of observing an actor than directing them. Directing lends distance, and with distance comes enchantment.
The people whom the camera loves, those famous, blessed people, are those who will allow it to come right up close without becoming self-conscious.
Whenever anyone says to me 'Let's play a game,' my heart sinks. Whenever someone says 'Let's do some work,' I light up.
Some of the most precious time in the development of an actor's work on a character is spent simply staring at himself in the dressing-room mirror, subtly shifting shape according to impulses that he doesn't quite understand, rolling the taste of a person he is playing around his tongue.
Chekhov believed it was vital to engage with what he called 'the will of the auditorium,' to reach out to each member of the audience and share the creative act with him or her.
Chekhov wrote of naturalism: 'The legacy that naturalism will leave behind it will be coarsened and nervously disordered audience that has lost its artistic taste; and much time will be needed to restore it to health.'
The central purpose of Chekhov's teaching is to encourage the actor's respect for his or her own imagination and the freedom to create from it.
The theatre is the place where extraordinary things happen, where you see people behaving, not as they do on the street, but as they might in your dreams. Or your nightmares.
Film and television will perfectly satisfy the demand for realism. It is only when the need for something which goes further is felt that people have recourse to the theatre, an inherently poetic medium.
The theatre is precisely the place where you go to exercise that slack muscle, the imagination. It is the imagination's gymnasium.
It is not, as you stand in the wings, a question of being in character - but being ready for the character to take over. Character is an assumption, not an imposition.
Any attempt to go through lines is disastrous, robbing them of their freshness, dulling the brain.
Conditions for good acting: 1) you must need to act. 2) you must have talent. 3) most important: you must have a good character.
In order to be an actor, you have to show up at the theatre on time, you have to know your lines, you have to know your cues, you have to keep fit, you have to keep your brain alive, you have to be aware of your colleagues' needs, you have to fight against the inherent difficulties of saying the same lines over and over again, you have to want to give the audience something for their money, you have to understand that they have come to the theatre looking for something that they believe no other medium can give them, and you have to care when they are disappointed. You have, moreover, to learn how to keep your difficulties, personal, professional, physical, away from they audience.
The theatre remains one of the few areas in which people acknowledge that something more important is at stake than their own personal gratification or reward.
It's a pretty old arrangement, an actor and an audience, and we're not going to let it die.
