I

Actor-Training

The art of true listening

Stanislavsky’s ‘big thing’ was ‘truthful’ acting. That doesn’t mean his toolkit is great for realism and hopeless for anything else. He started his career in Gilbert and Sullivan and ended his life with opera students. How much more non-naturalistic and highly theatrical can you get than The Mikado or Rigoletto?

That said, most of us as actors in the West are going to spend our time performing scripts (for film or stage) where the genre is essentially ‘psychological realism’, i.e. what the viewer sees is pretty close to life as we know it. Even if we’re on the planet Mars, the characters’ behaviour will have a certain psychological dimension to which we can relate as twenty-first-century human beings. That doesn’t necessarily mean we believe in what we’re seeing: rather, we believe in its possibility. This is a subtle but important difference, to which we shall return.

There’s an inherent paradox in good acting, particularly when it comes to psychological realism. You create the illusion of absolute ‘truth’ and naturalness, as if you’re really ‘living in the moment’ and conjuring up those particular words in that particular moment of performance. (Stanislavsky called this process ‘the creation of the living word’.)8 Yet, in most cases, you can only seem that spontaneous if your technique is finely honed. Stanislavsky maintained that the greater your talent, the more refined your technique should be if you really want to reach the heights of virtuosity. But how many of us want to hear this truism? Since realistic acting is basically about replicating something that everyone does quite naturally every single day of their lives – i.e. living – it’s easy to assume that anyone can act. And this assumption is bolstered when you see a TV personality or a Big Brother finalist becoming a Hollywood star or a West End attraction. Furthermore there’s the curious phenomenon of people playing themselves with brilliance and conviction in Paul Greengrass’s 2006 film, United 93. So if anyone can act, why bother with technique?

Actually, the art of repeatedly ‘living naturally’ – either within the artificial conditions of the stage or the technical demands of the film-set – is bizarrely difficult and requires real skill. For Stanislavsky, we block our chances of developing that skill when we assume we have great talent:

Because they are lazy or stupid these actors of ‘genius’ convince themselves that all they have to do is ‘feel’ something . . . in order to have the rest take care of itself.9

As all actors know from experience, ‘feeling something’ is a capricious and unsustainable activity. For ‘the rest to take care of itself’, you need a disciplined actor-training.

The foundation of a decent actor-training as far as Stanislavsky was concerned was PSYCHO-PHYSICALITY. Although we’ll come back to this tool in detail, PSYCHO-PHYSICALITY basically alludes to the fact that your body and your psyche are trained together to achieve a sense of inner-outer co-ordination. This means that what you experience internally is immediately translated into an outer expression, and (conversely) what your body manifests physically has a direct and acknowledged affect on your psychological landscape. So, I bury my head in my hands: before long, my muscular memory and my imagination kick in, and I start to feel despair. Or maybe I’m feeling buoyantly happy: without me consciously contriving it, my shoulders relax and my chest expands and there’s a Puckish spring in my step. The membrane between what’s going on inside me and my body’s expression of that inner information is delicate and porous.

But why does an actor need a specifically ‘psycho-physical’ training?

The art of great acting is the art of true listening. Listening operates on two levels: you have to listen to yourself in terms of your own inner activity (‘What’s this sensation I’m experiencing?’) and at the same time you have to listen to your performance partners (‘What’s she saying? What’s he doing? And how do their words and deeds affect me?’). This level of listening can only exist when you’re in a particular state of receptivity: rather than fixing your performance to be exactly the same every time you do it, you have the confidence on stage or in front of the camera to respond playfully to the ever-changing nuances of each moment. If you can be this responsive, then the opportunities for stimulating INSPIRATION may come thick and fast. And ultimately we all long to be inspired actors, so anything we can do consciously to prepare the ground for the possibility of being inspired is surely a positive thing.

Basically, that’s what Stanislavsky’s actor-training is geared towards: putting you in the strongest possible place – physically, imaginatively, emotionally and vocally – to listen, listen, listen, and from that true listening will rise INSPIRATION. And here’s where The Toolkit comes in.

All the tools in this chapter can be used for pretty much every kind of theatre or screen preparation, as they can assist you in developing a basic actor-training. They’re fundamentally tools for establishing an INNER CREATIVE STATE. If you can establish an appropriate INNER CREATIVE STATE, you can begin to listen internally to your body and externally to your fellow actors, and from there you can enhance your sense of playfulness and spontaneity.

Of course, Stanislavsky’s full actor-training programme in the Moscow Art Theatre included physical disciplines such as ballet, stage-fighting and acrobatics, as well as vocal training in diction and scenic speech, though I don’t detail these disciplines in this chapter. That’s partly because Stanislavsky himself doesn’t describe exactly what the classes entailed, as he had specialist teachers to lead them. It’s also partly because today there are plenty of books and workshops available for actors of all ages and stages, who want to learn or improve on these particular skills. And it’s partly because Stanislavsky’s own specialism as an actor, director and teacher was his ‘psycho-physical’ approach, so that’s the main emphasis of The Toolkit.

This chapter isn’t intended as a rule-by-rule guide to actor-training. It simply provides a chance for you to understand what works for you personally, and from there you can build your own technique. It falls into three sections:

First of all, we look at three ‘attitudes’ towards the art of acting, which can put you in a strong place to begin your creative work:

•psycho-physicality

•discipline

•stage ethics

We then pick up the first three hands-on tools in the kit:

•relaxation

•breathing (to prepare your body)

•concentration and attention (to prepare your psyche)

Finally, we look at four ‘conditions’ of creativity, which the toolkit aims to develop:

•inspiration

•spirituality

•the inner creative state

•creative atmosphere

TRAY I

THREE ‘ATTITUDES’ TOWARDS THE ART OF ACTING

Essentially, these three ‘attitudes’ underpin any basic actor-training, as well as any performance environment, and they’re really perspectives from which you might approach your acting work.

Psycho-physicality

We should be absolutely clear what we mean by PSYCHO-PHYSICALITY, as it informs everything else that follows in The Toolkit.

Basically, PSYCHO-PHYSICALITY refers to the dialogue between your body and your psyche. Your body can give you as much information about the character as your brain does, and your psychology inevitably affects how you use your body. It’s an inner – outer transference.

So how does that impact on acting?

The main vehicle you have for communicating to the audience the world that the writer has invented is your body, in that the physical form you present on stage or screen conveys your psychological interpretation of a character. And by ‘body’, I also mean your vocal apparatus, from your lungs to your lips. If you didn’t have a body, how could you give shape to your thoughts, feelings and fantasies?

Because your body is the interface between your inner landscape and the world-at-large, the more expressive your body can be, the more variations of character you can portray. You don’t necessarily have to be gymnastically nimble or acrobatically versatile – though of course the more supple and adroit you are, the greater the reach of your physical vocabulary. But it’s more a question of being aware that each of your physical actions holds within it a psychological resonance, and, conversely, your psychological state impacts on your physical expression.

So, developing a psycho-physical technique has two aspects. First of all, you have to increase your ability to listen to your internal dialogue between what you feel inside and how you express it externally. Secondly, you need to become sufficiently physically versatile to convey to your audience the whole gamut of complex responses whizzing around your psyche. If you can begin to achieve these two things – making of yourself a subtle flute upon which the range of your humanity can play – you can access a multitude of nuances to your characterisations and then present those nuances to the receiving audience through the apparatus of your physical body.

This all sounds great, but once you get out into the big, wide world of the twenty-first-century ‘industry’, the process ain’t so easy. The short-cuts demanded of you in the brief rehearsal schedules of theatre or the next-to-no-rehearsal times of television can dull your inner listening. You stop hearing the dialogue between body and psyche, and – worse still – you can actually forget that the dialogue exists. The characterisations you come up with may be very beautiful in their physical forms, but they’ll be lifeless re-creations of effects you achieved in some quite different context. So when you strike the metaphorical tuning-fork, there’s no resonance, no reverberation between what you’re doing and your present circumstances. If you get caught in this trap, it’s hard to excite yourself, let alone transport your audience.

However . . .

You have the capability as an actor to develop a sense of your own inner-outer co-ordination. If you prepare yourself appropriately, you find that each of your physical gestures can instantly open up an inner landscape for you, and each inner impulse translates itself effortlessly into something physical. Once this inner-outer co-ordination kicks in, you start to replicate in your creative work the process that spontaneously and naturally unfolds in everyday life. As Stanislavsky says in Creating a Role:

Our deep spiritual well springs open wide only when the inner and outer feelings of an actor flow in accordance with the laws fixed for them, when there is absolutely no forcing, or deviation from the norm, when there is no cliché or conventional acting of any kind.10

Being psycho-physically aware is much closer to our natural state as human beings than is often the case in many training spheres and performance situations. We frequently find ourselves as actors in rather formal and inflexible circumstances: ‘Go there! Do that! Speak this! Make me laugh! Make me cry! Hit that mark! Miss that microphone!’ As Stanislavsky notes:

In the vast majority of theatres the actors and producers are constantly violating nature in the most shameless manner.¹¹

So how do you prevent yourself as an actor from ‘violating nature’?

One of the easiest ways is to appeal directly to your body, rather than to your emotions or intellect. And Stanislavsky was very clear that a human being’s muscular memory (especially when a certain sensitivity has been awakened through a thorough actor-training) is very well-developed – unlike many memories of emotions and sensations which can be unreliable and fragile. Your body is biddable, your feelings are capricious. So why not consciously construct a role through its physical dimensions? This doesn’t mean slapping on a latex nose or adopting a limp, and lo and behold! – the character is formed. Far from it. But all you have to do is remind yourself of the basic tenet of PSYCHO-PHYSICALITY: that physical action has an inherent psychological resonance. As long as you’re psycho-physically open and listening out for that resonance, the physical dimensions of your characters will never just be empty forms, they’ll actually stir within you genuine inner sensations.

One inner sensation we should note at this stage is the experience of the vital energy produced by the actual act of acting itself. Stanislavsky suggests that if you simply feel this energy coursing through your veins, it arouses a particular creative pleasure. This pleasure can even be powerful enough to lure you into an appropriate INNER CREATIVE STATE, in which you can produce truly compelling performances. How fantastic is this! It means you don’t have to chase the emotions of the role. You don’t have to crank yourself up into some kind of performative state. You can simply use your natural, creative energy – or your performance-related adrenalin – to springboard into the character’s inner life; there, you can feed off your creative energy’s own peculiar psycho-physical openness and aesthetic playfulness to stimulate your performance. (We’ll return to this idea with various other tools, including EMOTION MEMORY and EMOTION.)

There’s one final – and huge – advantage to being psycho-physically trained. Because you’re more ‘resonant’ as a performer, you’re also far more useful as a resource to your director. Since a director’s means of tangibly expressing his artistic vision of a play is predominantly through the actors’ bodies, the more psycho-physically responsive you are, the greater the palette of colours you can offer him. With a psycho-physically fine-tuned acting troupe, rehearsals can be quicker, easier and infinitely more textured. You never know – having a psycho-physical ‘attitude’ could get you more work!

In brief:

•PSYCHO-PHYSICALITY means training your body to be receptive to your psyche, and vice versa. Through this training, you can start to listen to your acting instrument and hear the range of its possibilities.

•A psycho-physical process is much closer to the way you respond in everyday life than the strategies of many training environments and performance situations.

•The emotional energy of acting itself can be a fertile starting point for your psycho-physical voyage into the heart of a character.

•The more psycho-physically adept you are, the more resources you can offer your director.

The panacea inherent in all these ideas begs the question: why aren’t all training systems and schools more overtly ‘psycho-physical’ in their ethos?

Possibly because the Western tendency is to segregate disciplines: ‘Now we’re doing tap, now we’re doing Shakespeare, now we’re doing accents and dialects’. My own experience in the Russian tradition of actor-training was that every discipline employed very similar vocabulary, so that the holistic nature of psycho-physical acting was always in evidence. Whether we were dubbing voice-overs onto animations or preparing ports de bras, our tutors constantly alluded to the integration of body, voice, soul and psyche. Each discipline reflected the others.

And DISCIPLINE is a crucial word. Becoming psycho-physically fine-tuned may present you with a panorama of creativity drawing upon a very natural state of being, but it’s no doddle. Whether it’s the first day of training or the hundred-and-fifth performance, it requires an incredible amount of DISCIPLINE.

Discipline

DISCIPLINE can sound like an oppressive term. We like acting because it’s childlike, challenging, playful, and immensely pleasurable: we don’t want to hear that it involves a heap of hard work.

But how can an activity, which demands that at a specified time on a specific day you should go through a predetermined series of actions, deliver words not of your own spontaneous choosing, and conjure up powerful emotions at the flick of a spotlight or the click of a clapper-board, require anything but DISCIPLINE of the highest order?

For Stanislavsky, DISCIPLINE had a particular resonance. Not only was he fighting against a profession which was in a fairly shabby state of disrepair at that time in Russia, but he also believed that, if it was properly used, theatre had an incredible potential to influence and reflect social change. (This is just before Brecht, don’t forget):

If an actor does not possess complete self-control, if his inner self-discipline is not strong enough to produce creative discipline or an ability to disregard everything of a personal nature, how can he be expected to find the necessary powers to reflect the highest achievements of the social life of his time?12

To a twenty-first-century liberal ear, this may sound seriously Soviet and self-righteous: ‘self-discipline’, ‘creative discipline’, ‘the highest achievements of the social life’. And let’s be honest, most of us have probably turned up late to a class, or staggered blearily to a rehearsal, or even done a matinee after a rather boozy lunch. But there’s another connotation to DISCIPLINE, aside from carrying out your job professionally. It concerns your ability to discern between your own personal ‘baggage’ and your creative raw material: i.e. DISCIPLINE is your ‘ability to disregard everything of a personal nature’.

Discriminating between your personal ‘shit’ and your imaginative resources is vital when you’re training psycho-physically. If all you have to work with is yourself – your own body, imagination, emotions and psyche – it can be all too easy to blur the boundaries between your creative ‘self’ and your personal ‘cargo’. It’s an incredibly delicate process, extricating yourself from your own baggage. You have to be able to forget the row you had with your boyfriend over breakfast this morning, or the fact that your mobile phone was nicked last night: you have to know how to leave your metaphorical dirty boots at the door. And there’s no denying, it takes a curious amount of inner DISCIPLINE to keep the work creative and not allow a training environment or a rehearsal room – or even a film-set – to become a therapeutic chamber. Good training is, therefore, largely about developing the appropriate selfawareness to understand how the raw materials that you bring into the working environment – i.e. your own body, imagination, emotions and psyche – can be constructively fashioned into something relevant to the script and the character.

Once again, your first inroad into developing this awareness is through your body, as it’s tangible, touchable and therefore directly trainable. In Stanislavsky’s words:

Your immediate objective . . . has to be to train your physical apparatus to the limits of your natural, inborn capacity. You must . . . go on developing, correcting, tuning your bodies until every part of them will respond to the predestined and complex task . . . of presenting in external form your invisible feelings. You must educate your bodies according to the laws of nature. That means a lot of complicated work and perseverance!13

This ‘complicated work and perseverance’ needn’t be a chore. In fact it shouldn’t be a chore. If every aspect of your physical training is invested with an imaginative core, then very quickly it becomes a pleasurable and thought-provoking psycho-physical experience, and not a dull discipline.

I discovered this to my great delight at the State Institute of Cinematography in Russia (where I studied acting in the 1990s) during my Mime training with Scenic Movement teacher, Vladimir Ananyev. I’d previously ‘done time’ at a British drama school lined up in a row on a Friday afternoon with seventeen other students, pretending to place our hands on an invisible wall by repeatedly tensing and relaxing our fingers and palms. It was a dull discipline to say the least, and I can’t say I was inspired by the prospect of more Mime in Russia. But Ananyev’s training was heavily steeped in Stanislavsky (and Michael Chekhov), and suddenly I found we were exploring invisible caves, shimmying through underground tunnels, flinging open imaginary treasure chests, and plunging our hands into pools of pretend mud. The training was still all about relaxing and tensing our palms and fingers, but our ATTENTION was switched from the taxing technical specifics to the challenges of the imaginary journey. A physical and precise DISCIPLINE was effortlessly transformed into a fun, psycho-physical experience.

Of course, DISCIPLINE carries through from actor-training into performance practice, especially when it comes to the precision of film. An actor friend of mine was once filming a very emotional scene for a BBC drama not far from Uxbridge on the flight path to Heathrow airport, so that every time an aeroplane flew over, the filming had to grind to a halt. Added to which, there was a clay pigeon shoot taking place not far away. Whenever the cry ‘Cut!’ went up, the actors had to be able to hold on to all the appropriate inner sensations without going emotionally cold. ‘Could you weep between that clay pigeon and that Boeing 747, please?’ Now that requires real psycho-physical DISCIPLINE.

But DISCIPLINE doesn’t stop with your body and psyche. For Stanislavsky, DISCIPLINE was also an attitude towards your fellow performers. It’s astonishing how many actors don’t learn their lines dead-letter-perfectly – even with classical texts, even with Shakespeare, even at the National Theatre, London! And I used to be as guilty as the next actor. As long as I got the gist of a line, I thought that was kind of okay. Heck, doesn’t a certain amount of improvisation keep you on your toes and enhance your sense of being ‘in the moment’? Stanislavsky would certainly say no! He’s absolutely clear about why an acute sense of DISCIPLINE towards learning lines is not only fundamental to serving the writer, but also vital to developing a truly collaborative ensemble:

When they do not get the right cues, the conscientious actors make violent efforts to stir the initiative of the sluggish actors, thereby impairing the true quality of their own acting.14

In other words, it’s the generous actor who suffers at the hands of the others’ deficit of DISCIPLINE. DISCIPLINE is, therefore, right at the heart of a psycho-physical ensemble. If you find yourself making adjustments primarily to accommodate your partner’s ‘sluggishness’, you’re neither honouring your own skills as an actor nor serving the true dynamic of the play. So hey, sluggards – don’t pass the buck!

In brief:

•You need psychological DISCIPLINE to distinguish between what’s your baggage and what’s useful for the character.

•You need physical DISCIPLINE to train your body rigorously.

•You need imaginative DISCIPLINE to invest any technical training with a colourful, playful backdrop.

•You need a sense of collective responsibility towards your fellow actors, which you can go a long way towards developing by simply knowing your lines properly.

Springboarding directly from DISCIPLINE is Stanislavsky’s notion of STAGE ETHICS – the third ‘attitude’ to underpin most acting environments. Although he calls it ‘stage ethics’, the chief principles are just as relevant to film, television and radio.

Stage ethics

Stanislavsky looked at STAGE ETHICS from three angles:

•how the actor behaved inside the theatre;

•how the actor behaved outside the theatre;

•the working relationship in a theatre-building between the artistic employees and the administrative staff.

All three aspects were geared towards one basic ethos: to celebrate and elevate the art of acting.

Because Stanislavsky felt so passionately that theatre could be an instrument of radical, social reform, he saw acting as a calling which shouldn’t be taken lightly:

Unless the theatre can ennoble you, make you a better person, you should flee from it.15

And he truly believed that you couldn’t abuse your body and psyche offstage without it impacting on your work onstage.

His passion for STAGE ETHICS grew out of his desire to prepare the best conditions within which an actor’s INNER CREATIVE STATE could flourish. To this end, he pounced on any behaviour that might disrupt the working environment. Lateness, for example, was a particular bug-bear:

If even one person is late, it upsets all the others. And if all are late your working hours will be frittered away in waiting instead of being applied to your job. That makes an actor wild and puts him in a condition where he is incapable of work.¹⁶

Although Stanislavsky’s words are nearly a century old, there’s something curiously familiar about them:

The struggle for priority among actors, directors, jealousy of each other’s success, divisions caused by differences in salaries and types of parts – all this is strongly developed in our line of work and constitutes its greatest evil. We cloak our ambition, jealousy, intrigues, with all kinds of fine-sounding phrases such as ‘enlightened competition’, but all the time the atmosphere is filled with the poison gases of backstage backbiting.¹⁷

Each of these ‘poisons’ – ambition, jealousy, intrigue and backbiting – can all too easily become part of your inner fabric if you’re not very careful. One of our difficulties as actors is that, unlike a painter with his blank canvas, a sculptor with her block of marble, a potter with his lump of clay, or a composer with her fresh page of manuscript paper, we begin each new work with a ‘canvas’ already marred by 18 or 29 or 41 or 63 years of graffiti, with tucks, tears and tatters, blotches, blobs and splodges. Somehow we have to prepare a blank canvas within ourselves so that we can start the work on each new character from a place of artistic neutrality. Only then do we give ourselves the best opportunities to be creatively vivid and unexpected, rather than falling into the clichés of our everyday habits.

To prepare our own personal blank canvas before setting to work on it with our metaphorical oils or charcoal or water-colours or pastels, we can draw upon a number of basic tools in the kit.

At this stage in our actor-training, there are four very simple tools with which we can begin: the first two of them are RELAXATION and BREATHING.

TRAY 2

FOUR BASIC TOOLS FOR PREPARING THE ‘BLANK CANVAS’

Relaxation

Challenge Number One: How do you create a blank canvas of yourself on which you can start to create?

Time and again in The Toolkit, we’ll return to the notion that the body is the most biddable of tools and is, therefore, often the most useful starting point. So we’ll begin with the body.

As I’ve already suggested, part of the difficulty as an actor is that every time you start work on a character – even if you’re an eighteen-year-old drama student, let alone a sixty-year-old pro – your ‘canvas’ is already riddled with various idiosyncrasies. These are a combination of whatever nature has bestowed upon you, along with a whole host of tensions which have embedded themselves in your body throughout the course of your life. Your first task is to recognise these tensions and then begin to ease them away. And the tool for the job is physical RELAXATION.

Stanislavsky saw unnecessary physical tensions as ‘the most substantial obstacles to creative activity’.18 Which makes sense really: we know that the principle of psycho-physical co-ordination is that your inner antennae become receptive to your physical expressions (and vice versa). So if you’ve got the constant white noise of physical tensions blasting around your psyche, the signal of communication between your inner life and your outer body will be endlessly distorted. It’ll be impossible for you to ‘hear’ the most useful information for creating exciting and idiosyncratic characterisations: instead, you’ll simply lock onto your own habits and shortcuts.

Furthermore . . .

If your physical body is tense, it’s quite likely that your psychological apparatus is also tense. It’s curious how easily we think we can just get up and play Hedda or Hamlet or Henry V: we leap blindly into the complex task of tackling immense psychological problems when our physical bodies are creaky and out-of-condition. Or we’re muscle-bound and pumped up, which is equally unhelpful.

An actor is like a sculptor: before you can start shaping an expressive figurine, you need to soften the clay – which, in this case, is your body. Once you’re in a state of RELAXATION, your body is much more likely to be at your creative beck and call, and (looking at it from the other way round) if you’re physically relaxed, you’ll probably be psychologically open. Which is why Stanislavsky placed RELAXATION at the foundation of his ‘system’. He believed that if you could free your body of every sort of tension, your inner life would respond accordingly, and then you could more readily and accurately ‘reflect the life of the play in which [you’re] appearing’.¹⁹

There’s another crucial reason for relaxing your body: tension can be the fast-track to stage-fright.

Stage-fright usually occurs when you become dislocated from the onstage action. This dislocation might be the result of a momentary lapse in your focus and you suddenly find yourself rocket-propelled out of the world of the play and hurled into a vortex of ‘What happens next? What am I doing? WHAT DO I SAY?’ It can also occur when you become more bothered about what’s going on in the auditorium than what’s going on onstage. Crises of confidence hurtle round your head: ‘Do they like me? Am I interesting enough? Is my agent impressed? Am I good enough? Do I sound convincing? Will that critic slate or rave?’ Because you’re a psycho-physical being, these mental tensions inevitably cause a ripple effect of physical tensions, and a dam is suddenly erected in the flow of your creative juices.

However . . .

If your body is relaxed, your mind usually opens, and then you can lock your focus into the onstage action without any effort whatsoever. Then your juices can generously flow. And when those creative juices are flowing, you no longer judge your own performance. You simply get on with the action and allow yourself to exist honestly and naturally in the performance space. Your sense of playfulness is acute and your emotions are increasingly accessible to you. Which is what I discovered when I played a bereaved mother in David Hare’s The Permanent Way, a role which required me to break down in mid-sentence twice in twenty minutes. The challenge in performance was not only how to tap into my emotions, but how to sustain that emotional accessibility over the course of a run totalling 10½ A months. During this time, I discovered that the less I worried about whether or not the tears would actually flow, the more readily they did. If I went on stage with the relaxed attitude of, ‘Well, maybe I’ll cry tonight, maybe I won’t,’ then – no problem: the tears sprung forth. If I wound myself up into a physical and mental knot, fretting, ‘Oh, Christ, I’ve got to cry in ten minutes!’, I was emotionally as dry as a bone. Each night, I had to allow myself to be an empty vessel into which the words of the play could pour and, in that state of psycho-physical RELAXATION, my experience of the character’s journey was far more pleasurable and psychologically fleshy.

So . . . psycho-physical RELAXATION is the first step in prepping yourself to receive all manner of creative impulses. If you’re sufficiently relaxed, you’ll be playful and inventive in your decisions. And if you can knead yourself like clay into this open INNER CREATIVE STATE, you make room for INSPIRATION to come flooding in.

With this in mind, we’ll turn to the second basic tool for preparing the blank canvas: BREATHING.

Breathing

You have no choice – you’ve got to breathe. And, as most meditational practices reveal, BREATHING is closely allied to RELAXATION.

BREATHING (or ‘respiration’) is the rhythm of life, the sustainer of the human body, and a fundamental tool for Stanislavsky in terms of acting processes:

Till you realise that the whole basis of your life – respiration – is not only the basis of your physical existence, but that respiration plus rhythm forms the foundations of all your creative work, your work on rhythm and breathing will never be carried out in full consciousness, that is to say, as it should be carried out, in a state of such complete concentration as to turn your creative work into ‘inspiration’.20

Part of the reason that ‘respiration plus rhythm forms the foundations of all your creative work’ is that Breath + Rhythm = Emotion.

I came to understand this equation fully when I was again working with my Russian Scenic Movement tutor, Vladimir Ananyev:

‘Breathe out three times, and breathe in once,’ he instructed one day. ‘And repeat that sequence three times. So: out-out-out-in, out-out-out-in, out-out-out-in, out-out-out-in.’

This I did.

‘Now do the opposite,’ he continued, ‘breathe in three times and out once. In-in-in-out, in-in-in-out, in-in-in-out, in-in-in-out.’

I did this too.

What I discovered was that the first breathing pattern provoked a sense of well-being and jolliness, whereas the second breathing pattern made me feel anxious and tense. The first pattern felt expansive and natural; the second pattern felt shallow and grasping. Ananyev then pointed out that the first pattern was that of laughter, and the second pattern was that of tears. As you’ll discover if you try it for yourself, repeating either pattern a few times – without hyperventilating, of course – quickly induces a state in which you genuinely start to feel either positive or perturbed. Your muscular memory ignites your emotions purely from the alterations you make to your breathing pattern. It’s not a trick: it’s just another way of working psycho-physically, this time from the outside in. (See EMOTION.)

Perhaps a more obvious use of breath is in voice production, and herein lies a curious challenge for an actor: what happens if the amount of breath required for certain performance situations isn’t the same as the amount of breath required for the character’s emotional rhythm? Again, this was brought to the fore for me with The Permanent Way and the two moments when my character, the Second Bereaved Mother, broke down into tears. As Ananyev’s ‘in-in-in-out’ exercise reveals, the breathing pattern of sorrow is quite shallow. And yet often with The Permanent Way, we were touring to large venues which required a huge amount of breath and breath-control simply to fill the space. I found myself making quite significant adjustments in performance to accommodate both the breathing pattern of my character and my own breathing pattern as a vocal technician in order that I could reach the back row of the gods while remaining true to the character’s emotional state. The result was that when we were performing in larger spaces, I had to invest more energy into the character’s EMOTIONS than I did when we were in studio spaces. It wasn’t a question of being vocally louder, but rather of turning up the temperature on the character’s feelings: if I increased the intensity of the Mother’s sorrow, I could fill the space vocally without having to shout her intimate confessions. In this way, I consciously combined BREATHING and emotional energy to marry the technical challenges of the performance space with the TRUTH of the dramatic action.

So you see, BREATHING and EMOTION are intricately interwoven when you start working psycho-physically. You don’t have to squeeze your emotions like a tube of toothpaste: you can simply hook into a particular physical breathing pattern and trust your muscular memory.

RELAXATION and BREATHING are the first two hands-on physical tools in The Toolkit. Having relaxed the body and activated the breath, it’s time to warm up our inner apparatus with the last of the four basic tools for preparing the blank canvas: CONCENTRATION AND ATTENTION.

Concentration and attention

CONCENTRATION AND ATTENTION were very important tools for Stanislavsky, as revealed by the fact that his writings are riddled with references to them. An Actor Prepares has a whole chapter devoted to them. Elsewhere, he describes ‘concentration’ as ‘the first of the steps common to all creative artists’ and suggests that it’s actually the most difficult step.21 As early as 1908, it was one of the key terms he used in his first tentative documentations of his ‘system’,²² and later, RELAXATION and ‘concentration’ formed part of the primary phases of the actor-training programme which he devised and put into practice between 1929 and his death in 1938. All in all, ‘concentration’ was a crucial tool in the kit right from its formative stages.

Why so?

Let’s go back to the artistic climate in which Stanislavsky formulated his ‘system’.

It was common practice in nineteenth-century Russian theatre for the stars of a play to make their entrance and head straight to the front of the stage. There they took a number of bows, while the supporting cast froze in mid-action. Having received their due adulation, the celebs returned to the drama of the play, at which point the supporting cast unfroze and the performance could continue. Stanislavsky wanted to get away from this star system, away from the convention that the actors play to the audience rather than to each other, away from a style of theatre which he felt lacked artistic integrity and inner substance. His idea with CONCENTRATION AND ATTENTION was that:

In order to get away from the auditorium you must be interested in something on the stage.23

To this end, he invented the idea of the ‘fourth wall’,²⁴ an idea discussed in Chapter 5 of An Actor Prepares (a chapter which happens to be called ‘Concentration of Attention’, see Preface): the ‘fourth wall’ was an imaginary wall between the actor and the audience designed to keep the actor’s ATTENTION on the stage.

Being ‘interested in something on the stage’ may seem obvious enough today, but it was a bizarrely pioneering proposition at the time. And surprisingly it’s a far more significant directive than it at first appears . . .

The American writer and director David Mamet is very dismissive of the notion of ‘concentration’:

Acting has nothing to do with the ability to concentrate. It has to do with the ability to imagine. For concentration, like emotion, like belief, cannot be forced. It cannot be controlled.²⁵

However, if we focus on the term CONCENTRATION AND ATTENTION rather than ‘concentration’, per se, we suddenly find there’s actually very little disparity between what Mamet proposes and Stanislavsky’s own suggestions. When Mamet says –

The ability to concentrate flows naturally from the ability to choose something interesting. Choose something legitimately interesting to do and concentration is not a problem. Choose something less than interesting and concentration is impossible.26

– he’s talking the same talk as Stanislavsky. Like Mamet, Stanislavsky advocates that you begin by guiding your ‘concentration’ towards what your character really wants in a scene, towards his or her driving desire or what Stanislavsky calls an OBJECTIVE. If you find something that truly interests you, your powers of ‘concentration’ are effortlessly harnessed and deliciously directed towards actions relevant to the script, and then the audience no longer preoccupies you. Or as Mamet writes, cutting to the chase:

The teenager who wants the car, the child who wants to stay up an extra half an hour, the young person who wants to have sex with his or her date, the gambler at the race-track – these individuals have no problem concentrating. Elect something to do which is physical and fun to do, and concentration ceases to be an issue.²⁷

Physical and fun: that’s the key. CONCENTRATION AND ATTENTION are about finding something physical and doing it with a sense of fun.

As we compare and contrast nineteenth-century Russian Stanislavsky with twenty-first-century American Mamet, we see that CONCENTRATION may begin as a kind of inner process – be it OBSERVATION of a person or thing, or a thought about your OBJECTIVE – but with the appropriately directed ATTENTION, it quickly prompts you towards ACTION. In fact, we soon begin to see that everything is about ACTION – even thought, which you might have ‘thought’ was static: as Stanislavsky himself puts it:

What is it that acts? Thought. So . . . concentration is an inner active action of thought.28

So CONCENTRATION is extremely active. And it’s outward-flowing. You don’t need to turn your ATTENTION inwards towards your emotions. Instead, you should turn it outwards towards your ACTIONS and OBJECTIVES.

What emerges from all these ideas is that if we keep adding the notion of ATTENTION, then CONCENTRATION becomes a remarkably dynamic activity, and not a mental tension.

In brief:

•CONCENTRATION AND ATTENTION is arguably a more creatively useful phrase than ‘concentration’ on its own.

•CONCENTRATION AND ATTENTION keep your focus geared towards the onstage action by finding ACTIONS and OBJECTIVES, which interest you and draw you towards something physical and fun.

Having unlocked some of the ideas behind CONCENTRATION AND ATTENTION, let’s clarify what exactly Stanislavsky means by the word ATTENTION on its own.

Stanislavsky had three clear uses for ATTENTION:

•to find your initial ‘lure’ into a role;

•to begin the delicate merger of yourself as an actor with the writer’s character in your early stages of working on a role;

•to attend to your own ‘mental health’.

Let’s take each of these in turn.

1. The ‘lure’

When you approach a scripted role, your primary task as an actor is to prise that part off the page and plunge it into your pores. So how are you going to do that? Stanislavsky suggests that the tool of ATTENTION can help you out significantly, if you

concentrate your attention on the most effective lure for [your artistic emotions] . . . The bond between the lure and the feeling is natural and normal and one that should be extensively employed.29

The ‘lure’ into the character – i.e. something in the character which naturally draws your ATTENTION – will be your initial trigger into the role. As you get to know the play and the role better, you’ll probably refine or adjust that connection. But the great thing about the ‘lure’ is that it sets those all-important creative juices flowing pretty quickly.

I once asked a seasoned classical actor which Shakespearean part he would play if the whole gamut of roles were at his fingertips. ‘Richard III,’ he replied. When I asked what ‘lured’ him towards that character, he described how Richard’s humour really excited him. He liked the fact that, after Richard has wooed and won Anne, he turns to the audience and basically says: ‘Look how powerful I am now: I can have any one I want, even though I’m an ugly bastard!’

And I no friends to back my suit withal,
But the plain devil, and dissembling looks,
And yet to win her, – all the world to nothing!
Ha!³⁰

The actor’s ATTENTION to the role quickly accessed a trigger for him to knead his imaginative clay.

2. The merger

Once you’ve identified your ‘lure’ into a character, you need to find a way to merge with the role. Stanislavsky suggests the best way to do this is to convert your ‘lure’ into an OBJECTIVE. The most user-friendly way to use an OBJECTIVE is to sum it up in a phrase which begins, ‘I want to . . .’, followed by a goal or ambition towards which you can then strive. Using Mamet’s quotation above, your OBJECTIVE might be: ‘I want to own that car’, ‘I want to stay up late’, ‘I want to screw that guy’, ‘I want to back the winning horse’.

For the actor playing Richard III, it’s very easy to convert his initial ‘lure’ into a useable OBJECTIVE. Instead of saying, ‘Look how powerful I am: I can have anyone I want’, he could simply adjust the words to something like: ‘I want to prove my power to everyone’.

To merge even more closely with the character, the next task for our classical actor would be to road-test his initial OBJECTIVE. This involves giving his IMAGINATION a bit of a work-out, because he has to concentrate on his OBJECTIVE and use his ATTENTION to fine-tune his choice.

To do this fine-tuning, he thinks through the various aspects of the play, constantly changing his points of ATTENTION. So sometimes he might turn his ATTENTION to the other characters. Sometimes to particular scenes in the play. Sometimes to the specific psycho-physical facts we have about Richard, such as his hump or his ambition. Basically, our actor uses his ATTENTION to train his IMAGINATION, so that it responds to his initial ‘lure’.

Once our actor has presented himself with a host of options, Stanislavsky would then invite him to

choose only those problems you need and endow them with your own individual qualities by merging them with those given you by your part.31

And this is the important bit. The reason that our actor allows his IMAGINATION to flit from one point of ATTENTION to another is to enable his inner tuning-fork to sound the TRUTH of what he has chosen. All the time, he balances whatever activates his personal creative juices with whatever is accurate to the playwright’s script, as both of these points of ATTENTION will develop his inner sense of TRUTH. As a result of this imaginative flitting, our actor may then want to fine-tune his original OBJECTIVE, which was ‘I want to prove my power to everyone’. He might now find that the verb ‘flaunt’ or ‘celebrate’ is more provocative than ‘prove’, as in ‘I want to flaunt my power’ or ‘I want to celebrate my power’. He might find that either of these verbs draws out more vigorously the initial sense of ironic humour, which ‘lured’ our actor so fervently towards the role of Richard in the first place, thereby strengthening his inner sense of TRUTH.

In effect, what our actor is doing is using his ATTENTION to merge himself organically with the role. If he locates any fractures between himself and the character, he’ll need to fill them in at some stage; otherwise they’ll hold him at one remove from the character. If there’s too much ‘writer’ and not enough ‘him’, his characterisation will be formal and empty. If there’s too much ‘him’ and not enough ‘writer’, the story will be off-kilter.

3. Your ‘mental health’

Because psycho-physical actor-training is very intensive and draws on all your resources of body, imagination, emotion and psyche, you need to monitor how each of these is affected by your creative work. Stanislavsky is very clear about your emotional responsibility to yourself:

Remember to devote the greatest possible attention to the slightest sign of depression in yourself! For if you let despondency steal into your heart today, you can be sure that your work will never thrive, either today, or tomorrow or the day after.32

This is important. CONCENTRATION AND ATTENTION aren’t tools you need to labour with too ardently. The more effortless you can be in your actor-training, the more pleasure you’ll take in your creative process.

In brief:

•ATTENTION is the ‘lure’ of your actor’s nature – your trigger – into the heart of the character.

•ATTENTION can be used in the early stages of merging with your character, as you transform your ‘lure’ into an OBJECTIVE and imaginatively investigate the play.

•ATTENTION is your means of monitoring your mind so that you can maintain the right level of ‘mental hygiene’.

You can use your ATTENTION with a lightness and brightness to ensure that your training (and, ultimately, your performance) proceeds with ease and joy.

*

The four tools we’ve looked at so far – RELAXATION, BREATHING, and CONCENTRATION AND ATTENTION – have a simple purpose: to prepare and lay the basic foundations for our personal blank canvas. Each one is also geared towards developing our inner listening skills: the first tool (RELAXATION) focuses on the body, the second (BREATHING) on the emotional rhythm of the body, and the third and fourth (CONCENTRATION AND ATTENTION) on our imaginative resources.

Once we’ve put the first four tools to use, the remaining ideas in this chapter –

•inspiration

•spirituality

•creative atmosphere

•the inner creative state

– constitute ‘conditions’ within which we should ideally find ourselves working. They’re the means by which we can begin to paint the most aesthetically vibrant picture on our newly-prepared psycho-physical blank canvas.

TRAY 3

FOUR ‘CONDITIONS’ OF ACTING PRACTICE

Inspiration

What do we mean by INSPIRATION?

The spontaneous.

The instantaneous.

The creatively exciting.

It arises when (in that much used, but frustratingly imprecise, phrase) you’re ‘living in the moment’. You create fantastic dialogues ‘in the moment’ of improvisation or you execute extraordinary actions ‘in the moment’ of performance. All these moments are totally unexpected, yet utterly in keeping with the character you’re playing and the action of the writer’s script. That’s when you know you’re inspired.

Stanislavsky began to elucidate his ideas about INSPIRATION in 1906. His early years as an actor-director at the Moscow Art Theatre had been extremely challenging to him personally, so he took a holiday to Finland. There he found the space and time to formulate the basics of what would later became known as his ‘system’. The more he thought about the state of mind in which you find yourself as an actor when you’re in performance, the more he knew that the INNER CREATIVE STATE of mind was the ideal one. A nervous state of mind, a fractured state of mind, a preoccupied state of mind – none of these does anything but interfere with your process. But if there was a way of guaranteeing that as an actor you were always in an INNER CREATIVE STATE of mind, then maybe this would be the first step towards accessing a direct path to INSPIRATION. As he sat in his study in Finland, Stanislavsky asked himself some questions (as summed up here by David Magarshack):

Could [a creative state of mind] be achieved at will? And if not, could this creative state of mind be produced bit by bit, put together from different elements after a series of carefully devised exercises? An ordinary actor would of course never become a genius [simply] because he knew how to achieve the creative state of mind on the stage, but might he not come very close to the thing that distinguished a genius?33

That distinguishing ‘thing’ is INSPIRATION. Behind all Stanislavsky’s questions was an unavoidable and creatively exasperating fact: INSPIRATION cannot be summoned at will. And yet the nature of our profession almost demands it. Unlike an artist or a poet or a songwriter or a sculptor, we can’t wait until we feel inspired. Our creative work has to happen at 7.30 on a Tuesday evening, or at 6 a.m. or at midnight or at whatever ungodly hour appears on our filming call-sheet. Who gives a tuppenny fig whether we’re in an INNER CREATIVE STATE or not? It’s our job to come up with the artistic goods.

This is the very reason why Stanislavsky formulated his ‘system’. Looking at the vagaries of INSPIRATION and the uncompromising DISCIPLINE demanded of actors to create to order, he set about devising some conscious means through which the SUBCONSCIOUS (the twin sister of INSPIRATION) might be aroused. His belief was:

The more you have of conscious creative moments in your role the more chance you will have of a flow of inspiration.³⁴

Of course he was perfectly well aware that:

My ‘system’ will never manufacture inspiration. It can only prepare a favourable ground for it.³⁵

And he’s right. However prepared you are, however rigorously you’ve warmed up, however thoroughly you’ve researched your part and learned your lines, sometimes your creativity will work for you and sometimes it won’t. But at least if your actor-training provides you with the right tools to prepare consciously the INNER CREATIVE STATE of your body and mind, then you give yourself the best possible chance to tap into the kind of INSPIRATION that over the centuries has fuelled the greatest artists in the world. Alternatively, you can just end up going through the motions of a well-worn rehearsal choreography, and that gives little pleasure to anyone.

The paradoxical joy of a conscious and well-founded technique is that once it’s fully embedded in your body, you can forget all about it. You don’t go out on the stage or in front of the camera to show the audience how conscientiously you’ve developed your technique. You go out on the stage or in front of the camera to tell the writer’s story and lead the spectator towards a particular experience. As Stanislavsky incited his actors:

If today you are in good form and are blessed with inspiration, forget about technique and abandon yourself to your feelings.36

And how fantastic such moments of abandonment are!

And yet, we mustn’t become too idealistic or evangelical about our mission. We needn’t punish ourselves if our creative work is occasionally pedestrian. Stanislavsky gives us a timely reminder that, however prepared we may be, we’re only human after all. So:

An actor should remember that inspirations appear only on holidays.³⁷

The challenge is to try and create a sense that every day’s training or rehearsal or performance could be a ‘holiday’. Or, to pick up a term from Peter Brook – a ‘holy’ day. Which leads us to our next ‘condition’ of performance: SPIRITUALITY.

Spirituality

A close partner to INSPIRATION, SPIRITUALITY crops up in Stanislavsky’s work with astonishing regularity. Especially when we consider that he was writing in Soviet Russia at a time when anything esoteric was heavily suppressed. Here are just a handful of the references to SPIRITUALITY harvested from An Actor Prepares:

The essence of art is not in its external forms but in its spiritual content.38

The main purpose of our art [is] to create the life of a human soul and render it in artistic form.³⁹

Your own physical and spiritual state will tell you what is right.⁴⁰

An artist must have full use of his own spiritual, human material because that is the only stuff from which he can fashion a living soul for his part.⁴¹

There are nigh on fifty other references to ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ throughout An Actor Prepares, and yet how often do you hear the term used in most Western performance circles?

We shouldn’t fight shy of the term ‘spirit’ in acting. It’s no coincidence that early theatre came out of the church and that ancient rituals involved mask, costume, impersonation and transformation. Sadly, there’s not much time for the ‘spirit’ in the cut-and-thrust of the twenty-first-century acting industry. We’re often judged at castings by our height, weight, looks and physiognomy, as much as by our acting acumen, let alone any ‘spiritual’ connection we might have with our art. One year, I walked into three consecutive auditions and, even before I’d opened my mouth, I heard the words, ‘You’re too short!’ So I left. It’s quite hard to be spiritual in those situations.

You might think it’s quite hard to be ‘spiritual’ when you’re blasting the shit out of some villain in a cops-and-robbers movie, but that would be slightly missing the point. If you genuinely tap into your resources of body, imagination, intellect and emotion, then you’ll almost inevitably unlock in your work a much deeper resonance, which could be called your ‘spirit’, regardless of how mindless or otherwise the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES of the script might seem.

In terms of acting processes per se, Stanislavsky is quite specific about the significance of ‘spirit’. He suggests that when there’s

an organic connection of the spiritual aspect of the actor with his personal technical equipment 42

then you can access a direct avenue to INSPIRATION.

How so?

According to Stanislavsky, if you open yourself up as an actor to the possible existence of your ‘spirit’ and combine that belief with your ‘personal technical equipment’, you unavoidably call into action all aspects of your acting instrument:

not only sight and hearing, but all human emotions, body, thought, the will, memory and imagination.⁴³

This unavoidable interaction between the components of your psycho-physical being puts you in a very strong position to enhance your inner-outer co-ordination. You could even say that true psycho-physical co-ordination is the creation of a ‘spiritual’ life. And this ‘spiritual’ life is manifested

only when an actor feels that his inner and outer life on the stage is flowing naturally and normally . . . [Then] the deeper sources of his subconscious gently open, and from them come feelings . . .⁴⁴

We see here how closely Stanislavsky’s terminology connects SPIRITUALITY and INSPIRATION. His suggestion is that when you’re creatively open (through RELAXATION, BREATHING and CONCENTRATION AND ATTENTION) and you can put yourself in a natural, childlike state of play, then – sans coercion – your deeper, less conscious resources come bubbling to the surface.

If this seems a little obscure at the moment, the practical use of ‘spirit’ becomes much more accessible in Chapter 2, when we come to the tools of CONNECTION and GRASP. For now, let’s just be clear that any mention of SPIRITUALITY in acting in no way interferes with your own religious or personal beliefs. What we’re looking at really is the idea of some powerful, but invisible affectivity which can springboard us as actors into all sorts of creative experiences. These experiences might otherwise be suppressed if we were to lock actor-training into nothing but the body, the emotions and the head.

We’ve talked about creative openness and playfulness and about having physical fun. Everything we’ve looked at so far – whether in terms of the ‘attitudes’ towards our profession, or the three basic tools for preparing our metaphorical blank canvas, or our striving for INSPIRATION through opening ourselves ‘spiritually’ – is leading towards the development of an INNER CREATIVE STATE which tends to flourish in a CREATIVE ATMOSPHERE.

Inner creative state and Creative atmosphere

The INNER CREATIVE STATE is one in which anything is possible, where your sense of play and spontaneity is at your finger tips. You’re so physically relaxed and psychologically warmed-up that you’re open to every changing nuance in your fellow actors, your audience and yourself. In this state, you really are listening.

Stanislavsky’s response to the significance of the INNER CREATIVE STATE in his own ‘system’ was quite clear:

In my involvement with the new methods of inner technique, I sincerely believed that to express the experience [i.e. what the character goes through in the course of the play], the actor need only master the creative state, and that all the rest will follow.45

Which implies that the INNER CREATIVE STATE is a powerful state. And the best seedbed in which it can flourish is a CREATIVE ATMOSPHERE.

A CREATIVE ATMOSPHERE is one in which everyone is utterly attentive to everyone else’s artistry. In which there’s absolutely no judgement of anyone’s process, since that would only lead to the inhibition of your own INNER CREATIVE STATE, as well as that of your fellow-actors.

CREATIVE ATMOSPHERE and the INNER CREATIVE STATE are, therefore, mutually interdependent.

A CREATIVE ATMOSPHERE is safe. It’s trusting and nurturing. At the same time, it’s bold. It’s dangerous and daring. It’s playful – yet serious. It’s sincere – yet mischievous. To exist in it is joyous. To create it is damn hard. To destroy it is dead easy:

Creative atmosphere is one of the powerful factors in our art and we must remember it is extraordinarily difficult to create a working atmosphere. The director is in no position to create it on his own, only the collective can create it. But it can be destroyed unfortunately by any person.46

The responsibility for nurturing a CREATIVE ATMOSPHERE percolates far beyond the actors. As we saw with STAGE ETHICS, everyone in the building – be it the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the National Theatre or Universal Studios – is responsible for the overall CREATIVE ATMOSPHERE. A CREATIVE ATMOSPHERE requires an unspoken contract on everyone’s part: it can’t be assumed or taken for granted. As Stanislavsky’s assistant director, Maria Knebel, writes in On the Active Analysis of Plays and Roles:

Art doesn’t come to us straight away. It demands an enormous effort. ‘The work of the theatre,’ wrote Nemirovich-Danchenko [Stanislavsky’s co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre] . . . [is] a dogged, persistent, many-faced kind of work which fills the whole backstage, from top to bottom. From the flies above the stage to the traps under the stage; there lies the actor’s work on the role. But what does that mean? It means work on yourself, what you’ve been given, on your nerves, on your memory, on your habits.⁴⁷

Stanislavsky’s own preoccupation with the INNER CREATIVE STATE follows the same concerns and adopts the same vocabulary as those which he uses for both PSYCHO-PHYSICALITY and INSPIRATION. He believed that the INNER CREATIVE STATE actually mirrors your normal state in everyday life. The paradox is that – just as with psycho-physical acting – you need great patience to develop it, despite its naturalness and normality.

During his vital time in Finland in 1906, Stanislavsky beavered away to fathom some techniques to create it. Eventually he came up with four steps into the INNER CREATIVE STATE, stemming from the tools of RELAXATION and ATTENTION. He proposed that as an actor, you needed:

1to be physically free, yet in control of your relaxed muscles;

2to be infinitely alert in your ATTENTION;

3to observe and listen to what’s going on around you – just as you would in real life – so that your onstage contact is as plugged in as it is in real life;

4to believe in the EVENTS on stage.

Step 4 might sound a little troublesome at first but, as we’ve already touched upon, you don’t have to believe you really are Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, having every unmentionable abuse enacted upon your body: you simply have to believe in the possibility of the events. (See THE MAGIC ‘IF’.)

Were you to distil the basic learning outcome of Stanislavsky’s actor-training down to one particular element, it would probably be this: to encourage you as an actor to develop an INNER CREATIVE STATE of body and mind, a state in which you almost don’t give a damn. You’re not censoring yourself. You’re not judging yourself. You’re not worried about whether or not you’re giving the director what he or she wants. You’re just responding and playing. And when you’re in an INNER CREATIVE STATE, your inner-outer listening is sharpened and your opportunities for inspired acting are increased. Which is why actor-training is as relevant for the proven professional as it is for the student actor, because accessing an INNER CREATIVE STATE remains an ongoing concern for you from your first day at drama school to the last night of your retirement run. The INNER CREATIVE STATE is a healthy state. And it’s a playful state. Above all, it’s a listening state. It’s physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. What more could you want? Bring it on.

Overview

So far, we’ve established some fundamental ground rules by looking at the appropriate ‘attitudes’ towards acting (PSYCHO-PHYSICALITY, DISCIPLINE and STAGE ETHICS).

We’ve begun to prepare the blank canvas with some basic tools (RELAXATION, BREATHING and CONCENTRATION AND ATTENTION).

We’ve seen the goals or ‘conditions’ of performance towards which we’re aiming (INSPIRATION, SPIRITUALITY and the existence of an INNER CREATIVE STATE and a CREATIVE ATMOSPHERE).

It’s time now to walk into the rehearsal room and set to work on a script.

Once you get into the rehearsal room, the director will usually assume that you’ve done all the necessary preparation on yourself and your psycho-physical instrument, and that your actor-training is readily serving you. Therefore, the work inside the rehearsal room will inevitably springboard off your own particular acting tools. That doesn’t mean that your actor-training stops: you’re simply shifting into a different creative gear.