2
Rehearsal Processes
Diving in
So you’re in rehearsal, with all the trepidation and excitement that that entails. Ahead of you may be eight weeks before opening in a big commercial show, four weeks before filming a feature, or a five-minute line-run before the television camera rolls. Whatever the scenario, it’s time to start showing your true creative colours, as you begin to incarnate a role and assure the director that casting you was the best decision she ever could have made.
In this chapter, we look at a host of tools which can help you in a multitude of circumstances. Its contents fall into three key areas:
•Mining the Text
•Embodying the Role
•Approaches to Rehearsal
The first section, ‘Mining the Text’, looks at the kind of analysis you might apply to a script, either collectively with the director or independently as part of your own detective work. Although it’s essentially head-led work, we’ll see how its reverberations are profoundly psycho-physical.
The second section, ‘Embodying the Role’, moves on to issues of physically building a character, again either collectively as a company or independently, according to the director and the medium. As well as physical ‘tools’, we’ll also assess some imaginative, emotional and psychological options.
The third section, ‘Approaches to Rehearsal’, is the meat of The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, and here we look specifically at Stanislavsky’s later rehearsal practices, the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS and ACTIVE ANALYSIS. The exciting element in both these rehearsal processes is that, right from the word go, they offer you the chance to build your character in relation to other actors. The work is collective and collaborative, and creatively very sexy.
As with all the chapters in this book, the divisions I’ve made are to simplify presentation on the page. In reality, there are endless cross-overs between these divisions, some of which I allude to explicitly, and some of which you’ll note from your own experience and practice. The paradox of compiling The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit is that I’ve had to fragment something which is inherently holistic. But then if Stanislavsky can do it – as he does throughout his writings – then I’m in good company.
TRAY 4
FOUR GENERAL TOOLS FOR BEGINNING TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
Continuing the image of the trays in a metal toolkit, the tools in this section are divided into small groups. The initial four are:
•the first reading
•the text
•mental reconnaissance
•given circumstances
These are big tools for general usage, like a hammer, a saw, a spirit-level and a spanner. They provide some broad introductions to pretty much any kind of script.
The first reading
Getting a new script is very exciting: it’s like a blind date with a new lover. Seeing and feeling that big, chunky wad of paper, containing the map of the journey on which your whole creative life is about to embark, is immensely provocative. And just as you’ll have a powerful immediate response the moment you clap eyes on your blind date, so the importance of your first impression of a script shouldn’t be underestimated. It harnesses your instinct and your intuition, both of which are potent creative energies. Even if your immediate response is, ‘I don’t like this character’ – that in itself can yield a rich harvest of ideas about empathy and understanding. No first impression is a bad impression.
However . . .
Unless you’re forewarned, it’s hard to appreciate just how vital and fecund these first impressions can be. So Stanislavsky suggests that, before you pick up a script to read it for the first time, you should prepare an environment which is as conducive as possible for you to receive those invaluable first responses. The bus-stop is out. The quick hop on the underground is a no-no. Reading Act 1 in the bath, Act 2 in Starbucks and Act 3 in the supermarket checkout queue is definitely out of the question. After all, as Stanislavsky warns:
This moment of your first meeting with a part should be unforgettable . . . The loss of this moment is irreparable because a second reading no longer contains the element of surprise so potent in the realm of intuitive creativeness.48
Obviously if we’re talking Shakespeare or Chekhov or Ibsen, for example, you may well be familiar with the play already. Yet, regardless of how well you may know a text, that first encounter – when you know you’re going to be playing a specific part in a specific production for a specific director – will have a particular frisson which can still be relished.
To feel the full value of your immediate impressions, Stanislavsky proposes that you create something of a ritual for your FIRST READING, where there will be no interruptions and where an appropriate INNER CREATIVE STATE of mind can be tapped into straight away:
One must know how to choose the time and the place. The occasion should be accompanied with certain ceremoniousness; if one is to invite one’s soul to buoyancy, one must be spiritually and physically buoyant.49
Part of being ‘spiritually and physically buoyant’ is being utterly open-hearted to the words that you’re reading, and Stanislavsky is particularly ardent about this:
Since, in the language of the actor, to know is synonymous with to feel, [the actor] should give free rein, at a first reading of a play, to his creative emotions. The more warmth of feeling and throbbing, living emotion he can put into a play at first acquaintance, the greater will be the appeal of the dry words of the text to his senses, his creative will, mind, [and] emotion memory, [and] the greater will be the suggestiveness of this first reading to the creative imagination of his visual, auditory, and other faculties, of images, pictures, sensation memories.50
All too often we forget how profoundly a FIRST READING can impact on us, as we stuff the script into our rucksack to be flicked through at some opportune moment. Stanislavsky’s gripe with this ‘unceremonious’ attitude is that it hints at a certain hubris:
We do it not so much because we want to come to know the play but because we want to imagine ourselves in some fat part or other.51
How many of us have rifled through the pages of a new script to find our scenes, count our lines, and only then decide whether to go to the casting or not? Of course, if you’re a very successful actor with a mound of scripts on your desk, the ongoing process of ‘ceremonious’ readings might be just too daunting, and then the ‘fat part’ will unashamedly be the likeliest lure. However, if ‘some fat part’ were determined solely by the number of lines, then Kattrin in Mother Courage could easily be given the cold shoulder . . . But a blind date, who doesn’t say much, may pack a few punches in other ways.
The blind date is of course the TEXT itself, and in relation to a fiRST READING, Stanislavsky has some very specific suggestions.
The text
Your first point of negotiation with a TEXT – if it’s a conventionally written piece – is the black-and-white words on the page. Your task as an actor is to convert those words into living, breathing ACTIONS.
This can be something of a challenge if the TEXT is no great work of literature. The onus is then on you as an actor to find its hidden reverberations. That means looking for the script’s emotional content along with its literary texture, as according to Stanislavsky, the latter will give you the former:
A subtle understanding of the literary texture of the play is one of the most important conditions for an actor to be able to render these feelings on the stage.52
I’d suggest that the ‘literary texture’ comprises the script’s structure, language and TEMPO-RHYTHM. Every TEXT, whether it’s the well-fashioned work of a literary giant or the tentative scribblings of a first-time playwright, will inevitably have some kind of literary texture, since no TEXT can help but have a combination of language, structure and TEMPO-RHYTHM. There’s no point in us saying, ‘This script’s no good; this part’s unintelligible’: it’s our job to get inside the writer’s words, to find the literary texture, and to breathe life into it, whether we’re talking a box-office blockbuster, an episode of EastEnders or a Maeterlinck masterpiece.
You have to ‘Treasure the spoken word’.53 And certainly no word should be uttered unless you’re crystal clear about why you’re saying it:
It is absolutely wrong to speak your words to no purpose. You must acquire the habit of putting the greatest possible meaning into every word you utter. You must be fully aware of the value of every word.54
But perhaps we’re putting the cart before the horse. Can we really think about ‘valuing every word’ until we’ve understood the underlying thoughts and their accompanying ACTIONS? And acquiring that understanding requires a certain amount of detective work, otherwise known as ‘round-the-table analysis’ or MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE.
Mental reconnaissance
Stanislavsky’s emphasis on ‘round-the-table analysis’ – or MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE – evolved around 1904, as he began to move away from an extremely dictatorial way of directing (in which he told his actors exactly what to do and where to go) towards a highly collaborative rehearsal practice (in which he invited his actors to pool all their ideas). The whole cast would sit together around a table, animatedly studying and nimbly dissecting a TEXT, so that everyone shared an understanding of the play. Decisions about the artistic direction of the production arose from their collaborative process of discovery, rather than from the single-minded vision of a dictatorial director. After all, if the actor is to be the main avenue through which the play’s content is communicated to the audience, then the director needs to nurture a process in which the actor is placed right at the centre of any creative discovery. So significant was this shift in Stanislavsky’s rehearsal ethos – from dictating every move to assessing every contribution – that, by the 1930s, MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE (or ‘the logical investigation of the play’)55 had become a formal part of the rehearsal process for all theatrical organisations right across Russia.
The idea behind MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE was to obliterate what Stanislavsky called ‘the seamier side’56 of his actors: i.e. their passivity. He wanted to endow them with a sense of genuine responsibility towards creating their roles from the very first moment of rehearsal. To this end, it was vital that the MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE of a script wasn’t a dry and cerebral activity; it was about stimulating emotional responses:
The analysis made by an artist is quite different from one made by a scholar or a critic. If the result of scholarly analysis is thought, the result of an artistic analysis is feeling.57
This is important, and it takes us back to the notion of being utterly open-hearted during your FIRST READING of a TEXT. Through your MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE you open yourself up to your visceral and intuitive impressions of the script, you don’t accumulate intellectual facts. You’re not swotting for an exam, you’re preparing yourself for a full-blown one-to-one with the character you’re playing. It’s a significant relationship: it’s going to haunt you, hunt you, excite you and preoccupy you for a good few weeks. So you might as well enjoy it and let those creative juices flow.
Of course, MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE doesn’t have to be undertaken collectively ‘round a table’: it’s the sort of work you can do quite easily on your own. One of the ways in which Stanislavsky suggests you might carry out your analytic detective work is by looking at seven ‘planes’ of a TEXT.58 These ‘planes’ are extremely useful and comprise:
1. THE EXTERNAL PLANE, which is basically the dramatic structure of the script, its events, plot-devices and form. Through the ‘external plane’, you can see the writer’s architectural perspective, and this can be a very handy way of understanding the script’s rhythmic composition as much as its structure. So, with Chekhov’s Three Sisters, for example, we know the action takes place over four acts, chronologically spaced out over nearly five years, with 21 months between Acts 1 and 2, and 2¾ years between Acts 2 and 3, and a matter of months between Acts 3 and 4: this information in itself gives us a feel for the play’s overall TEMPO-RHYTHM and relation to time. The main events are 1) a name-day party; 2) a cancelled shrove-tide party; 3) a fire in the town; and 4) the departure of the soldiers: given these events, each act has a very distinctive atmosphere pervading it. By looking at the ‘external plane’, we get a clear sense of Chekhov’s architecture in terms of time, EVENTS and emotional temperature.
2. THE PLANE OF THE SOCIAL SITUATION, which includes details such as the characters’ class and nationality, and the historical setting, etc. Assessing the script through this plane involves gleaning all the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES, and it provides us with clear, skeletal facts onto which the flesh and blood of the characters can then be grafted. So with Three Sisters, we know the girls are Russian; they’re the daughters of a general; two out of three of them have jobs; and it’s the end of the nineteenth century. Sometimes the writer consciously chooses not to give us those specifics. In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, we intuit that the characters are working-class; their nationality could be anything, though the names Vladimir, Estragon and Pozzo give a European flavour; and the historical setting is fairly non-specific. All we know is that it’s a country road, there’s a tree and it’s evening. The lack of ‘social situation’ provides us with information in an impressionistic, rather than a literal way.
3. THE LITERARY PLANE, which incorporates the ideas and style of the writing. The kinds of language that the writer uses in general, as well as the different types of dialogue that are specific to each character, give us nuances of characterisation, as well as dictating the overall genre and emotional pitch of the script. So in Three Sisters, we have Vershinin’s philosophising, Kulygin’s Latin phrases and his various schoolmasterly references such as ‘C-minus for conduct’,59 and Solyony’s quotings of strange Russian poetry. With Henry IV Part I, we have the blood-thirsty rhetoric of Hotspur, the folksy speech of Mistress Quickly with her ur-Malapropisms, Falstaff’s relishing of language, and the measured, military tones of the King. Certain characters speak in prose, others in poetry: the language tends to be very muscular, and – as is the case with most Shakespearean characters – they all enjoy words, taking a distinct pleasure in the sound of their own voices. In the world of TV, a hospital drama adopts a vocabulary quite distinct from a sitcom or a domestic soap opera. And similarly a Quentin Tarantino movie uses language in a strikingly different way from a chick-flick.
4. THE AESTHETIC PLANE, which addresses the theatrical devices adopted by the writer, and the scenic and artistic choices. Chekhov has chosen to enfold most of the action in Three Sisters on an internal level, with very little plot development revealed explicitly. And we have only to compare Jack and the Beanstalk with The Mousetrap with Carousel with Death of a Salesman with the direct address of David Hare’s The Permanent Way to gain an instant impression of the impact the aesthetic plane makes upon a TEXT. In some ways, the choice the writer makes about the ‘aesthetic plane’ tells you something about the relationship between the audience and the stage, and the kind of journey on which the writer wants to take the audience. With most Chekhov plays, the audience has to work quite hard to piece together the various characters’ THROUGH-LINES, whereas Brecht hands on a plate to the audience the contents of a scene by virtue of placards such as:
Three years later Mother Courage is taken prisoner along with elements of a Finnish regiment. She manages to save her daughter, likewise her covered cart, but her honest son is killed.60
5. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PLANE, which considers the inner workings of the characters and their underlying feelings and OBJECTIVES. Here we definitely move from the writer’s perspective (which largely dictates planes 1 – 4) to that of the actor (which largely dominates planes 5 – 7). Although a writer will give you huge clues as to the character’s psychological make-up, your way of manifesting it in dramatic terms will be filtered through your own individual life experience, professional technique, and imaginative interpretation. How I choose to incarnate Masha in Three Sisters might be quite different from another actress: I might pursue Masha’s romantic restlessness, and therefore I might consider her OBJECTIVE to be ‘I want to fall in love with the ideal man’. Another actress might choose to emphasise Masha’s need for intellectual compatibility, and therefore might describe her OBJECTIVE as ‘I want to quench my thirst for knowledge and understanding through a knowledgeable man understanding my needs’. Yet another actress might focus on the role Masha’s father clearly had in her life and how that might then impact on her connection with both her husband, Kulygin, and her lover, Vershinin – both of whom are older and both of whom are in professional positions of authority. For this third actress, Masha’s OBJECTIVE might be expressed as simply as ‘I want a father figure’.
6. THE PHYSICAL PLANE, which can be defined in terms of the ACTIONS that the characters execute and the external characterisations which the author provides (such as Epikhodov’s squeaking shoes in The Cherry Orchard or the King’s deformity in Richard III). Again, your choices as an actor merge with the details provided in the script: some physical activities will be specified – such as Chebutykin’s constant beard-combing in Three Sisters; others will be supplemented by the actors – such as any clowning tricks which the actors playing Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot may wish to add to those Beckett suggests in the text.
7. THE PLANE OF PERSONAL CREATIVE FEELINGS, which belong to you as an actor and which will be aroused through your process of analysing the text. This plane really involves many of the tools discussed so far: the process begins with your ‘lure’ into the character, your connection with the role and with the script, and those aspects of the script which may begin to get your creative juices flowing. From that point of departure, all manner of ideas and desires may occur to you. As you investigate the ‘plane of personal creative feelings’, you’re actually engaging in a process of fully merging yourself with the character, allowing your imaginative connection and your emotional connection and your empathic connection with the TEXT to propel you into the heart of the character, so that the join between the two (self and character) becomes seamless. We can begin to see this emerging in the example above concerning the three actresses’ OBJECTIVES for Masha on the ‘psychological plane’: I would suggest that the ‘psychological plane’ and the ‘plane of personal creative feelings’ inform each other quite significantly. As we work our way through the toolkit, the implications of the ‘plane of personal creative feelings’ will become increasingly evident.
These seven planes are an incredibly useful way of analysing a TEXT – partly because they present a gradual movement from the writer to the actor, but also because we start at the ‘periphery’ of our creative journey (i.e. the TEXT) and step by step move towards the ‘centre’ of our creative journey (i.e. the way in which the details of the TEXT touch and inspire us as actors and directors).
And this is the general process behind MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE as a whole. Whether the process is engaged in collectively by the whole company or independently on your own, you’re not trying to become an encyclopaedia; you’re hunting for the ‘lures’ into the character. You do it in such a way that the process – of examining, weighing, recognising, of rejecting some ideas and confirming others – engages your IMAGINATION, your EMOTIONS, your thoughts and physical impulses, so that you’re inspired to get up on your feet and act, act, act! MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE is not pure head work; it’s another step along the path of finding conscious means to activate unconscious, inspirational and spontaneous processes. Which means that if the process is adopted by the director and the company collectively, your round-the-table discussions shouldn’t become too protracted; otherwise you’ll kill stone-dead your desire to act. After all, you want to dive into the very heart of the script, you don’t want to become a fact-accumulator.
However . . .
Although the intention is not to accumulate facts intellectually, there are some facts which are vital: Stanislavsky called them GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES, and to a large degree they also constitute the various elements that you draw from the seven ‘planes’ of MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE.
Given circumstances
The early round-the-table MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE is great for clarifying the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES, which Stanislavsky describes as being:
•the story of the play [e.g. is it linear or fragmented? Chronological or kaleidoscopic? This may draw upon ideas from the ‘aesthetic plane’];
•the facts, events, epoch, time and place of action [this connects in many ways with the SIX FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS];
•the conditions of life for the character [this will probably incorporate the ‘plane of the social situation’];
•the actors’ and directors’ interpretation [this will probably incorporate the ‘plane of personal creative feelings’];
•the MISE-EN-SCÈNE, or stage pictures [this will probably incorporate the ‘aesthetic plane’ to some extent];
•the details of production, including the sets, the costumes, properties, lighting and sound effects [again this may draw upon the ‘aesthetic plane’].61
Then there are other GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES to consider, as we’re not just talking ‘Female, aged 26, one-legged, of Egyptian extraction’. Suppose you’re involved in an outdoor production of The Merchant of Venice: the particular technical and geographical circumstances will affect your artistic decisions. Likewise with an ‘in-the-round’ Ionesco, or a filmed-on-location Lorca, or Sophocles for school kids, or Racine on the radio. Basically, the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES consist of all the data you can glean from the script plus the physical conditions of the actual production as determined by the director and the medium (stage, screen, radio, etc.).
GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES are essentially the springboards for your IMAGINATION to propel you towards what Stanislavsky calls THE MAGIC ‘IF’: ‘What would I do if I suspected my uncle had murdered my father?’ (Hamlet) ‘What would I do if my wife was accused of witchcraft and I knew she was innocent?’ (The Crucible) As with all aspects of MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE the process of assembling the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES is not about acquiring a whole list of facts and figures; it’s about appealing to your IMAGINATION, to your ‘personal creative feelings’ and then stimulating your desire to get up and act out the script’s drama.
What you’re doing is seeking physical ACTIONS and feeling their impact on your inner landscape. Which gives us another equation: Given Circumstances + Actions = Powerful Emotions. Stanislavsky himself is keen to emphasise this.
We artists must realise the truth that even small physical movements, when injected into given circumstances, acquire great significance through their influence on emotion.62
MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE addresses character and psychology: you’re not researching how your character might have lived in a particular epoch simply to patch fascinating historical details onto your characterisation. You’re unpacking the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES – be they historical, social, or economic – so you can understand what kinds of dreams and ambitions your character might have, and the constraints under which they might suffer. If it’s winter in nineteenth-century Russia and you come back from working in the post office saying, ‘I’m so tired,’ the chances are your fatigue and general Weltschmerz will have been exacerbated by your wearisome journey. If it’s a twenty-first-century Hollywood movie and you come back from the office saying, ‘I’m so tired,’ you’ve probably just driven home in an air-conditioned car, so your preoccupations and expectations will be quite different from the nineteenth-century Russian post-mistress. The GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES surrounding geographical place, historical setting, weather, life-style, material conditions, are there to fuel your imaginative ideas about your character.
And the most astonishing details can crop up when you start researching the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES, details which can flesh out your characterisations in quite idiosyncratic ways. I once played Masha in Chekhov’s The Seagull, and during my investigation into the ‘plane of the social situation’, I discovered that, in the late nineteenth century, people in Russia used to mix cocaine into their snuff. Eureka! What a fabulous ‘lure’ into the character! ‘Maybe that’s why Masha is forever pinching snuff . . . maybe she’s a coke addict!’ The snippet of historical information instantly gave me a new and intriguing way to play the character, one which both tickled my imaginative fancy and stirred my CREATIVE INDIVIDUALITY.
I then read of the plight of many intelligent middle-class women in Russia at the time, women who, for various economic and political reasons, hadn’t been able to fulfil their educational potential – so maybe that might be true for Masha, too. Maybe she’s intellectually bored and she’s educationally unfulfilled, so she’s clutching at romantic straws to give her life a certain substance. With details like this, I was beginning to create a dynamic PERSPECTIVE for Masha. Through a comparatively small amount of research into the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES of the time, my IMAGINATION had been prompted to build up a possible past and future for her, and as Stanislavsky writes:
The present cannot exist not only without a past but also without a future. People will say that we can never know it or predict it. However, we not only can but we must desire it and have perspectives on it. If in life there can be no present without a past or without a future, then on the stage too, which reflects life, how can it be otherwise?63
As I worked on Masha, I found that my creative juices had been stimulated enormously by the research. The playwright had provided me with a particular GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCE – Masha ‘Takes a pinch of snuff’64 – and I’d fleshed it out with other historical details to give myself a sense of creative volume. (See the SIX FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS.)
There’s one final point to make about being psycho-physically open to the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES of a script. With television in particular, character descriptions can sometimes change quite radically once you get to the casting – or even as late as the costume fitting. At the snap of a finger or the change of a T-shirt, the ‘attractive parent from Surbiton’ can become the ‘single mum from Clerkenwell’. If you’re psycho-physically relaxed and happy to be playful, you can adapt and adjust to most GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES with comparative ease and a lot of pleasure. If scenes are cut or added, and vital information about your character is consequently lost or inserted, you’re happy to adapt to those huge shifts in the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES while still bedding your creation in a sense of TRUTH.
*
So far, we’ve noted our instantaneous responses – the ‘lures’ – towards the script and we’ve trawled the TEXT for various GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES. Time now in our ‘mining of the text’ to look at the actual, detailed, structural mechanisms that the writer has put in place: What happens when? Which EVENT precedes or succeeds which other dramatic EVENT? And why has the author put the EVENTS in this order? The tools for looking at scenic structure are:
•bits
•objectives and counter-objectives
•subtext
•punctuation
•the Six Fundamental Questions
TRAY 5
FIVE TOOLS FOR BREAKING DOWN THE STRUCTURE OF A SCENE
Bits
When you first read a play, you naturally assume that the order of the scenes is the order in which the author always intended them to flow. As any dramaturg or script editor knows, it ain’t necessarily so. Not only can the order change, but sometimes whole chunks of text are ditched or added. Sometimes lines are reallocated to different characters, as the writer herself gets to know the terrain of her own creation.
Once the script hits the rehearsal-room floor, the task of the actors and director is then to reverse that whole process – to unpick the structure blow by blow, or as Stanislavsky might put it, BIT by BIT. By doing this, you can unlock the characters’ psychological OBJECTIVES and you can begin to understand how the writer constructed them. In other words, you can recreate the writer’s original process.
What exactly is a BIT of action? (Note here that ‘action’ is used to refer to the dramatist’s structuring of dramatic action – i.e., which event follows or precedes another – rather than the tool of ACTION – see page 132 – which refers to the choices made by the actor in the playing of a particular moment.)
A BIT is simply a piece of text lasting anything from about six lines to maybe a page. A typical 3-page piece of dialogue may consist of between two and five BITS of action depending on what’s going on in the scene and what kind of tactics each character is using. In her translation of An Actor Prepares, Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood uses the word ‘unit’ of action, though Stanislavsky’s original Russian word for BIT (kusok) was totally non-scientific-sounding and arguably less alienating. Although the term ‘unit’ is commonly used in rehearsal practices, there’s something more pliant about the term BIT: often the divisions in a piece of dialogue are not entirely clearcut, so the word BIT reflects that essential blurriness. In fact, more and more practitioners are using BIT as the accepted terminology, so I’d advocate adopting it here, while simultaneously remaining open to the interchangeability of BIT and ‘unit’ according to your director’s predilections in the rehearsal room.
So . . .
When it comes to breaking down a piece of text into BITS, the decision about where one BIT ends and another BIT starts is very much up for grabs, and it could shift slightly depending on which character’s PERSPECTIVE you take. Chopping up the chamber scene in Hamlet might involve slightly different divisions if you see it through Gertrude’s eyes rather than Hamlet’s. That said, I think the process is far less complicated than it can sometimes seem in a rehearsal when you’ve got ten actors around a table all chipping in their penn’orth.
Here are some basic guidelines:
The simplest demarcation of a BIT usually occurs where one character exits the action or another enters; the dramatic arc of the scene will inevitably be affected by Character A’s departure or Character B’s arrival, and this will provoke a change in dynamic, however subtle that change may be.
You can also determine the movement in a scene from one BIT to another when the subject-matter of the dialogue changes, or where one character who was rather reactive in a scene begins to become particularly proactive.
Be warned, though: in the early stages of breaking down a scene into its composite BITS, it’s not very helpful to have too many divisions. While your urge may be to mark every single change in the subject-matter, these changes may simply be little diversions in a larger current which is surging the action forward, rather than a complete break in the flow of the scene. You’re really looking to see where the entire course of the stream alters – not where there’s a kink in the banks. Stanislavsky urged:
Do not break up a play more than is necessary, do not use details to guide you. Create a channel outlined by large divisions . . .65
Of course, it depends on the length of the script and the complexity of its content, but try not to over-fragment the text and keep your life easy in the early stages.
Paradoxically, the process of breaking down a text into BITS of action is to ensure that once you put all the BITS back together again into a ‘score’, the flow of the script is much more articulate and precise than it was before. The ‘score’ of BITS becomes a kind of blueprint, guaranteeing that a production retains its shape throughout its run and doesn’t become aesthetically flabby. As Stanislavsky puts it:
When they are gathered up and grow together, these separate [‘bits’] form the score of the role; the scores of separate roles, after constant work together during rehearsals, and after the necessary adjustments . . . have been made by the actors, finally merge into the score of the whole performance.66
When we come to the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS and ACTIVE ANALYSIS, we’ll look in more detail at the ‘score of the role’. Both of these rehearsal approaches are built on improvisation, which is why it’s helpful not to have too many BITS of action through which you then have to navigate in your improvisations. At this early stage, stick to the main channel, and try to avoid letting the details misdirect you.
As well as ensuring a flow to the script by drawing together every character’s ‘score’, there’s another vital reason for breaking a scene into BITS of action: it becomes much easier to identify what exactly it is that your character wants from the other characters. This ‘want’ – as we’ve touched upon already – is known as an OBJECTIVE, and as David Mamet and Ivana Chubbuck would endorse full-bloodedly, OBJECTIVES and COUNTER-OBJECTIVES lie at the heart of all impactful drama.
Objectives and counter-objectives
You could almost say there’s only one basic purpose behind the process of accumulating the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES and breaking down the text into BITS of action: it’s to unlock why the character does what he or she does in the course of the dramatic action. You can’t really go on stage or in front of the camera unless you know what it is you’re doing – and it’s hard to do anything if you don’t really know why it is you’re doing it. What do you want? What’s your desire? What do you want to achieve? Who do I want to influence and persuade? Such a desire or a drive or an impulse is what Stanislavsky called a ‘goal’ or a ‘task’ (zadacha), a word which then became translated in An Actor Prepares as the somewhat more scientific-sounding OBJECTIVE. This term has come into common parlance all over the Western performance world and is some – times expressed by actors, when confronted with a line or an ACTION in the script that they don’t immediately understand, as ‘What’s my motivation?’
OBJECTIVES and BITS of action are very closely interconnected: you can’t really have one without the other. Or as Stanislavsky puts it:
At the heart of every [‘bit’] lies a creative objective . . . Each objective is an organic part of the [‘bit’], or, conversely, it creates the [‘bit’] which surrounds it.67
He maintains that the method of drawing an OBJECTIVE from a ‘bit’ is extremely simple:
It consists of finding the most appropriate name for the [‘bit’], one which characterises its inner essence . . . The right name which crystallises the essence of a [‘bit’] discovers its fundamental objective.68
If the naming of one tool leads to the naming of the other, then we need to clarify the whole labelling process before we go any further.
Over the years – as I’ve kneaded Stanislavsky’s ‘system’ to my own practical use – I’ve found that the name you give to a BIT can be anything that helps you in any way. It can be a noun, a catch-phrase, a complete sentence. Here are some that I’ve used at various times: ‘The Catalyst’, ‘Setting the Record Straight’, ‘His Last Chance’, ‘Casing the Joint’, ‘Her Burgeoning Love’, ‘Going their Separate Ways’, ‘Her Perspective’ and ‘His Perspective’. In labelling a BIT, you can use absolutely anything as long as it engages your feelings, as well as your analytical thoughts. You want a phrase which ignites you on both an imaginative and a visceral level, something that sparks your fantasy and kindles your passions. And as Stanislavsky suggests, you’re searching for something which
will embrace the innermost meaning of the whole [‘bit’]. This word will spell your objective.69
However . . .
There’s an important difference between the labelling of an OBJECTIVE and the labelling of a BIT. While I’d suggest you can express the name of the BIT in any way that works for you, Stanislavsky insists that:
You should not try to express the meaning of your objectives in terms of a noun. That can be used for a [‘bit’] but the objective must always be a verb . . . This is because a noun calls forth an intellectual concept of a state of mind, a form, a phenomenon, but can only define what is presented by an image without indicating motion or action. Every objective must carry in itself the germ of action.70
This is the crux of the matter: ‘Every objective must carry in itself the germ of action.’ ACTION is at the heart of everything.
Why?
Because essentially an OBJECTIVE is both psychological and physical. It’s psychological in that it sums up something without which your character cannot exist (their emotional drive, the need within the character). And it’s physical in that the character is compelled to execute a series of ACTIONS in order to try and obtain whatever their OBJECTIVE might be. That’s why the OBJECTIVE must be expressed as a verb, as verbs conjure up ACTIONS. Verbs are doing words, and it’s the impulse to act which is the vital touch-paper in your acting process. The best way to express an OBJECTIVE, therefore (as I’ve already mentioned), is to start by saying, ‘I want to . . . [do something]’.
It’s all common-sense really: if you want something, you have to do something to get it. Let’s take the notion of success and the ways in which ‘being successful’ might manifest itself:
‘I want to live in a bigger house.’ What do I have to do to make it happen? ‘I have to go to work and earn more money.’
‘I want to star in a major role in that movie.’ What do I have to do to make it happen? ‘I have to phone my agent and make sure she’s put me up for it. Then I have to perform well at the casting.’
Inherent in these transitive verbs are feelings – the desire to work and earn, the drive to phone and perform. These feelings in turn are my ‘inner challenges to action’.71 In other words, I can’t just be successful: I have to do something to create a circumstance or situation or relationship, which leads to me being successful.
Of course I might not achieve my OBJECTIVE, because someone else’s COUNTER-OBJECTIVE (sometimes known as an ‘obstacle’) might block it. I might not earn more money because maybe my boss has embezzled the funds and the firm goes bankrupt. My agent might not have put me up for the role because she doesn’t see me as a tall, buxom, blonde Bond girl. I might not perform very well at the casting because maybe the director took a call on his mobile in the middle of the audition and disrupted the whole proceedings. Even if I do perform well, I might not clinch the movie anyway, as the director planned to cast his wife in the role all along.
Whatever the outcome, my desire to achieve my OBJECTIVE must be passionate. So finding the right name for the OBJECTIVE is very important. It can’t be cold and intellectual. It must be precise and emotive. You need to find something so magnetic that it draws you onto the stage or in front of the camera with such creative compulsion you simply can’t wait to get out there and fulfil that action. Your OBJECTIVE burns – and so do you.
Let’s see how to make them burn. Using the tools of BITS, OBJECTIVES and COUNTER-OBJECTIVES (or ‘obstacles’), let’s look at an extract from Helen Edmundson’s adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and understand how the labels you choose both for the BIT of action and for the OBJECTIVES and COUNTER-OBJECTIVES interconnect.
In this scene, Anna is at home, pregnant, awaiting the arrival of her lover, Count Vronsky, who is also the father of her forthcoming child. She’s still living with her husband, who for the time being is tolerating the affair. Rather unfortunately, Vronsky has just bumped into Anna’s husband at the front door:
ANNA: You met him?
VRONSKY: Yes. At the door.
ANNA: It serves you right for being late.
VRONSKY: Your note said he would be at the Council; I would never have come otherwise.
ANNA: Where have you been, Alexei?
VRONSKY: I’m sorry my darling. It’s been a busy week.
ANNA: Really? Busy? Betsy came to see me this morning. I heard all about your Athenian evening. How disgusting.
VRONSKY: It was disgusting but I had to go. The Colonel asked me to entertain a foreign dignitary.
ANNA: Oh – you mean that little French girl you used to see. I believe she was there.
VRONSKY: Anna, you don’t understand . . .
ANNA: No, I don’t. What do I know – a woman who can’t even share your life? I only know what you tell me and how do I know whether you tell me the truth?
VRONSKY: Anna, don’t you trust me?
ANNA: Yes, yes. You just don’t understand what it’s like for me. How can I go out like this and with the way people are talking? I don’t think I’m jealous, I’m not jealous – I trust you when you’re here but when you’re away leading your own life . . . oh, I believe you, I do believe you. Alexei, I’ve stopped now. The demon has gone.
VRONSKY: I don’t enjoy that kind of life anymore. I thought you understood that.
ANNA: I do, I do. I’m sorry.
She kisses him.72
As I’ve said, the breaking-down of a piece of text into BITS of action is never set in stone: one person may think that a BIT ends at a very different point from another, though it’s important to come to some sort of collective agreement. On some occasions, you may even find that a director comes to a rehearsal with the BITS (or ‘units’) already determined; on other occasions, you may all sit ‘round the table’ and work them out together. What I offer below in the case of the Anna Karenina extract is far from gospel, but we’re looking to see where the stream changes course, rather than where the banks slightly kink. That said, you’ll see that I’ve marked the kinks with 
to indicate where a character’s tactic changes, even though the general thrust of the scene remains more or less the same. Likewise with the titles I offer for each BIT: they’re only springboards into further creative possibilities:
Bit I: Tit-for-tat
ANNA: You met him?
VRONSKY: Yes. At the door.
ANNA: It serves you right for being late.
VRONSKY: Your note said he would be at the Council; I would never have come otherwise.
We see in BIT I how Anna is slightly getting her own back on Vronsky. Although she didn’t intend for him to run slap-bang into her husband, she’s got issues with Vronsky at the moment and she probably quite enjoys the discomfort he must have endured having to exchange pleasantries at the front door with the cuckolded husband.
Bit 2: Anna cuts to the chase
ANNA: Where have you been, Alexei?
VRONSKY: I’m sorry my darling. It’s been a busy week.
ANNA: Really? Busy? Betsy came to see me this morning. I heard all about your Athenian evening. How disgusting.
VRONSKY: It was disgusting but I had to go. The Colonel asked me to entertain a foreign dignitary.
ANNA: Oh – you mean that little French girl you used to see. I believe she was there.
VRONSKY: Anna, you don’t understand . . .
Anna isn’t going to waste time now. Ever since Princess Betsy, the renowned society gossip, turned up at the Karenins’ house this morning, Anna has been seething with anxious thoughts about what Vronsky has been up to while she’s stuck at home heavily pregnant with his illegitimate child. The thought of an ‘Athenian evening’ and all the lewdness inherent in togas and French girls and free-flowing wine must surely have provoked the green-headed Envy-monster. Her insecurities, her jealousies and inadequacies all come surging to the fore, and she’s not going to hang about making small talk with him. Her preoccupation with the Athenian evening is what we might call her PRESSING ISSUE.
PRESSING ISSUE is not necessarily a Stanislavsky phrase, but it’s a useful tool, nonetheless. It’s the subject that underlies a dialogue, propelling it – either secretly or explicitly – in a particular direction and (see SUBTEXT) it’s the preoccupation which can drive a character’s OBJECTIVE. Indeed, it may have echoes with a character’s SUPER-OBJECTIVE (discussed in detail below), though it’s not the same. A SUPER-OBJECTIVE will usually underpin a character’s action throughout the whole play, whereas here, for example, Anna’s PRESSING ISSUE has been sparked by the conversation with Princess Betsy which only took place that very morning: its history is recent. A character may actually have a series of PRESSING ISSUES throughout a play, a new one sparking each particular scene, but there will only be one SUPER-OBJECTIVE driving the character throughout the whole play.
The PRESSING ISSUE is also tied in with TEMPO-RHYTHM, in that if we choose to suppress our PRESSING ISSUE and not let anyone know what it is that’s preoccupying us, we often find that our inner TEMPO-RHYTHM is at odds with our outer TEMPO-RHYTHM. Conversely, if we bring our PRESSING ISSUE right to the fore, as indeed Anna does here, our inner and outer TEMPO-RHYTHMS will tend to synchronise, as the amount of SUBTEXT is reduced: i.e. there’s little disparity between what we think and what we say, everything’s on the surface. If, for example, I meet some friends for a drink to celebrate a birthday and I’ve just landed a fantastic television role and I’m feeling really terrific, then my inner TEMPO-RHYTHM of jubilation will be in synchrony with my outer TEMPO-RHYTHM of bonhomie. If, however, I’ve just received a whacking great tax bill for which I’ve not saved a bean, my PRESSING ISSUE will resonate at a very different inner TEMPO-RHYTHM from my outer show of hilarity, which I feel bound to maintain so as not to sabotage the celebrations.
I’ve marked a sign in BIT 2, at the point in which we see that Anna has a very clear MOMENT OF DECISION (see SUBTEXT and ACTION). She could choose to let Vronsky convince her that he has been very busy; instead, she takes the moment to raise the issue of the Athenian evening, possibly haunted by the thought of him watching scantily clad tableaux vivants of Athenian-dressed beauties.
MOMENTS OF DECISION (also not absolutely pure Stanislavsky tools, but useful nonetheless) are vital, and all too easily rushed over in a piece of drama. In real life, MOMENTS OF DECISION have a distinct danger to them as we can never truly predict what another person’s reaction may be to what we say or do; regardless of how well or little we know them, they might still surprise us with their response. I might decide to say to my boyfriend, ‘I’ve been thinking: things haven’t been going too well lately and perhaps we need a break from each other’, my OBJECTIVE being that ‘I want to test my partner’s love for me and hopefully elicit the response, “Nonsense, darling, we just haven’t spent enough time together: let’s go to Paris for a romantic weekend”.’ And yet, for all I know, he might come out with the words, ‘You’re absolutely right – I’ve been thinking the same, so let’s call it a day, yeah?’ In my MOMENT OF DECISION, I have to be prepared to take the consequences of whatever response or outcome might be elicited by my words.
I’ve marked Anna’s second speech with because there’s a definite MOMENT OF DECISION here, which indicates a slight kink in the bank of the stream rather than a complete change of BIT.
Bit 3: Anna’s explosion
ANNA: No, I don’t. What do I know – a woman who can’t even share your life? I only know what you tell me and how do I know whether you tell me the truth?
VRONSKY: Anna, don’t you trust me?
ANNA: Yes, yes. You just don’t understand what it’s like for me. How can I go out like this and with the way people are talking? I don’t think I’m jealous, I’m not jealous – I trust you when you’re here but when you’re away leading your own life . . .
Here we see the emotional consequence of the PRESSING ISSUE. A volatile back-pressure has been building up within Anna at the end of BIT 2, and Vronsky’s words, ‘you don’t understand’, are like a red rag to a bull, because – from her PERSPECTIVE – it’s him who doesn’t understand her, not the other way round. Now her guard is completely down: her reaction is instinctive and, as a result, her emotions pour out uncensored.
Within this explosive BIT, I’ve suggested there are two MOMENTS OF DECISION: in the first Anna chooses to lie to Vronsky and tell him she trusts him, when clearly everything in the previous BIT illustrates that she doesn’t. In the second
she chooses to address her own inner machinations, and try to understand whether or not she is jealous, before going on to qualify the extent of her trust: ‘I trust you when you’re here but when you’re away leading your own life . . .’. Which is the whole point, isn’t it? If you don’t trust someone when they’re not around, then you don’t really trust them, period.
Bit 4: Anna digs herself out of a hole
ANNA: . . . oh, I believe you, I do believe you. Alexei, I’ve stopped now. The demon has gone.
VRONSKY: I don’t enjoy that kind of life anymore. I thought you understood that.
ANNA: I do, I do. I’m sorry.
She kisses him.
By this time – possibly in response to Vronsky’s silent reaction embedded in the ‘. . .’ of Anna’s speech – she realises that she’s rapidly alienating him and she needs to draw him back to her. Mercifully, she has enough self-awareness to hear the sound of her own demons and to attempt to reduce their impact. She seals the deal with a kiss, papering over the emotional distance between herself and Vronsky with a sign of physical intimacy.
My division of this dialogue into these four particular BITS is partly led by viewing the action from Anna’s PERSPECTIVE, as she seems to be driving the scene in the proactive (or ‘major’ role) with Vronsky in the reactive (or ‘minor’ role). If we were to look at the dialogue more specifically from Vronsky’s PERSPECTIVE, we might slightly alter the division of the BITS to something like this:
Bit 1: Tit-for-tat
ANNA: You met him?
VRONSKY: Yes. At the door.
ANNA: It serves you right for being late.
VRONSKY: Your note said he would be at the Council; I would never have come otherwise.
Bit 2: Vronsky defends himself
ANNA: Where have you been, Alexei?
VRONSKY: I’m sorry my darling. It’s been a busy week.
ANNA: Really? Busy? Betsy came to see me this morning. I heard all about your Athenian evening. How disgusting.
VRONSKY: It was disgusting but I had to go. The Colonel asked me to entertain a foreign dignitary.
ANNA: Oh – you mean that little French girl you used to see. I believe she was there.
Bit 3: Vronsky corrects Anna
VRONSKY: Anna, you don’t understand . . .
ANNA: No, I don’t. What do I know – a woman who can’t even share your life? I only know what you tell me and how do I know whether you tell me the truth?
By marking a BIT here, we see how Vronsky starts to take control, a stance which he continues into the next proposed BIT.
Bit 4: Vronsky challenges Anna
VRONSKY: Anna, don’t you trust me?
ANNA: Yes, yes. You just don’t understand what it’s like for me. How can I go out like this and with the way people are talking? I don’t think I’m jealous, I’m not jealous – I trust you when you’re here but when you’re away leading your own life . . .
Again, we see how his leading question places him in the ‘major’ position, even though Anna speaks far more text than he does. Silence can be eloquent.
Bit 5: Vronsky straightens the situation (perhaps by making as if to leave in the ‘. . .’ of Anna’s speech)
ANNA: . . . oh, I believe you, I do believe you. Alexei, I’ve stopped now. The demon has gone.
VRONSKY: I don’t enjoy that kind of life any more. I thought you understood that.
ANNA: I do, I do. I’m sorry.
She kisses him.
I propose that there’s a MOMENT OF DECISION on Vronsky’s part embedded in the ‘. . .’ punctuation of Anna’s speech, in which he chooses to make a move to leave or executes some other gesture of impatience. If he were to do this, he’d demonstrate that he’s simply not going to pursue this conversation as long as Anna is in her particular frame of mind. If he were to make as if to leave, Anna would have to change both her tactics and her TEMPO-RHYTHM pretty radically and pretty quickly – which indeed she does in the text.
You could follow either of these sets of divisions for this extract of dialogue: neither is more or less right or wrong than the other. It would take the two actors playing Anna and Vronsky to sit down with the director and clarify where the divisions into BITS occur, and it may well be that five BITS in so sparse a piece of dialogue would be too much. Or it might be that the staccato rhythm of five short BITS reflects the inner emotional fragmentation of the scene more accurately than four. There’s no gospel: each leads to a different, but equally valid, interpretation. What this does do, however, is provide an inroad into the way in which BITS and OBJECTIVES interconnect and cross-reference in terms of labelling, as we’ll look at now.
The first list of BITS (taking the scene from Anna’s PERSPECTIVE) is:
•Tit-for-tat
•Anna cuts to the chase
•Anna’s explosion
•Anna digs herself out of a hole
Here are some possible OBJECTIVES and COUNTER-OBJECTIVES for this list of BITS:
Bit 1: Tit-for-tat
ANNA: I want to enjoy Vronsky’s discomfort.
VRONSKY: I want to chastise Anna for putting me in an uncomfortable position.
Anna’s OBJECTIVE and Vronsky’s COUNTER-OBJECTIVE reflect the sparring that’s clearly going on in BIT I: neither character is in a mood to be particularly open to the other, as each feels let down by the other.
Bit 2: Anna cuts to the chase
ANNA: I want to find out the truth from Vronsky about what he has been up to lately.
VRONSKY: I want to appease Anna for my absence.
Here in BIT 2 Vronsky readjusts his PERSPECTIVE to accommodate Anna’s questioning, as he doesn’t really want a row. After all, why bother meeting up with your mistress if you’re only going to have a bad time?
Bit 3: Anna’s explosion
ANNA: I want to convince Vronsky of the untenability of my situation.
VRONSKY: I want to straighten Anna’s delusions concerning my behaviour.
In BIT 3, Anna can no longer pretend that the reality is anything other than what it actually is, and so she lets all her emotions out, while Vronsky remains anchored to his integrity.
Bit 4: Anna digs herself out of a hole
ANNA: I want to re-engage Vronsky’s love for me.
VRONSKY: I want to distance myself from Anna’s madness.
The final BIT 4 shows how Anna realises things aren’t going the way she wants them to, so she has to change her tactics. Vronsky’s COUNTER-OBJECTIVE reflects the fact that this isn’t a scenario he particularly wants to pursue.
Thus we have four BITS and four possible OBJECTIVES and COUNTER-OBJECTIVES.
If we were to look at the scene from Vronsky’s PERSPECTIVE and divide the scene into five BITS rather than four, this is how our OBJECTIVES and COUNTER-OBJECTIVES might shift. Our new, extended list of BITS is:
•Tit-for-tat
•Vronsky defends himself
•Vronsky corrects Anna
•Vronsky challenges Anna
•Vronsky straightens the situation
The OBJECTIVES and COUNTER-OBJECTIVES might be as follows (noting that for BIT I they remain the same as they did when we considered the encounter from Anna’s PERSPECTIVE):
Bit 1: Tit-for-tat
ANNA: I want to enjoy Vronsky’s discomfort.
VRONSKY: I want to chastise Anna for putting me in an uncomfortable position.
As we’ve already discussed, the sparring inherent in this OBJECTIVE and COUNTER-OBJECTIVE reflects the fact that neither character is in a mood to be particularly open to the other, as each feels let down by the other.
Bit 2: Vronsky defends himself
VRONSKY: I want to retain a certain sense of my professional status, even within the context of our domestic encounter.
ANNA: I want to put him on the spot and let him know that I have ‘inside information’.
The OBJECTIVE and COUNTER-OBJECTIVE proposed here for BIT 2 reflect the tension between the public and the private, between the professional and the romantic, between He who can be seen publicly and She who has to remain behind closed doors. It reveals a profound and underlying inequality of circumstances.
Bit 3: Vronsky corrects Anna
VRONSKY: I want to correct Anna’s misinterpretation of my work.
ANNA: I want to convince Vronsky that he can’t fob me off.
In BIT 3, Vronsky will not let Anna contort the reality into anything other than what it actually is, while Anna tries to retain control of the conversation.
Bit 4: Vronsky challenges Anna
VRONSKY: I want to challenge Anna into being straight with me.
ANNA: I want to work this situation out to our mutual benefit.
Vronsky is not prepared in BIT 4 to be railroaded by Anna. Anna’s COUNTER-OBJECTIVE reflects the fact she needs to be more compliant if she’s going to hang on to some kind of loving status quo.
Bit 5: Vronsky straightens the situation
ANNA: I want to re-engage Vronsky’s love.
VRONSKY: I want to clarify for Anna that this madness is not acceptable behaviour.
In this final BIT 5, Vronsky doesn’t want to let Anna contrive what, in his opinion, is a misguided PERSPECTIVE. Anna’s COUNTER-OBJECTIVE is not so much ‘counter’ as ‘pro’: she obliges in the straightening of the situation.
Obviously with both of these lists – whether the scene is divided into four or five BITS – I’ve taken certain interpretational decisions with which you might completely disagree, but we can begin to see how the words chosen for a BIT then become fine-tuned into workable, action-driven OBJECTIVES for the characters. We also see how one character will have an inciting OBJECTIVE (i.e. he or she is driving the BIT) and the other character will have a resisting COUNTER-OBJECTIVE (i.e. he or she is impeding or creating an obstacle which stops the achievement of the first character’s OBJECTIVE). It’s the conflict between Character A’s inciting OBJECTIVE and Character B’s resisting COUNTER-OBJECTIVE, which creates the inherent dramatic tension of the scene. Do we come away from this piece of dialogue between Anna and Vronsky believing that any rift or jealousy has been healed or diffused? Or is this one helluva doomed love affair? The answer may lie in the final stage direction of the dialogue: note that ‘She kisses him’, rather than ‘They kiss’ . . .
I’d suggest that ultimately OBJECTIVES can be distilled down to one critical thing. If you want something so badly – if your survival (be it financial, physical, emotional, professional, romantic, erotic, political) depends upon your attainment of it – what will you lose if you don’t get it? Just how high are the stakes? And there’s no question: the higher the stakes of the OBJECTIVE, the more exciting it’ll be for you to play. There has to be a dimension which takes it beyond the mundane.
After all . . .
‘I want to make a cup of tea’ won’t inspire you for very long.
‘I want to make my long-lost aunt feel welcome, so I’ll make her a cup of tea’ might endure longer.
‘I want to ensure my long-lost aunt keeps me in her inheritance so I’ll make her feel welcome by making her a cup of tea’, will add coal to the furnace.
Furthermore . . .
The higher the stakes, the more satisfaction you’ll get from achieving your OBJECTIVE. Conversely, if you fail to achieve it – through the power of the other characters pursuing their own COUNTER-OBJECTIVES with more success than you, i.e. the obstacle with which they present you is too great for you to surmount – the greater will be your sense of defeat, dissatisfaction, or maybe even fear.
Fear is a many-splendour’d thing, which in terms of acting processes themselves can be eliminated with a well-defined OBJECTIVE. I’ve often found that if there’s a scene coming up in the performance of a play which I’m dreading, the chances are I’m dreading it because I haven’t actually found the right OBJECTIVE. The stakes need to be high. You need to want to go out onto that stage or in front of that camera and achieve it. If at any point you’re thinking as an actor, ‘Oh, I hate that scene in Act 3 where I have to lure the priest into the cave’, it’s probably because you haven’t identified a sufficiently inspiring OBJECTIVE. Change the OBJECTIVE – sharpen your verb, raise the stakes, CONCENTRATE YOUR ATTENTION on what the scene’s really about – until the point where you think, ‘Wow, yes! I can’t wait to get out on that stage or in front of that camera, and show that priest what I’m worth!’ There need never be a moment of performance in which you – as an actor – experience dread or fear. Simply re-examine your OBJECTIVE – and make it burn.
That said, you don’t have to bust a gut over it. In all fairness, it’s rare to find a potent OBJECTIVE immediately or through pure intellect. If you go about your MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE creatively, you’ll usually find that the right OBJECTIVE gradually formulates itself into a valuable, forward-moving desire. And it’s worth spending time doing this, as – according to Stanislavsky – the right OBJECTIVE can prepare the most propitious ground for INSPIRATION:
When an actor is completely absorbed by some profoundly moving objective, so that he throws his whole being passionately into its execution, he reaches a state that we call inspiration.73
It’s in these moments of complete commitment to attaining your OBJECTIVE that you’ll find yourself coming up with all sorts of moments in rehearsal or performance which were completely unplanned and yet utterly in keeping with the character and the action. That’s when you know you’re acting from a state of INSPIRATION.
So, one of the most exciting things about an OBJECTIVE is that it ensures you’re motivated and focused in rehearsal or performance. And perhaps one of the sexiest ways of using this tool is to keep much of your character’s OBJECTIVE hidden from the other characters. That way, there’s a resonant gap between what you actually say or do, and the intention behind what you say or do. And this is what Stanislavsky called SUBTEXT.
Subtext
As we go through our daily lives pursuing our various OBJECTIVES in the workplace, around the social sphere and at home, we don’t necessarily communicate all our desires through the words we choose to speak. Stanislavsky maintained that only about 10% of what’s actually going on in our heads is expressed through words; the remaining 90% remains unspoken and, in drama, that 90% lies bedded beneath the script. He came to this conclusion while directing and acting in the plays of Anton Chekhov. In fact the term SUBTEXT was first coined by Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky in 1898 when they were working on The Seagull, and they used it to describe the undercurrents of thoughts which flowed beneath the text. Never – before Chekhov – had a writer left more unsaid by the characters than was actually said, and the combined artistic forces of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko realised that a whole new approach to text analysis was now required.
What exactly is SUBTEXT?
As Stanislavsky says, it is that which:
flows uninterruptedly beneath the words of the text, giving them life and a basis for existing . . . It is the subtext that makes us say the words we do in a play.74
Let’s translate that into practicalities.
There’s a cyclical and ongoing sequence inherent in all human behaviour, which flows as Action – Reaction – Decision. And it goes like this:
CYCLE I
•A executes an Action on B (e.g. A hits B);
•B has a gut Reaction to A’s Action (e.g. ‘I’m going to hit you back, you bastard!’);
•B then makes a Decision about that Reaction (e.g. ‘Okay, so you’re having a heavy time at work and you’re not behaving in your usual measured and compassionate way. Well, on this occasion, I’m not going to retaliate by giving like-for-like’).
CYCLE II
•B instigates a new Action towards A (e.g. B embraces A).
•In turn, A has a gut Reaction to B’s Action (e.g. ‘Weird! You’re embracing me and I thought you’d hit me back . . .’);
•A makes a Decision about his response to B’s Action (e.g. ‘Wow, that’s incredible! And I’m going to let you know how grateful I am for your generosity and understanding!’).
CYCLE III
•A executes a new, corresponding Action (e.g. A kisses B).
And on it goes: Action – Reaction – Decision ––– Action – Reaction – Decision.
This process unfurls naturally and continually through all human intercourse. And often the Reaction moments and/or the Decision moments lie beneath our spoken words.
However . . .
Although they may be unvoiced, they’re not absent. Far from it. Those Reaction or Decision moments are the instigating impulses behind our physical ACTIONS and our spoken words. They are our SUBTEXT.
To discover the layers of SUBTEXT in a script – the moments of Reaction and/or Decision – you’ve got to head for your character’s OBJECTIVE: what your character really wants will determine how much and what they choose to say.
Let’s take a piece of dialogue from Brutus and Portia in Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene ii, shortly after the conspirators have gathered to plot the murder of Caesar. Note in this dialogue that one character (Portia) has a good deal of TEXT but very little SUBTEXT, while the other (Brutus) says very little and yet his SUBTEXT and his psychological journey through that SUBTEXT are as clear as daylight:
PORTIA: Brutus, my lord!
BRUTUS: Portia, what mean you? Wherefore rise you now?
It is not for your health thus to commit
Your weak condition to the raw cold morning.
PORTIA: Nor for yours neither. You’ve ungently, Brutus,
Stole from my bed: and yesternight, at supper,
You suddenly arose, and walk’d about,
Musing and sighing, with your arms across,
And when I ask’d you what the matter was,
You stared upon me with ungentle looks;
I urg’d you further; then you scratch’d your head,
And too impatiently stamp’d with your foot;
Yet I insisted, yet you answer’d not,
But, with an angry wafture of your hand,
Gave sign for me to leave you: so I did;
Fearing to strengthen that impatience
Which seem’d too much enkindled, and withal
Hoping it was but an effect of humour,
Which sometime hath his hour with every man.
It will not let you eat, nor talk, nor sleep,
And could it work so much upon your shape
As it hath much prevail’d on your condition,
I should not know you, Brutus. Dear my lord,
Make me acquainted with your cause of grief.
BRUTUS: I am not well in health, and that is all.
PORTIA: Brutus is wise, and, were he not in health,
He would embrace the means to come by it.
BRUTUS: Why, so I do. Good Portia, go to bed.
PORTIA: Is Brutus sick? And is it physical
To walk unbraced, and suck up the humours
Of the dank morning? What, is Brutus sick,
And will he steal out of his wholesome bed,
To dare the vile contagion of the night,
And tempt the rheumy and unpurged air,
To add unto his sickness? No, my Brutus;
You have some sick offence within your mind,
Which, by the right and virtue of my place,
I ought to know of: and, upon my knees,
I charm you, by my once-commended beauty,
By all your vows of love, and that great vow
Which did incorporate and make us one,
That you unfold to me, yourself, your half,
Why are you heavy, and what men tonight
Have had resort to you: for here have been
Some six or seven, who did hide their faces
Even from darkness.
BRUTUS: Kneel not, gentle Portia.
PORTIA: I should not need, if you were gentle Brutus.
Within the bond of marriage, tell me, Brutus,
Is it excepted I should know no secrets
That appertain to you? Am I yourself
But, as it were, in sort or limitation,
To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed,
And talk to you sometimes? Dwell I but in the suburbs
Of your good pleasure? If it be no more,
Portia is Brutus’ harlot, not his wife.
BRUTUS: You are my true and honourable wife,
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart.
PORTIA: If this were true, then should I know this secret.
I grant I am a woman; but withal
A woman that Lord Brutus took to wife:
I grant I am a woman; but withal
A woman well-reputed, Cato’s daughter.
Think you I am no stronger than my sex,
Being so father’d and so husbanded?
Tell me your counsels, I will not disclose ’em:
I have made strong proof of my constancy,
Giving myself a voluntary wound
Here, in the thigh: can I bear that with patience,
And not my husband’s secrets?
BRUTUS: O ye gods,
Render me worthy of this noble wife! (Knocking within.)
Hark, hark! One knocks: Portia, go in awhile;
And by and by thy bosom shall partake
The secrets of my heart.
Notice how Portia states very directly what she’s thinking and she’s feeling, she doesn’t mince her words. Her lack of SUBTEXT forces Brutus’s lies and deflections to simmer like boiling blood beneath the surface. He begins by fobbing her off with, ‘Don’t worry, darling, I’m fine – just a bit of a headache, that’s all’, the SUBTEXT of which the audience knows must be something like, ‘Actually, sweetheart, I’m bloody awful – I just can’t tell you about it now’. Portia’s utter directness – her lack of game-playing or contrivance – forces Brutus to a point where he agrees to tell her exactly what the secrets of his heart are. Thus his OBJECTIVE changes from being something like ‘I want to protect Portia’ to ‘I want to share my heart with her’. However, he’s saved at the moment of confessing his PRESSING ISSUE by the rather timely knocking at the door. As an audience, we’re completely in-the-know about his SUBTEXT, because we’ve just seen the previous scene with the conspirators; therefore, we absolutely understand how his PRESSING ISSUE fuels his SUBTEXT. Portia knows him well enough to sense he’s preoccupied and has a powerful SUBTEXT going on, but as yet she has no idea what exactly that PRESSING ISSUE might be. She presents very clearly in her opening speech how it has manifested itself in highly physical ways over the last few days: from everything she says, we get a tangible sense that Brutus’s 90% unspoken life has found other, very noticeable means of expression: musing, sighing, ungentle looks, head scratching, foot stamping, etc.
So SUBTEXT can be conveyed either non-verbally (be it through body or through silence) or through the disparity between what a person actually says and what he or she means. SUBTEXT is a great tool for actors. It’s the means by which you can personally engage with a role, because you can join the dots between what the writer has written and how you bring it to life in a way that’s utterly unique to you. If you can find the counterpoint between the spoken word and the unspoken SUBTEXT – the disparity between what’s said and what’s meant – you’ll begin, according to Stanislavsky, to manifest the ‘melody of the living soul’75 of the character. And this is what good theatre or cinema acting is all about – sounding out the living soul of a character as conjured up by its SUBTEXT. If a performance wasn’t about sounding out the SUBTEXT, then as far as Stanislavsky was concerned the audience might as well stay at home and read the script.
There’s one final component we should consider here, because without it we can’t possibly convey our own SUBTEXT or read another person’s. And that’s the PAUSE. This is only a brief reference as there’s further detail on this tool in the section on ACTIVE ANALYSIS. For the moment, we just need to bear in mind that if a writer marks PAUSES (or ‘beats’) in a script, it’s often an indication that there’s an active SUBTEXT at work – whether we’re talking Anton Chekhov, Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Mark Ravenhill or any one of a number of powerful contemporary writers of stage and screen. As we’ll see, the PAUSE is your means of breathing life into the Action – Reaction – Decision sequence. And if good psycho-physical acting is about good listening, then the PAUSE is the perfect tool for listening to your own inner thoughts and feelings, as well as to the words of the other characters. As Stanislavsky puts it:
You convey, you pause, your partner absorbs what you conveyed, you continue, you pause again and so on. Of course, as you do this you must have in mind the whole of what you are to convey. To you as author of the subtext this is automatically clear, but to your partner it is all new, it must be decoded and absorbed.76
In brief:
•SUBTEXT is the key to unlocking OBJECTIVES.
•SUBTEXT is the ‘melody of the living soul’.
•SUBTEXT is the reason why audiences want to see a performance and not just read a script.
•SUBTEXT is your means of personalising a role.
•SUBTEXT is the kernel of the Action – Reaction – Decision sequence.
•SUBTEXT works in conjunction with OBJECTIVES to propel everything we do and say as the character.
•SUBTEXT is revealed through PAUSES or ‘beats’ which a writer may mark in a script or which an actor might insert into dialogue.
You can begin to see how significant a tool SUBTEXT is in the toolkit. Stanislavsky felt very strongly that your ability to affect the audience through SUBTEXT was vital and should be shared:
Do not conceal from us the hints you yourselves get from beneath the words, between the lines . . . just as you yourselves see, hear, and sense the life of a human spirit in the play. Be creators, not mere narrators.77
‘Be creators, and not mere narrators’ is a powerful incitement: of course, it’s the writer’s story that you’re telling, but it’s you who’s creating it for this spectator or this camera, ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’, as if for the first time. You can enhance your skill to ‘create’ and not just ‘narrate’ by understanding how to use every clue embedded in the text. That means developing your ability to understand the words and the PAUSES, as well as to decode the all-important PUNCTUATION.
Punctuation
As we ‘mine a text’, we shouldn’t underestimate the number of clues given to us by the black-and-white dots on the writer’s scripted page. Actually, the key to a script’s SUBTEXT often lies in its PUNCTUATION. If the writer hasn’t written ‘pause’ or ‘beat’ (which many contemporary writers now do), there may be suspension marks (. . .) indicating a silent thought-process or a moment where the character cannot complete a sentence for fear of giving too much away. If there are lots of suspension marks in a speech, you can probably deduce that the character’s thought-processes are either changing rapidly, or that those thoughts are deep and complex, and therefore the character is struggling to find the appropriate means to articulate them. Take a look at Masha’s speech in Three Sisters after Vershinin has left town towards the end of the play:
By a curving shore stands a green oak tree, hung with a golden chain . . . A green cat . . . A green oak . . . I’m getting all mixed up . . . (drinks some water.) My life’s ruined . . . I don’t want anything . . . I’ll be all right in a minute . . . It doesn’t matter . . . What does that mean, a curving shore? Why do those words keep going through my mind? My thoughts are all mixed up.78
Clearly there has to be some thinking time in those suspension marks. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the actress playing Masha has to mentally fill in the dots night after night. But it would probably be helpful if, at some point in her preparation of the role, she works through for herself the inner MOMENTS OF DECISION – uncovering the thoughts that Masha chooses to voice and those she chooses not to voice. What may only look like dots on a page are profound and important sources of information.
Obviously suspension marks aren’t the only indicators of SUBTEXT: all PUNCTUATION provides clues as to the TEMPO-RHYTHM, intention and inner content of a script. Stanislavsky had a very keen eye for this: he saw PUNCTUATION marks as being distinct directives as to how you manipulate your listener. So:
•you can use an exclamation mark (!) to provoke sympathy, approval or protest in your listener;
•you can use a question mark (?) to invite your listener to answer, even if you’re asking a rhetorical question and therefore inviting a silent, rhetorical answer;
•you can use a colon (:) to invite your listener to wait for further information.
And as for the comma:
‘Love the comma!’ Stanislavsky constantly said, ‘because it is in it that you can make people listen to you.’ He compared the comma with a hand raised in warning, which makes the audience wait patiently for the continuation of an incomplete phrase.79
There’s actually some really intricate detective work to be done on PUNCTUATION as far as Stanislavsky was concerned:
You need to work out why the author put a full-stop here and not a semi-colon or suspension marks . . . Perhaps he wants to emphasise this thought particularly. Perhaps he wants to pick out the following thought and therefore prepares [the listener] for the expression of a whole thought. Only when you have thought through and thoroughly analysed a whole chunk in toto, and when a distant musical enticing perspective has opened up before you, will your speech become (as it were) long-sighted and not short-sighted as it is now. Then you will be able to speak not separate phrases or words, but whole thoughts.80
It’s fair to say that not all writers are as attentive to PUNCTUATION as Stanislavsky suggests. C. P. Taylor, for example, wrote huge numbers of suspension marks sometimes between every line of dialogue, and so we get:
HELEN: Don’t just say things to pacify me, John . . . will you not, love? . . . I couldn’t stand that . . .
MOTHER: John . . . John . . .
HALDER: Oh, Jesus . . . I cannot cope with that bloody woman just now . . .
MOTHER: John . . .
HALDER: I’m coming . . .
MOTHER: I thought you were in the toilet.81
And Shakespeare scholars are at pains to point out the disparity between folios and quarto texts with regard to PUNCTUATION. So we may not need to be as reverential to the dots and commas as Stanislavsky implies. That said, there’s no harm in taking hints from his suggestions, and there are plenty of excellent thoughts and exercises in the books of contemporary voice teachers, including Patsy Rodenburg, Cicely Berry and Barbara Houseman to which you might refer. What’s of particular interest here is that even from the first rehearsals of a script, when the actors and directors were simply sitting round a table ‘mining the text’, Stanislavsky’s eye for the details of the printed page and all the psycho-physical information embedded in the sentences was incredibly sharp.
It’s almost time to stop ‘mining the text’ imaginatively and cerebrally, and to start physicalising our discoveries about character and action. Before we do, there’s one final tool to consider, as Stanislavsky said that without this tool you shouldn’t go on stage: namely the SIX FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS.
The Six Fundamental Questions
The SIX FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS are referred to in Chapter 4 of An Actor Prepares (‘Imagination’) and they’re very closely allied to the basic GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES of a script. The first three of the six questions are directly related to the facts provided by the writer, though the second three are more up for grabs. The SIX FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS are:
•‘Who?’
•‘When?’
•‘Where?’
•‘Why?’
•‘For what reason?’
•‘How?’
During my actor-training in Moscow in the 1990s, I discovered just how vital these six questions are, yet their significance is curiously underplayed in the English translation of An Actor Prepares. So here and now, we’re going to put them slap-bang in the middle of the table as we complete our first stage of ‘mining the text’.
Who? is fairly straightforward, as in ‘Who is my character?’ You can find the answer to this question in the ‘social plane of the text’ (see GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES), and it’ll probably stem from an accumulation of the rock-solid facts in the script. So, if I’m Masha in Three Sisters: ‘I’m Russian. I’m the daughter of a general who died a year ago, and I’ve been married to a schoolteacher since I was eighteen. My mother is also dead. I’m the middle of three sisters, and I was brought up in Moscow. I’m a woman. I’m a wife. I’m a sister. At the start of the play, I’m twenty-two. I tend to dress in black. I play the piano. I read. I’m adored by my husband, despite the fact that I’m so rude to him and he knows by the end of the play I’m having an affair; yet despite all this he even describes me as “kind” and “good”. I’m bored with life. I have no job. I’m emotional: I laugh, I cry, I sob, I whistle, I hum. I can be outspoken to people sometimes. As the play unfurls, I fall in love . . .’
Where? is equally straightforward, and operates on a number of CIRCLES OF ATTENTION – from the immediate surroundings to the larger geographical placement. So with Masha at the beginning of Three Sisters: ‘I’m at my younger sister’s name-day party in the house she shares with my older sister, along with my brother and the old nanny, Anfisa. I’m in the living/dining room. The house is quite big (as indicated by the hoards of officers we regularly entertain and the number of people who take shelter here in Act 3 when the fire breaks out). I’m in a provincial town in Russia maybe a hundred miles from Moscow, possibly Perm. The town is small – both in size and outlook – and I despise the civilians, seeing myself as one of the few intelligent and sophisticated inhabitants.’ For Three Sisters, place is immensely important, as the omnipresent desire to be somewhere other than here is a vital cog in the inner workings of the play’s action and the characters’ psyches (reflected in the repeated chorus, ‘To Moscow, to Moscow’). There’s also a huge sense of movement in the play: the three sisters are gradually moved out of the house by their sister-in-law Natasha through the course of the action; the inhabitants of the town are severely disrupted by the fire in Act 3 so that they have to decamp and find shelter in other houses including the Prozorov house; Baron Tusenbach leaves this life to die in Act 4; and the soldiers leave the girls to go off to their next posting. Place. Displacement. Belonging. Ownership. Loss. All these issues fuel the plot and the characters on every level. There’s also a psychological dimension to Where?: ‘Am I on the periphery of the play’s action or at the centre? Am I one of the key players in the drama or am I a supporting participant?’ If I was Masha, I could go on to ask myself: ‘Am I at the centre of Vershinin’s life, or on the periphery? Is my husband Kulygin at the centre of my life, or on the outskirts?’ It’s probably fair to say that in most scripts, the arc of a character’s journey – be it a geographical movement from one place to another or a psychological one – is the main thrust of the overall dramatic ACTION.
When? is also drawn from the particular facts in the text. In Act 1 of Three Sisters: ‘It’s the late nineteenth century. It’s May. It’s mid-morning. It’s not only my sister’s name-day, but also the first anniversary of my father’s death.’ As with the ‘Where?’ question, there are various CIRCLES OF ATTENTION: with Act 1 of Three Sisters, the big circle is the nineteenth century, the next circle down is May, the smallest circle is mid-morning, and resonating in the background is the contradictory combination of the sister’s name-day (present tense) and the father’s death (past tense). Act 2 projects us into February 21 months later: it’s shrove-tide, it’s snowing outside, and the atmosphere is quite different from the early summer optimism of Act 1 – both inside the house and out. This means a whole 21 months have passed since Vershinin and Masha clapped eyes on each other and before they actually act upon their feelings. Act 3 takes place 2¾ years after Act 2, therefore 4½ years since the start of the play, yet it’s only now that Masha chooses the time is right to declare her love affair to her sisters. This means that she and Vershinin have been keeping their romance subterranean for a very long time in a very closed community – that’s quite something. By Act 4, it’s autumn: death is in the air, along with departures and farewells, the end of a year, the turning of the leaves and the halting of hopes. In terms of the time-scale surrounding the duel between Tusenbach and Solony, it’s significant that they’ve been at loggerheads over Irina for nearly five years: their fight stems from no hot-headed irrationality, it’s a chronic ongoing dispute. Throughout the whole of this play, time affects atmosphere and psychology and motive. The inertia is tangible. In fact, it’s not until you pick between the lines of Three Sisters that you realise just how much time passes in the course of the play. It’s so important for the actors to get a feeling of that slowness, in order for the audience to truly appreciate the lack of action within the lives and hearts of these girls: their house and their town and their jobs and their marriages really are prisons for them.
Why? is the first of the SIX FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS which begins the creative voyage into the actor’s IMAGINATION: we’re no longer dealing with pure textual facts, we’re now starting to interpret and personalise whatever information the writer has given us. To some extent, the answers to ‘Why?’ come directly from the dramatic structure of the play or the scene: Why is this scene present? Why did the writer write it? In what way is it driving the action forward? What do we learn about a particular character from this scene? What’s her OBJECTIVE? If this scene weren’t in the play, would the narrative continue seamlessly? The chances are – with a good script – you couldn’t take away any scene or any character, without the narrative falling apart or shifting so radically that it would become a completely different script. Once you’ve identified the dramatic function of a particular scene or a particular character, then it’s highly likely that the answer to the question Why? will become crystal clear. Why is Masha in Three Sisters? On the one hand, there’s a very revealing fact to consider: Chekhov wrote the part for his wife, Olga Knipper, so he obviously knew her temperament, her repertoire, what kind of role would suit her, what kind of part he wanted to see her in and what kind of part she wanted to play. On the other hand, there are the ensemble dynamics to consider: it’s very significant that the most emotional of the sisters is the least physically active, in the sense of being the one without a job (see EMPLOI). Irina and Olga are always working and talking about working, as if they’re trying to distract themselves from their dissatisfaction with life through physical and intellectual occupations. In fact, everyone else in the play has a job except Masha (if you consider that Natasha’s job is to be a mother), and because Masha has time on her hands, she’s able to go deep into the core of her emotional appetites – and we know from his own descriptions of his plays, as well as his numerous encounters with women, that Chekhov loved love!
Obviously, there’s a certain amount of room for interpretation with the FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION Why?, in the sense that every character’s OBJECTIVE will be up for debate, and the choice you personally make for your OBJECTIVE is a huge part of the answer to your interpretation of ‘Why am I here?’ One actor might consider Vershinin’s OBJECTIVE is, ‘I want to seduce Masha because I love her’ – and that’s why he’s here rather than hanging out with his mess-mates. Another actor might feel the Lieutenant-Colonel’s behaviour is far more manipulative and his OBJECTIVE is, ‘I want to seduce Masha because I need some personal gratification’ – and that’s why he’s here rather than staying with his suicidal wife. The answers to the FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION Why? combine the facts of the writer’s text with your own interpretation of those facts, which in turn leads to you creating your own particular SUBTEXT.
The fifth FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION, For what reason? is a curious one. In the English language, Why? and For what reason? could seem remarkably similar. In Russian, however, the two words are quite different: pochemu is ‘Why?’ and zachem is ‘For what reason?’ And it’s with this FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION that the appeal to your IMAGINATION grows even stronger. As Stanislavsky suggests, the question, ‘For what reason?’
obliges you to clarify the object of your meditations, it suggests the future, and it impels you to action.82
Each of these three phrases is very significant: you have to clarify what you’re CONCENTRATING YOUR ATTENTION on, i.e. whom or what; create a possible future for your character, i.e. what could arise if you CONCENTRATED YOUR ATTENTION fully on the object of your meditations; and propel yourself into the appropriate ACTIONS to secure that future.
The significance of the question For what reason? was made crystal clear to me in 2003, when I was playing the small, but perfectly formed part of Pimple the maid in Max Stafford-Clark’s production of Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. It was my National Theatre début, so I invited my Russian Scenic Movement teacher, Vladimir Ananyev, over from Moscow to share the excitement. After the performance, Ananyev hung his head in his hands and asked, ‘Why are you such a hooliganka? Don’t you see? Your performance is all happening on the stage.’ This confused me, as I thought that was the whole point, wasn’t it? Everything should be ‘happening on the stage’ – a phrase which I interpreted as ‘Everything should be born “in the moment” of performance’. However, that wasn’t at all what Ananyev meant. As far as he was concerned there was no ‘reverberation’ to what I was doing; my performance stopped at the wings, as he could sense there was no For what reason?
Little by little, as I questioned him about what he meant, I began to unravel the significance of the question, For what reason? Pimple, for example, works hard in Mr Hardcastle’s house, and from the way in which Stafford-Clark had staged the production – with Pimple bringing on various props and furniture and generally being on hand – it was clear to see that she was good at her job. Efficient. Effective. And personable.
‘Why does Pimple bring in the tray of lemons and cinnamon?’ asked Ananyev.
‘Because I want to help Mr Hardcastle prepare his hot punch for his guests,’ I replied.
‘For what reason do you want to help him?’ asked Ananyev.
‘Because I want to do my job well,’ I replied.
‘For what reason do you want to do your job so well?’ pressed Ananyev.
‘Because I want to earn more money,’ was my reply, interpreting Pimple’s OBJECTIVE as being a basic matter of survival: money buys food and clothes, food and clothes keep you alive.
‘And for what reason do you want to earn more money?’ pursued Ananyev.
By now, my mind was blank. Beyond feeding and clothing herself, I couldn’t really find a ‘reverberant’ answer for Pimple. After all, she didn’t really need anything else in terms of the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES of the play. So Ananyev offered up some suggestions:
‘Maybe she wants to improve her lot romantically as well as financially. If she earns more money, she can buy the beautiful shawl she saw last week at the market. Once she’s wearing that, then she might attract the attention of the young squire who lives on the neighbouring estate. He might then fall in love with her and take her from Hardcastle Hall and raise her up from her humble position and change her life forever.’
Suddenly – by virtue of some proposed answers to the FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION For what reason? – Ananyev had plunged me deep into the realm of IMAGINATION and invention.
First of all, the answers to the question For what reason? ‘clarified the object of my meditations’ – i.e. the OBJECTIVE which drove my character through the play. And so my OBJECTIVE shifted from ‘I want to help Mr Hardcastle’ to ‘I want to earn more money’.
Secondly, the answer ‘suggested a future’: If I earn more money, where might my future lie? In much better circumstances with much happier prospects.
And thirdly, the answer ‘impelled me to action’: I wanted to fulfil the simple physical tasks before me (bringing Hardcastle the ingredients of lemons and cinnamon to make his special hot punch for his guests, along with cleaning the tables and moving the furniture). By achieving these simple tasks, I could strive towards a more complex psychological OBJECTIVE – ‘I want to improve my lot romantically and financially’ – which in turn had the potential to transform my life.
Now my character had a whole set of imaginative dimensions beyond the simple physical tasks before me. Of course, the audience was completely oblivious to the specifics of my imagined scenario, and yet I found that the imaginative background immediately gave my playing of the character a certain volume, or ‘reverberation’ beyond the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES of the script, and that ‘reverberation’ rapidly enhanced my sense of play as an actor and my sense of impulse as a character.
Going back to Three Sisters, what might be the answers to Masha’s ‘Why?’ and ‘For what reason?’ Let’s take Act 1: ‘Why does she stay for lunch when Vershinin arrives?’ Because she wants to spend time with an interesting man. She’s bored: she doesn’t love her husband, she has no children – there’s a certain emptiness to her existence. Spending time with an interesting man would give some content to her life. After all, she has no job and therefore she has nothing to occupy her body . . .
. . . and she’s bored by her husband and therefore she has nothing to occupy her mind . . .
. . . and so the one aspect of herself through which she might find fulfilment is through her heart.
Thus her body, mind and heart might all be drafted into unified occupation.
Let’s take it further: ‘For what reason does Masha want to spend time with an interesting man?’
Because she wants to fall in love.
‘For what reason does she want to fall in love?’
Because . . . she wants to live at the extremes of her nerve endings.
Because . . . she wants to fulfil her romantic potential.
Because . . . she doesn’t want to wither away emotionally as spinster-sister Olga seems to have done. And she doesn’t want to throw her life away domestically with a man she doesn’t love as she sees Irina about to do and as she perceives that she herself is doing in her own marriage.
Because . . . she wants to sense the utter completion that you feel when you’re heart-and-soul-and-body in love.
And ‘For what reason does she choose Vershinin?’
This is where the investigation could become rather fun and complex. If we adopt a somewhat Freudian perspective on the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES as indeed I hinted at earlier in this chapter with reference to the ‘psychological plane’, it’s clear to see that Masha doted on her father: isn’t that why, after all, at the start of the play she’s still in black one year after his death, while Olga and Irina have abandoned their mourning weeds for blue and white respectively? The similarities between Vershinin and her father are manifold: the military connection; the intellectual capability; the fact that the wind howled in the chimney the night father died just as it’s howling in the chimney at the moment Vershinin declares his love in Act 2; then there’s the age gap between Masha and Vershinin of about twenty years. Maybe she seeks through Vershinin a connection she thought she might have had with her husband Kulygin – whom she also thought was clever and intelligent and a little daunting when she first married him – a connection which will link her to a man (her father) who was no doubt an impressive and romantic figure in her life. And if her father hadn’t died a year ago (from when the play begins), the whole family might well have gone back to Moscow, and thus her escape might have been managed. Falling in love with Vershinin fills a space in her heart and a place in her family home.
Who knows? This might be reading far too much into the text – but you can see how the imaginative impulse supplied by the FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION For what reason? can suddenly give all manner of textures and reverberations to an interpretation of a part beyond the written word.
The sixth FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION, How? was clarified for me by another of my Russian mentors, acting master Albert Filozov. Filozov trained at the Moscow Art Theatre Studio, as a result of which his own acting practices are steeped in all the playful aspects of Stanislavsky’s later work, including ACTIVE ANALYSIS. He believes that if you’re truly alive to the myriad nuances of your fellow actors’ behaviour, then your How? will never be fixed: it will inevitably and necessarily change each night or during each take on a minuscule level (see ADAPTATION) as you respond to their ever-changing performances. Filozov suggests that as long as you’ve put all the other pieces in place in your preparation of a part and you’ve done all the necessary detective work on the character and the dramatic ACTION, you don’t actually have to know the answers to How? You can simply get out there – in front of that camera or onto that stage – and see what happens: just dive into Mamet’s ‘terrifying unforeseen’. Filozov argues that it’s your prerogative as an actor to change the ongoing moment-by-moment answers to the FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION How? every night, as you respond truthfully and spontaneously to your acting partners. These are not disruptive changes that you’re making: often they’re almost imperceptible to the outside eye, but they’re highly ‘reverberant’ to the INNER CREATIVE STATE. So, the real FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION that you’re asking yourself is ‘How will I behave tonight in response to this actor in front of this audience given these actions?’
In terms of film, of course, a certain amount of fixedness is necessary to ensure the continuity of each take, but that doesn’t mean you can’t remain alive within the technical and rigid structure. The inner How? – the very light in your eye – can be bright and nuanced and constantly alert and attentive to the tiny changes in your partner on every single take. It’s crucially important to remember that just because the physical and technical elements need to be rigid, your inner life can’t be rigid or your performance will be dead. You can never stop listening – and if you truly listen, it’s impossible to fix your inner life. Fixedness and spontaneity are as incompatible as trying to open and close a door in the same moment.
Before you get to the actual performance, however, it’s possible to set some potential How?s in place during rehearsal. The director Max Stafford-Clark calls this process ‘actioning a text’, a technique for which he has become internationally famed. The process involves finding a transitive verb which motors every line in a text, be it ‘I excite’, ‘I threaten’, ‘I educate’, ‘I charm’, etc. These are the ACTIONS that you seek to play upon your fellow characters – i.e. they are the means by which you strive in each moment of a scene to achieve your larger OBJECTIVE. As Stafford-Clark details in his wonderful book, Letters to George,83 this is a Stanislavsky-based practice that he has refined over the years at Joint Stock, the Royal Court, and Out of Joint.84
A very useful development of this technique was introduced to me by acclaimed British actor, Miles Anderson, who had worked for several years under the directorship of Richard Cottrell at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre, UK. During a discussion out in Australia in the spring of 2005, Cottrell suggested to Anderson, who was at the time working with me in Stafford-Clark’s re-staging of The Permanent Way at the Sydney Theatre, that an actor might colour each line-by-line transitive verb with an adverb. So, for example ‘I seduce cautiously’, ‘I threaten playfully’, and ‘I tease assertively’. Alternatively, ‘I seduce playfully’, ‘I threaten assertively’ and ‘I tease cautiously’. Then again, perhaps ‘I caution seductively’, ‘I play threateningly’ and ‘I assert teasingly’. Instantly you can sense the subtleties involved in the combination of verb and adverb. The transitive verb pinpoints what you’re trying to do, the adverb adds a nuance to how you’re going to do it.
You can make all these preliminary decisions about the answers to your How? questions while sitting round the table, as long as you have the caveat that once you put the scene on its feet, you’re free to make any necessary and natural adaptations and refinements, which will inevitably occur once you’re eye-balling your fellow actors. This is certainly what Stafford-Clark advocates with his actioning technique: for him, his idiosyncratic rehearsal process simply forms a platform from which the rocket of the play can launch, it’s not the rocket itself.
In brief:
•You can find the answers to the first three of the SIX FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS (Who?, Where? and When?) in the script and from your factual research around the script.
•The fourth FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION (Why?) takes you into the structure of the play and what might be the character’s psychological OBJECTIVE underpinning the ACTION.
•The fifth FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION (For what reason?) leads you even further into the realm of your personal IMAGINATION and JUSTIFICATION.
•All five of these FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS can be explored through ‘mining the text’.
•The sixth FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION (How?) really becomes clear once you get onto the rehearsal-room floor, where you physicalise the role and interact with your fellow performers, responding to their ever-changing subtleties.
•You can fine-tune your How?s by selecting a transitive verb to be the ACTION you play on your partner. You can then colour that verb with an adverb which determines how you intend to play the ACTION.
*
Overview
So what has ‘mining the text’ entailed?
First of all, we’ve used four general tools for basic textual analysis, addressing all the information embedded in the script. This has involved:
•a conscientious FIRST READING;
•an appreciation of the raw material – i.e. the TEXT;
•an assessment of the TEXT through our MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE (including looking at the seven ‘planes’);
•a reaping of the facts and figures in the text which comprise the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES.
We’ve then looked at five tools for understanding how the actual structure of a scene can take us further into our process of characterising a role. We’ve:
•broken a text down into BITS of action;
•come up with some psychological OBJECTIVES and COUNTER-OBJECTIVES (or ‘obstacles’);
•fuelled those OBJECTIVES and COUNTER-OBJECTIVES with some SUBTEXT;
•examined the way in which the PUNCTUATION itself can deepen our understanding of the script’s inner mechanism;
•merged the writer’s information with our own interpretation by asking the SIX FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS, and thus we’ve begun a true personalisation of the part.
All this ‘mining of the text’ – which might occur collectively with the director and the rest of the company round a table, or individually as part of your own exploration of a role – has been a vital stage in our detective work. But it’s time to transmute that brain-work into physical work, as we begin the complex process of ‘Embodying the Role’.
Getting your body into the space is an exciting and daunting part of rehearsals, as suddenly your sense of responsibility as an actor comes to the fore. Every physical movement you make delivers a mass of encoded messages to the receiving audience, so you need to be sure those messages are relevant. In an age of psychological realism, the message you usually have to communicate is one steeped in TRUTH.
TRAY 6
THE TOOL WHICH UNDERPINS OUR CREATIVE WORK ON A ROLE
Truth
TRUTH is a tricky word and an even trickier concept. In the twenty-first century, there’s no such thing as ‘objective truth’ any more: your perspective is as legitimate as my perspective which is as legitimate as anyone else’s perspective. Each person’s vision of the world is as justified as anyone else’s. Which is fine, because when it comes to TRUTH, what we’re really looking for is a context for what we’re seeing, some rules which determine our expectations, some kind of LOGIC AND SEQUENCE.
LOGIC AND SEQUENCE are a tantalising duo, which crop up with curious regularity in Stanislavsky’s writings, including being displayed on placards in an acting class described at the end of Chapter 11 of An Actor Prepares85 LOGIC doesn’t have to mean mathematical logic: our emotions can have their own logic, which at first may seem utterly chaotic, but with time reveals itself to have an absolute coherence. However, it doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking rational logic or emotional logic: the audience aren’t going to buy into what we’re doing unless we’ve created some sort of truthful context for the action – be it Star Wars or West Wing or Woyzeck.
The key to this sense of TRUTH is the ongoing sequence of Action – Reaction – Decision, described earlier in reference to MOMENTS OF DECISION. In this sequence:
•A does something to B (Action);
•B has a gut response to A (Reaction);
•B makes a choice about what A has done (Decision);
•and B does something back to A (next Action).
The audience stops believing what they’re watching when one of those steps (usually Reaction or Decision) is omitted. Instead, they start questioning the sense of TRUTH in what they see: ‘I don’t understand why Character X did that’ or ‘I don’t believe Character Y would respond like that’. But I repeat, the TRUTH doesn’t have to be a realistic TRUTH. It can be absurd, abstract, science-fiction, horror. As long as there’s a LOGIC AND SEQUENCE to the rules and the context of the piece, I can ‘believe’ in an episode of Star Trek or Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna, just as I can believe in an episode of E.R. or Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.
Stanislavsky was hot on TRUTH. He believed that a sense of TRUTH marked the difference between a craftsman and an artist. And he pinpointed three different kinds of TRUTH which he saw arising in acting practice:
1.‘make-believe truth’86 (which draws on clichés and short-cuts);
2.‘actual fact’87 (which is life as we know it);
3.‘scenic truth’88 (which is ‘actual fact’ distilled into a creative form).
‘Make-believe truth’ isn’t great, but neither is it utterly useless, as half the time with a ‘make-believe truth’ you can con your audience into accepting what they see. (If that’s what you want to do . . .) You’ve usually based your choices on certain stereotypes: ‘Oh, this is what a colonel in the army would be like: stick on a moustache, slick down my hair and bark a few orders as I strut about in khaki.’ These stereotypes of ‘make-believe truth’ are quite different from what we might term ‘fantasy’. Of course, if you’re playing a hobbit in Lord of the Rings or a talking lion in Narnia or a superhero in X Men, there’s going to be an element of fantasy involved in the choices you make. But fantasy is quite different from ‘make-believe truth’. ‘Make-believe truth’ stems from generalities as opposed to realms of reality: it doesn’t matter what genre, medium or character type you’re exploring or how far-fetched the realms of the script’s ‘reality’ might be, your choices as an actor can have the same degree of specificity that you’d apply to psychological realism, if you simply engage your creative IMAGINATION. There is no need for you as an actor to ever fall into the abyss of ‘make-believe truth’.
That said, you have to be on your guard: even if you don’t intend it to happen, clichés can creep into your performance surreptitiously and (in Stanislavsky’s words) ‘clip your wings’.89 So to prevent the conventions and lies kicking in, Stanislavsky proposed that you should consciously develop an inner sense of TRUTH to use as a metaphoric internal sounding-board during your creative process, since a sense of TRUTH
supervises all [an actor’s] inner and physical activity, both when he is creating in rehearsal and when he is performing his part. It is only when his sense of truth is thoroughly developed that he will reach the point, where every pose, every gesture, will have an inner justification.90
If you really listen to yourself as you train your psycho-physical co-ordination, you’ll know when an action rings true or not – you’ll hear the inner sounding-board of your sense of TRUTH chiming in or out of key.
The second kind of TRUTH – ‘actual fact’ – is what you see around you. But however valuable OBSERVATION may be as a tool, it’s not always appropriate to transport ‘actual fact’ into performance. Here’s a simple example. Suppose the colonel you’re playing has a Glaswegian accent: if your accent is too accurate, too ‘truthful’, the audience will have no idea what you’re actually talking about. So as you ‘embody the role’, you have to introduce a degree of moderation, of artistic ‘untruth’.
And indeed, the third kind of TRUTH – ‘scenic truth’ – involves that kind of moderation. In the process of embodying a role, you draw upon your OBSERVATION of the real world. (‘Oh, that’s what a colonel looks like, so let’s consider how this individual deals with the conflict of duty and desire, given his military status. And how does he communicate that conflict in his broad Glaswegian accent?’) Then you artistically and intuitively filter that factual information into a format you can use in performance. So, the ‘true’-sounding Glaswegian accent is filtered through your IMAGINATION to make it a credible impression of the required accent, while still remaining truthful to the writer’s intentions and understood by the audience; at the same time, your OBSERVATIONS and psychological assimilations of the real-life colonel filter out your ‘make-believe’ generalisations.
I discovered how this filtering process worked when I was playing an Investment Banker in Hare’s The Permanent Way. I could have begun my journey into the character by going for the ‘make-believe truth’ and considered what the broad brushstrokes of an Investment Banker meant to me. I’d watched enough Wall Street movies, I’d seen enough documentaries and news programmes to come up with a formula. But because The Permanent Way was based on real people, I decided to visit the actual man in his high-powered merchant bank in the City of London. The guy was in his fifties, coming up to retirement, extremely successful, absolutely loaded – and generally very at-one with the world. Back in the rehearsal room, I tried to take on the ‘actual facts’ that I’d observed in the real banker and portray them in my own way through my body and voice. I adopted his laidback posture, I spoke in his gently timbred tone, and I beamed his beatific smile. After a while, the director asked me what on earth I was doing. The problem was that, as a five-foot-one female in her mid-thirties, I couldn’t convey with much sense of TRUTH the cool aplomb of the fifty-five-year-old male. In the process of embodying the role, I needed to convert the ‘actual facts’ of life into an appropriate ‘scenic truth’.
To do this, I started with something as simple as shifting my physical weight from my heels (which felt cool and laid-back) forward to the balls of my feet (which felt more plugged in and switched on). Suddenly my psychological focus felt more switched on too. My mind was keener and my diction was sharper. It was more scenically affective and dramatically connected.
‘Scenic truth’ relates to the emotions as well. We tend to think that Stanislavsky’s ‘system’ is about beating your breast and tearing your hair out. In fact, he called upon his actors to be ‘cool and impartial’,91 as a sense of TRUTH isn’t about being so wound up in an emotion that it floods your entire performance like an emotional tsunami. Inherent in your sense of TRUTH you have to have a sense of artistic detachment. This is important, because if you take some of Stanislavsky’s words on emotional TRUTH out of context, they can sound as if he wanted actors to use real emotions – real joy and real distress, for instance:
Each and every moment must be saturated with a belief in the truthfulness of the emotion felt, and in the action carried out, by the actor.92
But there’s a significant difference between feeling the real emotion and believing in the truthfulness of the emotion. It’s subtle but significant, a little like the difference between believing in what’s going on in the enacted drama and believing in its possibility. To help actors develop their inner TRUTH sounding-board or monitor, Stanislavsky came up with ‘three steps’.93 These three steps built on the idea that we need to adjust the facts of life (‘actual fact’) to the fictions of performance (‘scenic truth’).
1.First of all, you need to reconstruct all the experiences that the character has in the script, colouring in even the smallest details with your own IMAGINATION. [Look at everything the writer gives you and ask the SIX FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS, so that you can supply information from your own IMAGINATION to fill in the blanks left by the writer.]
2.There then has to be a certain identification with the character and its surroundings. [Go back to your initial trigger into the character, the original ‘lure’ between you and the role, so you can pinpoint your connection with the part and your empathy with its circumstances.]
3.Having reminded yourself of the ‘lure’ – the point of ‘identification’ – you need to clarify your character’s specific ‘objectives’. [If you sharpen your OBJECTIVES, every moment will make sense for you; it’ll have some kind of LOGIC AND SEQUENCE, however tangential or whacky or idiosyncratic that LOGIC AND SEQUENCE may be.]
Once you’ve taken these three steps, Stanislavsky believed the ground should be ready for your sense of TRUTH towards the character to flourish within you.
Your next task is to put that sense of TRUTH to the test by finding a series of simple physical ACTIONS, which you can execute from your character’s PERSPECTIVE. And it really is through the simplest of physical ACTIONS that you can hear your inner sounding-board. In some ways, the smaller those ACTIONS are, the easier it is for you to believe in them. And you have to believe in what you’re doing, because if you can’t believe in your smallest physical ACTION, how can you possibly execute complex psychological tasks with any degree of conviction?
Let’s take a simple example. Suppose my OBJECTIVE in leading a workshop is ‘I want to create a good learning environment in which I can inspire the actors with the value of Stanislavsky’s “system”’. In itself, this is a pretty complex psychological task. Yet I can make life easier for myself. To achieve my complex OBJECTIVE, I can execute a series of ACTIONS so simple that there’s no way my sense of TRUTH in them can be questioned. So I enter the studio, switch on the light, turn on the heaters, sweep the floor, set out the chairs in a welcoming circle, lay out my handouts in an accessible way, do my warm-up, grab a bottle of water and await the arrival of the participants. Through this series of very simple ACTIONS – which will either ring true or they won’t, in that I either switch on the light or I don’t – I can begin to create within myself the feeling of an informative, capable, well-organised acting tutor. If I can pre pare the ground in this way, my complex psychological OBJECTIVE should be much easier to achieve. (We’ll come back to this in greater detail later in this chapter with ‘Approaches to Rehearsal’, re: the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS and ACTIVE ANALYSIS.)
Stanislavsky was adamant that if you can feel the TRUTH of what you’re doing, you’ll stir your passions. It’s as simple as that. There’s an age-old jibe aimed at a mythical Method actor, whose director asks him to execute some simple physical task – something like bringing in a drinks tray. The actor asks, ‘But what’s my motivation?’ To a director who just wants to get the play on its feet and create beautiful stage pictures, it doesn’t really matter what the motivation behind the action is: ‘Just bring in the drinks, for Chrissakes!’ Yet if there’s no sense of TRUTH for the actor, the moves will be empty, formal and, worse still, there’ll be no creative passion to be stirred within him. He might as well quit and let the director hire a robot to do the job instead. It’s not naïve or difficult or earnest of an actor to want to fathom out the motivation behind a move: it’s simply his IMAGINATION desiring some creative food with which to fuel the ACTION. And we shouldn’t forget that through tiny physical movements, we can unlock big complex EMOTIONS. As Stanislavsky insists:
You will come to know that in real life . . . many of the great moments of emotion are signalised [sic] by some ordinary, small, natural movement . . .
We artists must realise the truth that even small, physical movements, when injected into given circumstances, acquire great significance through their influence on emotion.94
The long and short of all this is that TRUTH – a big and mighty word – actually lies in the smallest of physical ACTIONS. (As I’ve said, we’ll keep revisiting the importance of ACTION throughout The Toolkit.) So from the first moments of physically ‘embodying a role’, we should be absolutely attentive to our inner sense of TRUTH. If we metaphorically knock the marble off its course by one millimetre, we might find our interpretation of a role ends up being formal and uninspiring. Yet if we CONCENTRATE OUR ATTENTION on the tiniest physical ACTIONS, we prepare the best imaginable ground in which to stir our passions and arouse our IMAGINATIONS in the most unexpected and exciting of ways.
In brief:
•TRUTH isn’t dependent on naturalistic detail; as long as the context of the script has its own LOGIC AND SEQUENCE, then any genre, style or medium can build its own sense of TRUTH.
•TRUTH in acting has three manifestations:
– ‘make-believe truth’ (which tends to consist of broad brushstrokes and clichés);
– ‘actual fact’ (which stems from your direct experience of life);
– ‘scenic truth’ (which involves filtering your real experiences into something aesthetically usable in performance).
•Your sense of TRUTH can be used as an inner monitor or sounding-board in rehearsal or performance to ascertain what feels physically and psychologically appropriate.
•You have to be ‘cool and impartial’ when it comes to creating something with an emotional ‘scenic truth’.
•You can create a sense of TRUTH if you:
– flesh out the details of the text;
– find a point of identification with a character;
– clarify the specific OBJECTIVES of your character.
•You can test the TRUTH of a dramatic situation by constructing a series of simple physical ACTIONS, which feel appropriate and right when you execute them.
•TRUTH is a physical sensation, as much as an inner feeling.
Having determined at this point in The Toolkit that we’re working towards a sense of TRUTH, there are three key tools which can help in the first steps of embodying a role. They are
•imagination
•the Magic ‘If’
•observation
TRAY 7
THREE BASIC TOOLS FOR BUILDING A SENSE OF TRUTH
Imagination
IMAGINATION is perhaps one of the most vital tools in any artistic endeavour, and, as we’ve seen with the toolkit so far, you won’t get very far without it. In fact, you might think it’s superfluous to talk about the role of IMAGINATION either regarding acting in general or Stanislavsky’s toolkit in particular. And yet it would seem odd if we omitted it, especially as Stanislavsky devotes a whole chapter to it in An Actor Prepares.
As a tool, IMAGINATION is closely connected with ‘scenic truth’, and Stanislavsky’s words on the subject dispel any myth that he was wrapped up in some kind of fourth-wall mysticism:
There is no such thing as actuality on the stage. Art is a product of the imagination, as the work of the dramatist should be. The aim of the actor should be to use his technique to turn the play into a theatrical reality. In this process imagination plays by far the greatest part.95
When you start to build a role, the first thing you do – whether you realise it or not – is appeal to your IMAGINATION. However, Stanislavsky’s own relationship to the actor’s active IMAGINATION is curious. As I’ve mentioned already, he spent his early years as a director completely ignoring his actors’ IMAGINATIONS: instead, he gave them very physical directions and told them exactly where to stand and sit and how long they should pause or kiss. (All of this is revealed in vivid detail in his 1898 production plan for The Seagull.)96 With time and experience, he came to realise that it’s actually the actors’ imaginative pictures which ‘serve as lures to our feelings when we are dealing with words and speech’.97 As we’ve seen, this realisation radically altered his approach as a director.
In fact, your relationship with a director reveals exactly how you’re using your IMAGINATION tool. If your IMAGINATION is fully functional, you can take on board any direction proposed to you, and all those ‘What’s my motivation?’ questions can be answered effortlessly without rubbing the director up the wrong way. In fact, if you don’t exercise your IMAGINATION, you can run the risk of becoming little more than a pawn in the director’s hands. Stanislavsky himself warned:
The kind [of imagination] that does not respond to suggestions presents a more difficult problem. Here the actor takes in suggestions in a merely external, formal way. With such an equipment, development is fraught with difficulty, and there is very little hope of success unless the actor makes a great effort.98
A well-developed IMAGINATION is your key to artistic freedom: it enables you to make physical adaptations to whatever GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES arise, it helps you to find psychological JUSTIFICATIONS for any directions you’re given, and it’s a muscle that can be exercised. Indeed, it should be exercised.
So how do you exercise your IMAGINATION?
First of all, your IMAGINATION is stimulated by your powers of OBSERVATION. In Stanislavsky’s words:
The more an actor has observed and known, the greater his experience, his accumulation of live impressions and memories, the more subtly will he think and feel, and the broader, more varied, and substantial will be the life of his imagination, the deeper his comprehension of facts and events, the clearer his perception of inner and outer circumstances of the life in the play and in his part.99
The second way of exercising your IMAGINATION is to combine OBSERVATION with the stimulation of the five senses (taste, touch, sound, sight and smell). When our senses are stimulated, we usually find that powerful EMOTION MEMORIES are aroused. These three areas – OBSERVATION, sensory stimulation and EMOTION MEMORY (also known as ‘affective memory’) – work together in conjunction with our IMAGINATION. As Stanslavsky puts it, IMAGINATION
stirs up our affective memory, calling up from its secret depths, beyond the reach of consciousness, elements of already experienced emotions, and re-grouping them to correspond with the images which arise in us . . . That is why a creative imagination is a fundamental, absolutely necessary gift for an actor.100
There’s an important note here: when you’re working with creative IMAGINATION, you start by taking something you’ve already experienced. You then ‘regroup’ the thoughts, images and memories which come to you, so that they correspond with the ideas in the script. It’s a bit like restacking your inner building blocks to make a turret out of a cottage, or a wall out of a chicken shed. This means that as you embody a role, you’re not using your own materials in their raw state: it’s the imaginative use of your emotions, memories, experiences, etc., which enables you to transform your personal ‘actual facts’ into usable ‘scenic truths’. Which is why you need to keep your IMAGINATION exercised and fully operational, so you can remember a time in your life when you drowned a spider in the bath or dissected a frog in the backyard, and you restack those memories to get inside the psyche of Lady Macbeth or Sweeney Todd.
The third aspect of IMAGINATION is that it’s physical. You don’t just sit poring over the text and understanding what the SIX FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS might mean to you intellectually. All the information you’ve gleaned from ‘mining the text’ around the table becomes transformed by your IMAGINATION into physical challenges: how your body moves, what actions your body takes, how your body interacts with the other characters, with the set, with the props, with the costumes, etc. IMAGINATION both fuels your desire to get up and do something active and physical, and then it fills those physical impulses with inner content. Again, Stanislavsky is quite clear about this:
[The actor] must feel the challenge physically as well as intellectually, because the imagination . . . can reflexively affect our physical nature and make it act . . . Not a step should be taken on the stage without the cooperation of your imagination.101
In other words, don’t cross the stage, stand up, sit down, let alone carry the drinks tray, unless your IMAGINATION is engaged in the whole process.
As far as Stanislavsky was concerned, the quickest and most powerful way of feeling the pulsating connection between your IMAGINATION and your body is to improvise:
Student actors who have been trained in improvisations later find it easy to use their imaginative fancy on a play where this is needed.102
This maxim was to influence Stanislavsky right up until his death, with the rehearsal processes of the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS and ACTIVE ANALYSIS focusing heavily on improvisation.
In brief:
•IMAGINATION is closely allied to ‘scenic truth’.
•IMAGINATION can provide the bridge between you as an actor and your director.
•IMAGINATION is the key to artistic freedom.
•IMAGINATION is developed through OBSERVATION, and works intricately with your five senses and EMOTION MEMORY.
•IMAGINATION becomes physical when you take all your MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE and feed it into your body.
•IMAGINATION is developed most directly through improvisation.
From early on in his discussions of acting, Stanislavsky proposed that one of the most direct ways to convert your imaginative processes into physical responses is by means of the tool he named THE MAGIC ‘IF’.
The Magic ‘If’
What would I do if . . . there were a mad axe-murderer behind the door? (Stanislavsky’s Gothic example in An Actor Prepares.) What would I do if I knocked someone over in my car? . . . if I were nominated for an Oscar? . . . if I were to discover I was pregnant with triplets? THE MAGIC ‘IF’ is the springboard from your IMAGINATION into the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES of the script, and in effect it works by appealing to your sense of ACTION: ‘What would I do if . . . ?’
In many ways, THE MAGIC ‘IF’ combines the outer sphere of ACTION with the inner sphere of psychology, as it provides one short hop from the world of the text to your own world as an actor, and its successful use lies in the fact that:
The circumstances which are predicted on ‘if’ are taken from sources near to your own feelings, and they have a powerful influence on [your] inner life . . . Once you have established this contact between your life and your part, you will find that inner push or stimulus.103
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you’ve got to have killed someone in order to play Macbeth. As I’ve already suggested, you can use your IMAGINATION in a number of ways: you’ve seen films in which characters are killed, or news items portraying dead bodies, or you yourself have killed a wasp or an ant or a spider or a mouse, or maybe you’ve even dreamt about killing a person. You’ve seen through film or novels or documentaries what happens if people find themselves in situations where killing is the only option. So with THE MAGIC ‘IF’, you’re not looking for the re-enactment of actual experiences, but you are seeking the stimulants to your IMAGINATION which will fill in the gaps between you and the ACTIONS of the script. You’re restacking your inner building blocks, creating a prison cell not a conservatory, or a chapel not a schoolroom.
One of the most complicated challenges for me as an actor arose with the Second Bereaved Mother in Hare’s The Permanent Way. The real mother’s eldest son had been killed in the 1999 Paddington train crash, the blaze of which was so intense there was literally nothing left of the young man’s body. At first, I had no idea how to connect with the overwhelming pain and anger that the real mother must have suffered. Not only did I have no children, but mercifully I’d never experienced a loss so shocking and unexpected in my own life. I had huge gaps in the connection between myself and the role, and I had to find a means of understanding what I would do if. . . How would I feel if. . . ?
To find some imaginative fuel to give integrity and taste to my embodiment of the role, I decided to go and visit the memorial site near what’s known as the Paddington ‘throat’ in Ladbroke Grove where a number of main train-lines converge into a smaller number of tracks on the busy approach into central London. I knew that the real-life mother went there every year on the anniversary of the crash: as this was the last place her son had been seen alive, she felt perhaps his spirit was still there somewhere. I needed to stand where she stood each year and ask myself, ‘What would I do if someone close to me had been killed?’
I found myself walking in the bright October sunshine and reading the simple commemorative plaque on the nearby wall of the Sainsbury’s car park right by the crash-site. I watched the trains hurtling by – looking (in this context) more like animated coffins than means of transport. I noticed the heavy wooden sleepers linking the tracks and understood in this moment that the ‘eternal sleepers’ of the crash were indeed somewhere in this landscape. And soon I found myself effortlessly answering the questions, ‘What if someone I loved dearly had been destroyed in this place? How would I feel? What would I do? What actions would the sensations propel me towards? How would I channel my anger?’
Very quickly, my original ‘What if . . . ?’ question had spawned a whole heap of follow-up questions, connected powerfully with animated ACTIONS and impassioned EMOTIONS. From those questions came new ACTIONS: I’d want to know what had happened that day to cause the crash; I’d want to know who to blame; I’d want to make someone answerable. So I’d attend inquests, I’d rally other ‘victims’, challenge judgements, overturn politicians’ arguments. I’d do politically active things when previously I’d simply been a mother of four, happily bringing up my family. I’d do everything I could to en sure my remaining children’s lives were a little better, safer, richer.
THE MAGIC ‘IF’ is a surprisingly non-coercive tool, in the sense that the question ‘What if . . . ?’ doesn’t ask you to believe blindly in the circumstances of the text. It simply asks you to consider the possibilities of what you might do if . . . ‘If’ implies supposition, it suggests that what you’re proposing is not for real – it’s asking you what you would do supposing these GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES were real. Because it’s non-coercive, it’s incredibly liberating. And through its liberating quality (replacing the command ‘Thou shalt believe in this fiction’ with the provocation ‘What would you do if this fiction were true?’), it accesses all manner of imaginative ideas and creative possibilities.
It’s also incredibly simple – almost childishly simple. Using this tool, you can cross the threshold from being an objective observer of a script’s ACTION to becoming a subjective participator in the embodiment of that ACTION. From: ‘Mother. Bereaved. From Cambridgeshire.’ To: ‘What if I were a bereaved mother whose idyllic life was smashed to smithereens?’ And from there, into the heart of the writer’s world.
In brief:
•THE MAGIC ‘IF’ propels you from your own self into the script’s dramatic narrative.
•THE MAGIC ‘IF’ urges you towards ACTION.
•THE MAGIC ‘IF’ opens your IMAGINATION to the possibilities of the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES without coercing you emotionally.
Time and again, we see with The Toolkit that the individual tools interconnect and inter-depend. The greater your IMAGINATION, the more intricate, unexpected, truthful and idiosyncratic may be the answers to your ‘What if . . . ?’ questions. The IMAGINATION is widened through your life experience, and as we saw with the IMAGINATION tool, the first way you can widen your experiences of life is through OBSERVATION.
Observation
Supplying THE MAGIC ‘IF’ with resources on which you can draw depends to a great extent on your individual powers of OBSERVATION. You could say that IMAGINATION comprises two aspects of your inner realm: what you’ve experienced of life and what you’ve observed of life. The difference between the two is similar to the difference between finding yourself actually caught in a war zone, and watching media reports on the television and films of soldiers in battle. Essentially, OBSERVATION supplements the parts of your experience which might not be direct. So it’s back to THE MAGIC ‘IF’ scenario: even though I’m not a murderess, I can play Lady Macbeth extremely convincingly because I’ve read accounts of murders, I’ve seen film footage of murderers, maybe I’ve even spoken to one. Through my OBSERVATIONS, I’ve woven into the fabric of my experience an understanding of what it might mean to me to be a murderer, of what it might entail in terms of the weapon to use or possible methods, of the kind of psychology that might generate a murderer, and what circumstances in my own life might theoretically provoke in me the impulse to kill. The filtering of those OBSERVATIONS through my personality can feed my IMAGINATION with sufficient psycho-physical information for me to embody the role.
OBSERVATION is not just an inner, mental process: like IMAGINATION, it has a very physical aspect to it. Whatever ACTION or EMOTION I’m playing, I have the outside world from which to draw, but more than that: I have the OBSERVATION of my own body, how my muscles respond to certain GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES, and how my BREATHING changes according to the emotional content of an experience. I’ve experienced laughter, I’ve experienced tears: when I have to portray those emotions on stage or screen, I can apply a sense of ‘self-OBSERVATION’ to monitor whether my portrayal is authentic or compelling. Is there a sense of TRUTH in what I’m doing? Am I faking it or feeling it? Does my body feel right in this manifestation of this emotion? Stanislavsky suggests that you can use this quality of ‘inner observation’ in a very practical way. Following a rehearsal or performance, you can inwardly observe which aspects rang true or false for you. If your part goes wrong one night,
listen in silence to the voice of your subconscious.104
It’s like striking a tuning-fork and listening for the resonance. The ‘voice of your subconscious’ is your ‘inner observation’ – that inner monitor or sounding-board which we’ve already mentioned – letting you know whether or not you found the sense of TRUTH tonight. We’ll come back to this idea of self-observation in Chapter 3 when we consider DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. The main notion to hold onto here is that OBSERVATION has a surprising number of dimensions and some very practical uses.
In brief:
•OBSERVATION is a means of developing IMAGINATION.
•You can strengthen your inner muscles as an actor, by homing in on physical OBJECTS or people and, through observing them, allowing your IMAGINATION to springboard into fantasy, and from fantasy into ACTION.
•OBSERVATION of your own body and inner self will alert you to whether what you’re doing in rehearsal or performance feels appropriate and ‘truthful’ within the context of the script.
Each of the tools so far in this section of ‘Embodying the Role’ – TRUTH, IMAGINATION, THE MAGIC ‘IF’, and OBSERVATION – is used for inherently ‘inner’ or imaginative processes: the path we’ve followed shows that having established the need for a sense of TRUTH, the three accompanying tools provide ways of developing it.
The next four tools in the kit are geared towards further evolving your sense of psycho-physical co-ordination as you embody your role. They are:
•action
•tempo-rhythm
•emotion memory
•emotion
TRAY 8
FOUR TOOLS FOR
BUILDING PSYCHO-PHYSICAL
CO-ORDINATION WITH A CHARACTER
Action
Throughout The Toolkit so far, ACTION is a term I’ve used quite liberally: it’s now time to look at some specifics and discover why it’s arguably the most vital tool available to us.
Everything you do on the stage – even if you’re simply sitting in silence – has to be for a purpose: this was the fictional director Tortsov’s instruction to his student-actors in An Actor Prepares. And it’s important to remember this. For all the emphasis on the emotional and psychological processes which characterise spin-off interpretations of Stanislavsky’s ‘system’, his overwhelming concern – even from his early production plans for The Seagull – was with ACTION. He believed that as soon as you take your focus off meaningful, purposeful ACTION, then what he termed ‘stock trade work’ (in which you simply go through the motions of the onstage ‘blocking’) almost inevitably obliterates your art. And for Stanislavsky:
Action is the chief element of our art – genuine, organic, productive, expedient action.105
Implicit within this list of adjectives is the idea that every ACTION you perform must have some kind of LOGIC AND SEQUENCE, otherwise you distort your sense of TRUTH. I once saw an essentially realistic production of The Seagull, in which the actor playing the estate manager Shamrayev came storming onto the stage in Act 2 to tell Arkadina that she couldn’t have any horses to go into town. Within seconds, the actor had thrust his hands into his pockets. Instantly, my belief in the TRUTH of the situation was fractured: after all, this was a working farm man, who vividly describes how all the men are carting the rye today, so presumably he has just come into the scene hot and sweaty and dirty. To thrust his hands into his pockets seemed to me to be totally incongruous. The ACTION was arguably more like that of an actor who didn’t know what to do with his hands than the logical and sequential ACTION of a farmer. Unless of course, Shamrayev had suddenly grown aware of how dirty his hands were in the company of the fragrant ladies, in which case he might have taken a moment to notice that detail, before thrusting them into his pockets to hide his filthy fingernails. As it was, there seemed to be no integrated LOGIC AND SEQUENCE in what the actor did and I had the vague sense of being served up Stanislavsky’s notion of ‘stock trade work’, rather than art.
I’ve talked about ACTION several times already in relation to the three-step sequence of Action – Reaction – Decision. I’ve also discussed how a performance can cease to affect the audience if a link in that chain is omitted. If there’s no LOGIC OR SEQUENCE in what they’re seeing, they simply stop believing in the possibility of those events – like Shamrayev and the trouser pockets. Time and again, we return to the notion that ACTION has both a physical dimension and a psychological one. We’ll look specifically at physical ACTIONS shortly: before we do, I’m going to bring in two of the SIX FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS: ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’ to illustrate how in many respects they’re the tools for moving your ACTIONS from the inner (psychological) realm to the outer (physical) realm:
Why you do something comes from your OBJECTIVE: it’s your inner, psychological drive.
How you do something is the way in which you behave in order to try and achieve your OBJECTIVE: it’s a physical sequence of ACTIONS.
So let’s say you’re banging your hand on the table. The way in which you bang your hand (the physical ACTION: the how) will depend on the reason behind your physical ACTION (the psychological ACTION: the why). Do you want to test the firmness of the table before you climb onto it and change a light-bulb? Do you want to wake your friend who’s dozing on the table? Do you want to quieten a rowdy meeting which is getting out of hand? Do you want to emphasise a point in an argument? Even the simplest deed (i.e. a physical ACTION) is motivated by a reaction or a decision (i.e. a psychological ACTION) which in turn is spurred by your OBJECTIVE.
You see how your OBJECTIVE is fundamental to any ACTIONS you might make. It’s your desire. It burns. It compels. And for you to really achieve what you want in a situation, you need to inject an equally burning, vital, compelling energy into your physical and psychological ACTIONS: in other words, those ACTIONS can’t just be empty shells. For Stanislavsky, this is the root of a truly artistic performance:
Out of desires, inclinations, impulses to act I am naturally moved to that important thing: inner action . . .
External action on the stage when it is not inspired, not justified, not called forth by inner activity, is entertaining only for the eyes and ears; it does not penetrate the heart, it has no significance in the life of a human spirit in the role . . .
Real life, like life on the stage, is made up of continuously arising desires, aspirations, inner challenges to action and their consummation in internal and external actions.106
There’s a huge amount of energy to be invested into each ACTION. Your ‘external actions’ can’t just be activities, they are the physical manifestation of your desires and aspirations. Likewise, your ‘inner actions’ are in no way diluted just because they’re inner: they are the psychological manifestations of your desires and aspirations, as you ‘warn, threaten, educate, assure, impress, undermine, delight, intimidate, or enchant’ (in the way that we saw with Stafford-Clark’s practical use of psychological ‘actioning’). If your OBJECTIVES are strong enough, you should reach the point where you can’t help but be propelled into ACTION, be it physical or psychological. Your ACTIONS become the only way for your internal desires to find sufficient outlet, like a boiling kettle or a stopcock under pressure.
And this is why Stanislavsky places so much emphasis on ACTION, because it’s through ACTION that you can contact your EMOTIONs more directly. There’s often a danger, when you’re confronted with a juicy, emotional part, that you feel the need to dredge up your emotions and connect yourself straightaway with the psychological core of the script. The result, as Stanislavsky warns, is that you end up taking short cuts or generalising the emotion:
If you tell an actor that his role is full of psychological action, tragic depths, he will immediately begin to contort himself, exaggerate his passion, ‘tear it to tatters’, dig around in his soul and do violence to his feelings. But if you give him some simple physical problem to solve and wrap it up in interesting, affecting conditions, he will set about carrying it out without alarming himself or thinking too deeply whether what he is doing will result in psychology, tragedy or drama.107
So that’s your task as an actor: to combine a ‘simple physical problem’ with some ‘interesting, affecting conditions’. I’d suggest that those ‘interesting, affecting conditions’ are a combination of your OBJECTIVE, your psychological ACTIONS and your GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES.
Here’s what I mean.
Suppose my OBJECTIVE is ‘I want to seduce you’: that OBJECTIVE in itself is one of my ‘interesting, affecting conditions’, as it involves my inner desires and it’s bound to provoke some psychological ACTIONS (such as ‘I entice you’, ‘I delight you’, ‘I amuse you’, ‘I enthuse you’). But I’m not going to worry too much about those psychological ACTIONS. Instead, I’m going to give myself ‘a simple physical problem’: I’m going to put my hand on your knee. Achieving that ‘simple physical problem’ may be easy enough: who knows? It’ll depend on your COUNTER-OBJECTIVE: you might quite enjoy the hand-on-knee encounter (and so you facilitate my OBJECTIVE) or you might find it deeply intrusive of your personal space (and so you counter my OBJECTIVE). But let’s not worry about that too much, either. Instead, let’s wrap the scenario up in a few more ‘interesting, affecting conditions’ by throwing in some GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES to spice up my OBJECTIVE and my psychological ACTIONS.
Let’s suppose we’re in a crowded restaurant: this GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCE in itself will add some danger to my ‘simple, physical problem’. But the stakes can be even higher if we add a heap more GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES: maybe you’re a millionaire and I’m a struggling actress; maybe you’re married and so am I; maybe you’re a famous football coach and I’m an undercover journalist. Each little detail will crank up the creative energy and the performative fun, all the while marrying my OBJECTIVE (‘I want to seduce you’) with my psychological ACTIONS (‘I entice you, I delight you, I amuse you, I enthuse you’) and my ‘simple, physical problem’ (‘I’m going to put my hand on your knee’). I can guarantee that some kind of EMOTIONS will arise from this scenario, without us really having to worry about them.
So ACTION combines the physical and the psychological in a highly performative and very enjoyable way. In fact, Stanislavsky saw appropriately chosen ACTIONS as a true acting palliative:
Just as a breath of fresh air will clear the atmosphere in a stuffy room these real actions can put life into stereotyped acting. It can remind an actor of the true pitch which he has lost. It has the power to produce an inner impetus and it can turn a whole scene down a more creative path.108
In brief:
•ACTION exists even in stillness and silence.
•ACTIONS should always be purposeful, and have some kind of LOGIC AND SEQUENCE.
•ACTION is both internal / psychological (i.e. a decision or a reaction) and external / physical (i.e. a deed or an activity).
•ACTION is a crucial part of the Action – Reaction – Decision sequence which underpins all human intercourse.
•ACTION can be a direct way of accessing EMOTIONS.
•Physical ACTION is particularly powerful when you endow it with ‘interesting, affecting conditions’ (which can include OBJECTIVES, psychological ACTIONS and GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES).
•An appropriately chosen sequence of physical ACTIONS will provoke interesting psychological ACTIONS, and together they can create the role that you’re embodying.
For a sequence of physical ACTIONS to be truly effective and affecting, it needs to resonate with the appropriate TEMPO-RHYTHM, a tool which can also be applied both to psychological ACTIONS and emotional states.
Tempo-rhythm
TEMPO-RHYTHM is an unavoidable part of natural life. According to Stanislavsky:
Wherever there is life there is action; wherever action, movement; where movement, tempo; and where there is tempo there is rhythm . . .109
The whole universe is subject to the laws of rhythm, whether it be the night following the day, the spring following the winter, the beating of a heart, the ebbing and flowing of the tides, or the waxing and waning of the moon. At the centre of the rhythmic law for all living creatures is the continual inhalation and exhalation of breath, and as we’ve already seen, through BREATHING we access EMOTION. There’s no doubt that TEMPO-RHYTHM is at the very heart of acting.
Stanislavsky himself understood from early in his professional development that TEMPO-RHYTHM should form the foundation of all creative work. As a young performer in 1884, he explored the effect of TEMPO-RHYTHM on the body, when he and his fellow acolyte actors walked and stood and sat while a pianist hammered out different TEMPO-RHYTHMS. Then in 1908, he wrote to his friend Vera Kotlyarevskaya, drawing together what he then considered the three most significant strands of his burgeoning ‘system’:
What fascinates me most is the rhythm of feelings, the development of the emotion memory and the psycho-physiology of the creative process.110
By the time of the 1919/20 season at the Moscow Art Theatre, he had established a system of classes addressing
the feeling of rhythm not only in movement, but in the inner sensations and in sight, and so on. The process of sight is the raying out of spiritual juices that come from us and enter into us. These rayings out have movement, and once there is movement, there is also its tempo and its rhythm.111
(I look at these ‘rayings out’ in GRASP and COMMUNION below.)
Then again, Norris Houghton, in his famous descriptions of Stanislavsky’s work with the Moscow Art Theatre, tells how ten specific TEMPO-RHYTHMS were used in rehearsal, from (1) which was that of a man almost dead, to (2) that of a man weak with illness, through to (9) which was that of a person seeing his house burning, and (10) that of a person jumping out of a window.112
Given its evident importance in the development of Stanislavsky’s practices, what exactly is TEMPO-RHYTHM?
At its most simple, ‘tempo’ is the speed at which you carry out an action, and ‘rhythm’ is the intensity with which you carry it out.
For Stanislavsky, TEMPO-RHYTHM was the key to putting yourself into a state of genuine, creative excitement and, through that genuine excitement, arousing within yourself the relevant emotional state. It wasn’t just a question of speeding up or slowing down your breathing patterns or physical movements and then you’d suddenly feel emotional: TEMPO-RHYTHM also had the power to conjure up exciting images and memories. Finding those images and locating a character’s TEMPO-RHYTHM happens to a great extent when you start to physically embody the role and carry out the script’s ACTIONS on the rehearsal room floor. Though not exclusively . . .
You can actually fathom quite a lot about the necessary TEMPO-RHYTHM directly from what you see in the printed script. Just by looking at a page, you get a sense of how the basic rhythm of the dramatic ACTION unfolds. Take the abrupt lines of a Caryl Churchill script with lots of ‘/’s indicating where characters’ short speeches overlap, compared to a Shakespeare scene involving long monologues in iambic pentameters. All this visual information is incredibly useful, and it becomes fully embellished and embodied once you put the scene on its feet. Not forgetting, of course, that TEMPO-RHYTHM exists as vibrantly in PAUSES as it does in moments of ACTION. The Russian actor Vasily Toporkov, who worked with Stanislavsky in his later years, illuminates this point very lucidly in his description of a rehearsal:
[Stanislavsky:] ‘You are not standing in the correct rhythm!’
[Toporkov:] ‘To stand in rhythm! How – to stand in a rhythm! To walk, to dance, to sing in a rhythm – this I could understand, but to stand!’ [. . .]
[Stanislavsky:] . . . ‘To stand and watch for a mouse – that is one rhythm; to watch a tiger that is creeping up on you is quite another.’113
However . . .
Your inner (psychological) TEMPO-RHYTHM and your outer (physical) TEMPO-RHYTHM may not necessarily be the same. The waiter in a busy restaurant may be physically darting from table to table but, inside, his TEMPO-RHYTHM may be perfectly calm and measured. Meanwhile, the person sitting quietly at the bus-stop may have just received the most terrible news and her heart is in deep turmoil. I vividly remember the acute contradictions in my own inner–outer TEMPO-RHYTHMS after I’d just received the tragic news of the untimely death of a very close friend. As I stood on the crowded commuter train journeying home, I could barely contain the cauldron of sensations which bubbled inside me, yet my physical body was, to all appearances, as still as the jolting train would allow. Often in everyday life we hide immensely turbulent emotions behind a façade of coping strategies, yet these inner–outer counterpoints of TEMPO-RHYTHMs can be rich spoils for a psycho-physical actor.
That said, there are times when a fracture between your inner TEMPO-RHYTHM and your outer TEMPO-RHYTHM is very unhelpful and deeply disconcerting. This can happen, for example, when whatever you’re undergoing rhythmically as the actor contradicts the appropriate TEMPO-RHYTHM for your character. I experienced this uncomfortable reality when I played the Investment Banker in Hare’s The Permanent Way. The character was essentially cool and unflusterable, yet as I stood on the stage at the opening preview, I became horribly aware that my first-night excitement had raised my own inner TEMPO-RHYTHM to a pitch far more intense than that of the Investment Banker. Suddenly I felt a bizarre schizophrenia, as if the character was in front of me or to the side of me, but I certainly wasn’t ‘in the centre’ of it. Over the course of the first few shows, I was able to calm my own inner TEMPO-RHYTHM down to a pitch more suited to the character. Which was a huge relief – as my own performance experience then became far more pleasurable and my portrayal of the character decidedly more centred.
My experience isn’t uncommon: Stanislavsky analyses this first-night phenomenon by describing the actor as being at a personal tempo of Number 200, when the character is at a tempo of Number 20. If you can somehow bring yourself to a tempo of Number 100, you can at least begin to reintegrate yourself with the character.114
During his lifetime, Stanislavsky became ever more convinced that TEMPO-RHYTHM was an extremely powerful tool due to its influence over an actor’s emotions and inner sensations. By the time he had established the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS in his mature years, he stated categorically:
You cannot master the method of physical actions if you do not master rhythm.115
In brief:
•‘Tempo’ is the speed at which you execute an ACTION, and ‘rhythm’ is the intensity with which you execute it.
•TEMPO-RHYTHM is directly connected with your BREATHING and your arousal of EMOTION.
•You can often see the embryonic TEMPO-RHYTHM of a scene just by looking at the lay-out of a script on a page.
•TEMPO-RHYTHM exists even in stillness: standing watching a mouse is quite different from standing watching a tiger.
•Your inner TEMPO-RHYTHM might be very different from your physical TEMPO-RHYTHM.
•TEMPO-RHYTHM lies at the heart of the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS.
Having talked so much about the TEMPO-RHYTHM of feelings and the power of ACTION to arouse EMOTION, it’s time to turn our attention to an extremely provocative tool in Stanislavsky’s toolkit, yet one without which – as human beings, let alone actors – we wouldn’t fully function. It’s EMOTION MEMORY.
Emotion memory
EMOTION MEMORY is also known as ‘affective memory’, ‘emotion recall’, and ‘sense memory’. It’s one of the most controversial of Stanislavsky’s tools partly because it became the kernel of the ‘Method’ in America from the 1930s onwards under the directorship of Lee Strasberg in the Group Theatre and later at the Actors Studio, New York. Although plenty of stars of genius and acclaim have emerged from the Method school, EMOTION MEMORY has gained something of a bad reputation for seemingly spawning a whole host of actors with psychoses and neuroses. But there are plenty of healthy and effortless ways of applying EMOTION MEMORY, which illustrate how it’s a natural and vital part of any imaginative and creative process.
Stanislavsky originally came across the term ‘affective memory’ in two works by the French psychologist Théodule Ribot, which were entitled Les Maladies de la Mémoire and Les Maladies de la Volonté, and which were published in Russian in 1900. Basically, Ribot discovered that those patients who thought about positive experiences during their illness recovered more quickly than those who allowed their illness to take its course. Ribot also discovered that memories of past experiences might not be instantly accessible to the conscious mind, but if you stimulated one of the senses – be it taste, smell, touch, sound or sight – you could provoke your memory in unexpected ways.
Stanislavsky was struck by the power that past-tense memory has on present-tense experience, as well as by the power of the senses over the memory itself. And this is very important to remember: EMOTION MEMORY doesn’t mean you have to dredge up the dark times in your life when you experienced grief or disappointment or jealousy or hatred. Or even the good times when you experienced excitement, love or pride. Powerful emotions can be stimulated as much by the smell of your boyfriend’s aftershave, the feel of a velvet glove, the taste of a pickled gherkin, a photograph of a concentration camp victim, or the vibrational rumblings of a didgeridoo. Your senses are a direct avenue to your IMAGINATION and your EMOTION MEMORY, and they’re generally pretty reliable.
Another thing we should be clear about is that EMOTION MEMORY is natural and unavoidable. We draw upon it all the time in our everyday transactions. The decisions I make in each moment of my life are based on my memories of what has gone before and my imaginings of what may happen in the future. So, I don’t walk down that particular alleyway, because I remember once a big black mastiff leapt out and scared the living daylights out of me, and I imagine it might happen again. Yet I do sit down for ten hours at a time at my laptop and write this book, because I remember the response to my first book, and I imagine the future joy of clarifying ideas through these pages and sharing thoughts with other practitioners.
These memories and imaginings affect my present-tense decisions. I’ve had the experience of fear in my life, which – courtesy of my memory – alerts me to the fact that I don’t enjoy the pounding heart and sweaty palms provoked by the barking mastiff. Ergo: I find a different way home. I’ve also had the experience of success in my life, which – courtesy of my imagination – I can inflate into the idea of future acclaim and reward. Ergo: I carry on writing this book! And thus, my EMOTION MEMORY and IMAGINATION work together continuously to shape my present-tense decisions, by bridging and merging with my past and my future. This is how we operate as human beings. And we simply can’t escape the power that EMOTION MEMORY – or ‘affective memory’ or ‘sense memory’ or whatever else we choose to call it – has over us at every moment of our lives.
And it should be celebrated, not feared. For Stanislavsky, a colourful EMOTION MEMORY is your ‘store-room’ as an actor. It’s piled high with riches from all sorts of places. Not only from your own experiences, but also from your communication with other people, seeing how they live in Madrid or Minnesota, Kabul or Kyoto, Outer Hebrides, Inner Mongolia, the Australian outback or the African inland. It’s supplemented by visiting the Hermitage Museum and the British Library and the Uffizi Gallery, by watching Warner Brothers movies and Sky TV. It’s a rich resource that, on the one hand, can enable you to find more out about your own inclinations and emotional predilections and, on the other hand, can help you access the initial trigger or ‘lure’ into a character which we’ve already discussed.
But why might EMOTION MEMORY be useful when you’re embodying a role?
First of all, EMOTION MEMORY can put you right at the centre of a dramatic situation. Just like THE MAGIC ‘IF’, it can turn you from being an objective ‘listener’ into the subjective ‘doer’. As Stanislavsky describes it:
The emotions of a reader or a hearer differ in quality from those of an onlooker or principal in [a tragic] event.
An actor has to deal with all these types of emotional material. He works it over and adjusts it into the needs of the person whom he portrays . . .
[Thus sympathy] might be transformed into direct reaction . . . From the very moment when the actor feels that change take place in him he becomes an active principal in the play of life – real human feelings are born in him – often this transformation from human sympathy into real feelings of the person in the part occurs spontaneously.116
When it doesn’t occur spontaneously, you have to work a little harder. This usually means tapping into your EMOTION MEMORY ‘store-room’ to find a situation from your own life which is analogous to that of the character.
And this is where the terrain becomes a little controversial. So, let’s go back to Macbeth. The idea is not that in playing Macbeth you recall a time in your life when you killed a king, as the chances are not many of us have had that particular experience. Rather, you find the broader brushstrokes of connection with the character, which then take you into the depths of the character’s ‘realm’. Stanislavsky provides a clear example of what he means, as quoted by Gorchakov in Stanislavsky Directs: he’s giving notes to a young actress, Titova, who is exploring the role of a prostitute during a rehearsal at the Moscow Art Theatre:
‘Everything is very sincere, touching, and good, in touch with what you are doing, Titova. You don’t have to reveal any of your actress’ secrets . . . [but tell] me just one thing: what were you thinking about when Jacques left you alone on the square?’
‘I was thinking, Konstantin Sergeyevich, that for the last year whatever I do in the theatre doesn’t come off and if I don’t do better this time you will throw me out of the Moscow Art Theatre.’
Stanislavsky turned to everyone: ‘Please listen to this attentively. This is a very important statement. It was intuition that put Titova on the right road to work. She didn’t imagine herself as a prostitute, but she imagined very vividly what would happen to her as an actress if I threw her out of the theatre. As a result, she gave us an impression of a woman in a most desperate situation. The right intuition gave birth to all her actions. What were you thinking about in the following moments?’
‘I didn’t care what happened to me afterward.’
‘That’s exactly what I felt when I watched your acting. And I want you all to remember how the right movement and right external actions follow from the correct organic state. Now, Titova, please don’t think that when you’re rehearsing next time you must remember and repeat mechanically what you did today. If you do that, you will have only the external form. Each time you have to repeat this scene, think only of the personal equivalent that can generate this emotion in you . . .
‘We will not throw you out, Titova, but you must always believe in this now, and you must imagine each time in a different way what would happen to you if this really took place.’117
There’s a whole heap of things to be unpacked from this quotation.
First of all, we see how Titova uses a range of tools. She begins with her ‘lure’ – called here her ‘intuition’ (‘It was intuition which put Titova on the right road to work’): her intuitive ‘lure’ helps her to empathise with the character’s sorry state. She then shifts to EMOTION MEMORY as she reflects on the past (‘I was thinking . . . that for the last year whatever I do in the theatre doesn’t come off’). She then combines her EMOTION MEMORY with IMAGINATION as she contemplates what she considers to be an almost inevitable future (‘if I don’t do better this time, you will throw me out of the Moscow Art Theatre’). She then adds a further imaginative impulse with THE MAGIC ‘IF’ (‘she imagined very vividly what would happen to her as an actress if I threw her out of the theatre’). These imaginative tools then propelled her into ACTION. Those ACTIONS then generated genuine feelings, thus completing the cycle from the past-tense EMOTION MEMORY to the future-tense IMAGINATION to the present-tense experience of an EMOTION.
It’s important to note that Stanislavsky and Titova are in rehearsal, and indeed this current chapter of The Toolkit is about ‘Rehearsal Processes’. In a good rehearsal process, any tools should be used to find your inroad into the character, according to the genre and style of the script. Today it might be EMOTION MEMORY, tomorrow it might be IMAGINATION, on Wednesday it might be physical ACTIONS. The rehearsal room is your laboratory: you should dare to try anything, whether it works or not. Stanislavsky reckoned that only 10% of what you do in the rehearsal room remains in your final performance. So let’s use that laboratory – and experiment! I stress this because it’s important that we don’t extract particular sections from any of Stanislavsky’s writings and say, ‘Aha, see! – This is how it should be done!’ Stanislavsky’s account of Titova’s process is just one example: a different actress might have found it quite easy to imagine exactly what she would do ‘if’ she were a prostitute, and her IMAGINATION might have been avid enough to conjure up warm and creative sensations without using the tool of EMOTION MEMORY.
A final point to draw from this quotation is the fact that the same memory won’t necessarily work every time:
Do not count on always recovering the same impression. Tomorrow something quite different may appear in its place. Be thankful for that and do not expect the other. If you learn how to be receptive to these recurring memories, then the new ones as they form will be more capable of stirring your feelings repeatedly. Your soul in turn will be more responsive and will react with new warmth to parts of your role whose appeal had worn thin from constant repetition.
. . . On the other hand, don’t spend your time chasing after an inspiration that once chanced your way. It is as unrecoverable as yesterday . . . Bend your efforts to creating a new and fresh inspiration for today.118
If you’re working psycho-physically, this isn’t a problem: you can hop from one stimulus to another to another with equal affectivity. It may well be that a certain EMOTION MEMORY works perfectly well for six rehearsals in a row; then suddenly something completely unexpected will supersede it, and you’ll find yourself open to a whole new range of images and impressions and memories. Keep yourself alert, keep yourself fresh, keep yourself responsive – and then you stand a chance of an unexpected emotional INSPIRATION ambushing you.
As we work through The Toolkit, you should feel quite free with the tools. They can be used in the way in which you need them, and at times you don’t need to use them at all. Sometimes in rehearsal, we find we just get on a creative roll, and if that’s the case, don’t mess! As one of Stanislavsky’s actresses, Solovyova, advised:
We use ‘emotional recall’ or ‘affective memory’ when our inspiration [fails], or in Stanislavsky’s expression, when ‘Apollo does not answer readily’. But if your intuition gives you what you need, you don’t have to use affective memory. Stanislavsky used to say, ‘If the part comes to you spontaneously, you don’t have to go through affective memory. Just thank Apollo and act!’ . . . I never knew what key would open the door to the heart of a part for me. Would it be through affective memory or would I feel the part from the first reading of the play? Seeing myself in the same situation would I have the same feelings, the same understanding and response to the character I was to portray – finding the same feeling in my heart? Or would I visualise it so clearly that it would awaken in me the necessary feelings?119
Solovyova is maverick, as indeed we should all be. As I said in the Introduction, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
However . . .
We shouldn’t take short-cuts, either. One of the key criticisms of EMOTION MEMORY is that, if you’re always trawling your own memory store-room for material, you’ll reduce all your characters to variations of your own personality. Stanislavsky had a very clear response to this argument:
The musical scale has only seven notes, the sun’s spectrum only seven primary colours, yet the combinations of those notes in music and those colours in paintings are not to be numbered. The same must be said of our fundamental emotions, which are preserved in our affective (emotion) memory, just as things seen by us in the external world are preserved in our intellectual memory: the number of these fundamental emotions in our own inner experience is limited, but the shadings and combinations are as numerous as the combinations created out of our external experience by the activity of our imagination.120
Your individual EMOTION MEMORY supplies you with the ‘primary colours’, but your IMAGINATION then mixes those primary colours into an endless palette. This means you have the potential to play a mighty myriad of roles. Which gives us another equation: Emotion Memory + Imagination = the breadth of the dramatic canon at your fingertips.
So how do you activate your EMOTION MEMORY?
Stanislavsky offers five clear steps, which I’ve adapted here.121
1.You have to put yourself in a sufficiently relaxed and playful psychological ‘place’ (your INNER CREATIVE STATE) to access your emotions. He suggests that this means knowing your character’s biography in as much detail as you know your own. So keep adding new details to that biography – even after the play is up and running, or the movie’s started filming, so that it becomes as deep and textured and varied as your IMAGINATION will allow.
2.Then you have to define the exact EMOTION for each bit, not being afraid to stumble on an ugly one. So it might be love, jealousy, anger, resentment, delight – whatever. Enjoy playing the ugly EMOTIONS as much as relishing the refined ones.
3.You then go beneath the TEXT to see what the particular EMOTION is really about. The example that Stanislavsky gives is that ‘egotism is first of all pity for oneself’.
4.Having defined the nature of the EMOTION, you then search for the ACTIONS which will arouse that EMOTION. ‘This is the bait which the feeling will rise to.’ And this is what the process of rehearsing is all about: finding the physical ACTIONS to ‘bait’ your EMOTIONS. (Yet again, we’re back to ACTION.)
5.Finally, once you’ve found the way to arouse the EMOTION, you then have to know how to control it. As a creative artist, you have to be the master of your materials, and not their slave.
While I don’t for one minute suggest that following these five steps will lead to you having your EMOTION MEMORY at your utter beck and call, there’s certainly a lot to be said for points 1, 4 and 5. (1) The correct ‘psychological place’ or INNER CREATIVE STATE is incredibly useful. (4) Accessing EMOTIONS through ACTIONS is sound advice. And (5) being able to control your EMOTIONS is absolutely crucial. After all, we’re professional actors, not patients in a therapy clinic, so once you’ve found the ‘right bait’ to arouse your EMOTIONS, you’ve got to be able to work with them creatively and appropriately. Stanislavsky was very clear about this:
[The actor] must have the willpower to control these feelings, to stop their action when it is necessary, or to change them.122
If you’re a psychologically healthy artist, I don’t really see that there’s a problem. Especially if you adopt Michael Chekhov’s image of holding your EMOTIONS metaphorically in the palm of your hand. There, they’re connected to you via the umbilical cord of your arm, but it’s up to you whether you offer them up or hold them back, whether you metaphorically open your palm or close your fingers over them. You’re in control of them, they’re not in control of you.
This degree of control is even more vital in the strict conditions of performance. Although this chapter is called ‘Rehearsal Processes’, let’s look briefly at how EMOTION MEMORY might be used and controlled in performance. By way of illustration, I’ll draw upon two working examples, one from my own experience and one from that of actor, Miles Anderson.
Anderson has played numerous emotionally charged roles on stage, film and television. Among them, two of the most notable are the volatile, coke-snorting, political publicist Roger O’Neill in the BBC drama House of Cards and Elizabeth Sawyer’s familiar, Dog, in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Witch of Edmonton. I was therefore intrigued to discover that, over the years, he’s found the use of any personal EMOTION MEMORY when he’s performing a role can actually distance him from the character’s inner life, rather than drawing him into it. For Anderson, the best use of EMOTION MEMORY in performance is to tap into all the relevant work he has already done in rehearsal, rather than to dredge up any personal cargo.
To this end, he uses rehearsal time to get right inside the body and psyche of a role, to such an extent that he knows exactly what makes the character tick, laugh, cry, emote. In other words, he builds up an emotional store-room for the character, which he can then access more or less at will:
I have to have a ‘thin skin’ in rehearsal, as if there’s a bubble of emotion inside my chest, which responds to whatever the character’s going through. It’s also like having antennae everywhere, going from your knees, toes, fingers.123
Once he’s actually playing the role – on screen or stage – Anderson’s goal is to make an imaginative connection with the character’s GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES and engage in the drama’s ACTION with a full-blooded commitment, putting any personal cargo temporarily on the backburner. He keeps the ‘thin skin’, while the emotional bubble remains inflated and the antennae are tingling, but it’s all in response to whatever’s going on in performance.
Given the ease with which Anderson can tap into his emotional reservoir both in front of a camera and a live audience, his inner palette is clearly very rich. Yet it’s curious to discover just how little of that emotional activity stems from the recall of autobiographical experiences, and just how much of it arises from his imaginative exploration of the role.
My own use of EMOTION MEMORY was significantly challenged when I played the Second Bereaved Mother in The Permanent Way. To some extent, I embarked on a similar journey in rehearsal to the one described by Anderson: I took time to investigate the mother’s own psychology so that, when I was in performance, I could imaginatively enter her inner ‘realm’. However, my major challenge was how to access those powerful feelings every night for a total of 10½ months.
I discovered that my attitude to EMOTION MEMORY altered dramatically during that time. Over the course of those 10½ months, I used all manner of stimuli to provoke the relevant EMOTIONS, depending on how I felt each night. I usually spent some time before going on stage, preparing an appropriate INNER CREATIVE STATE; however, whatever I CONCENTRATED MY ATTENTION on during that prep-time varied from night to night. Sometimes I connected imaginatively with what the real-life mother had been through. Sometimes I recalled my visit to the memorial site at Ladbroke Grove. Sometimes I imagined how I’d feel if I suddenly lost someone whom I loved dearly without having had the chance to say goodbye to them or even to see the body once they’d died. Sometimes I lingered on something I’d seen on the news. Sometimes I used Ananyev’s ‘In-in-in-out’ BREATHING pattern for a minute or so (see BREATHING above). Sometimes I simply contemplated the darkness of the backstage area. One night I noticed the emergency sign with the outline of a person running away with a flame at their heels, and in my IMAGINATION I saw the victims of the train crash trying in vain to escape from the blazing inferno. Sometimes I thought about a myriad of sad things that had happened to me in my own chequered life. Basically, I opened myself to whatever stimuli wanted to flood my mind each night. I didn’t censor myself – and it didn’t really bother me whether the thoughts were personal EMOTION MEMORIES, imaginative provocations, physical sensations, or action-based EMOTIONS stemming from the events portrayed on stage. I simply developed a kind of inner monitor over those 10½ months – an inner sounding-board for my sense of TRUTH – which knew when an appropriate INNER CREATIVE STATE had percolated my body and I could then enter the stage in that INNER CREATIVE STATE, ready to tell my character’s story.
There were even times when I relied on nothing but pure technique, when my own emotional reservoirs felt arid and dry. On those occasions, I simply re-enacted – as accurately and with as much commitment as I could – the tiny physical ACTIONS of the mother whom I’d witnessed break down in front of me: how her voice faltered, how long she paused before talking again, how her vocal pitch cracked, how she boldly endeavoured to regain her composure as quickly as possible by brushing away her tears, straightening her back and munching on a chocolate digestive. If I succeeded in getting the tiny physical details accurate, then more often than not, the emotion-wells sprang forth again.
I began to understand over those 10½ months, that PSYCHO-PHYSICALITY really can work from the inside out or the outside in: I could appeal to my EMOTION MEMORIES and my IMAGINATION in order to create the desired INNER CREATIVE STATE, or I could externally mimic the physical ACTIONS of a person in deep distress, which in turn would invoke the EMOTIONS I was seeking. Both usually worked as far as the audience were concerned and, therefore, both seemed to be perfectly legitimate strategies. After all, it’s the audience who have to feel the real emotions, not necessarily the actors: you can be weeping and wailing as hard as you like, but if your audience is left feeling ‘cool and impartial’, then you’ve hardly fulfilled your OBJECTIVE.
What emerges with The Toolkit is that not only will different actors use different tools, but different actors will use the same tool in different ways. And that’s exactly how it should be. A toolkit is there to be used as best suits you.
In brief:
•EMOTION MEMORY is also known as ‘affective memory’, ‘emotion recall’ and ‘sense memory’.
•EMOTION MEMORY works inextricably with IMAGINATION, influencing all your daily decisions by bridging your past-tense memories and your future-tense fantasies.
•EMOTION MEMORY is your store-room as an actor, coming from your own experiences and supplemented by your ‘second-hand’ experiences as gained from museums, books, galleries, films, television, etc.
•EMOTION MEMORY can shift you from the position of an objective ‘listener’ to that of a subjective ‘doer’: all you have to do is find something analogous from your own life which links you to the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES of the character.
•EMOTION MEMORY works with IMAGINATION to mix the ‘primary colours’ of your life experience into a whole palette of possibilities, from which you can construct a character and break the limits of your own autobiography.
•You’ll find that the same EMOTION MEMORY won’t work for you every time, so you need to be open and playful to all manner of stimuli.
•Your memory of what you discovered about the character in rehearsal can be just as useful a springboard in performance as any autobiographical stimuli; in other words, the EMOTION MEMORY of your rehearsal discoveries can be just as stimulating as any EMOTION MEMORY from your own life.
•EMOTION MEMORY is inevitably used in correlation with other tools including IMAGINATION and THE MAGIC ‘IF’, to assist you when you need it, and not to be used when you don’t need it.
Having examined the power of EMOTION MEMORY and its close dialogue with IMAGINATION, it’s worth addressing Stanislavsky’s attitude to EMOTION per se.
Emotion
EMOTION is not so much a tool as an intrinsic part of the ‘system’. Just as you can’t perform without a body, you can’t act in a truly vibrant manner without your EMOTIONS being drafted into your psycho-physical work at some level or another.
So what is an emotion? Many fine and accessible books exist on the subject, some of which argue that EMOTIONS are physiological responses to situations, including sweaty palms, increased heart rate and muscular tension. Others argue that EMOTIONS are cognitive interpretations of situations: Am I in danger or am I safe? But here and now, we need to be clear about the parameters of what it is that we’re considering. Often the word ‘emotional’ can be alienating, as images of weeping at weddings and sobbing at sad movies spring to mind; however, this is not the way in which, as actors, we can most usefully approach the notion of ‘being emotional’. We’re talking about something much more nuanced, something which appears in upbeat manifestations as well as melancholy ones, and the phrase ‘being emotional’ can apply equally to a composer or a jazz singer, a playwright or even a lighting designer, as it can to an actor. ‘Being emotional’ is really about being creatively responsive and openly playful.
Whether an EMOTION is considered physiological or cognitive, the most important question for us as actors is arguably: what causes it?
The simplest answer is: an EMOTION arises when something or someone stops us from getting what we want. Or when something or someone makes it easier for us to get what we want.
If I do get what I want, I experience positive emotions. If I don’t get what I want, I experience negative emotions. Here’s a simple scenario: I’m walking to the sorting office to pick up an important package, and there’s half an hour to go before the sorting office shuts. My mobile rings: it’s my boyfriend, saying he’s locked himself out, can I go back home and let him in? Damn . . .
Alternatively: a car horn toots and it’s my boyfriend: he’s spotted me walking along the street and he’s offering to give me a lift to the sorting office. Hoorah!
In the first instance, my boyfriend’s behaviour (his COUNTER-OBJECTIVE) blocks the achievement of my OBJECTIVE: it serves as an obstacle. In the second instance, his behaviour (still, in principle, a COUNTER-OBJECTIVE) accelerates the achievement of my OBJECTIVE: it serves as a facilitator. Each situation produces a different emotional response in me, ranging from the negative to the positive.
The magnitude of my emotional response will depend on how important it is for me to achieve my OBJECTIVE. The higher the stakes, the greater will be the impact on me when my circumstances are changed.
So: if my OBJECTIVE is ‘I want to pick up my passport from the post office, because I’m off to Japan in the morning’, the consequences of achieving it or otherwise will have a greater significance for me than if my OBJECTIVE is ‘I want to pick up a book that I ordered off the Amazon website’.
The emotional weight of my experience will also be altered if my boyfriend’s COUNTER-OBJECTIVE has higher stakes.
So: if my mobile rings and my boyfriend has not only locked himself out but he’s also left a chip pan on the stove which might catch fire, the stakes are suddenly raised: if I go back home to let him in, I risk losing the opportunity to collect my passport and jeopardise the whole trip to Japan. If I’m just collecting the book that I ordered from Amazon, my emotional response to the change in my path won’t be so great: ‘Hey, big deal, I can pick up the book another time.’
Maybe it’s not a chip pan on the stove. Maybe our baby is locked in the house on her own – up go the emotional stakes still further.
There’s one more thing to consider, and that’s my boyfriend’s PERSPECTIVE towards my OBJECTIVE. If his PERSPECTIVE towards my trip to Japan is laissez-faire, he won’t think twice about asking me to go back home and let him in. If he thinks the trip is as important as I do, he won’t think twice about trying to find another way of getting back into the house. It’s a question of whether my OBJECTIVE is more important than his COUNTER-OBJECTIVE – both in my eyes and in his. Of course, if we add in the home-alone baby, I guess the passport’s a goner!
Let’s recap:
•EMOTIONS arise when something or someone either stops you from achieving or enables you to achieve your OBJECTIVE.
•The more you need to achieve your OBJECTIVE, the greater will be your emotional response either when you’re blocked in your pursuit or when that pursuit is made easier.
•The PERSPECTIVE of the other person towards your OBJECTIVE versus their need to pursue their own COUNTER-OBJECTIVE will also affect the nature of your emotional response.
So where does Stanislavsky fit in to all this EMOTION talk?
EMOTION was a doubled-edged sword for Stanislavsky. He wanted actors to realise that they couldn’t rely on a beautiful voice and a versatile body to do their job for them: they also needed an accessible emotional reservoir. Yet he was fully aware of the risks and pitfalls involved in using EMOTIONS:
The more [an emotion] is violated, the more it resists and throws out its invisible buffers before it, and these, like hands, do not allow emotion to approach that part of the rôle which is too difficult for it . . . And the more the buffers are developed, the harder it is for emotion to appear when needed and the more necessity there is for old stencils and stagy craftsmanship. The more stamps and staginess, the farther the emotion runs from them.124
I’ve often heard actors bemoan the fact they can’t cry in performance. Somehow they’ve allowed their emotional buffers to develop and they find themselves chasing their own EMOTIONS like frightened sheep. But why do we put so much attention on crying? Maybe it’s because tears seem to be physiological ‘proof’ that the actor has achieved the desired EMOTION (though most actors will reach for the tear stick on the twentieth shoot of the day . . .) And there are certainly other EMOTIONS with equally challenging physiological manifestations, such as blushing with embarrassment or blanching with fury. But because (partly due to skin pigmentation of course) not everybody does blush or blanch – though arguably everyone has the capacity to cry – a good deal of emphasis is laid upon the actor’s ability to weep.
In fact, all EMOTIONS are complex – laughing, crying, blushing, blanching: they aren’t just simple primary colours. Stanislavsky himself was acutely aware of their complexity:
Every passion is a complex of things experienced emotionally, it is the sum total of a variety of different feelings, experiences, states. All these component parts are not only numerous and varied but they are also often contradictory.125
And we shouldn’t be afraid of those contradictions: contradictions are good. If your character appears to behave in one way during Scene 3 and another way during Scene 5, then celebrate it and develop it and allow those contradictions to flourish. After all, we know that the LOGIC AND SEQUENCE of the EMOTIONS aren’t like the mathematical logic of reason.
And this is where rehearsal time is crucial when you’re embodying your role. It’s important to use rehearsal time to explore your emotional palette and see how you can mix the myriad ‘colours’ to create your characters. It’s the only way to find out what you’re made of. After all, Stanislavsky believed that:
There lies in the nature of every gifted actor the seed of every human feeling and sensation. One only needs to find the right bait to arouse him.126
The rehearsal period is the very time for finding that bait – through your ACTIONS and interactions with other characters. So be daring in your explorations, not dormant. Be brave in your rehearsals, not boring. In fact, you might even say the fundamental reason for working with EMOTION MEMORY and EMOTION is to get to know your inner palette, so you’re free to be the master of your own emotional repertoire. As Stanislavsky put it:
When you know the inclinations of your own nature, it is not difficult to adapt them to imaginary circumstances.127
Once you start to look at EMOTIONS and EMOTION MEMORY in this light, they’re both good fun. Using them is your chance to get those creative juices flowing, rather than feeling you have to dredge up lots of dark, mysterious sensations. Because when you’ve found your ‘lure’ into the character, your main EMOTION – both in rehearsal and performance – becomes the actual joy of creative play. As we saw with PSYCHO-PHYSICALITY, simply being on the stage or in front of the camera – embodying this role and dialoguing with these actors, and moving this audience to laughter or tears – is a hugely emotional experience in its own right. So EMOTION doesn’t have to be dark and psychotic. We can take immense pleasure in laughing and crying, expressing anger, jealousy, love and hate, not to mention incandescent joy. All this energy can imbue our embodiment of the character with great artistic dimension.
*
Here are the tools we’ve covered so far in ‘Embodying the Role’:
•truth (which we strive for in any performance)
Followed by:
•imagination
•the Magic ‘If’
•observation
These three help us in our pursuit of a sense of TRUTH.
Then:
These four develop our PSYCHO-PHYSICALITY by coordinating and harmonising our inner sensations and outer expressions.
All of these tools offer us some psycho-physical means of accessing our own resources and making a personal connection with a TEXT.
It’s time now to turn more directly to some concrete issues of character and characterisation, as we continue the complex and fascinating task of ‘embodying the role’. There are four more tools which help us add textures to our characters. They are:
•inner psychological drives
•heroic tension
•emploi
•objects
TRAY 9
FOUR TOOLS FOR TEXTURING A CHARACTER
Inner psychological drives (see Preface)
Stanislavsky devotes a whole chapter of An Actor Prepares to the INNER PSYCHOLOGICAL DRIVES: although the chapter is one of the shortest in the book, the INNER PSYCHOLOGICAL DRIVES are actually some of the most useful tools in the whole toolkit. He describes them as:
three impelling movers in our psychic life, three masters who play on the instrument of our souls.128
And those ‘three masters’ are our ‘thought-centre’, our ‘emotion-centre’ and our ‘action-centre’, and they intricately interconnect throughout the course of our daily lives, as well as in the construction of a character.
First of all, our ‘thought-centre’ creates mental pictures about the character.
Through their potential to ‘lure’ us towards the character, those images stir our ‘emotion-centre’.
As our ‘emotion-centre’ is stirred, we find ourselves driven towards doing certain things to make manifest that character, as our ‘action-centre’ kicks into work.
We’ve touched upon some of these ideas already through the tools of IMAGINATION (linked to our ‘thought-centre’), OBJECTIVES (linked to our ‘emotion-centre’) and ACTIONS (clearly linked to our ‘action-centre’). Each of these three ‘drives’ is very complex and very exciting.
Let’s take the ‘thought-centre’ first. Imagine that physically it’s associated with your head: we usually associate our thoughts with our head, so this makes sense. The ‘thought-centre’ operates on a whole array of paradoxes, as your thoughts can comprise both wild fantasies and mathematical logic, all-consuming daydreams and philosophical reason. In other words, a thought-centred person could be as imaginative as Walter Mitty or as scientifically-gifted as Einstein, an inspired artist or a leading statistician.
Imagine that the ‘emotion-centre’ is physically associated with your solar plexus, which is the nucleus of nerve endings located anatomically between your stomach and your spine. You can actually feel that this area is your ‘emotion-centre’: we talk about butterflies in the stomach, or being sick with rage, or losing your appetite when you’re passionately in love. In fact, it’s been scientifically proven that there are more nerve endings in your stomach than in your brain: in other words, more processing of information takes place in the stomach area than in the head. Yet the intelligence of this area of the body is completely underestimated by most people who are inclined to think our rational brains do most of the decision-making in our lives. As with the ‘thought-centre’, the ‘emotion-centre’ is also an extremely complex centre because it houses the whole range of emotional responses which comprise your inner landscape from jealousy to delight to rage to excitement to anguish.
Imagine that the ‘action-centre’ is associated physically with your pelvic area: in many respects, this centre is the equivalent of the base chakra in eastern meditational practices. That said, the potential of the ‘action-centre’ courses throughout your whole body: after all, it’s through the actions of your body that your thoughts and feelings can be manifested in the world, as I touched upon in the discussion of PSYCHO-PHYSICALITY. If we didn’t have a body, we would have no means of making tangible the most ingenious of thoughts or the most textured of emotional responses. Like the ‘thought-centre’ and the ‘emotion-centre’, the ‘action-centre’ is also a very complex centre in that it houses both unbridled sexual energy and restrained formal etiquette. This is a curious combination. It’s fairly evident this centre would have some sort of sexual energy given its predominant location in the groin. The idea of formal etiquette is a little harder to make sense of, but if you think about it, any ritual – from shaking hands to brushing teeth to starting the ignition of your car – has a kind of active component to it which doesn’t necessarily involve very much thought or emotion: you just do it. These kinds of rituals are pure ACTION, with their impulse stemming directly from the ‘action-centre’. Here’s a quick example to illustrate the ‘action-centre’ impulse behind most etiquette:
Imagine we’re at a drinks party and I meet you for the first time, so I shake hands with you, perhaps saying, ‘Hi, my name’s Bella. Pleased to meet you, John.’ As we shake hands, we don’t need to invest a huge amount of emotion or thought in our gesture: it’s just an action, a ritual, a formality. I’m giving you my name, you’re giving me yours: it’s a simple exchange of information to facilitate any further interaction.
Imagine we’re at the party again, but this time suppose you’re my all-time favourite actor. My physical action is the same as in the first instance, in that I simply shake your hand, but now my energy impulse stems from my ‘emotion-centre’: ‘Oh, my God! You’re Johnny Depp, aren’t you? How fantastic to meet you!’ This is no longer pure etiquette (i.e. pure ACTION): there’s now an emotional investment.
Now let’s suppose we had a big row last night about whether Stanislavsky is better than Mamet and we’re meeting again this morning; we tentatively shake hands, sheepishly trying to fathom each other’s light-of-day responses. ‘Hi, Johnny . . . how are you doing? Okay . . . ? Yeah, me too, I’m fine, I’m okay . . .’ Again all we do is shake hands as we did in both the first and the second instances, but this time my energy is coming from my ‘thought-centre’ as I ask myself the inner questions, ‘Can I shake hands? Is he still angry? Will he reject me? Will he accept me?’
Thus you can see that simple ritual (i.e. the first of these three scenarios) is essentially an ‘action-centre’ impulse. And I’m sure we all know that wild sexual chemistry is an ‘action-centre’ impulse too.
It’s incredibly useful when you’re embodying a role to figure out whether a character is predominantly led by their brains (‘thought-centre’), feelings (‘emotion-centre’) or involuntary impulses (‘action-centre’). All three INNER PSYCHOLOGICAL DRIVES interconnect on a very rapid-response level, but each of us can probably answer the question, ‘Are we fundamentally thoughtful? Emotional? Or action-driven?’ I often find I flit between the three: after days of working on a book (‘thought-centre’), I want to do nothing but paint walls or plant broccoli (‘action-centre’). After working on a role for a long time (‘emotion-centre’), I’m very happy reading a good book (‘thought-centre’) or going to the gym (‘action-centre’). If one centre dominates our lives for too long, we soon feel the internal fragmentation, whether we consciously process it or not.
Let’s take Chekhov’s three girls in Act 1 of Three Sisters: Olga keeps herself continually busy, marking books and preparing Irina’s name-day party, so she doesn’t have to think or feel: her ‘action-centre’ dominates her behaviour. Masha does very little other than malinger in the dark mood which she brings into the scene until suddenly her ‘emotion-centre’ is stimulated by the arrival of Vershinin. Irina is head-based, always fantasising about a future that might come into being, with images of working hard, living in Moscow, being in love with the right man: her ‘thought-centre’ dominates her behaviour.
Obviously, the division isn’t entirely that cut-and-dried, as each INNER PSYCHOLOGICAL DRIVES stimulates elements of the other two, but you can test your intuitive responses to a role by asking the questions: ‘What would this character do in this circumstance? What would this character feel about this? What would this character think about this? How much of a delay would there be between the emotional reaction and the physical response? Would they think long and hard before they did anything? Would they do something first and consider the consequences later? Would their emotions obscure their thoughts and colour their actions?’
To some extent we can take it back to the Action – Reaction – Decision sequence. Is there a long or short time-lapse between the character’s Reaction-and-Decision and ensuing Action? In other words, does my Action fly like a dart either into your head (provoking lots of thoughts and questions) or into your gut (provoking a rapid emotional response)? How quickly do you respond physically to my Action: i.e. how rapidly does your body kick in? Alternatively do you process your gut Reaction through your ‘thought-centre’ so you can make a very considered and deliberate Decision about your ensuing Action? There’s a myriad of combinations of responses and sequences, all of which can help you colour and texture a character.
And these kinds of questions need not apply only to dialogue. The INNER PSYCHOLOGICAL DRIVES can be particularly useful when you’re working on a soliloquy, as you’re never just talking to yourself or just talking to the audience: there’s always some kind of inner dialogue going on between your thoughts, your feelings and your actions. Let’s take Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ speech from Act III, Scene 1. He begins in his ‘thought-centre’ as he contemplates, ‘To be or not to be – that is the question’: in other words, he’s asking himself: ‘Shall I live or shall I kill myself? That’s my dilemma.’ Killing oneself is a physical action. So Hamlet’s thoughts are battling with his body: should he use his own body to snuff out his own life force? And before long, his emotions start pouring forth as he thinks about all the dreams and fantasies (which are thought-based activities) that might haunt him. (‘For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/When we have shuffled off this mortal coil/Must give us pause.’) The soliloquy is an immense and complex conversation between all his INNER PSYCHOLOGICAL DRIVES, ending with the realisation that his dreams and fears may actually curb his actions:
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. [My emphasis]
Furthermore, it’s curious to note that this intellectual, bookish man is seen to feign madness – or genuinely become mad – the implication being that his ‘thought-centre’ goes from the rational to right-off-the-scale.
Once you’ve located the predominant INNER PSYCHOLOGICAL DRIVE of your character, it’s then very useful to consider the opposites:
I’ve said that the ‘thought-centre’ houses both mathematical logic and wild fantasy, so if your character is very rational, where in the script might they be seen to be very imaginative?
I’ve said that the ‘emotion-centre’ houses all sorts of complex responses, so if your character is emotionally very volatile, where might they be seen to be emotionally restrained?
I’ve said that the ‘action-centre’ is both etiquette and sexuality or impulsiveness, so if your character seems to be very formal or detached, where might they be seen to be very spontaneous or sexual?
The energy behind the opposites of each INNER PSYCHOLOGICAL DRIVE is incredibly useful, and the dynamic between such opposites was called by Stanislavsky HEROIC TENSION.
Heroic tension
There’s a wonderful term in psychology called ‘enantiodromia’ – the Law of the Pendulum. Just as a fully working pendulum will swing the same number of degrees each way – i.e. 45° to the left and 45° to the right, not 27° to the left and 92° to the right – so too will our psychologies. If I have the capacity to like you a little bit, I also have the capacity to dislike you a little bit. If I have the capacity to love you passionately, I also have the capacity to hate you inexorably. This is a great idea to bear in mind when you’re embodying a role in order to stop you from opting for the obvious choices. It’s what Stanislavsky meant by HEROIC TENSION,129 which is a little tool that you find in the part of your toolkit with those odd screws and miscellaneous bolts, but it’s invaluable – as those odd screws always are.
Finding the tension of contrasts in your role can be very creatively energising. It allows for contradictions to co-exist, which is vital, since – as we’ve considered before – we mustn’t feel that LOGIC AND SEQUENCE iron out all the complexities of a character and its innate human nature. For Stanislavsky:
Extremes extend the gamut of human passions and enlarge the palette of the actor. Therefore when he is playing a good man, he should seek out what there is of evil in him; if he is playing an intelligent character, find his mentally weak spot; if he is playing a jolly person, find his serious side.130
After all, ‘black only becomes black when white is introduced’131 and the ‘logical behaviour of a drunken man is not that he staggers but that he tries not to stagger’.132 So as we embody a role, we’re looking both for the psychological juxtapositions and the physical counterpoints: all too often, we can fall into the trap of going for the broad brushstrokes, the ‘make-believe truth’ which relies on generalisations and quick-fix choices. Finding the HEROIC TENSIONS between opposites – in the character’s psychology and physicality – can be both fun and authentic.
That said, there are certain broad brushstrokes which can give us some valuable starting points in our embodiment of a role. One of these brushstrokes is considering what the character does for a living: in other words, what is their EMPLOI?
Emploi
EMPLOI has two connotations.
First of all, EMPLOI as type. Stanislavsky’s general concern with EMOTION in the early formation of his ‘system’ stemmed from his desire to retaliate against those actors who, following the traditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, stuck to their own particular ‘types’ or EMPLOIS. That ‘type’ might be Juve Lead, Soubrette, Old Character part, or Comic Servant, for example. To some extent, it wasn’t the actors’ fault as these types were often written into texts and an individual would be hired by a company specifically to play that EMPLOI. This fact in itself locked actors into certain shortcuts, ‘make-believe truths’ and sterile stereotypes.
Secondly, EMPLOI as occupation. And this is where the tool becomes incredibly useful, as it’s another angle on ACTION and ‘doing’. What a character does for a living and what they choose to do with their time have a huge influence on their OBJECTIVES and ACTIONS throughout a script. When you’re building a character and embodying a role, it’s intriguing to ask, ‘What does my character do? What’s my character’s profession?’ These are questions we usually ask of someone when we meet them in real life, so why not ask them of our characters? Most of us spend more time at work than anywhere else, so the choices we make about our professions and the demands that our jobs make on us provide a snapshot context of the kind of life we lead. So we see in Three Sisters how Olga is a schoolteacher who becomes a headmistress; Irina becomes a postmistress and then trains to be a teacher; Tusenbach surrenders his commission to work in a brick factory.
Of course, it’s just as interesting to note when a character doesn’t have an EMPLOI. With Masha in Three Sisters, it could well be that part of her ennui stems from the fact she has so much time on her hands. Furthermore, it’s curious that she marries a schoolteacher and falls in love with a Lieutenant-Colonel: the EMPLOIS of her men-folk reflect something of her own psychology and the kinds of people who interest her. A character’s EMPLOI indicates how they might spend their days and occupy their nights: it influences their wishes, their dreams and their fears. Even if they’ve no paid employment, they still – like Masha – make choices about how they spend their time, and all this information can be extremely lucrative as we ‘embody a role’.
Indeed, EMPLOI also affects a character’s physicality, as it determines to some extent how they inhabit their body. Do they work on the land? Do they sit at a desk? Are they posted in Iraq? Do they teach Tai Kwan Do? Their body will reflect their daily pursuits, and their EMPLOI will even dictate the way they stand. And this is a very handy hint: one of the first things to consider once you start physically embodying a role is how your character stands and walks, as their EMPLOI will affect their contact with the ground. In turn, that contact with the ground will influence the alignment of their spine. And that alignment of the spine will in turn inform the character’s emotional experiences and thought processes. Joan of Arc is a soldier, she wears boots and armour: put her in the Dauphin’s perfumed court and see how she stands. Lear is a king, he wears fine footwear: let him hobble barefoot on a blasted heath, and watch how he deports himself. Marlene in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls is a business woman, power-dressed in fitted suits and heels: how does she behave when off-duty in her sister’s threadbare home?
EMPLOI also affects a character’s psychology. Let’s consider this in relation to the three INNER PSYCHOLOGICAL DRIVES of thinking, feeling, doing. Is the character’s job action-based, like a plumber or a personal trainer? Is their job emotion-based, like a poet or a therapist? Is their job thought-based, like a computer analyst or a politician? And how do these ‘centre’-led jobs interact with each other? I once facilitated an international conference for senior managers in a major internet company. Over the course of the two days, I noticed how the ‘ideas people’ (the designers) were in effect the company’s head, while the marketing people (the enthusers) were the company’s feelings, and those who made everything that the designers designed and the marketing people enthused about (i.e. the engineers) were the company’s body. Together they constituted this high-powered, international company: each needed the others.
There are other psychological aspects implicit in the physical surroundings of our EMPLOI. Why does someone choose to be a florist, not a haberdasher? A cobbler, not an electrician? How does a man feel who spends his days standing among people’s worn-out shoes, putting his hands inside their boots? How does a woman feel standing amidst daffodils and dahlias, making up wreaths as well as bouquets? And what if the cobbler is a woman and the florist is a man? The surroundings which form part of our daily occupation influence who we are psychologically and what we do physically. And that includes the space in which we work. The taxi driver in his cramped cab. The priest in his chilly church. The football manager on his newly mown pitch. Suddenly we see how a simple GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCE – a person’s job – yields a huge harvest in terms of psycho-physical information.
And it’s not just the surroundings in which a person works – it’s the OBJECTS that they use.
Objects
For Stanislavsky, everything on stage could be a partner: a lighting state, a sound effect, a costume, a piece of the set, and even an inanimate OBJECT.
Beginning with your powers of OBSERVATION, you can start to develop a fascinating ‘dialogue’ with an OBJECT. In Stanislavsky’s words:
Intensive observation of an object naturally arouses a desire to do something with it. To do something with it in turn intensifies your observation of it. This mutual inter-reaction establishes a stronger contact with the object of your attention.133
As your OBSERVATION works upon your OBJECT, it quickly activates your IMAGINATION and before long you may find yourself projecting your OBJECT into an imaginary context. The imagined circumstances surrounding the OBJECT
can transform the object itself and heighten the reaction of your emotions to it.134
So, swiftly we move from OBJECT to OBSERVATION to IMAGINATION to EMOTION, with a little bit of ACTION thrown in. Immediately we see how the resonances of an OBJECT can be startlingly profound. Look at Masha in Three Sisters clutching her pillow in Act 3 as she fantasises a life with Vershinin. See how Mary Warren in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible presents a hand-made poppet to Elizabeth Proctor in Act 2 as she conjures up her possible powers of witchcraft. Where would Beckett’s Krapp be if he didn’t have his tape recorder, and what about Brecht’s Mother Courage and her cart and war accoutrements? Your dialogue with an OBJECT can reveal a range of nuances about your character’s inner state. So a cigarette can be an aid to an alluring seduction or a weapon of personal destruction. The lipstick on that coffee cup delights you if the drinker has just popped out to powder her nose, and taunts you if the drinker left without a farewell kiss. Does the unopened letter contain the news of a long-lost lover? Or the results of your recent blood test?
The power of props and their emotive potential is summed up brilliantly in Stanislavsky’s example of how to play a murderer:
The only thought, the first one, with which you should enter the circle is your knife. Concentrate on the physical action: examining the knife. Look at it closely, test its edge with your finger, find out whether its handle is firm or not. Transfer it mentally into the heart or the chest of your rival. If you play the villain try to estimate the force of the blow that would be needed to thrust the knife into your rival’s back. Try to think whether you would be able to deal the blow, whether the blade should not have been a bit shorter or longer, whether it should not have been a little stronger, or whether it would stand the blow without bending? All your thoughts are concentrated on one object only: the knife, the weapon.135
The effortless way in which you can combine IMAGINATION, THE MAGIC ‘IF’, EMOTION and OBJECTIVE, as well as physical and psychological ACTION, is summed up and summoned up wonderfully in this simple relationship with a prop. You can begin to see just how powerful an OBJECT can be as a tool for propelling you from page to stage – from your MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE to your embodiment of the role – in an easy, imaginative leap.
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We’ve looked at a range of tools so far in ‘Embodying the Role’, from the amorphous sense of TRUTH to the rock-solid physical OBJECT. Before we move onto the third section of this chapter – ‘Approaches to Rehearsal’ – let’s consider the tool towards which all the other tools are ultimately geared: the arousal of the SUBCONSCIOUS.
TRAY 10
THE MEAT OF THE TOOLKIT
AND THE ‘SYSTEM’
Subconscious
In many ways, the SUBCONSCIOUS is the twin sister of INSPIRATION. I specifically put INSPIRATION in Chapter 1 on Actor-Training to encourage a sense of bravery in the first stages of developing a psycho-physical technique. And I’ve included the SUBCONSCIOUS here to understand how its life is engendered when you’ve prepared a character thoroughly. Igniting INSPIRATION and accessing the creative genius of the SUBCONSCIOUS is what we’re really seeking as actors as we ‘embody a role’.
The final chapter of An Actor Prepares is called ‘On the Threshold of the Subconscious’, and Stanislavsky has a very clear vision of what you experience on this side of the threshold as opposed to that side of the threshold:
We see, hear, understand and think differently before and after we cross the ‘threshold of the subconscious’. Beforehand, we have ‘true-seeming feelings’, afterwards – ‘sincerity of emotions’. On this side of it we have the simplicity of a limited fantasy; beyond – the simplicity of the larger imagination. Our freedom on this side of the threshold is limited by reason and conventions; beyond it, our freedom is bold, wilful, active and always moving forwards. Over there the creative process differs each time it is repeated.136
You know when you’ve stepped over the threshold into your SUBCONSCIOUS, because your IMAGINATION and your body and your sense of daring push you into places of which your conscious brain couldn’t conceive. You suddenly find yourself doing things which fit absolutely with the decisions you’ve made about the character, which adhere truthfully to the words of the writer, and which don’t disrupt the director’s aesthetically constructed MISE-EN-SCÈNE or the camera’s carefully positioned shot. Creatively you’re absolutely flying. The audience feel it, the camera sees it, your fellow actors are with you, the stage or the film-set becomes your ‘home’, you’re utterly relaxed, you feel totally in possession of the space and the text and the moment and the ‘spirit’. And – paradoxically – there’s an exciting sense of danger, because to some extent even you don’t know what you’re going to do next, let alone the spectator!
Wow! What an adrenalin rush!
But it’s not a fix that we can have whenever we fancy.
By its very nature, the SUBCONSCIOUS is elusive. We can’t consciously call upon it. That said, we can consciously do things to prepare the ground for its arousal. We can know our OBJECTIVES, we can understand the structure of the scene – its BITS, the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES – we can open ourselves to the INNER CREATIVE STATE, etc. As we saw with INSPIRATION, this is what Stanislavsky’s whole ‘system’ was designed for: to put the conscious scaffolding into place so the SUBCONSCIOUS can do its unexpected and inspired work.
But your careful preparation is only a springboard. You have to play dangerous in order to evoke the SUBCONSCIOUS. If night after night after night, or take after take after take, you merely go through the motions of every word and action as if you know them like the back of your hand, then forget the SUBCONSCIOUS. All that will happen is that artistic boredom and inertia will set in.
Playing dangerous isn’t so easy, though, and there’s a simple reason why we often play safe: we’re afraid we’re going to forget our lines. That’s the base line. Even with film, when you have the option of another take, it’s still a fear which haunts us all – from acolyte student to seasoned pro. Even Laurence Olivier and Derek Jacobi have suffered incapacitating stage fright: Antony Sher actually documents his battle with what he calls The Fear, in his book, Primo Time.137
The curious thing is that knowing our lines is the least the audience will expect of us, and it’s the least we should expect of ourselves. And that’s just it – it’s The Least. If you stay in the safety zone, you make it incredibly hard for the SUBCONSCIOUS to work. So you have to develop a blind faith in yourself. As you step out onto that stage or in front of that camera, you have to trust that you do know the lines, that they are in your head – and even better, that they’re in your body.
Paradoxically, it’s often in those moments when we lose our lines that the SUBCONSCIOUS steps in and takes us somewhere truly exciting. The SUBCONSCIOUS is both a safety net and a wild horse. And that’s the joy of the paradox: the SUBCONSCIOUS springs into action either when we’re incredibly prepared or in a moment of crisis. And we just have to ride the wild pony.
To be this brave, one of the most useful things we can do is to nurture a sense of TRUTH for ourselves in the realm of the piece – whatever its genre or style or medium. If we can believe in the possibility of our GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES, then our SUBCONSCIOUS has the chance to pick up the creative baton and run with it:
Have you noticed that each time this truth and your belief in it is born, involuntarily, the subconscious steps in and nature begins to function? So when your conscious psycho-technique is carried to its fullest extent, the ground is prepared for nature’s subconscious process.138
It would be foolhardy and facetious to offer any specific exercises for arousing the SUBCONSCIOUS, as it’s a product of your overall psycho-physical technique, combined with your physical relaxation, your mental and imaginative playfulness – enhanced by a good script and a collaborative ensemble. Plus a certain degree of raw talent, of course, which allows you to forego the safe and dive across the threshold into Mamet’s ‘terrifying unforeseen’ – like a Marlon Brando! Do the prep, and trust the rest.
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Overview
In the first two sections of this chapter, we’ve ‘mined the text’ for the various details provided by the writer to whet our creative appetites. Then we’ve looked at how to turn that textual analysis into something physical as we ‘embody the role’.
This has included considering the nature of TRUTH, and how to build it through
•imagination
•observation
•the Magic ‘If’
Having developed a sense of TRUTH in what we’re doing, we’ve begun to build a psycho-physical connection with the character using
•action
•tempo-rhythm
•emotion memory
•emotion
We’ve then begun to texture that character using the tools of
•the inner psychological drives
•heroic tension
•emploi
•objects
Once we’re familiar with the text and we’re working with our bodies, the power of our SUBCONSCIOUS can then start to work its creative magic.
It’s time now to look at what happens when we meet our fellow actors on the rehearsal-room floor. This is where the real work begins . . .
Section 3
Approaches to Rehearsal
The important element in this final section of Chapter 2 is your partner – whether it’s on stage or in front of the camera. You can do as much textual analysis as you like and any amount of individual work, but only when you put yourself physically into relevant situations with other living, breathing human beings can you really start to penetrate the inner workings of the script.
‘Approaches to Rehearsal’ focuses on two particular rehearsal processes – the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS and ACTIVE ANALYSIS. They’re both hugely liberating for actors and they can lead to all sorts of creative discoveries. You’ll see in Chapter 4 that there aren’t many exercises offered to accompany this section, as essentially we’re looking at holistic rehearsal processes: if we try and fragment them too much, they’ll simply unravel. The best thing is to attend to each of the components and then give the approaches a go – under the watchful eye of an attentive and sensitive director.
In fact, THE ROLE OF THE DIRECTOR is vital with both processes, as the responsibility of orchestrating the vast range of creative discoveries and finding the appropriate MISE-EN-SCÈNES lies fundamentally with him or her.
TRAY 11
GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF DIRECTING AND STAGING
The role of the director
How a director conducts a rehearsal greatly affects the tools you choose as an actor to manifest a role. He or she also influences how you then use the tools you’ve chosen. So before probing the rehearsal processes themselves, it’s worth investigating Stanislavsky’s own attitude to THE ROLE OF THE DIRECTOR.
We’ve seen how Stanislavsky’s approach to directing changed radically over the course of his life. This was partly due to the problems that he himself encountered as an actor and partly in response to the discoveries he made as a trainer of other actors. We know that in the early days of the Moscow Art Theatre, he started out as a ‘director dictator’, with his score for his 1898 production of Chekhov’s The Seagull indicating to the very second the precise length of every pause and even the length of each kiss. But in his defence, what choice did he have? The aspiring new Moscow Art Theatre of 1897 had some big ambitions to fulfil:
We . . . wanted to give luxurious performances, to uncover great thoughts and emotions, and because we did not have ready actors, we were to put the whole power into the hands of the stage director. He had to create by himself, with the aid of the production, scenery, properties, interesting mise en scène [sic] . . .
I demanded that the actors obey me, and I forced them to do so. True, many of them performed what I directed them to do only outwardly, for they were not yet ready to understand those directions through the medium of emotion. But what was I to do? I could see no other means, for we were faced by the necessity of creating a complete troupe and a new theatre with new tendencies in the space of a few months.139
Under these restrictions, it could only be a matter of time before some of his highly talented young actors, including Vsevelod Meyerhold and Olga Knipper, rebelled. He was forced to admit that this style of directing utterly blocked the actors’ own creativity, rendering them mere puppets in the director’s hands. In response, he began to include his actors much more directly in the rehearsal process, by introducing lengthy periods during which the company would sit round the table engaging in the kind of MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE that we’ve already talked about.
There’s no doubt that the ‘round-the-table analysis’ was incredibly useful, but it had a major flip-side. The process was so extensive and intensive that, by the time the actors actually stood up and started to rehearse the play physically, their heads were stuffed liked baked potatoes with too much diverse information. Once again, their creative guts were constipated.
These two periods of experimentation (the ‘director dictator’ and ‘round-the-table analysis’) brought Stanislavsky to the final stages of his creative life as a theatre maker. He realised that, although some detective work on the script was absolutely vital, the sooner the actors could start embodying the play physically, the richer the rewards.
And it didn’t really matter how much or how little cerebral knowledge they might have of the text at first. Once they were up on the rehearsal-room floor, the actors could integrate their bodies, imaginations, emotions and psychological energies all at the same time. In this way, their understanding of the script arose out of a genuine combination of their own creative resources: it came from the soul, not the cerebrum.
Out of this creative conflagration evolved the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS and ACTIVE ANALYSIS. The director was still a vital cog in the rehearsal machine, but his responsibility shifted from being that of a puppet master: instead, he was something like a photographic technician, who slowly allows the negative film to emerge as a positive image by adding the right chemical solutions at just the right time. In this way, the film image develops into the most appropriate, brightly coloured, and sharply focused composition imaginable.
So what constituted a good director as far as Stanislavsky was concerned?
As a starting point, a director should have as profound an understanding of acting techniques as an actor. And it’s no surprise to hear that in Russia today directing courses at drama schools can last for five years: a large part of the programme includes exactly the same actor-training as those students engaged in the full-time, vocational acting courses.
Stanislavsky then suggested that there are three key principles which a director has to tackle. They’re all quite straightforward, but warrant inclusion here. A director should know:
•how to work with the author;
•how to work with the actors;
•how to work with everyone else involved in the production.
Let’s look at the implications of each of these:
1. The author
The director should know how to work with the author, unless (of course) the author is dead. This may sound like an obvious piece of advice, but consider the complexities of Stanislavsky’s relationship with, for example, Chekhov. If the contact between writer and director is problematic, your confidence as an actor can be seriously fractured, making it very difficult to generate a CREATIVE ATMOSPHERE. If, however, the director knows how to get inside the writer’s mind, the animation in the rehearsal room can be deliciously compelling with everyone firing on all cylinders. I know this from working with Max Stafford-Clark. He’s particularly good at the contact with a playwright, having spent a lifetime working both with new writers and new writing, teasing out THROUGH-LINES and untangling ACTIONS.
2. The actors
The director must know how to work with the actors. For Stanislavsky, one of the first steps in negotiating the production of a script is to provoke actors into asking all the right questions: many of these questions will come from the MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE and discussion of the script, which will then spur the actors to come up with appropriate OBJECTIVES for the characters. From their answers to those questions, they can fill in the necessary details to breathe life into the roles. This often means the director simply watches the living actors with all their quirks and idiosyncrasies negotiating their roles, and then he sensitively compares those living, breathing people with the qualities of the fictional characters. From there, he can gently guide them away from any unhelpful personal habits towards elements which may be useful for their parts. As Stanislavsky puts it:
The most important function of the director, as I understand the definition, is to open up all the potentialities of the actor and to arouse his individual initiative.140
If a director can have as much understanding of the tools in The Toolkit as the actors, then he can watch the performers at work and he, in turn, can then ask himself the appropriate questions to help the actors manifest the roles: ‘What would help this particular person at this particular point? Sharpening the OBJECTIVE? Clarifying the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES? Accessing a particular EMOTION MEMORY?’ And the more the director can talk the same language as the actors, the more options they’ll all have at their disposal, with the result that the final production may be potentially more detailed and captivating.
3. Everyone else in the production
The director should also know how to work collaboratively with everyone else involved in the production – screen or stage. This includes the composer, the designer, the wardrobe team, the sound designers, the production crew and stage management team or – in film – the multitude of vital technicians, including the cameraman or woman, the sound engineer, lighting designer, editor, etc. The director is as much an organiser of the final production’s manifestation as a conduit between the writer and the actors. He needs to be a ‘person-manager’, as well as an artist.
There’s also the question of genre and style. It’s important to keep reminding ourselves that The Toolkit isn’t restricted to realism or naturalism. Stanislavsky loved all forms of performance: from opera and operetta, to farce and melodrama. It’s the director’s challenge to encourage the actors to liberate a genre from its traditional trappings – in just the same way that it’s important to free an individual actor from his or her own personal clichés.
With all these considerations in mind, Stanislavsky approached THE ROLE OF THE DIRECTOR from the literary, aesthetic, organisational and interpretational perspectives, as well as developing an intimate contact with his actors.
As we’ll see with ACTIVE ANALYSIS, THE ROLE OF THE DIRECTOR for Stanislavsky became increasingly important and extremely textured, right up until the day he died. After all, the subtleties involved in a rehearsal process which places improvisation at its very core demand of the director a highly developed intuition towards each actor’s process. It’s his job to help every actor sound the true notes and ditch the false, and not just let them wallow about in a chaotic quagmire of artistic anarchy. Far from it. The director has to develop a sophisticated ability to take all the stage pictures that the actors spontaneously discover in their improvisations, and turn them into a coherent and aesthetic MISE-EN-SCÈNE.
Mise-en-scène
The term MISE-EN-SCÈNE – or ‘putting on the stage’ – may sound pretentious at first. But it’s a vast improvement on the much used and utterly unhelpful alternative ‘blocking’. So often we concern ourselves with ‘blocking’ a scene: ‘Should I sit by the window on this pause? Should I walk over to the sideboard on that line? Where should I stand in relation to Hamlet during this opening speech?’ The result can be startlingly phoney and two-dimensional. That’s because ‘blocking’ does exactly what it says: it blocks you from any fluid, excitable, creative discoveries. And that’s exactly what happened with Stanislavsky’s company when he ‘blocked’ a play through a production plan. He knew in his heart of hearts that a theatrical production plan which remains a theatrical production plan can never truly resonate: the actors have to ‘fulfil’ it. As Vasily Toporkov describes:
Daring directorial conceptions which could not be justified by the actors were rejected by [Stanislavsky]. Better something simpler within the capability of the actor than a fruitless rush to unattainable heights by unjustified means.
A director’s plan, which is not fulfilled by the actors, remains a plan, not a performance. We can appreciate the director’s imagination, but such a production can never touch the heart of the audience.141
Yet sometimes there’s no alternative: there has to be a rigid choreography. Most television directors – just like Stanislavsky in the first years of the Moscow Art Theatre – are up against the limitations of time. So they usually have to ask the actors to ‘block this scene for the camera quickly’ just before the filming of a shot. It’s a five-minute process. The economic pressures demand quick-fix performing. And it takes an open and confident professional to endow the kind of rigid choreography that most television requires with an inner, creative suppleness.
The need for inner suppleness, along with the other dilemmas which face us as actors when a MISE-EN-SCÈNE is thrust upon us, was of huge concern to Stanislavsky. Yet he also believed that if you were psycho-physically playful, you could usually make sense of any prescribed ‘blocking’:
All disputes with your [director] about the mise-en-scènes [sic] are almost always a waste of time . . . The creative force in you suffers no diminution whether you sit, stand or lie down. The only point that may be considered pertinent in this connection is the extent to which your creative powers can be said to have been set free, and whether in a certain mise-en-scène [sic] your body does or does not obey your will because, somewhere inside you, you have not achieved the proper degree of freedom and have, consequently, failed to achieve the necessary harmony.142
This is quite a gauntlet that Stanislavsky throws down here. Basically he’s saying that the more skilled we are in our art, the more we’ll be able to work with a sense of inner freedom and creative play under even the most mechanical of directorial schemes. And the opposite is true: the less skilled we are, the more wooden we’ll appear.
For all the impact of this gauntlet – ‘Go where you’re told and make it mean something’ – Stanislavsky still made a radical turn-around as a director in his later years. As he said to his opera students in 1935:
Before, we tried to squeeze the actor into the mise-en-scène, while the mise-en-scène should be born as the result of his work and his adaptation to his partner and the [objective]. In the theatre of the future we shall work without any fixed mise-en-scènes so as to preserve the freshness of all the organic processes. If we deprive the actor of the mise-en-scène, he will have to think more of the circumstances of his part . . .
[So] now we shall proceed differently. We shall create the line of his action, the life of his body, and then the life of his spirit will be created indirectly by itself.143
And this process became known as the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS.
TRAY 12
REHEARSAL PROCESS 1: THE METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS
The Method of Physical Actions
The basis of the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS is the basis of PSYCHO-PHYSICALITY as we’ve looked at it throughout The Toolkit. Physical ACTIONS affect EMOTIONS, and EMOTIONS provoke physical ACTIONS. The inner and the outer are entirely co-ordinated.
Although the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS was crystallised during the last five years of his life, you can see glimpses of it very early on in Stanislavsky’s professional career. His own performance of Dr Stockmann in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in 1900 was something of a eureka for him, as he experienced very vividly the fluid interaction between his inner images and their outer expression:
From the intuition of feelings I went to the outer image, for it flowed naturally from the inner image, and the soul and body of Stockmann-Stanislavsky became one organically. I only had to think of the thoughts and cares of Stockmann and the signs of short sight would come of themselves, together with the forward stoop of the body, the quick step, the eyes that looked trustfully into the soul of the man or object on the stage with me, the index and middle fingers of the hand stretched forward of themselves for the sake of greater persuasiveness, as if to push my own thoughts, feelings and words into the soul of my listener. All these habits came of themselves, unconsciously, and quite apart from myself . . .
I only had to assume the manners and habits of Stockmann, on the stage or off, and in my soul there were born the feelings and perceptions that had given them birth. In this manner, intuition not only created the image, but its passions also. They became my own organically, or, to be more true, my own passions became Stockmann’s.144
As his acting theories developed over the years, Stanislavsky’s increasing emphasis on the body became something of a survival tactic, as well as an artistic belief. Under the Soviet regime, anything psychological was considered to be dangerously idealistic and decadent. So the Socialist Realist artists sought to illustrate in their works that human beings were proactive, ‘doing’ creatures, whose actions had the potential to change society, rather than reactive, emotive beings, whose psychologies were flawed. If Stanislavsky was going to survive Soviet censorship, he had to get away from the emphasis on EMOTION MEMORY which had characterised his earlier work and adapt himself to the need for ACTION. This led to his declaration that actors require
only physical actions, physical truths, and physical belief in them! Nothing more!145
So successful was his shift in perspective that, to Stanislavsky’s chagrin, the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS was even exalted by the Soviets as the ultimate form of actor-training – which for him was the artistic kiss of death.
But what exactly was the basic premise behind the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS?
It was quite simply that actors could generate many of the creative discoveries in a rehearsal room through their bodies, rather than their brains. By getting up on their feet and inhabiting the rehearsal space, the actors’ bodies could feed their IMAGINATIONS and prompt them into all sorts of emotional discoveries, without them having to squeeze their EMOTION MEMORIES like a tube of toothpaste. If they could turn their attention away from big emotional delvings, leaving the SUBCONSCIOUS alone and focusing instead on small, manageable, everyday, physical tasks, then the SUBCONSCIOUS had the chance to spring to life and fuel the actors’ creative impulses.
To this end, the main task in rehearsals using the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS was to find a sequence of small, achievable ACTIONS, which would stimulate complex psychological experiences in the actors if they carried them out with precision and commitment. (We’ve alluded to this in ACTIONS above.) To be sure that the SUBCONSCIOUS had the best chance to work creatively, there needed to be a good, powerful and burning OBJECTIVE behind each physical ACTION. Every actor needed an inner canvas of psychological ‘I want to’s accompanying his outer ‘score of physical actions’, so there was an inner JUSTIFICATION; the actions couldn’t just be empty and formal.
If that’s the basic premise, how did the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS actually operate?
Through a sequence of simple stages (which have been set out very clearly by Sharon Carnicke, whose list I’ve adopted and adapted here):146
1.Identify the purposeful OBJECTIVE of the BIT you’re exploring (e.g. ‘I want to create an atmosphere in which I can run an inspiring workshop’).
2.Compile your ‘score of physical actions’ by listing all the little things you have to do to pursue your OBJECTIVE (e.g. ‘I open the door, I turn on the light, I switch on the aircon, I set up a circle of chairs’, etc.).
3.Test that ‘score of physical actions’ by means of a SILENT ÉTUDE, so that you play out that BIT of the scene without words (e.g. I carry through my simple ACTIONS without any text, to understand whether the order of the ACTIONS and the nature of the ACTIONS feel appropriate: maybe I want to switch on the aircon after I’ve laid out the circle of chairs? And I certainly have to switch on the lights before I do anything else). (See ACTIVE ANALYSIS and CONNECTION below for details on SILENT ÉTUDES.)
Part of the reason there’s so much emphasis on physical ACTION in this sequence is that, in the early stages of rehearsal, Stanislavsky intended to divert the actors away from the spoken word. He didn’t want them learning their lines by rote; instead – as I hinted in the Introduction – he wanted them to ‘create the living word’.
The ‘living word’ is one in which the roots run down into one’s soul, they feed on one’s feelings; but the stem reaches up into the consciousness where it puts forth luxuriant foliage of eloquent verbal forms, conveying all the deep emotions from which they draw their vitality.147
‘Creating the living word’ was hugely important for Stanislavsky. He believed that when you first pick up a text, the distance between the writer’s words and your own resources is of immeasurable size. It’s all too easy to become very formal with the words, burying your head in the script and not having a true sense of contact with your partners or the environment or even with what the words of the text are really saying. In these situations, the word is far from living: it’s sans roots, sans stem, and consequently sans foliage. To combat this scenario, he invited his actors to come to the first rehearsals with very little knowledge of the script. He would simply give them a broad outline of a scene and they would then improvise the circumstances in their own persons and using their own words. He was so keen that his actors should begin with a very intuitive and spontaneous relationship to a script, that when he was working on Othello in 1935, he didn’t even want his students to read the play beforehand. He was worried their intellectual grapplings with Shakespeare’s verse would violate their creative instincts on the rehearsal-room floor. Ignorance was bliss, and bliss was INSPIRATION.
Having taken away the writer’s text, Stanislavsky then focused the actors’ early improvisations on some of the basic tools in the kit. He took THE MAGIC ‘IF’, GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES and OBJECTIVES, and prompted the actors towards questions with which we’re now very familiar: ‘What would I do if I was in this situation? What do I want from the other person in this situation? And what would I say?’ Carrying these questions in their hearts, the improvising students would do the things they would naturally do and say the words they would naturally say. And so they set about improvising their way towards their characters. Then:
After you have learned to act from yourself, define the differences between your behaviour and that of the character. Find all the reasons and justifications for the character’s actions, and then go on from there without thinking where your personal action ends and the character’s begins. His actions and yours will fuse automatically if you have done all the preceding work [i.e. considered the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES and clarified the OBJECTIVES] as I have suggested.148
Some of these ideas are already familiar from CONCENTRATION AND ATTENTION and merging with the character. And, as you saw with physical ACTIONS, the important part of the process at this point is that ACTIONS have the capacity to appeal to your EMOTIONS, primarily because of your muscular memory. You have a whole palette of emotions embedded in your musculature: by inciting your body into action as early as possible, the more likely you are to awaken those powerful muscle memories. The physical, three-dimensional improvisations are a vital way of provoking these muscle memories, as well as accessing your thought-based memories, as you fuse with the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES of the character.
Gradually, through merging yourself with the character, and blending your improvised text with the written word, you’ll uncover the appropriate ‘score of physical actions’. Once you’ve found it, you then start to road-test it through further ÉTUDES, so that you can eventually fix it. That doesn’t mean pinning it like a butterfly to a board, but rather shaping it into a coherent whole. The idea is that each time you repeat it, it actually inspires you – much in the same way a virtuoso violinist plays exactly the same notes every night, but with an energy and passion that allows the strict structure to resonate and soar. (See ACTIVE ANALYSIS below for more details.)
But how do you ensure the process is unfolding appropriately?
The answer is: through ongoing textual analysis, both before an improvisation and after an improvisation. The METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS isn’t anarchical chaos. There has to be some textual analysis, otherwise how can your improvisations evolve in their precision? So after each ÉTUDE you compare where you were psychologically at each point in your improvisations with where you still need to go in order to render faithfully the writer’s TEXT.
That textual analysis still involves breaking a scene down into BITS and working out your OBJECTIVES. There’s still plenty of reference to biographical research and historical details. But the information is now fed into the rehearsal when you’re ‘organically’ ready for it, so it’s not just slapped on like an oversized overcoat. In this way, all your discoveries become much more experiential, visceral and hot-blooded, rather than coldly academic or calmly intellectual.
Okay – so far we’re improvising using our own words based on a simple scenario given to us by the director, and we’re allowing our physical body to do much of the early exploratory work for us. Each improvisation is backed up by some MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE and little by little, we’re uncovering a ‘score of physical actions’ which propels the scene forward.
At some point, surely, the writer’s words have to come into play?
Indeed, they do. And at this point in rehearsals, Stanislavsky became very attentive: he didn’t want to disrupt the ‘creation of the living word’ – i.e. the subtle evolution from the actor’s improvised words to the writer’s text – for fear of catapulting the actors straight back into rote-learning and clichéd stereotypes. So he carefully fed the actual lines of the script to the actors during their improvisations from the sidelines like a football coach – but only as and when he felt they were ready for them.
Generally, the lines of the play become indispensable to the actor only in the last phase of his creative preparations, when all the inner material he has accumulated is crystallised into a series of definite moments, and the physical embodiment of his role is working out methods of expressing characteristic emotions.149
If the writer’s text was introduced too early, it only became
a deterrent. The actor is not yet capable of making a full or deep or exhaustive estimate of it . . . The pure text of the playwright seems too brief and actors fill it out with words of their own, interpolations of ‘well’ and ‘now’ and so forth.150
So, Stanislavsky held back on the writer’s words until the actors were virtually gagging for them, when those words were the only ‘weapons with which to go into action’.151 At the point when the actors were truly gasping for them, the words ceased to be a memorised lexicon belonging to another person and they became those very ‘living words’, which he so desperately sought. Their roots did ‘run down into the actors’ souls’, they did ‘feed on their feelings’, and the stem did ‘put forth its luxuriant foliage of eloquent verbal forms’: the living word was created.
Although the point of the rehearsal process is that we do end up speaking the writer’s words, we need to be very clear about why we start by improvising the text with the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS. In no way are the improvisations an abuse of the writer’s text, a means of legitimising an easy paraphrasing. Not at all. The METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS is a process by which ACTION is verbal as much as physical as much as inner as much as psychological. The writer’s words become ‘grafted on’ to your psyche
without any forcing, and only because of that they [retain] their most important quality – liveliness.152
There’s one very particular – and rather cunning – reason why I find the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS so attractive. Often when we pick up a script, we take the writer’s words as gospel: we tend to believe that whatever the characters say is true. After all, unless the character is some sort of convicted felon or a compulsive liar, why should we not believe that what we’re being told is the truth? Yet, as Stanislavsky points out – and as we discovered with SUBTEXT – frequently in life we only say about 10% of what we actually feel or think or mean: our words are just the tip of an iceberg, the body of which lies submerged in our SUBTEXT and embedded in our physical expression. The same is absolutely true of a fictional character. With the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS, you form the hidden part of the iceberg organically: by improvising and exploring the text physically as well as discursively, you’re able to evolve simultaneously all that can be seen and all that lies hidden beneath the surface. And through this holistic process, you might come up with an ‘iceberg’ which is completely different from the ‘iceberg’ the writer had in mind when he conceived the character. Yet it fits with the script, it resonates for you as the actor playing the part, and it can have a powerful ‘subterranean’ effect on the audience. They sense something is lurking beneath the words of the script, even if it slightly eludes them, and their own creative juices are stirred into action as they try and see through the mild sense of mystery.
The tendency with a more ‘Learn-the-Lines-and-Don’t-Bump-into-the-Furniture’ method of rehearsal is that the nuances of the text develop after the surface area has been covered. Here with the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS it’s all happening simultaneously. Stanislavsky provides an interesting overview:
Let us compare our method with what is done in any theatre of the ordinary type. There they read the play, hand out the parts with the notice that by the third or tenth rehearsal everyone must know his role by heart. They begin the reading, then they all go up onto the stage and act, while holding the script. The director shows them the business to do and the actors remember it. At the predicted rehearsal the books are taken away and they speak their lines with a prompter present until they are letter-perfect in their parts.153
Sound familiar?
One final thing about the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS is that at its heart lies TEMPO-RHYTHM. It’s not just the LOGIC AND SEQUENCE of your ACTIONS which arouse your EMOTIONS, but also the speed and intensity at which your ‘score of physical actions’ is executed:
You cannot master the method of physical actions if you do not master rhythm. Each physical action is inseparably linked with the rhythm which categorises it. If you always act in one and the same rhythm, then how will you be able to embody a variety of characters convincingly?154
Mastering TEMPO-RHYTHM is not just about expanding the range of the characters you can play: TEMPO-RHYTHM is also your means of igniting the inner life of your ‘score of physical actions’ in the first place. The actor moves and, so to speak, takes a run-up, thanks to physical actions and gains momentum. At that moment with the aid of the given circumstances and the Magic Ifs he spreads the invisible wings of belief which carry him upwards to the realm of the imagination in which he sincerely believes.155
In brief:
•The METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS comes from the idea that you can work from simple physical actions to complex emotional and psychological experiences, as long as you fuel those simple physical ACTIONS with an OBJECTIVE. Your desire to fulfil that OBJECTIVE motors you through the physical ACTIONS, as long as there’s a LOGIC AND SEQUENCE and you inject everything with a sense of TRUTH.
•You can test out your ‘score of physical actions’ through SILENT ÉTUDES.
•Once you’ve discovered the ‘score of physical actions’, you repeat it to strengthen your connection with the inner life of those ACTIONS. Each time you enact the ‘score of physical actions’, it grows and blossoms, rather than becoming stale and repetitive.
•You keep returning to a process of MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE to draw out more facts and details from the script to enhance your merger with the character and draw your improvisations closer to the writer’s text.
•From the SILENT ÉTUDE, you then add words – first of all from your own improvised ideas, and then gradually from the writer’s text once all your inner preparation has been done and you’re hungry for the actual script.
•The METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS is a powerful means of creating ‘the living word’, because you move from silent action to improvised speech to the director’s sideline promptings of the author’s actual text. You learn the words effortlessly, almost without knowing that’s what you’re doing.
Stanislavsky talks so passionately – even romantically – about the potential of the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS and its awesome creative possibilities that you wonder why the script-in-hand, ‘Don’t-Bump-into-the-Furniture’ type of rehearsal (described in Creating a Role and quoted above) still dominates the Western world. Furthermore, you might think from the passion with which Stanislavsky writes about the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS, that it was the pinnacle of his professional experiments: after all, where else was there to go once you’d ‘spread your invisible wings of belief’? Yet, for Stanislavsky, there were still continents to discover.
Let’s turn to the equally psycho-physical, but arguably rather more playful and anarchic approach to textual analysis and embodiment of character known as ACTIVE ANALYSIS and its various components which include:
•étude rehearsals
•events
•grasp
•connection
•‘here, today, now’
•justification
•adaptation
•super-objectives
•through-line of action
•verbal action
•pauses
•the second level
•inner monologue
•envisaging
•moment of orientation
TRAY 13
REHEARSAL PROCESS 2:
ACTIVE ANALYSIS AND ITS COMPONENTS
Active Analysis
There’s some disagreement among scholars and practitioners as to whether there actually is a difference between ACTIVE ANALYSIS and the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS. I propose that there most definitely is. The emphasis with ACTIVE ANALYSIS is still on finding the right ‘score of physical actions’ to spark powerful emotional responses within you as an actor. But I think there’s a certain anarchy involved, which renders it far more applicable to the host of performance styles present in the twenty-first century than the more action-driven and scientifically logical METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS. From my own training in ACTIVE ANALYSIS in 1990s’ Russia, along with what I’ve garnered from Maria Knebel’s On the Active Analysis of Plays and Roles, I’d promote it as one of the most exciting and provocative means of embodying a role and engaging with other actors that I’ve yet to experience. I’ve put it to the test in three full-scale productions and I’ve used its basic principles in numerous workshops, and I know that I’m not alone in my endorsement of it.
The actual process of ACTIVE ANALYSIS is remarkably straightforward, and not dissimilar to the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS. The sequence is:
1you read a scene;
2you discuss the scene;
3you improvise the scene without further reference to the script;
4you discuss the improvisation, before returning to the script;
5you compare whatever happened in your improvisation with the words and incidents of the actual text.
You then repeat this 5-step sequence until the entire play is staged and the lines are learnt. It’s as simple as that.
One of the problems that emerged for Stanislavsky from too much sitting round the table and discussing a text was that the actors’ thought processes became disengaged from their physical and emotional resources. They could talk about the characters till the cows came home, but they hadn’t a clue about how their roles might manifest themselves emotionally or psycho-physically.
Suddenly with ACTIVE ANALYSIS, all the available avenues of investigation – mental, physical, emotional, and experiential – were harnessed together holistically. All three INNER PSYCHOLOGICAL DRIVES – the ‘thought-centre’, the ‘emotion-centre’, and the ‘action-centre’ – were drafted into the process simultaneously, and each one had equal significance in uncovering the layers of the play. By using all their resources in this way, the actors could get right inside both the inner action and the verbal action from the very beginning of rehearsals. They could immediately flesh out the script’s skeleton with blood and guts and sinews.
The reason why ACTIVE ANALYSIS is different from the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS is that it didn’t put all its eggs in one ACTION basket: as well as their bodies, the actors could follow their EMOTIONS or their fantasies. I’d say ACTIVE ANALYSIS generally had an exciting edge of play and anarchy and a ‘Give-it-a-Go’ bravura. Basically, it was less aesthetically ‘anal’ than the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS.
So, what rehearsal conditions are required to put ACTIVE ANALYSIS into practice?
As with the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS, the point of improvising a scene – rather than wandering around the stage with a script in your hand in an effort to find a decent ‘blocking’ – is that the organic link between your scenic movement and the cause or reason that gave birth to that movement can be forged with very little effort.
To make this linkage even easier, it’s important for the rehearsal room to be decked out as closely as possible to the final stage-set. This is because every prop, every piece of furniture, every wall, door, lighting and sound effect, provides you with new pieces of psycho-physical information, all of which help you enormously in your journey towards the character. If you rehearse for three weeks with a broom-handle sword, and then at the technical rehearsal you’re given a bloody great sabre, your whole psycho-physical perspective is altered. Obviously it’s not always possible to have every prop available in its final form throughout rehearsal, but it’s an ideal worth striving for.
Perhaps the most important condition of ACTIVE ANALYSIS is that it requires an incredibly astute director at the helm. Through your improvisations as an actor, you’re searching out the LOGIC AND SEQUENCE of a physical and psychological blueprint for your character. Sometimes the character’s LOGIC AND SEQUENCE may well be completely different from your own, and what might be nonsense to you makes complete sense in terms of the character. At this point, the director becomes supremely important. In the course of your improvisations, you may enact something which in terms of the bigger picture of the script makes perfect sense, but for you it feels unnatural and illogical. When this happens, the chances are that you’re exploring a new flavour of LOGIC AND SEQUENCE, which fits perfectly with the character as written but feels utterly strange to you, as you push the boundaries of your own psychological comfort zone. A good director will develop an acute sensitivity to the rehearsal process so that he can single out those moments which are genuinely illogical, and those moments where the character’s logic may seem strange to you as the actor but is in fact perfectly credible within the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES of the character and play as a whole.
This degree of sensitivity is crucial. ACTIVE ANALYSIS encourages actors to start from themselves: ‘What would I do in this situation?’ Yet you use the rehearsals – through the process of improvisations – to allow the character to ‘find’ its own voice and physicality. It’s back to the idea of the positive photograph emerging from the negative film. Your physical analysis of the character becomes an artistic synthesis in a complex way, and you can best be assured of the success of this complex synthesis if your director is absolutely attentive to each and every actor’s creative process. As Knebel writes:
Responsibility and initiative in the creative organisation of rehearsals by means of ACTIVE ANALYSIS lie, of course, at the door of the director.156
Having directed three productions using pure ACTIVE ANALYSIS, I know how vital the ‘creative organisation of rehearsals’ can be. The improvisational basis of the rehearsals tends to be – and, in many respects, has to be – quite chaotic. As an actor, you have to follow whatever impulse may be guiding you at each moment, so you can genuinely ‘actively analyse’ your relationships with the other characters. At the same time, there must be a sense of organisational overview in those improvisations, as each actor is not an island, but part of a collaborative whole. Little by little, the director has to guide the whole ensemble towards emotionally resonant and artistically satisfying stage pictures.
Those are the basic principles of ACTIVE ANALYSIS, with an overview of some of the necessary rehearsal conditions. Let’s now go into more depth.
This is where the toolkit becomes intricate, as we’re really getting to the heart of Stanislavsky’s legacy. We’ll begin by examining the actual nuts-and-bolts of ACTIVE ANALYSIS which involve a series of ÉTUDE REHEARSALS based on the sequence of: (1) read a scene, (2) discuss the scene, (3) improvise the scene, (4) discuss the improvisation, and (5) return to the text. And to kick-start that process, you need six tools:
The first of these tools, EVENTS, focuses both on Step 1 (the reading of the scene) and Step 2 (the analysis of the scene, during which you locate the main EVENT around which you’ll then improvise).
You need the next three tools, GRASP, CONNECTION and ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’ as you start to improvise the scene (Step 3) when your early ÉTUDES are entirely silent.
As Step 4 kicks in and you discuss the improvisation, the next two tools come into play (JUSTIFICATION and ADAPTATION): they’re very handy, because the more you get to know the script through your improvisations, the more you need to assess your own connection with the text, and that means ‘justifying’ and ‘adapting’ your ACTIONS as you merge with the role.
We start by looking at how the details of a production emerge through a series of what Stanislavsky called ÉTUDE REHEARSALS.
Étude rehearsals
As I’ve said, there’s something quite chaotic about ACTIVE ANALYSIS. And yet there’s a kind of logic in the chaos, as all the choices you make, even in your earliest improvisations, are steeped in a certain amount of round-the-table MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE of the script – just as they are with the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS. The ACTIONS, OBJECTIVES, GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES, possible SUBTEXT, etc., are discussed (just as they always were), so you have a firm springboard from which to leap into the creative unknown – or into Mamet’s ‘terrifying unforeseen’ – when you get up and start to improvise.
Before you make any attempt at an improvisation or ÉTUDE, an ÉTUDE REHEARSAL will begin with Step 1 (Read the scene) followed by Step 2 (Discuss the scene). Again, like the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS, the main difference between this and Stanislavsky’s previous rehearsal practices is that the period of discussion and MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE before each improvisation may only last ten minutes – maybe half an hour – but certainly not three weeks.
Knebel is quite clear about the function of MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE in ÉTUDE REHEARSALS: it’s to put even the smallest amount of living tissue onto the skeleton of the play (i.e. those black-and-white words on the page) so that you’ve got something to work off in your first improvisation. That living tissue (however small initially) comes from clarifying certain key areas:
•What does my character do in the play? (ACTIONS and EVENTS.)
•What are my character’s aspirations? (OBJECTIVES.)
•With whom am I struggling? (Which characters have COUNTER-OBJECTIVES to mine? Which characters create obstacles to the achievement of my OBJECTIVES)?
•With whom am I allied? (Which characters support my OBJECTIVES?)
•How do I relate to those characters with whom I’m neither struggling nor allied?
Having found some tentative and intuitive answers to those questions (you don’t have to know all the details of the play to begin with), there’s one more question you need to answer before your improvisations can proceed: ‘What is the main EVENT of the scene?’
Events
An EVENT (also known as an ‘effective fact’) is a piece of action without which the scene could not take place.
EVENTS are a vital part of our daily lives. As Stanislavsky urges:
Look back at some stage or other in your life and recall what ‘event’ was the major one in that segment, and then you will immediately understand how it was reflected in your behaviour, in your actions, in your thoughts and experiences, and your relationships with people.157
As soon as you start to look at your own life, you realise how it’s been constantly punctuated by EVENTS – both major and minor – which absolutely change your destiny. Often these EVENTS affect how you react to everything else that happens throughout the rest of your life, as well as how you relate to the people surrounding you. You say ‘yes’ to that party invitation and suddenly meet the person whom you eventually marry. You say ‘no’ to that outing with your uncle and it’s the day his car-brakes fail and he hits a tree. You accept a job. You fail an exam. A parent dies. A son is born. A book is published. A finger is broken. An EVENT can be a split-second MOMENT OF DECISION, and in that split second, the rest of the course of a life is altered. Or it can take months to burgeon.
A play or a film is a radically reduced ‘lifetime’ – usually only lasting two or three hours, even if a whole biography is covered. Yet in each scene there’ll be an EVENT which pushes the script forward and changes the courses of the characters’ lives. If you use your brief period of MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE on a scene to pinpoint the main EVENT, you can plunge headlong into its drama. As Stanislavsky maintains:
The ‘event’ . . . involves the actor in the world of the play . . . by the shortest possible route.158
You know from a cursory analysis of your own life that, when you identify the big EVENTS, it doesn’t take long to feel the potency of those EVENTS. At some point, you usually tell people about your EVENT, and in so doing you aim to connect them, by means of their empathy, to your experience of the world, your world view, your life path. We like telling our stories. We like unpacking the main EVENTS of our lives, because they are, after all, what makes us who we are. Human beings are natural story-tellers, and stories evolve from EVENTS.
To identify an EVENT in a scene, you just ask the questions: ‘What has to happen for this scene to take place? Why did the writer write this scene? What unfolds in it to push the narrative forward?’ It might be Maria dropping the letter for Malvolio. It might be Macbeth meeting the witches. It might be as simple as ‘Character A has to enter’: if Character A didn’t enter the scene at that particular point, he wouldn’t find his wife in flagrante with the butler and the rest of the plot wouldn’t unfold. It might even be something as momentary as a kiss. Here’s an extract from Mark Ravenhill’s 1990s’ hit, Shopping and Fucking, where we see that both a kiss and a non-kiss constitute two very important EVENTS in one scene. Mark has just returned from his sojourn in a rehab centre to visit his friend, Robbie (with whom he’d had a sexual relationship) and their flatmate, Lulu:
ROBBIE: So. They let you out.
MARK: Sort of.
Pause.
ROBBIE: Thought you said months. Did you miss me?
MARK: I missed you both.
ROBBIE: I missed you. So, I s’pose . . . I sort of hoped you’d miss me.
MARK: Yeah. Right.
ROBBIE moves to MARK. They kiss.
ROBBIE moves to kiss MARK again.
MARK: No.
ROBBIE: No?
MARK: Sorry.
ROBBIE: No. That’s OK.159
In those two EVENTS (the kiss and the non-kiss) – and indeed in the momentary PAUSE which must certainly exist between those two EVENTS – Robbie and Mark’s lives change. EVENTS and how we respond to them are the keys to deep psychological understanding. As Stanislavsky suggested to his students:
The basic task for the initial period of rehearsal is to understand the basic events, not becoming distracted by trivia which may lead one off to one side, to understand what the action and counter-action are, i.e. to define the dramaturgical conflict stemming from our deep analysis.160
In the incident with Robbie and Mark, Robbie’s ACTION of the first kiss is greeted by Mark’s COUNTER-ACTION of reciprocating the kiss. In his ACTION of the second kiss, he’s greeted by Mark’s COUNTER-ACTION of rejecting the second kiss. If you (as Robbie) were to actively analyse with another actor (as Mark) the EVENTS surrounding the two kisses, you’d be able to ‘define the dramaturgical conflict’ by experiencing what exactly unfolds between you as you improvise the encounter. And for any two actors, the nuances would subtly change.
In many ways, there may seem to be similarities between EVENTS and PRESSING ISSUES (see BITS above), and yet there’s an important difference. An EVENT is a happening without which the scene cannot unfurl. The PRESSING ISSUE is an offstage occurrence which serves almost to heat the scene like a Bunsen burner. So, for example, the PRESSING ISSUE in A Doll’s House could be considered to be the fact that Nora has forged her husband’s signature. We don’t see that occurrence, but it sits like a smouldering coal beneath the cauldron of her life. An EVENT takes place when a letter arrives from Krogstad in which he reveals the forgery, and suddenly Nora’s whole mode of behaviour radically shifts. In this encounter from Shopping and Fucking, Mark’s PRESSING ISSUE is that he broke rehab rules and had a sexual liaison with a fellow patient: this is what he needs to disclose to Robbie, hence his inability to reciprocate the kiss.
Sometimes in a scene, the EVENT doesn’t even take place. Let’s look at the little interchange between Varya and Lopakhin in Act 4 of The Cherry Orchard, when Ranevskaya has sent Varya into the living room to be proposed to by Lopakhin. The imminent PRESSING ISSUE is the recent sale of the estate and everyone’s departure; the scene is set up so that the EVENT we’re expecting is a proposal of marriage:
A pause. Offstage, stifled laughter and whispering. VARYA finally enters.
VARYA (inspects the luggage at some length): That’s strange, I can’t find it anywhere . . .
LOPAKHIN: What are you looking for?
VARYA: I packed these myself, and now I can’t remember.
Pause.
LOPAKHIN: So where are you off to now, Miss Varvara?
VARYA: Me? I’m going to the Ragulins. I’ve agreed to look after the house for them . . . I’ll be a sort of housekeeper.
LOPAKHIN: And that’s in Yashnevo? That’ll be about fifty miles from here.
A pause.
So, life in this house is over now.
VARYA (examining the luggage): Where on earth is it? . . . Maybe I packed it away in the trunk . . . Yes, life’s finished in this house . . . there’ll be nothing left . . .
LOPAKHIN: And I’m off to Kharkov now . . . by the same train. I’ve a lot of business on hand. I’m leaving Yepikhodov here to look after the place. I’ve taken him on.
VARYA: Not really!
LOPAKHIN: This time last year we’d already had snow, if you remember, and now it’s so mild and sunny. It’s cold nonetheless . . . three degrees below.
VARYA: I haven’t looked.
A pause.
Our thermometer’s broken anyway . . .
A pause.
Someone calls through the door from outside: ‘Mr Lopakhin!’
LOPAKHIN (as if he had been waiting for this call): Just coming! (Hurriedly exits.)
VARYA is sitting on the floor, lays her head on a bundle of dresses, and begins quietly sobbing. The door opens, and RANEVSKAYA tentatively enters.
RANEVSKAYA: Well?
A pause.
We have to go.161
This beautiful and delicate interchange is based entirely on an EVENT which doesn’t take place: Lopakhin doesn’t propose. Chekhov cleverly juxtaposes the characters’ inciting ACTIONS and COUNTER-ACTIONS. From one PERSPECTIVE, we could say that Varya’s inciting ACTION is to find the OBJECT that she claims she’s looking for (after all, she starts the scene by swooping in with a vast amount of energy). Lopakhin’s COUNTER-ACTION is to ask her to marry him. Chekhov provides two big pauses in which Varya’s inciting ACTION stops, but Lopakhin’s COUNTER-ACTION doesn’t kick in: Lopakhin simply hasn’t got the bottle to propose.
From another PERSPECTIVE, we could say that Lopakhin’s inciting ACTION is to propose, but the force of Varya’s feigned COUNTER-ACTION of looking for the lost OBJECT takes the wind out of his sails and he never quite finds the impetus again. Either way, the cleverness of the scene is that it’s built around a ‘non-EVENT’, and yet it holds the audience’s rapt attention.
*
So far in this exploration of ACTIVE ANALYSIS, we’ve read the scene (Step 1) and we’ve done some basic MENTAL RECONNAISSANCE including identifying the main EVENT and possibly locating the PRESSING ISSUE which might be underlying the main EVENT (Step 2). That’s enough discussion. It’s time to start improvising, and that requires the actors – through a series of SILENT ÉTUDES – to get each other in each other’s GRASP.
Silent études and Grasp
As we saw with the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS, the first stage of improvising isn’t too scary as you don’t have to say anything: it involves SILENT ÉTUDES.
What exactly does a SILENT ÉTUDE entail?
A number of things – and, at the same time, nothing.
During the course of his investigations into acting, Stanislavsky tried all sorts of SILENT ÉTUDES, some of which can sound pretty wacky if you read them cold. When he was rehearsing Turgenev’s A Month in the Country in 1909, he had his actors moving through a scene either in utter silence or mouthing their lines silently, and sometimes communicating with nothing but the looks in their eyes. Sometimes only the key words of a scene were spoken. Sometimes the actors were encouraged to ‘radiate’ their mental states to each other, while sitting on their hands to stop them from gesticulating what they really wanted to say. There were all manner of experiments, from the esoteric to the downright weird. But at the core of most of them was a very important idea: that we communicate masses of information simply through our eyes. As Stanislavsky said to his actors towards the end of his life:
Trust your eyes and you will guarantee audience attention. Be most aware of each other. Observe each other constantly and you will always guess when one finishes a sentence or completes a thought, although he never speaks it aloud.162
He understood that when actors work beyond the spoken word, they can tap into a deeper level of communication. The crux of a SILENT ÉTUDE is what Stanislavsky called ‘communion’ or ‘radiation’ (see below), allied to which is something called GRASP.
GRASP is a term embedded in Chapter 10 of An Actor Prepares entitled ‘Communion’, and I’d read the book nine times before I really noticed the term, let alone fully understood its impact and usability as a tool. I was already familiar with ‘communion’ and ‘radiation’, which cover similar territory, but both words were rather alienating and inaccessible. GRASP, on the other hand, seemed far more immediate and understandable. As Stanislavsky puts it, GRASP
is what a bull-dog has in his jaw. We actors must have that same power to seize with our eyes, ears and all our senses. If an actor is to listen, let him do it intently. If he is called upon to smell, let him smell hard. If he is to look at something, let him really use his eyes. But of course this must all be done without unnecessary muscular tension.163
At the heart of GRASP is the idea that you don’t just communicate through words and gestures, but also through ‘invisible radiations of will, vibrations which flow back and forth between two souls’:164
You experience an emotional state and you can make others, with whom you are in communion, do the same.
A great and inveterate mistake made by actors is to believe that only what is visible and audible to the public, in the wide expanse of the theatre building, is of scenic quality.165
Real ACTIVE ANALYSIS goes beyond the audible and deep into the visual, as it plunges into the heart of ensemble interaction. In a SILENT ÉTUDE, you read every tiny detail of information that your partner gives you through their eyes, nostrils, eyebrows, breathing pattern, small step towards you, flinch away from you, tremor of the little finger, flutter of the left hand. It’s a kind of litmus test of the scene, finding out exactly what’s going on between two people – both actors and characters – and what’s happening under the text. To be that tuned in to your partner requires immense focus and willing vulnerability, but it also requires a desire to take from your partner all the information they’re offering both consciously and unconsciously. That means actually exchanging energies with them and getting them in your GRASP.
There’s nothing esoteric or weird in this idea. We’ve all experienced how powerful a performance can be when two exciting actors are genuinely interacting on stage or in front of the camera – the electricity is tangible. When they’re in each other’s GRASP, they really listen, they really respond, they catch every nuance, they sense every movement. They are playful, alert, open in a childlike way, and up for the adventure of performance. They don’t care about ‘getting it right’ (whatever that might mean) – because in exciting performances, there is only one way to get it right, and that’s to respond to what’s happening here and now, right in the moment of interaction.
These actors are also in their own GRASP. They’re responding to their own inner impulses and breathing patterns, the pumping of their own adrenalin, their delight at being in front of a live audience or a mesmerised camera. GRASP is intoxicating and effortless, it’s dangerous and creative, it’s aesthetic and anarchic. But that anarchy isn’t disruptive, it’s collaborative and sexy. And it’s truly absorbing. For Stanislavsky:
Grasp does not in any way signify unusual physical exertion, it means greater inner activity.
An actor must learn to become absorbed in some interesting, creative problem on the stage. If he can devote all his attention and creative faculties to that he will achieve true grasp.166
Getting yourself in your own GRASP and then magnetising your partner into that GRASP isn’t hard work; it appeals to what Michael Chekhov called ‘quality of ease’. The contact is intense but effortless, as really you’re in nothing more than a natural state of creative curiosity and play. And if the script is good, the process is even more effortless:
The main inner current of a play produces a state of inner grasp and power in which actors can develop all the intricacies and then come to a clear conclusion as to its underlying fundamental purpose.167
In other words, it’s a two-way street. With a good sense of GRASP in ACTIVE ANALYSIS, you can uncover all sorts of intricacies about the play. And if the play is full of all sorts of intricacies, then your sense of GRASP will be all the more powerful.
In summing up the three most important features of the creative process, Stanislavsky cited GRASP as number one, followed by the THROUGH-LINE OF ACTION and the SUPER-OBJECTIVE. Since the references to GRASP come right in the middle of the chapter in An Actor Prepares on ‘communion’, we need to look at ‘communion’ or CONNECTION in relation to GRASP, and understand how the two tools interdepend.
Connection (see Preface)
Stanislavsky describes GRASP in quite robust terminology, whereas his description of CONNECTION is rather more esoteric. CONNECTION (like GRASP) is dependent on
those impressions which you get from direct, personal intercourse with other human beings. This material is difficult to obtain because in large part it is intangible, indefinable . . . To be sure, many invisible, spiritual experiences are reflected in our facial expression, in our eyes, voice, speech, gestures, but even so it is no easy thing to sense another’s inmost being, because people do not often open the doors of their souls and allow others to see them as they really are.168
Yet that’s what you’ve got to do: open yourself up for your partner to really see you, and vice versa. It’s a very intimate dialogue with your fellow actors. As Stanislavsky says, when we’re in CONNECTION, we use our eyes, faces, vocal timbres, hands and fingers, our whole bodies are drawn into the exchange. Personally, I’d say it’s almost as good as fine love-making! And this vibrant exchange of energies continues beyond your own lines in the script, so that it exists throughout your whole performance; between you and your fellow actors, there should be an unbroken dialogue, albeit partly silent.
Despite its sex appeal, it’s curious that so few actors genuinely commit to establishing real CONNECTION between each other. Probably because it’s actually quite hard work, and going through the ‘theatrical motions’ can be much easier. As Stanislavsky opines:
We are supposed to use the feelings and thoughts created by the playwright. It is more difficult to absorb this spiritual material than to play at external forms of non-existing passions in the good old theatrical way.
It is much harder truly to commune with your partner than to represent yourself as being in relation to him. Actors love to follow the line of least resistance, so they gladly replace real communion by ordinary imitations of it.169
Though it’s not always the actor’s fault. Even one hundred years later, very little conventional actor-training seems to focus on developing a sense of ‘communion’ or CONNECTION between actors. If you haven’t had the opportunity to experience it in your training, how can you do otherwise in your professional practice than ‘replace real communion by ordinary imitations of it’?
So how can we help ourselves?
First of all, through eye contact – which, as we’ve seen with GRASP, is a vital starting point.
Then through the word itself. And the word is very powerful (as we’ll see with VERBAL ACTION below). Once a word has been emitted into the ethersphere, there’s no retrieving it. The late-night phone call. The urgent text message. The invidious email. The impassioned letter. The whispered promise. The shouted threat. The loaded question. The drunken confession. Make any one of these communications and the course of events can change beyond expectation.
You see, the word is immeasurably powerful. And yet how often as actors do we utter our lines with scant regard for the true impact of what we’re actually saying? Or, indeed, how often do we hear our acting partners’ words and pretend it’s the first time we’ve heard them, but without really absorbing on a psycho-physical level the weight of what has just been said? CONNECTION is mighty, whether it comes via the spoken word or the silent exchange of energies. As a result, it requires a high level of attention, and the words you speak have to fly like arrows:
When you speak to the person who is playing opposite you, learn to follow through until you are certain your thoughts have penetrated his consciousness. Only after you are convinced of this and have added with your eyes what could not be put into words, should you continue to say the rest of your lines. In turn, you must learn to take in, each time afresh, the words and thoughts of your partner. You must be aware today of his lines even though you have heard them repeated many times in rehearsals and performances. This connection must be made each time you act together, and this requires a great deal of concentrated attention, technique, and artistic discipline.170
You might argue that Stanislavsky makes it sound rather like hard work, but it isn’t really. As we saw in Chapter 1, ‘artistic discipline’ and ‘concentrated attention’ go hand in hand with a burning desire to tell this particular story in front of this particular audience (live or camera) in dialogue with these particular actors and playing these particular OBJECTIVES. When you love your work, DISCIPLINE, CONCENTRATION AND ATTENTION, and certainly CONNECTION are no big deal.
In fact, when there’s no genuine CONNECTION going on between yourself and your partner, it can be almost painful and creatively debilitating. Stanislavsky recognised these situations only too well:
What torture to play opposite an actor who looks at you and yet sees someone else, who constantly adjusts himself to that other person and not to you. Such actors are separated from the very persons with whom they should be in closest relationship. They cannot take in your words, your intonations, or anything else. Their eyes are veiled as they look at you. Do avoid this dangerous and deadening method. It eats into you and is so difficult to eradicate!171
One of the easiest ways to eradicate ‘dis-connection’ is through ACTIVE ANALYSIS. Because the rehearsal process begins with improvisation, there is only one way in which you can go about an ÉTUDE – silent or otherwise – and that’s by absolutely listening to all your fellow actors. After all, you really don’t have any idea what they might do or say next. When you’re improvising, CONNECTION becomes unavoidable, because – like a game of chess – you’re constantly penetrating your partner’s next move. The result is that ‘a parallel interchange of currents’ (as Stanislavsky calls it) exists beneath the words:
It is like an underground river, which flows continuously under the surface of both words and silences and forms an invisible bond between subject and object.172
Like a river, that ‘interchange of energies’ endlessly adjusts in order to negotiate the various obstacles which might be thrown up by your fellow actors in the course of your improvisation. And the way to preserve your sense of TRUTH is to go with whatever’s happening ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’.
‘Here, today, now’
The basis of your improvisations in ACTIVE ANALYSIS is that you needn’t be afraid of just getting up and giving the scene a go. It doesn’t matter how much or how little information from the script you’ve retained in your memory at each stage in the rehearsal process; anything really goes.
However . . .
To be this free and confident, there has to be an atmosphere of immense liberation and experimentation in the rehearsal room. I know from my own experience the icy chill of fear that can percolate your innards when you’re asked to get up and improvise a scene in your own words. And yet, there’s a surefire way of dispelling that fear: you just have to be entirely assured that whatever you have in your imagination and intuition ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’ is all that you need to actively analyse the scene.
This is the crux of ‘starting from yourself’ and ‘merging with the character’. The character isn’t ‘out there’ somewhere – meaning that, until you’ve acquired all the information, you won’t be able to play it. ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’ you have all you require to fuel your process. You don’t have to know the play inside out, you don’t have to carry reams of research in your head when you walk onto the rehearsal-room floor, you don’t even have to know any of the lines. You begin with yourself, and from there you allow your IMAGINATION to do the rest of the work for you. You place yourself in the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES. You ask yourself what you would do ‘if’ . . . and from that transference of self into circumstance, you turn your ATTENTION towards your partner. Simply focus your ATTENTION on your onstage partner and open yourself to the limitless nuances of that exchange. Your partner is your main resource, not your own memory of the script. And if you’re both mutually relying on each other to keep the improvisation going, then true dialogue and real listening can’t help but evolve.
But the process isn’t wayward. As with the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS, don’t forget the key Steps (4) and (5): after each improvisation, you return to the script and check the discoveries you made in the ÉTUDE against the contents of the writer’s words by discussing your improvisation and then rereading the scene. Through this constant checking and rereading, you can surreptitiously mutate your ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’ knowledge step by step into the life of the character.
As ever, the LOGIC AND SEQUENCE of the exchange with your partner is very important, but that LOGIC AND SEQUENCE comes from your attentive interaction with them. So don’t consciously make life easy for each other. Just because you may know parts of the scene and therefore know what ought to happen next, don’t resort to trusty formulae and ‘make-believe truth’. If your partner doesn’t do what they need to do in order for the scene-as-written to proceed, you can only go with what they offer you ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’. If you genuinely respond to what they do, that genuine response will provide the LOGIC AND SEQUENCE of this particular encounter. Such a quality of listening and responding is far more important in the early stages of ACTIVE ANALYSIS than any accuracy arising from pure memory. Little by little, you’ll work your way as part of an ensemble towards the most logical and sequential MISE-EN-SCÈNE for the scene by constantly returning to the table – and the script – after each improvisation to discuss what unfurled. And these steps (Step 4: Discuss the impro, and Step 5: Return to the script) are absolutely vital in order to
think through everything that [the actors] have discovered, to check exactly how they have fulfilled the dramatist’s idea, to share their living experience acquired in the process of the work, to receive replies from the director to the questions that have arisen in their minds, to think through the author’s text with still greater depth, noting that which was not true once again, to seek through action a fusion with the role.173
You’ll even find that returning to the table after each improvisation begins to create its own irresistible energy. As you realise how close you’re coming to the actual structure and scenario of the scene, you’ll be bursting to get up and give the scene another go. You’ll want to take all the new information that you’ve gleaned from the script ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’ and feed it into a new improvisation.
As your ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’ comes closer to the writer’s text, you can start to fine-tune your merger with the role. And this is where two more tools from the kit come in particularly handy: JUSTIFICATION and ADAPTATION.
Justification and Adaptation
All along we’ve stressed that everything you do in your performance is for a purpose. And that purpose can be subtle. Let’s take Varya and Lopakhin in Act 4 of The Cherry Orchard: Varya comes into the room supposedly looking for something that she has lost. She knows that really she’s distracting herself from Lopakhin’s proposal, so she has to find a JUSTIFICATION which will also convince him that she’s here on a mission and that she hasn’t just been sent in by her mother in order to be proposed to. Chekhov has given a very specific physical activity to the character, thereby giving her a sense of purpose in an otherwise embarrassing situation and enabling her to ‘justify’ her presence in the room.
ADAPTATION (sometimes called ‘adjustment’) is similar to JUSTIFICATION but subtly different. ADAPTATION could be re-termed ‘a constant state of improvisation’. Even when he required his actors to find an accurate and repeatable ‘score of physical actions’ with the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS, Stanislavsky constantly invited his actors to be as spontaneous as appropriate in performance:
Don’t fix anything before the scene. This is the surest way to deaden the scene and your parts. The true adjustment will come on the stage as a result of the correct state of the actor in the character, from his desire to fulfil the problems of the part in the given circumstances.174
This hearkens back to the tool of the SIX FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS and the way in which the ‘How?’ doesn’t need to be fixed. It’s your right – no, your art – to adapt the ‘How?’s each night to the nuances of your fellow actors and the audience. The degree of improvisation that we’re talking about here is minimal: just like the constant adjustments you make to the steering wheel when you’re driving. If you can dare to not fix the ‘How?’ beforehand, you leave a wonderful gap for the ‘unexpected’ and the SUBCONSCIOUS to slip in. And ADAPTATION is a useful coping strategy: a prop is missing . . . Who cares? Your onstage partner forgets his lines . . . So what? The pause you usually expect is three times as long as normal . . . Fantastic! Simply adapt to whatever is happening ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’ and the ‘unexpectedness of the incident will excite you and your nature will rush forward’.175 And lo and behold! You’ve crossed the threshold of the SUBCONSCIOUS.
There are in fact three very subtle ways of using ADAPTATIONS.
1.You make constant adjustments to your own self, ‘because we must necessarily make allowances for the state of mind we are in at any given moment’.176 ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’ – that’s your starting point. So you feel vulnerable? Then use that feeling to uncover the vulnerability in your character. You feel confused? Find the way in which your character expresses confusion. You feel elated? That creative excitement may well elucidate something about the character that you hadn’t thought of before. Anything does go. Like a child at play.
2.If you allow yourself room for these constant ADAPTATIONS, you can put your fellow actors in an appropriate mood to respond to you. You ‘can transmit certain invisible messages, which can only be felt and not put into words’,177 thereby ‘infecting’ your partner with your own creative desire to be up for the adventure of improvising.
3.You can adapt your ‘How?’ response, as we’ve said, to the nuanced adjustments that you’ll note in your partners’ performances each time you enact the scene.
So these are the ways to use ADAPTATION: you listen to yourself; you ‘infect’ your partner; and you listen to your partner. You take all the minor ADAPTATIONS of ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’, and regardless of what you’re given, you adapt to it and go with it, and turn it into something unexpected and creative.
That’s the art of true listening, which the process of ACTIVE ANALYSIS encourages and which we talked about right at the start of The Toolkit. ACTIVE ANALYSIS develops your ability to listen to yourself, to your onstage partner, and ultimately – when you reach the time of performance – to the audience, to the camera, and to the creative excitement aroused by the actual experience of acting itself. In the process of rehearsal, your ADAPTATIONS will never be random, because after each improvisation, you return to the script (Step 5), and thus you draw your discoveries incrementally closer to the words and actions that the writer provided.
*
By now, our improvisations (through the repeated sequence of Read / Discuss / Improvise / Discuss / Return to the script) will be picking up momentum. We’ve identified the EVENTS, we’re in each other’s GRASP, there’s some good CONNECTION going on between us, our improvisational skills are developing through responding to the ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’ and to our moment-by-moment JUSTIFICATIONS and ADAPTATIONS.
We can start to put more detail into our work by contemplating some of the specifics from the writer’s text to build our sense of flow and dimension. This involves the tools of the SUPER-OBJECTIVE and its corresponding THROUGH-LINE OF ACTION. They in turn lead onto VERBAL ACTION and the PAUSE.
Super-objective and Through-line of action
The idea of ACTIVE ANALYSIS is that through the repeated sequence of read / discuss / improvise / discuss / return to the script, you come closer and closer to the actual words of the text in your improvisations. And the SUPER-OBJECTIVE is arguably the portal through which you can enter the writer’s psyche.
The SUPER-OBJECTIVE is the ruling idea of the script. It forges a link between writer, director, actor and eventually audience. If you can identify the SUPER-OBJECTIVE, you can clarify the motivating force behind why the writer wrote the script in the first place:
Just as a plant grows out of a seed, so too in exactly the same way does the writer’s work grow out of his independent thought and feeling. The thoughts, feelings and dreams of the writer, with which his life is filled and which agitate his heart, put him onto the path of creativity. They become the basis of the play. It is for them that the writer writes his literary work. All of his life experience, his joys, his griefs, which he himself has borne and observed in his life, become the basis of the dramatic work. It is for the sake of them that he takes up his pen.178
If you can clarify what the writer’s SUPER-OBJECTIVE may be, you and the director can begin to unify all the fragmented BITS of action and small OBJECTIVES throughout the script into one coherent whole. Identifying the writer’s SUPER-OBJECTIVE prevents you concentrating exclusively on your own role: instead, you start to see the bigger picture, as well as the context in which your character exists, so that you have a concept of every character’s function and journey. In this way, you’re opening your improvisations out from one particular scene to understanding how those scenes fit together to create the arc of the script. As with an OBJECTIVE, the SUPER-OBJECTIVE is usually expressed as ‘I want to . . .’: it simply has greater magnitude than a scene-by-scene OBJECTIVE.
Personally, I have ambivalent feelings about the SUPER-OBJECTIVE. In my experience as an actor and director, I’ve never found it’s something we’ve touched on in rehearsals. In fact, I’ve actually found that when it comes to theatre, a play’s SUPER-OBJECTIVE doesn’t really emerge until you put the production in front of a live audience. Their responses reflect back to you the dominant drive of the play and how the cumulative effect of the various actions shapes their overall experience. In terms of television, the SUPER-OBJECTIVE is even less easy to fathom. With soaps, series and serials, there’s a host of writers, and their shared SUPER-OBJECTIVE may well be, ‘We want to keep the audience tuned in’.
Whatever complexities it presents us with today, the SUPER-OBJECTIVE was one of the tools that Stanislavsky insisted that his actors used. In the final years of his experimentation, he even upheld the belief that anything an actor did on stage which didn’t lead to the SUPER-OBJECTIVE was unnecessary.179 For Stanislavsky, identifying the SUPER-OBJECTIVE unified the actors and director in their understanding of a play. It also unified all the acting processes within the actor: Stanislavsky maintained that if the actor pursued the SUPER-OBJECTIVE through a coherent line of ACTIONS, all the harvest of his acting ‘system’ would ‘be brought about subconsciously, miraculously, by nature’.180
So how do you identify the SUPER-OBJECTIVE?
If the writer is still alive – why not ask him or her what their SUPER-OBJECTIVE was in writing the script in the first place? This is exactly what I did with David Hare and The Permanent Way. As Hare put it:
For me, there are two axes in [The Permament Way] which became very interesting for me: one is the question of honour and dishonour – what it means to behave honourably and what it means to behave dishonourably, and the excitement of the contrast between the two is what animates the play.
The other is suffering: it’s the degree to which human beings distinguish . . . between suffering that’s avoidable and suffering that’s unavoidable, and what they should be doing about suffering that’s avoidable. I wanted to study how these [rail] accidents could have been avoided, and how people dealt with the results of these accidents. And once those two ideas became clear to me as the subjects of the play, then I was away. The ‘super-objective’ is quite simply: to express the anger of people who have suffered unnecessarily and been humiliated basically by the way they’ve been treated.181
As an actor, this was remarkably useful for me to know. I took Hare’s SUPER-OBJECTIVE idea of anger, and I related it to the story told by my character, the Second Bereaved Mother. The tool became particularly significant for me in a scene which re-enacted Lord Cullen’s Public Inquiry into the 1999 Paddington crash. Both Hare and the director, Max Stafford-Clark, had impressed upon me that the Cullen Inquiry was the Second Bereaved Mother’s chance to express her anger without censorship. She could use the formal inquiry to channel her private anger about the death of her son into public outrage at the incompetence of those involved in the rail privatisation. I therefore took the energy of Hare’s SUPER-OBJECTIVE and injected it into the choices I made for my moment-by-moment ACTIONS.
If the writer isn’t at hand to ask, then Stanislavsky suggests you look at what the protagonist does. To a large extent, he or she will be the ‘principal mouthpiece of the play’s ideas’.182 Having located it, you then need to be sure the emphasis of the SUPER-OBJECTIVE is correct. Stanislavsky gives the example of Molière’s The Hypochondriac to illustrate what he means. If the SUPER-OBJECTIVE of the principal character, Argan, is expressed as ‘I want to be ill’, the production becomes tragic. On the other hand, if the SUPER-OBJECTIVE is expressed as ‘I want to be considered to be ill’ then the play should fulfil its comic potential.
Although the protagonist will give you a big clue as to the overriding SUPER-OBJECTIVE of the play, of course each character has his or her own SUPER-OBJECTIVE, which will usually relate to that of the protagonist in some way. And that’s what you have to pursue through your moment-by-moment ACTIONS.
Whether you appeal directly to the writer or you look at the protagonist’s actions, labelling the SUPER-OBJECTIVE mustn’t be a dry, intellectual activity. Stanislavsky wards off directors who ‘know the game’ and can quickly come up with some clever label, which they then download on to the actors:
An actor cannot be fattened like a capon. His own appetite must be tempted.183
The SUPER-OBJECTIVE should be ‘irresistible’, inciting and exciting all three INNER PSYCHOLOGICAL DRIVES, so that it’s thought-provoking, emotionally charged, and it passionately propels you into action. In Stanislavsky’s words:
Defining the super-objective is a profound penetration into the writer’s spiritual world, into his idea, into those motivating principles which have moved the author’s pen. The super-objective must be conscious, emerging from the mind, from the actor’s artistic thought. It must be emotional, provoking the whole of his human nature and finally it must be strong-willed, emerging from his mental and physical essence. The super-objective must awaken the artistic imagination of the artist, must arouse his belief, must arouse the whole of his psychic life . . . Without the subjective experiences of the person creating it, it is dry, dead. It is essential to seek responses in the artist’s soul in order that the super-objective and the role should become living, quivering, shining with all the colours of authentic human life.184
The SUPER-OBJECTIVE provokes ‘complete surrender, passionate desire, unequivocal action’,185 and just like an OBJECTIVE – but on a magnified scale – pursuing it is about wanting something so badly that you can’t resist the desire to get up and act upon it.
To help this ardent pursuit of the SUPER-OBJECTIVE, we have the THROUGH-LINE OF ACTION (sometimes translated as ‘through action’). As Stanislavsky puts it:
For the actor, the through action is the active attainment of the super-objective. Thus the super-objective and the through action represent creative goal and creative action, which contain in themselves all the thousands of separate, fragmentary objectives, [‘bits’], actions in a role.
The super-objective is the quintessence of the play. The through-line of action is the leitmotif which runs through the entire work. Together they guide the creativeness and strivings of the actor.186
There’s no script without a SUPER-OBJECTIVE (after all, that’s what gave birth to the script in the first place). And there’s no achievement of the SUPER-OBJECTIVE without a THROUGH-LINE OF ACTION. Given these two facts, it’s fair to say the whole acting experience (certainly in theatre) is based on these two tools. Together, the SUPER-OBJECTIVE and the THROUGH-LINE OF ACTION are the fundamental components which ‘inspire an actor to act’.187 By means of the THROUGH-LINE OF ACTION, you manifest externally your inner, psychologically driven SUPER-OBJECTIVE. It
totally unifies all the elements. It goes right through them like a thread through separate beads, and it directs them towards the general super-objective. If the actor does not thread together all his actions into the unified core of the through-line of action, which is leading him towards the super-objective, then the role will never be played in such as way that people talk about it as a serious artistic victory. More often than not the actor is confronted by artistic defeat when he replaces the through-line of action with more trivial inessential actions.188
And this is where the ÉTUDE REHEARSALS of ACTIVE ANALYSIS really come into their own. Through the process of improvisation, you test out various THROUGH-LINES OF ACTION (a little like the ‘score of physical actions’ in the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS) and you find the one which most logically and coherently helps you to achieve your character’s OBJECTIVES. You ditch the trivial and you harbour the essential. Your decisions aren’t made cerebrally: this is a visceral, experiential and intensely psycho-physical voyage of discovery that you’re making.
In brief:
•The SUPER-OBJECTIVE links the writer, director, actors and audience.
•The SUPER-OBJECTIVE is essentially the reason why the writer wrote the script in the first place.
•The SUPER-OBJECTIVE can usually be identified by analysing the protagonist’s actions.
•The SUPER-OBJECTIVE often doesn’t become entirely clear until you put the play in front of an audience.
•The SUPER-OBJECTIVE unifies all the components of Stanislavsky’s ‘system’.
•The SUPER-OBJECTIVE must be mentally stimulating, emotionally charged and able to propel you into ACTION.
(All these could apply just as equally to TV and film.)
In brief:
•The THROUGH-LINE OF ACTION is the means by which you physically manifest the SUPER-OBJECTIVE.
•The THROUGH-LINE OF ACTION unifies all the smaller BITS and OBJECTIVES throughout a script.
•By means of the improvisations which comprise ACTIVE ANALYSIS, you discover the THROUGH-LINE OF ACTION and test its validity.
(A THROUGH-LINE OF ACTION also applies to TV and film – and it can be especially useful if scenes are filmed out of sequence. If you’ve charted your THROUGH-LINE OF ACTION, you can fathom the emotional pitch that your character has reached in every scene. Then it won’t bother you in what order the scenes are filmed, you can just drop into that ‘pitch’.)
Finding an appropriate THROUGH-LINE OF ACTION to manifest a script’s SUPER-OBJECTIVE shouldn’t be too troublesome if you attentively apply the process of ACTIVE ANALYSIS. All the necessary discoveries will arise out of your improvisations if you really do work with whatever you have ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’. Of course, those discoveries are not just dependent on what you do physically. All along we’ve talked about ‘listening’ and ‘creating the living word’, so time now to turn to the power of VERBAL ACTION.
Verbal action
First things first: VERBAL ACTION always depends on physical ACTION. VERBAL ACTION is as potent as physical ACTION. And for Stanislavsky the fundamental basis of dramatic art was how to present through the bodies of the actors the ideas of the writer’s TEXT.
As I mentioned in Chapter 1, the question of how to make words sound ‘truthful’ had been occupying the greatest minds of the international theatre for many, many years. Stanislavsky’s own contribution to the debate was that learning the lines by rote actually obscured the meaning of the words, rather than bringing actor and audience closer to their meaning.
He was also canny enough to realise that if a script is very well written, it instantly ignites your creative journey as an actor, so there’s a tendency with a good script to think that all you have to do is learn the lines and the play will stand up by itself. And, actually, when you look at Shakespeare or a play of such rapid rhythmic genius as a David Mamet masterpiece, you wonder what more you need to do other than learn the lines and let the play stand up by itself.
For Stanislavsky, it was all quite simple: words and ACTIONS served exactly the same purpose – to enable a performer to fulfil their character’s OBJECTIVE. And that was only possible if the actors approached the rehearsal process with their whole bodies, their vibrant imaginations and their quivering viscera: in other words, they didn’t leave all the work to their heads. Hence his emphasis on ACTIVE ANALYSIS.
Let’s just recap the improvisation process so far, so we can see how VERBAL ACTION kicks into play.
Beginning with the tools of THE MAGIC ‘IF’ and ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’ – i.e. ‘What would I do here, today, now if I were in these circumstances?’ – you read the scene and discuss it (Steps 1 – 2). You then start to improvise the text (Step 3).
At first there may be very little language, as you save your words until your inner impulse is so strong the only way forward is to express verbally what you want in the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES. Your own words might feel clumsy at first: but don’t worry, and try not to censor yourself. You’re the explorer of a character, not the author of a script. If you work from the premise that in life we usually speak for some productive, expedient purpose, then as long as you apply the same premise to your improvisations, your awkwardness as an actor should be fairly transitory.
Each time you improvise the scene, you draw closer and closer to the text as written. But this knowledge doesn’t come from a cerebral learning process, it percolates through you on an holistic and experiential level, as you discuss the impro (Step 4) and return to the scene (Step 5).
If in any improvisation you find that one actor is much closer to the actual words of the text than the other, that’s fine. As long as you all work in the ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’ and simply respond to each moment as it arises, there shouldn’t be a problem. Nor does it matter if one of you introduces a piece of text from a different scene. This mis-positioning of text can often illuminate a particular preoccupation or undercurrent within the character, one that you might not have uncovered otherwise. The ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’ gives you the opportunity for all kinds of unexpected discoveries as you explore the script’s VERBAL ACTION through the improvisations.
Once again, THE ROLE OF THE DIRECTOR is incredibly important. All the time, he has to ensure your improvised text doesn’t become learnt text. Each new improvisation should bring you one step closer to the actual words, rather than embedding in your memory your own approximation of the written script. As Knebel says:
Sometimes you encounter a particular phenomenon which puts a break on the work. After repeating the étude two or three times, the actor begins to fix his improvised text. It is essential to struggle against this. As soon as the étude becomes a repetition, not a search for a new and more profound sense of the image, it is vital to cut off immediately these attempts, which lead him down a false path.189
One thing we should be very clear about: the process of ÉTUDE REHEARSALS and the journey towards VERBAL ACTION in no way diminishes the need to be dead-letter-perfect. (I discussed this with the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS.) Part of the discussion that goes on after each improvisation (i.e. Step 4) addresses questions such as: ‘How did my language differ from or mirror the way in which the character speaks? What choices does the character make in terms of sentence structure, words, images? How did my use of language reflect that? Am I too formal at the moment? Am I too colloquial?’ This issue arose when we looked at the way in which round-the-table discussions are concerned with the choices of words as much as with ACTIONS: these are vital GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES. (See the ‘literary plane’ in reference to GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES.) The energy that underpins a Shakespeare play or a verse drama is quite different from the energy of an episode of Midsomer Murders. The poetic mood and the VERBAL ACTION, which drive a character to speak in verse and not prose, give us significant clues into the character’s psycho-physical make-up and the world in which the author has set the play. Your improvisations with ACTIVE ANALYSIS shouldn’t reduce everything to a realistic ease. Form, genre, style are all part of the character: these elements aren’t imposed on a script, they’re deeply embedded as an active part of the action’s landscape.
It doesn’t mean that you’re suddenly going to start improvising in iambic pentameters. And that wouldn’t be the point anyway. Every reading of the text will bring more and more of the imagery and the TEMPO-RHYTHM of the language into both your conscious and your subliminal realms; they’ll affect and influence the choices that you go on to make in each ensuing improvisation. The closer you draw to merging with the character, the more you’ll find the writer’s words are the most succinct and accurate means – the only means – of expressing what your character wants. Before long, you’ll actually reach the point when you find yourself using the author’s words with complete precision. This won’t necessarily be an indication of your memory, but rather a revelation of how far you’ve progressed in mastering the character’s (i.e. the author’s) complex thoughts.
When you do reach this point in the course of your ÉTUDES, the director’s attention to the detail of the VERBAL ACTION has to be absolutely rigorous. Maria Knebel calls the director to arms:
All the actor’s work in the process of mental reconnaissance all the complex process of coming to know the play through étude analysis is assisted by returning to the play in the post-étude investigations, delving deeply into the role of the play . . . and creating an illustrated subtext for the play. All this will lead the actor to imperceptibly make the author’s text his own. At the point where the collective has made the transition to the author’s actual text, it is vital for the director to keep track of the accuracy of the delivery with total strictness and demand. He must wage a pitiless struggle against the ‘approximate’ text, against ‘ad-libbing’ which sometimes occurs with the actor. He must demand of the performer, not the mechanical assimilation of the text, but a profound and conscious knowledge of it, the full observation of the character with the author’s intonation, as expressed by the whole structure of the phrase right down to the interjections and punctuation marks.190
VERBAL ACTION is precise. The exact rhythm, syntax, genre and style are all part of the way in which the character expresses him or herself. Any approximation will take you away from the character, not towards it. It’ll render your VERBAL ACTIONS imprecise, and then they’ll miss their target, leaving your performance generalised – whereas we want razor-sharp.
There’s one final, crucial point to be made about VERBAL ACTION. There may well come a point when you’re actually ready to learn the lines. In other words, the improvisations don’t have to go on ad infinitum: once you’ve unlocked the inner workings of a scene, you’re free to go away and learn the script. This isn’t a contradiction of the ‘don’t learn by rote’ dictum: it’s simply that, if you’ve fully understood on a psycho-physical level the inner mechanism of a scene, then there’s no point in improvising any more. The goal of improvisations is simply to get inside the part. If you’ve done that, then learning the lines will be effortless, and you’ll find yourself grabbing greedily at the author’s words.
There’s no hard-and-fast rule about knowing when you’ve reached that moment: Stanislavsky suggests it’s up to the director to sense it. And from my own experience of directing with ACTIVE ANALYSIS, it’s usually very evident when the actors are ready to learn the text. They have a palpable sense of interaction, they’re feeding off each other, and they clearly understand the essence of the scene. It might take only two or three ÉTUDE REHEARSALS to get to that degree of understanding: during my time of training in Russia, we performed an extract from Harold Pinter’s The Lover after two rehearsals and a very effortless learning of the lines. My fellow actor, Mark D’Aughton, and I quickly seemed to catch the essence of the scene, and at that point, our director, Albert Filozov, whose heritage is in ACTIVE ANALYSIS, curtailed the rehearsal time and told us to go away and learn the text.
Of course, when you approach a text, there are not only the words through which you can convey your inner ACTION and VERBAL ACTION; you also have the glorious PAUSE.
The pause
There are certain tools which leap out of the kit as vital, ‘Don’t-Leave-Home-Without-Them’ tools: the PAUSE (or ‘zone of silence’) is one of them. It’s at the heart of ACTIVE ANALYSIS; it’s essential for the ‘creation of the living word’, and it’s the means by which you can truly listen to what’s being said. It’s the root of genuine onstage CONNECTION and the provoker of authentic EMOTION. As Knebel writes:
The life of the actor in the zones of silence [i.e. ‘pauses’] is directly and organically connected with inner monologues, the subtext, the ‘burden’ as Nemirovich-Danchenko termed it.191
(See below for INNER MONOLOGUES.) Unless you allow yourself some ‘zones of silence’ – or active PAUSES – you start to short-circuit the life-giving sequence of Action – Reaction – Decision. Stanislavsky insisted on the PAUSE because:
The actor always cheats you during moments of surging temperament. To really measure the power of the actor’s excitement, we must direct our attention to how he takes in the facts and events, how he evaluates the thoughts of his partner; we must watch him during his moments of absorption . . .192
Replacing ‘surging temperament’ with ‘moments of absorption’ requires you to hear yourself as much as your partner. It’s back to the basics of PSYCHO-PHYSICALITY, listening to your own words, thoughts and body, as much as those of your fellow performers. And the PAUSES give you the time to hear that information. There should almost be the sense that when you do speak the words of the text, they’ve risen up out of your silence until the point at which you just can’t hold back your thoughts any longer. All the ideas that you need to express pour out through your spoken words.
For Stanislavsky, there are two kinds of PAUSES: the ‘logical pause’ and the ‘psychological pause’.
The ‘logical pause’ is predominantly a technical PAUSE. It shapes the measures of the text’s phrases; in other words, it’s the means of making sense of the speech. It usually comes at the end of a line or a stanza, and you need it to make literary sense of a text and render it intelligible.
The ‘psychological pause’ adds life to the thoughts. It manifests the SUBTEXT: it’s an ‘eloquent silence’:193
If speech without the logical pause is unintelligible, without the psychological pause it is lifeless.194
A ‘psychological pause’ can come anywhere, as long as it’s necessary and breathes life into the text.
Often a ‘logical pause’ coincides with a ‘psychological pause’, but in either case, a PAUSE is never empty. As Nemirovich-Danchenko put it, the function of the PAUSE is
to manifest the completion of an immediately experienced perturbation, to prepare the outburst of an approaching emotion, or to imply a silence charged with intensity.195
It’s the silent, inner continuation of one ACTION, or the preparation for a new ACTION, or even both. But one thing’s for sure: it’s never static. When you’re rehearsing with ACTIVE ANALYSIS, you can really fathom the nature of the PAUSES. They reveal your own character’s SUBTEXT, as well as giving you the chance to decode the other character’s SUBTEXT. It’s an intricate dialogue.
*
In our consideration of ACTIVE ANALYSIS so far, we’ve moved from early SILENT ÉTUDES to well-established ÉTUDE REHEARSALS; we’ve progressed from improvised text to absorbing the writer’s script. Before we conclude our ‘Approaches to Rehearsal’, we’ll look at a series of tools for really developing the three-dimensionality of a role through ACTIVE ANALYSIS.
Two of the tools are imagination-orientated:
•the second level
•inner monologue
And two of the tools are partner-based:
•envisaging
•the moment of orientation
All four are incredibly useful for creating the finer details in a dialogue and putting the real polish on a character.
The second level
Once the role starts to mature for you through the process of ACTIVE ANALYSIS, you can begin to develop the SECOND LEVEL. This consists of building the volume and substance of the character, ensuring it has an affecting and dynamic onstage life, which will resonate for the audience beyond the duration of the performance. In other words, the emphasis of The Toolkit is slightly shifting from the discoveries you make holistically about the character, towards how the actual performance of that character may eventually impact on an audience.
It was Stanislavsky’s co-director, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko who mainly experimented with the SECOND LEVEL, and it works very closely both with the FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION ‘For what reason?’ and with SUBTEXT, as well as with the idea of the PRESSING ISSUE. As Knebel describes it:
Very often we do not reveal even strong impulses, experiences and thoughts to the gaze of outsiders. Nemirovich-Danchenko tried to reach a point where the actor would be able to make this inner line, these unexpressed thoughts, the property of the audience, not by means of external action, but by means of that internal psycho-technique that he called the ‘second level’ of the scenic image.
In Nemirovich-Danchenko’s understanding, the second level is the inner, spiritual ‘baggage’ of the character, with which the latter comes into the play. It is formed from the whole sum total of the character’s impressions of life, from all the circumstances of his personal fate, and it embraces all shades of his sensations, his perceptions, thoughts and feelings.
The presence of the well worked out ‘second level’ renders all the reactions of the character to the events of the play more precise, makes them more vivid and significant. It clarifies, brings out, the motives of his behaviour. It saturates the words he utters with profound meaning.196
Stanislavsky gives a very vivid example of what was meant by the SECOND LEVEL from Chekhov’s short story, Melancholy in which an old Petersburg hansom cab driver, Yola, has buried his son just three days earlier:
In this ordinary cabby, people perceive only what throws itself directly into their eyes. His cap sprinkled with snow, his hands with large limbs mechanically holding up the reins. It doesn’t enter anyone’s head that inside Yola’s bosom there is ‘an enormous sadness which knows no boundaries’. If you were to split open Yola’s chest, and if the sadness were to pour out of it, then it would seem as if it had flooded the whole world. But nevertheless you can’t see it. It’s managed to contain itself in such an insignificant shell that you wouldn’t see it by day with a light. So what the majority of people do not perceive, a great artist [Chekhov] has seen, and he has led us into that world with such expressive power, that we sense Yola’s grief almost physically . . .
The actor would have to fantasise all of Yola’s life which gave birth to this boundless, all-consuming melancholy. This would be Yola’s ‘second level’, and yet externally his life would proceed modestly, unnoticed.197
Both Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky believed that it was through the creation of a SECOND LEVEL that an actor could create a piece of work which could affect the audience on a profound level, stirring them, educating them, even transforming them. Of course it’s perfectly possible for a spectator to enjoy a well-articulated characterisation without a SECOND LEVEL – you may laugh and cry with the character at various stages on their journey. But as Nemirovich-Danchenko put it, if an actor
succeeds in creating a deep human character, the audience senses a deep second level, and then the audience will say to itself, ‘Aha! I’ve sussed it!’ It is this divination, behind the external behaviour which makes the actor live, that is the most valuable thing in the actor’s art . . .198
Creating a SECOND LEVEL is about creating a breadth of experience, a volume of expression for your character. As with the FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION ‘For what reason?’, the SECOND LEVEL can liberate you as an actor because it allows your IMAGINATION to go in any direction you fancy. It accesses a sense of authorship and ownership of the part: it enables you to ‘be a creator, not a mere narrator’. As we discussed with ‘For what reason?’, the audience will be oblivious to the details of your imaginative journey. But it doesn’t matter. There’ll be a sense of CONNECTION with your audience, a sense of some kind of life or secret existing for your character beyond the limits of the text.
Let’s take the characters in Three Sisters. Nemirovich-Danchenko said:
Each character bears within itself something unspoken, some concealed drama, concealed dream, concealed experience. The whole big life is not expressed in words. At some point it will suddenly burst through in some phrase in some scene, and that’s when that high artistic joy which constitutes theatre will arrive.199
And, indeed, they do ‘burst through’: Solyony loves Irina and suddenly lets it out in Act 2. Chebutykin is in despair about his life and work, and suddenly lets it out by smashing the clock in Act 3. Andrey knows that his sisters despise his wife, Natasha, and he has to let it out in Act 3. We already know Natasha’s ‘concealed drama’: she’s having an affair with Protopopov.
The SECOND LEVEL works quite provocatively with the ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’ in the sense that while you’re making moment-by-moment ADAPTATIONS to whatever’s happening on stage, you also have a sense of a future for your character. There’s a dream which spurs your ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’ existence. Irina’s thoughts are always on the prospect of Moscow. Masha’s mind becomes increasingly fixated on an imaginary future with Vershinin. Thus, the SECOND LEVEL and the ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’ work together to create a powerful and resonant dialogue between present-tense and future.
Developing the SECOND LEVEL involves acquiring a certain amount of ‘inner’ or ‘spiritual cargo’ for your character, and there are a number of tools for doing this, not least of which is the INNER MONOLOGUE.
Inner monologue
The INNER MONOLOGUE is a powerful way of linking the ‘creation of the living word’ with your limitless attention to your partner. Like the SECOND LEVEL, it’s also very closely connected with the notion of SUBTEXT. And it’s exactly what it says it is: a silent, INNER MONOLOGUE to yourself, expanding, justifying, debating, deflecting whatever’s going on externally.
The INNER MONOLOGUE grew from Stanislavsky’s belief that it was inappropriate for actors to limit themselves to the words proposed by the author. Just as we do in everyday life, we should be listening to our performance partners and mentally arguing or agreeing with what’s being said. It’s back to the notion that we only really vocalise 10% of what we think, the other 90% remains unspoken. The INNER MONOLOGUE is a means of provoking all those things we leave unsaid and really getting inside every phrase that we do choose to speak. As Knebel puts it:
The more compressed the phrase which is evoked by large thoughts, the more saturated and the more powerful it is.200
When you create an INNER MONOLOGUE, you relate to your character not as literature, but as a ‘living person’. For Nemirovich-Danchenko, the INNER MONOLOGUE stops actors simply staring at each other when they’re waiting for their cue, because the only way you can evolve a truthful INNER MONOLOGUE is by absolutely listening to the words of your performance partner, evaluating them, and finding an appropriate, heartfelt response. If what you say depends on the text, how you say it depends on your INNER MONOLOGUE, and if you’re truly responding to your character’s GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES as you listen to your partner, then an appropriate INNER MONOLOGUE cannot fail to manifest itself. With an appropriate INNER MONOLOGUE, you should then find yourself thinking in the same way as the character, adopting their world view and desiring to persuade other people of that world view. In invisible ways, the INNER MONOLOGUE lures you more and more intimately towards the character’s world.
For Stanislavsky, the INNER MONOLOGUE
is the basis of any role for an actor. When this inner monologue – inaudible to an audience, but observable on the actor’s face, in his behaviour, and his form of expression – has become part of the actor’s consciousness, then the role is ready.201
If the INNER MONOLOGUE is a stream of thoughts fuelling the SUBTEXT, then parallel to it runs an inner show-reel of images, which Stanislavsky calls a series of ENVISAGINGS. Both of them vibrantly inform the spoken word and activate the potency of VERBAL ACTION.
Envisaging
As actors, we’re a bit like a bout of malaria: our job is to ‘infect’ others – the audience and our partners, the camera and the spectator. As Stanislavsky puts it:
Infect your partner! Infect the person you are concentrating on! Insinuate yourself into his very soul, and you will find yourself the more infected for doing so.202
We ‘infect’ through our words, and one way to keep our words infectious is to fuel them with vibrant images within our own heads, which we then strive to project into our listeners’ heads.
Knebel’s encapsulation of Stanislavsky’s ideas about ENVISAGINGS is very useful:
The more actively the actor is capable of seeing the living phenomena of reality behind the authorial word, of invoking inside himself a conception of the things that are being talked about, the more powerful will be his impact on the audience. When the actor himself can see what it is he needs to talk about and what he needs to convince his partner of on the stage, he succeeds in grabbing the audience’s attention with his visions, his convictions, his beliefs and his feelings. The audience’s response – that whole sphere of images and associations which may rise in its mind – also depends totally on what is put into the word, in what stands behind the word in the artist’s conception and on how the word is spoken.203
Knebel goes on:
When we are talking about something we have experienced in life, we always strive to make the listener see the picture which has left an impression in our consciousness. We always want the picture which we’re conveying to be similar to the original. That is, similar to those visions which were evoked by one or other event in our lives. The task of every actor is to achieve the same vividness of visions on the stage.204
My own experiment with the tool of ENVISAGING was startlingly revealing, and again it was with reference to my performance of the Second Bereaved Mother in The Permanent Way. In the script, I had the lines, ‘My son was totally literally destroyed’: the fire had been so fierce at the train crash that nothing remained of the woman’s son, not even the gold ring on his finger. As I described in THE MAGIC ‘IF’, I decided to go along to the memorial site at Ladbroke Grove, and, as I looked at the landscape in the bright October sun, the experience was potently provocative and extremely evocative. I had a palpable sense of what the mother must be going through. The result of my impressions was that, whenever in the course of the ten-month run I spoke the words, ‘My son was totally literally destroyed’, I had in my mind’s eye the cold steel glint of the tracks and the bare trees, with the young man’s soul or spirit or energy among them somewhere. By conjuring up that image, I endeavoured to plant in my audience’s head a conception – however fleeting – of the ‘total literal’ destruction caused by the terrifying train crash. I felt that psycho-physically I was executing an ACTION on the audience, even though all I was doing was sitting and recounting my tale.
ENVISAGINGS have a powerful energy attached to them: you appeal to your audience’s inner eye as much as to their physical ear. You want your ENVISAGINGS to be so powerful that the listener is compelled to see the world from your PERSPECTIVE. As Stanislavsky says:
If you have this inner goal sitting inside you, then you will act with words. If you don’t have this, then things won’t go well. You will inevitably speak the words of the role for the sake of the words, and then the words will be bound to hit or fall upon the muscles of the tongue.205
We know how hard it is in everyday life to get someone to see the world through our eyes: how much harder is it then with words which aren’t our own? Stanislavsky was firmly of the belief that if you could train your IMAGINATION to accumulate powerful images – which can be done in non-rehearsal time, just as I did with the visit to the crash site – then you can create the appropriate inner cargo for your role which is then expressed through your individual, living features.
In many ways, ENVISAGINGS and INNER MONOLOGUE, along with SUBTEXT and PAUSES, inextricably interweave, as you ‘infect’ your listener with your words, thoughts and feelings. And this artistic ‘infection’ should begin from the very first encounter between two charcters, using what is arguably one of the most significant – and yet frequently overlooked – of Stanislavsky’s tools: the MOMENT OF ORIENTATION.
The moment of orientation
I’m sitting in the dentist’s waiting room. In comes the dental assistant. Looking round the room, she asks, ‘Bella Merlin?’ She orientates herself to the room, even though it’s a room she knows very well, and she orientates herself to me, whom she doesn’t really know at all. She also orientates herself to the rest of the patients – her audience – who acknowledge her presence, await her words with bated breath, and relax when they hear that it’s not their name being called. Each orientation takes but a moment, yet onstage or in front of a camera how vital those moments can be!
Chiding one of his actors as he came bounding on stage to deliver his first line, Stanislavsky declared:
You begin with the dialogue right away, leaving out the most interesting moment – the moment of orientation, the moment they become acquainted with each other.206
Although a MOMENT OF ORIENTATION may be very short and barely perceptible, it marks the difference between a formal actor who’s going through the motions of a choreographed MISE-EN-SCÈNE and an actor who’s listening to his partner on a fully psycho-physical level. It exists in the silence and it exists in the words. It’s a vital moment for seeding your character’s OBJECTIVE while simultaneously trying to understand what your partner’s COUNTER-OBJECTIVE might be: you really have to figure out what you want from your partner and what your partner wants from you. In the words of Stanislavsky:
The moment of orientation, the feeling out of each other, does not end invariably when the partners enter into conversation . . . They continue to feel each other out in order to have greater influence on each other.207
The MOMENT OF ORIENTATION is also a means of connecting with your audience – like the dental assistant and the waiting-room people. And this is very important. Actor Miles Anderson recounted to me an experience he’d had working with the Norwegian actor Espen Skjønberg, in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm at the Manchester Royal Exchange – the auditorium of which is built in-the-round. As Skjønberg came on for each entrance, Anderson described how there was just a tiny beat before he spoke, during which he orientated himself to the whole 360° audience, as well as to the onstage actors, with the result that everyone was lured mesmerically and instantaneously into his performance.
The MOMENT OF ORIENTATION is a wonderful tool, and launches you straight into the LOGIC AND SEQUENCE of a scene. It’s a little, bitty tool, like a bradawl or a pair of tweezers – and it’s just as invaluable.
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Overview
In our ‘Approaches to Rehearsal’, we’ve acknowledged THE ROLE OF THE DIRECTOR and his or her responsibility for constructing an aesthetic and coherent MISE-EN-SCÈNE.
We’ve looked at the basic principles underlying the holistic processes of the METHOD OF PHYSICAL ACTIONS and ACTIVE ANALYSIS. These principles have included the gradual movement from ‘self’ to character through ÉTUDE REHEARSALS, including SILENT ÉTUDES. The first stages of these ÉTUDE REHEARSALS require us to:
•locate the vital EVENTS of a scene;
•get the other actors in our GRASP;
•develop a powerful sense of CONNECTION through our eyes, faces and bodies;
•allow whatever information exists in the ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’ to be sufficient to kick-start our creative process;
•JUSTIFY the decisions made in the ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’ of the ÉTUDE;
•ADAPT to the nuanced changes of the ÉTUDE.
Once we’ve laid down those vital foundations, the merger between self and character can accelerate as we:
•identify the SUPER-OBJECTIVE of the author and our character;
•discover an appropriate THROUGH-LINE OF ACTION to bring that SUPER-OBJECTIVE into being;
•realise the potency of our character’s VERBAL ACTION as we come closer and closer to the author’s script;
•fill the inner machinations of that script with ACTION through our PAUSES, both logical and psychological.
We’ve then started to add dimension and textures to our characters as our improvisations have matured, as we:
•develop a SECOND LEVEL for our character;
•substantiate the writer’s script with the impulses of our INNER MONOLOGUE;
•add power to the spoken word by investing it with our ENVISAGINGS;
•ensure that every aspect of all the work so far is put into place from the very first MOMENT OF ORIENTATION.
We’re now at the end of the rehearsal period. As the stages of ACTIVE ANALYSIS develop, more and more of the tools become completely interdependent and unusable without the others. As our own processes develop, our merger with the character becomes seamless, our absorption of the writer’s TEXT becomes effortless, our ‘embodiment’ reverberates with a vivid SECOND LEVEL and an open-pored quality of listening to the nuances of the ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’. With such an open heart and a playful mind, it’s time to step out in front of the audience.