3

Performance Practices

And . . . ‘Action!’

You’ve gone through the training.

You’ve found a character through rehearsal.

Now it’s time to get out onto that set and perform.

At this stage, it’s important to remember that Stanislavsky never promised his ‘system’ would guarantee INSPIRATION. All he was trying to do was find some conscious means to prepare the ground in which your INSPIRATION and your SUBCONSIOUS might appear. And that’s no mean feat. Acting is a kind of work unlike any other:

Very often the actor has to do the impossible for an ordinary man, he is defenceless before the injustice of the press and the public. He has ideals in art and makes great sacrifices to it.

If an actor loves his work, he loves it selflessly and disinterestedly. And that calls for respect . . . Human talent, pure human aspirations, and human nerves should be handled with greater care.208

And that means it’s the actors themselves who should be handling the ‘human talent’ with greater care. Stanislavsky had two pet hates. The first was actors of ‘genius’, who assumed that no technique was required. The second – at the opposite pole – was actors who followed a method (especially his) purely for its own sake. He believed that the blind pursuit of a ‘system’ was as harmful to INSPIRATION and CREATIVE INDIVIDUALITY as the nonchalance of the untrainable ‘genius’.

He also means in the above quotation that the actors’ ‘human nerves should be handled with greater care’ by the public – especially the critics. And yet we can’t monitor or censor the audience’s response to our work. All we can do is deliver our performances with integrity, artistry and a sense of play. It’s up to them to do what they will with the results of our creative endeavours.

In this chapter, we’re going to look at some tools from the kit which can serve an actor in performance. As with everything we’ve covered in The Toolkit so far, the divisions are somewhat artificial and we inevitably cross back into the realms of training and rehearsal in various respects. Which is great, because the more we can see the ‘system’ as holistic, the easier it is to use.

That said, there is one tool, or rather one aspect of the acting process, which can’t be appreciated fully until the actual performance itself, and that of course is the AUDIENCE.

TRAY 14

PERFORMANCE COMPONENTS

The audience

Most aspects of this tool are applicable to live, rather than recorded performances; nonetheless, one or two ideas are perfectly transferable. It may seem strange to call the AUDIENCE a ‘tool’, and yet the way in which it can access and magnify the meaning behind a performance is as tangible as anything else in The Toolkit. And to some extent, the camera lens, camera-woman, film-director, and indeed everyone else on the set can be your AUDIENCE, as much as a host of spectators in a darkened auditorium.

One thing’s for sure: Stanislavsky loved audiences. He didn’t really mind what ‘system’ you used, as long as you were never indifferent to the AUDIENCE, as they are always an active part of the live performance.

So why did he build the invisible ‘fourth wall’ between the stage and the auditorium? Wasn’t that to shut the AUDIENCE out?

No. Let’s return once more to the nineteenth-century Russian theatre and those celebrities who courted the audience’s approval.

Stanislavsky had grown up in an environment where the actor felt duty bound to win the crowd’s fancy and to be a success whatever the cost, and he came to the conclusion that this kind of performance ultimately disempowered the actor:

This dependence on the crowd makes [the actor] feel helpless, lost, stiff, tense, frightened, unnerved, absent-minded, and he wants to pander to the crowd by playing for effect. All this puts him in an unnatural state which we shall call an actor’s self-consciousness. It is the principal obstacle to nature’s creative freedom.209

The ‘fourth wall’ wasn’t necessarily conjured up to push the AUDIENCE out: it was there to preserve ‘nature’s creative freedom’ by reconnecting actors with a more useful onstage OBJECTIVE. That OBJECTIVE need no longer be, ‘I want to impress the audience’; it could be ‘I want to win Juliet’s love’ or ‘I want to be Thane of Cawdor’ or ‘I want to woo Orsino’. As Stanislavsky realised from his own performance experience, the more an actor tries to entertain the spectator rather than engage his onstage partner, the more the spectator will

sit back like a lord and wait to be entertained without making the slightest effort to take part in the creative work that is taking place before him; but . . . as soon as the actor stops paying any attention to him, the spectator will begin to show an interest in him, especially if the actor himself is interested in something on the stage that the audience, too, finds important.210

It’s back to the tool of GRASP: if as actors you can draw each other into each other’s GRASP, then the AUDIENCE will in turn be magnetised towards whatever’s going on on the stage. (It’s a little different on screen, as often you might find yourself playing your close-up to the First Assistant or even to an upturned waste-paper bin if your fellow actor has already been broken because their shots are finished. How much stronger an IMAGINATION do you need to create a sense of GRASP with an upturned waste-paper bin rather than a flesh-and-blood actor?)

Yet Stanislavsky’s relationship with an AUDIENCE was very textured. For all his emphasis on the necessity of onstage GRASP and the invention of the ‘fourth wall’, he put the audience right at the fore of theatre’s ability to transform people. We have a tendency to plonk Stanislavsky and his ideas at one end of the spectrum and Brecht and his ideas at the other, stressing that one was into empathy and realistic psychology, the other was into ‘alienation’ and political comment. In fact Stanislavsky’s social and moral conscience was extremely well-developed, and his directives to his actors were surprisingly inflammatory:

You should love your art because it makes it possible to talk to the spectator about the things he cares most for in life, and to make him a more useful member of society by embodying certain definite ideas on the stage in artistically creative characters. If the spectator obtains an answer to what is engaging his thoughts, he will grow fond of the theatre and will learn to look on it as a necessity. But if all we do in the theatre is to entertain him, he will come and have a look at us and then go away.²¹¹

You can’t help but wonder whether one hundred years later, we’ve really taken this on board. Of course, theatre now has to compete with TV and film. But if there were always something dramatically exciting – some real GRASP between living people happening on the stage – wouldn’t audiences flock to the theatre? For a performance to be ‘resonant’, you have to start by ‘infecting’ your partner. Unless you can ‘infect’ your partner, you make it almost impossible to touch the restless spectator sitting in the dark on K15.

Alexei Popov, one of Stanislavsky’s acolytes, stresses exactly what this exchange between actor and audience is about:

We the dramatists, directors, actors have forgotten that the performance is a friendly intimate talk (in the dark) with the spectator about life’s deepest, most sacred and crucial problems . . .212

What this means in practical terms is that you’ve actually got two dialogues going on at any one moment in performance time: the dialogue between the characters on stage, and the dialogue between the actor and the AUDIENCE. Stanislavsky summed it up by saying:

We are in relation with our partner and simultaneously with the spectator. With the former our contact is direct and conscious, with the latter it is indirect, and unconscious. The remarkable thing is that with both our relation is mutual.²¹³

These mutual and simultaneous dialogues – the exchange of live currents between actor and actor, and between actor and AUDIENCE – are at the heart of exciting performance. And they’re gloriously sexy, because they’re real and unpredictable.

However . . .

If you’re really going to juggle these two dialogues, you need a certain connection with your own acting process: one in which there are two key things:

•dual consciousness

•perspective

Once we’ve looked at these two tools, we’ll consider three others for developing performance awareness:

•creative individuality

•the inner creative mood

•scenic speech

TRAY 15

FIVE TOOLS FOR DEVELOPING PERFORMANCE AWARENESS

Dual consciousness and Perspective

At the tender age of 24, Stanislavsky described in his acting journal his performance of The Miserly Knight, saying:

It’s strange, when you feel you are right inside it, audience reaction is not so good; when you are in control of yourself and don’t let the part take you over, it is better.214

Who knows how often an actor is really ‘taken over’ by a part? There are tales of the acclaimed British actors Jonathan Pryce and Daniel Day-Lewis both seeing their dead fathers when they were playing Hamlet. And I myself have worked with actors whose in-the-wings prep has involved all kinds of Method-manifestations – some quite magical, some quite mad. But I do believe that most actors have an inbuilt DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS, whether they’re aware of it or not.

There’s undoubtedly a very delicate balance between immersing yourself in the onstage action and having an inner eye and ear open to what’s going on in the auditorium, the wings, the flies and the sound-booth. This balance becomes even more delicate in film acting, where the technical demands are a hundred times more complex. Obviously, with screen acting, the visual texture of your performance is far more important than any tangible exchange of energies between you and the audience per se, as your performance and the consumption of that performance don’t take place at the same time. While your audience is sitting in the dark of the cinema watching you act your heart out, you’re basking in the Bahamas or making your next movie or sitting at home waiting for your agent to call! At the moment of filming, however, you’re looking to fix here and now a performance which will reverberate forever across cinemas and televisions without you having any ‘in-the-moment’ ‘energetic’ exchange with your spectator. Your sense of DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS has quite a different quality, but is no less vital, as you negotiate the technical challenges and keep your performance alive in bite-size morsels.

DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS actually develops long before the performance, as you analyse your own behaviour to assess what’s appropriate for the character and the script. As we saw with DISCIPLINE, this process begins right at the start of actor-training. It continues into rehearsal as you build your character while simultaneously creating a natural and coherent MISE-EN-SCÈNE: one inner eye is on your process, the other inner eye is on the production. Even in performance, you never completely lose the sense of ‘being yourself’ on stage or in front of the camera. After all, you have nothing but your own body, imagination, emotional repertoire and voice, so how can you actually ‘lose yourself’? It’s nonsense. That said, we shouldn’t deny the immense creative pleasure you can take in ‘transforming’ your everyday self into your character.

And that transformation is an important part of the fun of acting. Adopting the semi-fictional voice of the student Kostya in Building a Character, Stanislavsky describes his split focus between self and transformed being, when he played the role of the Critic in an acting exercise:

Actually I was my own observer at the same time that another part of me was being a fault-finding, critical creature . . .

I divided myself, as it were, into two personalities. One continued as an actor, the other was an observer.

Strangely enough, this duality not only did not impede, it actually promoted my creative work. It encouraged and lent impetus to it.215

The important note here is that the duality did not impede, but rather improved his incarnation of the character. And that’s exactly how it should be.

So how can this duality exist? How can you utterly commit to what you’re doing and yet at the same time retain enough detachment to ‘manage’ your own performance?

By immediately drawing upon two tools: one that we already know (THE MAGIC ‘IF’) and a new one (PERSPECTIVE). Let’s take THE MAGIC ‘IF’ first.

As we know, Stanislavsky never asked his actors to believe in the reality of what was going on on the stage: he actually asked them to believe in the possibility of that reality. ‘What would happen if this was my reality? How would I behave and react if I were to find myself in these circumstances?’ The result is that throughout the performance, the audience doesn’t see a man who becomes Hamlet: they see a man who places himself in Hamlet’s GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES. And this is where the second tool comes in, as it’s about PERSPECTIVE.

Because you’ve committed yourself to the possibility of the onstage action with such conviction, the audience can immerse themselves wholly in what they’re watching, yet you won’t end up on the psychiatrist’s couch having become irredeemably stuck inside your character. Your inner stage-manager ensures that you’re constantly monitoring the appropriate choices: that you have a PERSPECTIVE on what you’re doing.

PERSPECTIVE was very important for Stanislavsky: it’s a technical tool to be applied to all aspects of a performance. It’s really a kind of subtle ‘sub-tool’ of DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS: it’s the end bit that you add to your adjustable screwdriver. Every gesture, word, thought, feeling, every exit and entrance – however straightforward – has to carry its appropriate PERSPECTIVE in terms of the play as a whole.

And PERSPECTIVE has two aspects.

The one is related to the character portrayed, the other to the actor. Actually Hamlet, as a figure in a play, has no idea of perspective, he knows nothing of what the future has in store for him, whereas the actor who plays the part must bear this constantly in mind, he is obliged to keep in perspective . . .

His own perspective, as the person playing the role, is necessary to him so that at every given moment while he is on the stage he will be in a position to assess his inner creative powers and ability to express them in external terms, to apportion them and make reasonable use of the material he has amassed for his part.216

This is why you need to develop a finely tuned psycho-physical instrument – through your actor-training and your rehearsal processes. Then you can maintain the healthy balance between being the creator of your role and the observer of your performance once you’re out there in front of the audience.

Yet again The Permanent Way proved very useful for me in understanding DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS and PERSPECTIVE. Although our rehearsal time was dedicated to everyone finding an auth en tic and true-sounding connection with some very emotional material, director Max Stafford-Clark referred to our role in performance as being ‘sheep-dogs’. We were there to herd the audience gently towards particular responses. We still laughed full-belliedly or wept real tears: everything had to have a genuine base and a committed manifestation. But ultimately it was the AUDIENCE who were to cry the tears and experience the anger; we were there to ‘get out of the way’ and tell the story with a narrative clarity and an artistic PERSPECTIVE.

Actually, I have my own sense of DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS and PERSPECTIVE. There’s a phrase going around academic circles which strikes chords for some actors and alienates others: it’s ‘bodymind’. Quite what constitutes ‘bodymind’ seems up for debate. For me, the phrase mind-body is more useful. My ‘mind-body’ is a kind of imaginary inner membrane beneath my skin and over my bones. Through this membrane, I can sense whether what I’m doing in performance feels too much, too little, too forced, too relaxed. In fact, it’s not dissimilar to Miles Anderson’s ‘thin skin’. In effect, it’s my DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS, but rather than placing it in my brain (which the word ‘consciousness’ implies), I experience it as a psycho-physical sensation. Did that moment feel right? Did those words resonate truly? My ‘mind-body’ is a kind of porous filter, the core of which sits just beneath my solar plexus, around my ‘emotion-centre’, and it serves as a subtle monitor of what I’m doing in performance. In effect, it’s closely allied to my inner sounding-board of TRUTH which Stanislavsky advocated that actors should develop.

This leads us on to the next tool in the kit, as, through my ‘mind-body’, I can begin to sense when my own personality is too evident and when my character’s CREATIVE INDIVIDUALITY comes to the fore.

Creative individuality

CREATIVE INDIVIDUALITY is closely connected to DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS. It’s a key word in Michael Chekhov’s technique, though Stanislavsky’s definition is subtly different. Chekhov’s definition implies that your CREATIVE INDIVIDUALITY is a part of you which comes into the creative process and guides you towards the threshold of the SUBCONSCIOUS. While this definition certainly resonates with Stanislavsky’s ideas, his interpretation is arguably more hands-on. Right at the end of An Actor Prepares, Stanislavsky describes what he means by CREATIVE INDIVIDUALITY:

Our type of creativeness is the conception and birth of a new being – the person in the part. It is a natural act similar to the birth of a human being . . . In the creative process there is the father, the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part; and the child, the role to be born.217

The ‘person in the part’ is your CREATIVE INDIVIDUALITY. It’s comprised of your own personality. (Indeed, how could it be otherwise, when it’s your body, emotions and imagination manifesting the role in front of the audience’s eyes or the camera’s lens?) Yet it’s not just you playing yourself. It’s the merger of your personality with the circumstances of the character to create a new being. Stanislavsky’s portrayal of Dr Stockmann in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People was a prime example of experiencing CREATIVE INDIVIDUALITY:

The image and the passions of the part became my own organic ones, or rather the reverse was true: my own feelings were transformed into Stockmann’s, and in the process I experienced the greatest joy an actor can ever experience, namely, the ability of speaking the thoughts of another man on the stage, of putting yourself entirely at the service of someone else’s passions, and of reproducing someone else’s actions as if they were your own.²¹⁸

So how do you step into this state of CREATIVE INDIVIDUALITY?

We’ve already seen how to achieve it through the process of rehearsals. First of all – as is so often the case throughout The Toolkit – you take the MAGIC ‘IF’:

From the moment of the appearance of [the Magic] If the actor passes from the plane of actual reality into the plane of another life, created and imagined by him.²¹⁹

Secondly, you find the appropriate ACTIONS arising from that MAGIC ‘IF’, and your combination of ACTIONS (call it a ‘score’ or a THROUGH-LINE) enables you to move beyond your everyday self into the character as created by the writer, through the process of re-styling your inner building blocks from a chapel to a chalet, or from a mosque to a mansion.

Obviously there’s an inbuilt paradox in CREATIVE INDIVIDUALITY. While you can’t completely change your stature or features in performance despite all manner of prosthetics and make-up, you can seemingly change the composition of your personality to create this new ‘person in the part’. As Stanislavsky points out, you don’t lose your sense of individuality or personality, but rather you find a deeper sense of your humanity as drawn out by the writer’s material.

And how does CREATIVE INDIVIDUALITY impact on performance?

If you’re truly relaxed and truly listening to yourself and your fellow actors, with the total bestowal of all your playful energy on the ‘HERE, TODAY, NOW’, you have the chance – and you give the audience that chance – to discover and understand new things about yourself and the human condition. Real people are seen to negotiate an infinite number of life situations, using their own human raw materials as the starting point and the writer’s text as the finishing point. And this is why acting can be so exciting: it’s an ongoing discovery of self and human nature. If you’re talking about live performance, then the longer the run, the more opportunities you have through the endless nuances of each performance to penetrate those human depths. If your involvement is in the recorded media, you have the unique chance to bring a whole range of human experiences right into the living rooms of millions of people. Each part you incarnate has the potential to take you and your audience deeper into the human psyche. For Stanislavsky:

There is no end to the work on a part or to the actor’s ability to bring it to perfection, as there is no standing still in it, if the man’s own life is spent in obtaining an understanding of himself as one who reflects the whole of life in his parts.220

The paradox is delicious. You’re playing yourself in an unlimited combination of circumstances, smelted in the furnace of your own life experiences and the collective unconscious of human kind – but you’re ‘becoming’ someone else. This is CREATIVE INDIVIDUALITY. This is the work of the SUBCONSCIOUS in the moment of performance. And these are wonderful, healthy and artistic moments of creative flight. And it’s most likely to flourish at its most profound, if you’re in the appropriate INNER CREATIVE MOOD.

The inner creative mood

The INNER CREATIVE MOOD evolves when you’re physically relaxed and imaginatively alert, when you’re mentally observant and can harbour a belief in the possibility of what’s going on onstage or on screen. If you can place yourself in the appropriate INNER CREATIVE MOOD, then you can adapt to all the ‘capricious mutations’,221 which take place in every moment of performance. And that’s when acting is exciting. You’re ready and willing and delighted to respond to all those changing subtleties between you and your fellow actors, across the footlights to the audience, or in response to the film director’s instructions.

The INNER CREATIVE MOOD is more or less the performance equivalent of the INNER CREATIVE STATE. If the INNER CREATIVE STATE allows you to respond to your rehearsal discoveries, your INNER CREATIVE MOOD ensures you can put those discoveries across in performance.

For Stanislavsky, the INNER CREATIVE MOOD was an entirely normal state and yet at the same time a better than normal state, and he was very clear about how to create it (as I outline here – with some adaptations):

1.Arrive two hours ahead of your first entrance onto the stage (or the film-set): in this way, you can give yourself plenty of time to knead your emotional clay, to shape it as you wish, or warm up your psycho-physical instrument so you can test its keys, pedals and stops.

2.Relax your muscles so you can rid yourself of any physical tension.

3.Warm up your IMAGINATION by contemplating a particular OBJECT – maybe a prop you use in the play – and seeing what new ideas your fantasy comes up with.

4.Warm up your CONCENTRATION AND ATTENTION by focusing on the largest ‘circle of attention’ which might include the furthest seat in the gods or the whole of the film-set, then reducing it to the smallest CIRCLE OF ATTENTION such as the hand-held prop or the close-up on your face.

5.Warm up your psychology by thinking through your various OBJECTIVES and inventing a few new imaginative fictions for your character.

6.Warm up your physical body by going through a few simple ACTIONS, which you execute as part of your character’s MISE-EN-SCÈNE to be sure there’s a sense of TRUTH in what you’re doing. Indeed, British actor Michael Caine apparently spends hours in his caravan working through his moves again and again, before going onto the set to film them.

This sequence is very comprehensive. Though I can’t say I’ve personally been as rigorous in a psycho-physical warm-up as to go through all these particular stages, I know plenty of actors, including myself, who do arrive two hours before their first appearance. After all, we each have our own way of preparing ourselves before a performance, and just being in the atmosphere of the building – theatre or film studio – can be hugely beneficial in terms of shifting the body and psyche away from the detritus of your daily life into the realm of your creative IMAGINATION.

So we’re opened ourselves to our AUDIENCE, we’ve tapped into our DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS and our sense of PERSPECTIVE, we’ve allowed ourselves to evolve into a CREATIVE INDIVIDUALITY, and we’ve acknowledged that all of these processes are facilitated when we’re in the appropriate INNER CREATIVE MOOD. In many respects, the tools in this chapter on ‘Performance Practices’ are quite esoteric. Before we complete our investigation of The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, we’re going to turn to one final aspect of performance, which is hands-on and technical: SCENIC SPEECH. Although in previous chapters, we’ve considered PUNCTUATION and we’ve looked at VERBAL ACTION, let’s just consider how the voice might work once we’re in performance.

Scenic speech

Stanislavsky was known for quoting the great tragic actor, Salvini, who said there are three things an actor needs in order to be a tragedian: voice, voice and more voice. The SCENIC SPEECH department took first place at the Moscow Art Theatre, and Stanislavsky paid particular attention to the correction of sibilance, whistling, over-resonance, speech impediments and poor diction.

Of course, you have to be able to control your sounds as an actor in order to express the inner life of your character. So, for all our concern with psychology and emotions, we’re going to close The Toolkit with something technical.

We know that despite Stanislavsky’s emphasis on improvisation in ACTIVE ANALYSIS, he considered that a character’s vocal patterns, rhythms, syntax and choice of vocabulary were crucial. He believed the more complex a character’s inner life, the more artistic your SCENIC SPEECH should be, and the more subtle, direct, and simple should be your vocal embodiment of the script. Speaking simply and beautifully is a science in its own right with particular, immutable laws, based on diction, PUNCTUATION and stressing.

With diction, Stanislavsky suggested that you think of the consonants like the banks of a river through which the vowels may flow. If your consonants are weak, the banks will burst and your flow of speech will be incoherent and inarticulate. Diction is the ultimate means of conveying your performance to an audience: if they don’t know what you’re saying, then you might as well not say it. But more than that. On a psycho-physical level, diction and words are messages to your own inner landscape, as much as to your receiving audience or your acting partners: the very feel of the words in your mouth can give you huge amounts of visceral, sensual and psychological information. So – literally – eat your words! Chew them around your mouth, and see just how they feel. Then when you get into performance, you’ll know their vibrancy and muscularity – that in turn will fuel your sense of their irreversible power.

We’ve seen Stanislavsky’s concern in rehearsal with PUNCTUATION as a means of gleaning information from a text. When it comes to performance, of course, PUNCTUATION continues to be vital. This became particularly clear to me working with Max Stafford-Clark on The Permanent Way. After a number of performances, Stafford-Clark noticed that all of us as actors had begun to insert full-stops in places where Hare hadn’t put any in the original script. It seems to be a frequent problem in long runs of a play, and Stafford-Clark’s assessment of the phenomenon was:

If you put false full-stops in, then you heat up one bit of text, but at the expense of the rest, and then people stop listening. It’s an actor’s tendency after a while to add extra false stops in order to ‘microwave’ their parts. They think: a quick flick of the microwave and it’ll seem boiling hot. And in fact it does, but then everything else around it gets dried up, and then the audience are being asked to respond on so many different lines that they become wary – particularly in a script as dense as The Permanent Way.222

Lesson to be learnt: don’t over-punctuate!

When it comes to stressing, Stafford-Clark and Stanislavsky also sing from the same hymn sheet: don’t overstress! It’s all too easy with a piece of text to feel you should emphasise every vital image. But as with ‘microwaving’ full-stops, you simply end up bombarding your audience’s ears with so much information they can’t tell what’s important and what’s supplementary, so they stop listening properly. As Stanislavsky says:

Actors often forget that the main purpose of the word is the conveying of thought, of feeling, of a conception, an image, a concept and so on. And this greatly depends on correctly distributed stresses, on the marking out of the main words. The more clearly the actor sees what he wants to say, the more miserly will be his placing of stresses. Miserliness in the placing of stresses, especially in the case of a long, difficult text with big clauses, helps the actor to convey the basic thoughts . . . An actor who does not know how to pick out a stressed word correctly will not be able to convey the precise meaning of a phrase which is a link in the chain of the development of the meaning of the text.223

The Permanent Way is based on verbatim accounts, so much of the language is very colloquial. As Stafford-Clark pointed out, the speeches are often padded with extraneous phrases, yet if you took those phrases away, the speech would be too bald. Their presence creates a musicality, a naturalness and a fluidity to the speeches. That said, they are only padding. Like the anacrusis in music, they’re the upbeat before the next bar starts; if you give them too much weight, you pull the speech out of shape. With all written scripts, we need to dare to lightly ‘throw away’ certain phrases, in order to give the important pieces of text more validity.

So the advice here is: when it comes to SCENIC SPEECH in performance, be abstemious with punctuation and stresses, and you keep your audience listening.

Which brings us full circle back to where we first began: the art of true listening, and the art of great acting.

‘Truthful’ acting can flourish when you listen psycho-physically to yourself, to your partner, to the script, to the performance space, and to your audience. Once you’re really listening, you need the liveliness of your heart to understand all the information you’ve heard. Then you need the expressiveness of your body to communicate all that information to your audience. This is what The Toolkit is for: assisting you in ‘the creation of the living word’ – through your body, your psyche and your soul.

The art of the word in performance is complex and textured. Because at the heart of the word lies action. Word and action. Verbal action. Physical action. Psychological action.

To create the ‘living word’, the active word, the reactive word: that’s your challenge as an actor. From the moment you pick up the writer’s script to the final curtain and the ultimate ‘Cut!’