It is sometimes suggested that the actor write out a biography of the character, e.g., where Juliet was born, her childhood, etc. However, if Irina feels alarmed by this type of preparation, intimidated by a tower of available material, she has alternative approaches. Irina can remember that biography is based on a past story, and a past story is a form of history. But our Western view of history is arbitrary. In the West, we tend to see ourselves as the product of the past and that the seeds of the future are already present. Thus we see a story or biography as a defined length of time with the future gradually becoming the present and the present gradually becoming the past. We can see history as a railway line with a train gradually advancing. Einstein’s view was less reassuring; he would dryly ask: ‘What time does this station leave the train?’
The Asian Tantrics also take a different view and believe that history is being permanently invented by the present. It is as if we are on a ship looking backwards at the wake that is constantly being expelled from beneath the stern.
Well, say Irina has researched every stage of Juliet’s development and still feels a queasy guilt that she has not done enough, or she feels intimidated by this type of work in the first place, then Irina can remember history or biography is not only linear. History is also describable as a matrix.
The matrix
‘A happened then B happened then C happened’ is only one view of history. ‘A happened because B happened because C happened’ is a more sophisticated version. In both these cases, events happen in a sequence. Time exists in a straight line and things happen one after another on that line. However, we can also see that ‘A happens and B happens and C happens.’ This is a substantially different view. This shape is not a pattern in a line with time as a catalyst between events. This is a view in which time and sequence are different.
Do we pass logically from childhood, through adolescence, through maturity to old age, in sequence? Well, yes. But sometimes, if we are honest, we know we can experience each of these phases during a single day. We may invent a path to navigate a forest, but soon forget that the path we have cut is arbitrary. The path is for us and not for the forest. The forest will go on, with or without our path. The story of our personal lives is as provisional as any path. How anyone sees the past is always tricky. The upshot of this is that Irina may get as much release imagining Juliet at the age of fifty as at the age of five.
A matrix view of a role acknowledges that we can fly off the handle for no apparent reason, fall in love for no apparent reason, get on with someone for no apparent reason, or feel frightened for no apparent reason.
In rehearsal Irina may hear a question such as: ‘Why do you think that Juliet falls for Romeo?’ And some possible answers:
Because he is good looking.
Because she wants to punish her father.
Because she wants to get out of the house.
Each of these replies, that range from the superficial, to the clever, to the cynical, may be of interest in the invisible work. But ‘why’ is a word that insists all things have their knowable cause. ‘Why’ implies that something happens and because of that, something else happens. Each of these three answers imply that there is a knowable reason why Juliet falls in love with Romeo.
But real life is not so well organised as we would like. One of our mistakes in rehearsal is to insist on a rationale and a coherence that real life simply does not possess. Life is more random and chaotic than we dare to see. There are many reasons why we fall in love; there are many reasons why we do many things. Some of these reasons we will never know. Maybe, for some events and feelings, there simply are no reasons. However unsettling for us, this possibility can unblock an actor who is frozen with character research.
Image and character
The matrix can also help Irina mine Shakespeare’s imagery. Shakespearean imagery is not linear; patterns of images emerge, disappear, re-emerge transformed, echo, die, and are reborn. Irina can search for clues as to what Juliet really sees in these rich interconnections of ideas and pictures. Shakespeare’s images resonate and feed off each other to nourish the actor’s imagination.
‘Hist! Romeo, hist! O, for a falconer’s voice
To lure this tassel-gentle back again.
Bondage is hoarse, and may not speak aloud;,
Else would I tear the cave where Echo lies,
And make her airy tongue more hoarse than mine,
With repetition of my Romeo’s name . . .
’Tis almost morning, I would have thee gone,
And yet no farther than a wanton’s bird,
That lets it hop a little from his hand
Like a poor prisoner in his twisted gyves,
And with a silken thread plucks it back again,
So loving-jealous of his liberty . . .
Sweet, so would I:
Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing.
Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow
That I shall say good night till it be morrow.’
First, Juliet wishes she could sound like a falconer to lure back Romeo. In the next sequence the bird is no longer the trained and hooded falcon, but a pet bird that a small child has tied with string so that the beloved possession can never hop too far. Finally Juliet mentions the bird only by implication. We sense that the bird may have been suffocated by the child’s adoration. It is remarkable that a fourteen-year-old debutante fathoms the dark side of love deeper than that grizzled war-hero Othello.
Irina can do sense-memory exercises to help her mine those feelings.
‘When did I ever feel that my possessiveness and jealousy could kill?’
‘How precisely did I feel at that specific time?’
‘Have I had feelings like these before?’
‘How did I feel when something like this happened before?’
‘How can I use these past feelings in the present?’
Although some actors find this personalisation effective, these techniques may actually block others. If Irina finds these sense-memory devices unhelpful, she might remember that the past is something being generated in the present. More specifically it is extremely useful for Irina to observe that the rising stakes play tricks with time. Or more precisely, we see time very differently when the stakes soar. An example might make this clearer.
A car accident
For the witness to a car crash, something very odd happens to time. He hears a long screech of brakes and a never-ending scream as a bicycle hits a car straight on. The cyclist is thrown into the air and seems to float and circle above the car before rolling through the cracking windscreen. The bystander finds himself slowly turning to telephone the ambulance. The screaming blue lights take ages to come, but finally the paramedics pronounce the cyclist and driver scratched but intact and the bystander realises that all this complex slow-motion choreography took only a few seconds to complete, so the cyclist must have shot into the air and he must have raced to the phone.
Perhaps Irina has had a similar feeling when time appears to slow down or stand still. Perhaps she has met someone at a party and suddenly found herself talking to him or her in a strange way. Perhaps she has had the odd experience of telling the truth to a stranger; one of those strange moments when, for no apparent cause, we start to speak from the heart; one of those moments when something odd happens to time, and we realise we are full of more ‘something’ than we ever knew. If Irina can pay attention to those moments when they occur in her private life, and have faith in them in her work, she may learn that Juliet can in fact reinvent all of Juliet’s personal history on the balcony. Perhaps Romeo releases her from the common dimension of time. The target may also release her from her character. For example, who could actually utter the bizarre lines:
‘Bondage is hoarse and may not speak aloud,
Else would I tear the cave where Echo lies . . . ’
Irina can analyse the minutiae of Juliet’s biography to discover what Juliet means by this strange image. Or Irina can simply say: ‘Actually, Juliet didn’t say these words; it was someone else.’
How is this possible? Who else could be speaking through Juliet’s mouth? But as the stakes rise, my sense of who I am starts to change. As the stakes continue to rise I can come out with ideas, visions and words that I did not know I held within. Sometimes I can wonder who is speaking, and realise it is me. The stakes can climb so high that I no longer know who I am. If the stakes fly higher, my manicured identity will drop away like the skin of a chrysalis. As the stakes soar it seems inside less that we are incorporating imagery from the past and more as if we are discovering something that from now on will always exist – and, in some strange way, will always have existed.
For instance, it is possible to feel that we have always known someone we have just met. Indeed, if you cross-examined Juliet, she may have no idea where ‘the boundlessness of the sea’ came from. Perhaps Juliet has never seen the sea. Perhaps the first time that Juliet sees the sea is when she utters that line. Then Juliet plunges into a series of bird images yet may know little ornithology. Yes, Juliet and Irina do need to know what ‘tassel-gentle’ literally means. But crises disinter all sorts of vocabulary and information buried within us. Recognition kick-starts research, as we have seen with the persona.
‘Bondage is hoarse and may not speak aloud,
Else would I tear the cave where Echo lies . . . ’
Is Juliet conscious of the violence in this imagery? Is she aware that if she equates herself with Echo then she implies that Romeo might be Narcissus? Is she conscious that the torn cave is a graphic picture of lost virginity? Probably not at this stage, but each of these considerations may help Irina’s invisible work.
Intimacy, like trust, is said to depend on time. Trust, love and intimacy, we are assured, always need time to develop. However, experience does not quite bear this out. When the stakes go up, Time disobeys the rules we have invented for it. For example a sensation of falling in love can be: ‘I love you, I will always love you – and I always have loved you.’
History has nothing to do with the past. History is how we perceive previous events now. History is only a sequence of reinventions. History isn’t exactly bunk, it’s just highly subjective. Juliet (and therefore Irina) is quite capable of totally reinventing both Juliet’s past and character in the living moment as she steps onto the balcony. There is nothing as unpredictable as the past.