Words don’t work. Words do not do what they are supposed to do. Measured against our expectations, words are inadequate and even banal. Trying to express in words what we need or feel is like knitting a scarf with tree trunks. We may want to tell the truth, but words lie; they have no option. Feelings and words live in different dimensions, like polar bears and whales. Speech, like any other reaction, always ends in failure. Words can start to do wonderful things only when we realise that they can hardly do anything at all. Of course Shakespeare’s language cannot express the immensity of what Juliet feels. That is precisely why Shakespeare is a genius. Like Chekhov, he clearly sees the distance between what we want to say and the meagre words we have to say it. More specifically they see the impossibility of ever being truly heard.
Although Irina may be intimidated by the sheer scale of the text, she must remember that Juliet’s problem is the precise opposite. Where Irina fears her emotion is too small to support the text, Juliet will feel her emotion is too huge to be constrained within the tiny confines of words. This remains a central and vital distance between actor and character. This is a liberating distance. And we have seen that if Irina tries to get ‘near’ to Juliet by eliminating the differences between them, she may reassure herself in the short term, but will block herself later.
And here is a vital distinction between Irina and Juliet: Irina’s challenge is that her text is too good. Juliet’s problem is that her text is not good enough. The more things matter to us, the more banal all available words seem. We know how hard it is to express our condolence to someone whose partner has died: ‘I can’t find the words.’
Words not only give expression. Words also deny expression. And the more that the stakes rise, the more the word tends to strangle the feeling.
‘No! It’s not that; it’s this’
Irina can work on this practically with another message exercise. In this instance Irina has to explain to Romeo over and over again: ‘No! It’s not that; it’s this! It’s not that; it’s this!’ etc. Irina needs to remember that the ‘that’ always refers to something general, while the ‘this’ always refers to something specific. Irina can make the ‘that’ clear by a splayed gesture and the ‘this’ by a focused one.
It is notoriously hard to describe gesture in words and I will spare you a diagram. However, Irina’s arms could spread helplessly and wide to show Romeo the idiocy of his romantic ramblings on a ‘that’, while ‘this’ could be a tiny constraining gesture bringing her thumb and forefinger together to indicate that Romeo must think practically. This is just an example, but always the ‘that’ and the ‘this’ are polar opposites. The ‘that’ is ‘bad’ to Juliet, the ‘this’ is invariably ‘better’; the ‘that’ is hopelessly general to Juliet, and the ‘this’ is always specific and helpful.
The gestures and moves distil the message of ‘No! It’s not that; it’s this!’ into something like: ‘It’s not your generalised idea, but my highly specific idea that matters.’
Irina needs to repeat this exercise over and over again and in many different ways, finding as many new ‘thats’ and ‘thises’ as possible. Again, when the time is ripe the observer shouts: ‘Text!’
More on the message exercise
As we have seen, on the command of ‘Text!’, Irina should, without the slightest gap, launch herself into ‘my bounty . . . ’ As we have seen, the first few times any message exercise is done, the actor often leaves a ‘gap of control’ which puts a kind of fire-wall between the energy of the message and the energy of the text. One of the objects of all message exercises is to let the physical energy of the message flow directly into the text. So that the muscles, both anatomical and imaginative, remember the way they moved in the exercise. Irina’s body and imagination remember how she shrank by the wall on a ‘that’ and how she flew up to his face on a ‘this’. When it comes to the text, the muscles behave in the same register as they did in the exercise and move in similar ways to support the text.
This is only one aspect of this scene, but it is a foundation for many scenes, and also a useful device to clear a saturated head.
The empty head
Block makes the head feel so stuffed that the moment of release often seems like an emptying. Indeed the newly free actor often asks, ‘Is that all?’
After some time playing the message exercise, Irina will lose herself in reaction. This is when Irina forgets herself, empties her head, and stops Irina from thwarting what Irina is trying to do. The actor must forget to obstruct.
For example, the two different elements in ‘No! It’s not that; it’s this’ may initially seem the same to Irina. If Irina smudges each ‘that’ and each ‘this’, the observer will notice that Irina makes no distinction between these elements. But it is Irina’s job to make her Romeo grasp that the ‘that’ and the ‘this’ are polar opposites. After a while, Irina will start to make a clearer distinction between these two. She will become more and more desperate that Romeo will not or cannot see this essential difference. So that she will feel forced to exaggerate the difference between ‘that’ and ‘this’. She will show, illustrate, indicate, explain or prove the huge distance between ‘that’ and ‘this’ to her partner in the scene.
Getting Romeo to appreciate the difference between ‘that’ and ‘this’ will matter more and more to Irina as the exercise progresses. For Irina, the scene becomes less about how she sounds, and more about what Romeo hears. Irina’s preoccupation with how Irina is coming across will diminish. Irina’s energy will increasingly engage in Romeo. Her impulses will originate more in her partner: ‘Why can’t he understand?!’ The scene becomes less about how Irina expresses Juliet and more about what Romeo can or cannot see or hear or believe.
Irina starts to play as Juliet only when she is free enough to make this transfer. As always, the reaction is only born in the target that Juliet sees. Irina can never transform herself into Juliet, but Irina can react to the world as if she sees it through Juliet’s eyes.
As always, the actor needs to see what is at stake for the character and not what is at stake for the actor.
The quality of interruption
The message exercises help only when they have the quality of interruption. Thought is a series of targets. When I think something, I see it as a target. All thoughts are targets. And all thoughts must obey all the rules of the target.
Thought has a very particular quality for the actor, and that is the quality of interruption. We never have a thought from nowhere. And we always have a thought. A human can never be both conscious and thoughtless. Each thought supersedes an old thought. Every new thought forces us to discard an old thought, a thought which will, in turn, be forced from our attention by an even ‘better’ thought, jostling itself into position. Thoughts are ambitious and continually elbow each other out of the way – and no two thoughts are ever the same.
Thought and text
Development is unavoidable. We cannot say the same word twice. We cannot have the same thought twice.
‘The orchard walls are high and hard to climb.’
Irina cannot give equal weight to ‘high’ and ‘hard’. They are different words. So the stimulus for ‘high’ must be different from the stimulus for ‘hard’; there must be a development from one to the other.
In the moment of saying ‘high’, Juliet may imagine that the word ‘hard’, which kicks its way into her view, is ‘better’ to get what she needs – for example, to get an answer out of Romeo. Similarly:
‘Fain would I dwell on form; fain, fain deny
What I have spoke. But farewell, compliment.
Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say “Ay”,
And I will take thy word.’
Here, each time Irina says ‘fain’, it must be different. For we can never say the same word twice. Furthermore each thought is not equal to its predecessor. Each thought thinks it is ‘better’ than its predecessor. Each thought pushes in until it is itself thrown out unceremoniously when it outstays its brief welcome. The targets Juliet sees in Romeo change, and the rest of her thoughts change too.
‘Dwell on form’ is no longer as useful as the thrillingly simple ‘deny what I have spoke’. Just as Juliet interrupts herself by telling herself to shut up on ‘farewell, compliment’, she interrupts herself again with the uncontrolled simplicity of ‘Dost thou love me?’ and then interrupts Romeo with ‘I know thou wilt say “Ay’’,’ and again interrupts herself, and any possible remonstrations he may make, with ‘And I will take thy word.’
Interruption does not have to be literal, in the sense that Irina’s new words should actually obliterate the previous. But the old thought never resolves itself into a void, and the new thought never emerges after a convenient gap. Before the old thought has time to expire, the new thought is clambering over its body. Irina will be more free if her thought acquires the quality of interruption.
Only the target and the target alone dictates the rhythm, speed and energy of everything that we do.
Rhythm, target and interruption
Rhythm is dependent on the target. Interrupting should never block the target. The actor needs to pay constant attention to the target. When we interrupt we do not withdraw our attention from everything. When we appear to interrupt, it is in fact a new target that has interrupted us. As a result we shift our attention away from the old target. The new target gets our attention till a ‘better’ one comes along. When it comes to the target we are incurably faithless. The interruption is because of the new target. When we start to play with seeing and interrupting, it can seem as if we can only do one at a time. But the actor needs to practise both seeing and interrupting. Of course, seeing comes fractionally earlier; we see then we do.
‘Interrupt’ does not mean ‘go fast’
This is the simple and relentless caveat to the above; it can prove oddly difficult to interrupt without going generally faster. Interrupting is about the transition from one thought to the next, and going too fast will cut the actor off from the target. Interrupting has nothing to do with speed. When we start to practise interrupting, it often has this side effect of making us go quicker. If the actor just speeds up in general, the target will be smudged. We do not control our speed. Only the target controls our speed. What we see dictates our rhythm. On the whole our thoughts run quicker than we like, and break records as the stakes climb. Similarly when we are flustered and say we cannot think, this is not strictly true. Our frustration is not that we cannot think at all, but that our imaginations are crammed with every thought other than the thought we need.
‘Interrupt’ does not mean ‘don’t listen’
Interrupting does not mean that the actor has to stop listening.
ROMEO
O wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?
JULIET
What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?
ROMEO
Th’exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine.
JULIET
I gave thee mine before thou didst request it . . .
But in this rapid exchange how can Irina listen to Romeo, and manage to interrupt him at the same time? How can she possibly start to see the thought and say ‘What satisfaction’ before she has actually heard Romeo say the word ‘unsatisfied’ first? When her key word is his last word, when she modifies this word into ‘satisfaction’, then surely she must hear every syllable of it before she can copy it?
Irina can remember two things: first, we tend to listen more when the stakes rise. Secondly, as the stakes rise, we also begin to sense the other’s underlying thought impulses. As the situation becomes more important, we struggle to predict what will happen. As the stakes increase we anticipate more exhaustively what the other will say. Our production of predictions and possibilities goes into overdrive. As the stakes rise, we have more dreams and nightmares about the other’s next words.
Imagine a friend has phoned you and gravely asked you to come round . . . immediately. He opens the door, is white as a sheet, and mutters: ‘I am very sorry, please come in, close the door behind you and sit down. I have some very bad news.’ And then he pauses to light a cigarette . . .
What happens during that . . . pause? How long does that . . . feel? What can you imagine during that . . . ? How many different scenarios can you predict? How many potential words of his do you dread? You have invented enough to write a novel. This is why we can have the strange sensation of knowing what is about to be said just before we hear it. The words seem to fill a space already prepared for them in our ears. Does extremity make us clairvoyant? It is more likely that the soaring stakes stimulate the imagination, and the scenarios that we invent multiply. The greater number of possible outcomes we envisage, the more probable it is that at least one of them will be proved correct.
In other words, just before Romeo says ‘unsatisfied’, Juliet might be dreading/hoping that the word he is about to come out with will be: elated/lonely/happy/frightened/frustrated/angry/sad/satisfied or unsatisfied, etc. She does not have to hear first the whole word and afterwards take a second to consider her response. Her response can be semi-ready and waiting. Irina has to interrupt as well as listen. It isn’t easy, but it’s what we do naturally as the stakes rise.
Interruption is inescapable
Even if Irina chooses to leave a long, astonished gap before she enquires: ‘What satisfaction . . . ’ – she will still end up interrupting anyway. For however long the silence, it can never be thought-free. Any silence will fill with thoughts. Whatever Juliet first says will be the thought that interrupted the thought that interrupted the thought, etc. . . . Every thought is an interruption. Perhaps Juliet decides to take time to compose herself, make a plan and then calmly question Romeo to shame him. Even that calm question will turn out to be different from the one that Juliet had originally planned.
A corollary is that there is no such thing as a true delay. We may put off doing something, but when we eventually do it, it is different. In other words, everything that Irina can do is born in the moment anyway. It is just better if the unavoidable improvisation of thoughts consists of Juliet seeing a young man who might be mad or bad or dangerous rather than Irina worrying about an audience who might be the same!
Thinking and seeing
When we think, we see our thoughts. A thought is a target. This thing that is seen is then discarded for something different that is seen and is then itself discarded, and so on. When I think, I reject one thought for another; I drop one thing I see for another thing I see. Thought is a process of discarding photographs. I see something and then what do I do? I ditch it for something else.