What Actors Do

THE SITUATION

A Growing Realisation

As I watched the Nederland Dans Theater video, I found myself overwhelmed by the dancers. I love to watch bodies in motion, especially when they move so beautifully. But I wasn't prepared for the rapturous impact these dancers had on me: so alive, so present, so in the moment (despite being on screen), so free, so at ease and yet so disciplined, so skilful, so witty, so full of feeling, so expressive, both as soloists and ensemblists, apparently in total command of any technique required of them. They literally moved me. To tears of sheer pleasure. It's more than likely I was roused to such hyperbolic elation by my preoccupations with acting at the time, because the immediate and upsetting thought accompanying these ecstasies was: When do I ever see actors like this? To which the instant reply was: Almost never! Hardly ever! If at all!

I began to understand that what had been growing in my unconscious - and must have been germinating long, long before Covid - was a realisation I'd scrupulously avoided acknowledging. After all, as I've said, one of my greatest pleasures in life is and has been working with actors. They are the essence of theatre. But the realisation was that my experience of most actors had become a steadily growing disappointment. For well over sixty years, I've been giving who-knows-how-many workshops for who-knows-how-many actors with an increasing sense that most of those participating were simply not equipped for the career they'd chosen. I mean that they seemed to lack any techniques to support them through the challenging job of acting. (Talent is one's potential; skills, technique, craft are what bring it to life.) They rarely played actions or objectives (even if they thought they were doing so); they rarely made genuine contact with their partners; they didn't or couldn't apply any processes advocated by, say, Meisner, Chekhov, Laban, Feldenkreis, Rodenburg or any of those many teachers who provide actors with a whole battery of creative problem-solving things to do. So they fell back on talking about how they felt. They came from all sorts of backgrounds, training and experience. Clearly they were serious, wanting to learn, otherwise why would they spend time and money on a week or so with me? This state of affairs, as I saw it, clearly wasn't due to their indifference, laziness or complacency.

I felt much the same about most of the performers I saw on stage. These were competent and accomplished, and I could acknowledge and admire many of the techniques they did possess, but rarely did they grab me sufficiently to make me care. Despite their accomplishments, I didn't believe them. They seemed to lack total. well, total presence. There was a lot of presentation, and I could see the experience, feel the energy, but they weren't fully there! Some part of them had been left behind - at home, in the dressing room - or, quite possibly, had never been allowed out, even at home.

Now, if I haven't alienated the entire acting profession, I'll enter two caveats. The first is that there are many - many - wonderfully talented actors. I've had the pleasure and precious good fortune to work with a few of them. These actors have taught me a lot about acting and about myself - and have, in fact, fuelled my belief in the theatre and my continuing desire to work in it. Actors and acting are what attracted me to theatre. They are the reason for my vocation: to experience human beings creatively alive and in action. And the aim of all my work has been searching for the ways to provide the conditions in which they could exercise the utmost autonomy and creative freedom.

To make my point, I'm citing examples at their extremes, which will inevitably be critical of some actors and their acting. But it goes without saying that every actor is utterly unique and has different ways and degrees of accessing truth, dealing with feelings, characterisation and so forth. Also, actors have different aspirations for their careers. If you want to be a movie star, or work in a community, or right wrongs, that is your absolute right. And may you have a rich and fulfilling life doing so!

The second caveat is that this deficiency of craft doesn't lie entirely within the actors' remit, but in the conditions under which they're forced to offer their wares. Peggy Ashcroft described the theatre as a disorderly profession. And it's true: an actor's progression is one long obstacle course with continuous hurdles to jump over and hoops to jump through as they steer their way through a chance-ridden, hazardous career.

A Maze and a Minefield

Actor Training is well-intentioned, but rarely rigorous or intensive enough. Students rush from class to class, getting a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and not quite enough of anything. Sometimes important skills are dealt with in the first year, when students are usually too overwhelmed by new concepts to absorb them fully, and may never be followed up in subsequent years. Some aspects of an actor's job may be totally omitted. I suppose the practical thinking is that experience in the professional world will complete the training. Learning on the job has many advantages. But it has its drawbacks, too; it can inculcate bad practice. The experiences of graduating students as they emerge into the 'real world' will probably be so hit-and-miss that much of whatever they have learnt may never be reinforced.

Actors have to master skills for which the application of their conscious brain and common sense is insufficient. The skills they require involve retraining the entire organism - physicality, feeling and thought - and these can only be developed experientially. Having to break patterns and learn an almost total reorganisation of the self is a slow process requiring many hours over many weeks, months and years of constant reinforcement and practice. What is it, ten thousand hours to master a skill? Three hours a day for close to ten years! So, students come out of drama school half-baked, like the dough for croissants distributed to coffee shops for their final baking. Unfortunately, some never get that final baking. I believe that what they learn should be that much more securely anchored within them before they emerge from the structured sanctuary of training into the Wild West of career-building. Of course, they should apply whatever they've learnt and continue to widen those skills throughout their lives. But there's no certainty that their career trajectory will provide them with much opportunity to do so. Quite the reverse! They may find themselves in situations that weaken or distort what they do know. For example, a 'senior' female actor, in my hearing, dismissively told a young actor that she wasn't paid to do warm-ups!

For many years, there was the conviction in some quarters that actors were born, not made. They either had it or they hadn't, so training was unnecessary or pointless. That cliché, 'How do you remember all those lines?!', clearly indicated that people couldn't imagine what else there was to ask an actor, because everything else flowed out of them naturally.

True! You cannot teach people talent, but you can enable them to make the most of the talent they do possess. Before they can call themselves artists, actors have, first and foremost, to become craftspeople. An actor's skills and techniques are challenging: complex, subtle, multilayered, encompassing every aspect of their being. Only by mastering these, can actors release their natural talent and work in a state of true presence. By presence, I mean total commitment, physicality, feeling and thought all working in harmony - the Enlightenment ideal of a balanced head and heart. 'High-definition' was Kenneth Tynan's epithet for the quality possessed by those actors he found exceptional.

We are holistic - mind, feeling, physicality working as one. But somewhere along the way there's been a loss of connection, or should we call it connectivity; the wiring has short-circuited, the streaming subscription has expired. So there is too much head without the involvement of the rest of the body (chilly) and/or too much generalised feeling without the mind (overheated). For obvious reasons, acting classes are separated into those dealing with movement, those dealing with voice, those dealing with text, those dealing with emotion, those dealing with improvisation, those dealing with. But they're rarely integrated, so most students embark on their careers without any sense of a whole.

Since drama schools have linked up with - in fact, been taken over by - universities, acting students are treated exactly like students studying any other, mainly intellectual, discipline, and are required to be graded accordingly. But you cannot grade a student actor who is in the process of learning not just a subject, but also about themselves. (Actors are both the objects and the subjects of their calling.) It's a slow process, and every individual's progresses is different - some may not release their true potential until well into their second or third year, while those who showed the greatest promise at the outset may fall by the wayside. You can grade application and industry and conduct. But not talent. I once tried to grade a class equally -...