Acting is About Sharing Yourself

Acting is about sharing yourself, not “getting away” from yourself.  How does that statement sit with you?  Have you fallen into the trap of trying to transform yourself into someone completely unrecognizable with every character you play?  Sometimes there is a lot of pressure from other actors to do this.

The worst situation is an acting class in which all the other student actors are encouraged to give their critique of your performance.  A lot of times, student actors don’t have the vocabulary yet to give you a truly useful critique, and so when a performance isn’t working, you will hear the criticism that it was “too much like you.”  Put another way, it could be: “you didn’t get away from yourself enough.”

Is this a valid criticism?  It usually comes from a good place, but is not necessarily verbalized accurately.  Let’s not forget that the purpose of an actor is to entertain the audience.  The audience does not care whether or not the actor is “getting away from himself” or not, as long as he enjoys the performance.  The real question becomes, how do you deliver an exciting performance?

The one thing you have to offer is your humanity.  Every human being is capable of experiencing every emotion in life.  When you come to a role, you bring your unique perspective to the character.  If your main goal is to eliminate every part of yourself, what do you have left?  Nothing!

Instead, when you approach a role, you should embrace the uniqueness that you bring to the role.  Your fresh perspective is what makes your performance different from any other actor who may perform it.  When you bring the emotional truth to it in that way, then you can begin to layer the physical and vocal changes on top of it.  As long as that layer of truth is there underneath, you can transform the external attributes as much as you want.

The bottom line?  People may or may not say “Wow, I didn’t even recognize him!”  But don’t worry about it.  Captivate your audience by baring your soul, and they will respond with gratitude and love.

Can Theatre Directing be TAUGHT?

Sometimes you write a piece and that's that: you do the research, write it up, and the thing feels finished. The article, however imperfect, captures a moment or a point of view. Job done. Case closed. Then there are the others: the ones when it feels like you aren't so much writing a story as unravelling a jumper. You tug at that part, and an entire skein follows. You ask a small, half-accidental question, and get an enormous answer that sets you off on an entirely different direction. It's one of the delights of journalism.

One quotation, provided by Peter Hall and printed in A Better Direction, has stuck in my mind. "How much better we might have been," Hall writes, "had we been properly trained." But the difficulty – and something the piece rests on – is that no one can quite agree what being "properly trained" means. Some people think it's the best thing in the world for a young director to pay his or her dues in a regional theatre. Others suggest that assisting established directors is the way to learn (interesting, though, that even Rupert Goold had mixed feelings about his time at the Donmar). There's another school of thought that the fringe is the best place for emerging directors to cut their teeth. Probably there are even a handful who still reject the idea that directing is something that can be taught at all (you suspect that long-suffering actors wouldn't fall into this category). Maybe the answer is that all of them have their place.

Hovering behind all this, as ever, is money. Even the RTYDS exists on a hand-to-mouth basis, raising funds from year to year with no guaranteed future. Universities, of course, are about to be forced into a handbrake turn in the way that they're funded, and no one knows what the effect will be on students or the colleges themselves (especially given that it's arts courses that ministers seem least impressed by). The arts themselves are experiencing painful cuts, and regional theatres, reliant on council funding, are closest to the abyss.

So, another truism about journalism: the more you read and research, the more questions you have. Are you a director, young or not-so? How did you get where you are? What should happen in the future, especially if money is tight? More schemes like the RTYDS, or fewer? I'd love to hear what you think.