Different Every Night E-Book

Mike Alfreds

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A top-ranking director sets out his rehearsal techniques in this invaluable handbook for actors and directors. Different Every Night is the culmination of a lifetime of work in the theatre, the most complete rehearsal methodology in print since Stanislavsky. It offers a vital masterclass for actors and directors, full of sound practical advice and guidance, and is packed with techniques for bringing the text to life and keeping it alive - both in rehearsal and performance. 'Most of what I am as an actress I owe to Mike Alfreds. He gave me the language and the tools I needed for my craft' Pam Ferris, from her Foreword 'If I was allowed to train again to be an actor, but I was only allowed one teacher, it would have to be Mike Alfreds. To me he is a genius when it comes to acting and storytelling' Mark Rylance 'an illuminating and inspiring book... based in rich experience and acute observation of actors at work (and play)... essential reading for actors and directors' Rogues & Vagabonds

Leseprobe

DIFFERENT EVERY NIGHT

Freeing the Actor

Mike Alfreds

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

CONTENTS

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

EPIGRAPH

FOREWORDby Pam Ferris

A PRACTICAL GUIDE

HEALTH AND SAFETY WARNINGS

1 INTRODUCTIONS

CURRICULUM VITAE

THE PRIMACY OF THE ACTOR

PERMANENT TRAINING

2 CONCEPTS

PROCESS V. RESULTS

WANT! DO! FEEL!

Want: Objectives

Scene Objectives

Through-Lines

Super-Objectives

Counter-Objectives

Do: Actions

Beats

Obstacles

The Hierarchy of Actions and Objectives

Feel: Emotion

Given Circumstances

3 PREPARATION

THE PURPOSE OF PREPARATION

PREPARING THE TEXT

Deconstructing the Text

Titling the Acts

Sections

Units

Actions

A Pyramid of Titles

PREPARING THE REHEARSALS

CASTING

4 THE WORK: REHEARSAL, PRODUCTION, PERFORMANCE

REHEARSAL: SOME BASIC PRINCIPLES

STRAND ONE: THE TEXT

Stage One: Actioning

Stage Two: Text – No Text – Text

Stage Three: Feeding-In

Stage Four: Points of Concentration

Logic Text

STRAND TWO: CHARACTER

The Starting Point

The Character Lists

Character Development

Techniques Towards Characterisation

The Actor and the Role

STRAND THREE: THE WORLD OF THE PLAY

Discovering New Worlds

Starting Points

Self-Blocking

Practice: A Handful of Dust; Marriage

BRINGING THE STRANDS TOGETHER

PRODUCTION

PERFORMANCE

5 UNCLOGGING THE WORK

Clearing the Decks for Action

Bad Behaviour

Actors and Directors

Actors’ Fears

Directors’ Fears

Rigour

6 CODA: SUMMING UP

RECAPITULATION

GLOSSARY

FURTHER READING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

For

PHILIP OSMENT

best of collaborators

To

ACTORS

for years of pleasure

with many thanks, some frustration and lots of love

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The following people gave me invaluable comment, criticism and encouragement: Laurence Boswell, Tony Graham, Robert Hale, Jenny Harris, Glynn MacDonald, Barbara Marchant, Philip Osment, Sue Parrish, Peter Thomson and Annabelle Winograd.

To them all, my warmest thanks. And to Nick Hern for remarkable patience – twenty-three years’ worth in fact.

For the happiness of being a writer or an actor, I would bear the dislike of my family, I’d bear deprivation, disappointment, I’d live in an attic and eat only coarse bread, I’d endure dissatisfaction with myself and awareness of my own imperfections, but, in return, I would demand fame . . . real, resounding fame . . . (She covers her face with her hands.) I feel dizzy . . . Oooooof! . . .

Nina, a would-be actress, in the second act of The Seagull

I performed senselessly . . . I didn’t know what to do with my hands, I didn’t know how to stand on stage, I couldn’t control my voice. You’ve no idea how it feels to know you’re acting badly . . . Now, I’m not like that . . . I act with enjoyment, with enthusiasm, I become intoxicated on stage and I feel beautiful . . . Now I know, I understand . . . that in our work . . . what matters isn’t fame, isn’t glamour, not the things I dreamt of, but the capacity to endure. To bear your cross and have faith. I have faith and it’s not so painful, and when I think about my calling, I’m not afraid of life.

Nina, an actress, in the fourth act of The Seagull

FOREWORD

PAM FERRIS

Most of what I am as an actress I owe to Mike Alfreds. He gave me the language and the tools I needed for my craft.

When I met him in 1976 I had been acting professionally for ten years, and although I’d had no formal training, I thought that all the classes I’d been to, and books I’d read, had given me my own ‘Way of Working’. How wrong I was. I was just muddling through.

The slow and sometimes painful process of taking on board Mike’s system seemed, at first, to threaten that vague thing I called ‘Instinct’, and I’ve since seen other actors struggle and sometimes reject his work for fear of damaging their mysterious internal processes. But if you trust the work, not just intellectually but viscerally, it liberates a powerful creativity that makes old-fashioned ‘Instinct’ look a shambolic hit-and-miss affair.

I remember clearly my feelings before the first performance of The Arabian Nights. The rehearsal period had felt like a series of exercises, all enjoyable and enriching, but without the goal-orientated focus I was used to. Nothing was set. No moves. No agreed way of saying a line. Nothing. There was too much freedom, and I felt really insecure. But I also knew that inside I had a huge resource of knowledge about the characters I was to play, the world they lived in and most important of all – what they wanted.

Understanding what a character wants and embodying it fully is the challenge. It took me about a year of continuous work for the knowledge to seep through from my brain to my whole being, and it makes me sad when young actors think that just to know the words ‘Action’ or ‘Objective’ is enough. I get even sadder when I work with some directors – I wish they knew who they were – who have some sort of intellectual theory about theatre, but no idea how to put it into practice. I hope they read and digest this book soon.

Over a period of years I came to enjoy that empty/full feeling before stepping on stage and I love it still. There is nothing so exciting for me as the push and pull of battling out a well-written scene with another actor. It’s like an improvisation with carefully worked-out parameters, but within those limits, it’s as free as any football match. I believe an audience knows when actors are ‘in the moment’ and Mike’s work fosters that freedom more than any director I know.

I haven’t worked with Mike for many years now, but I still find myself comparing other directors with him. I’m always a little shocked by their lack of rigour, their vagueness, their willingness to accept second best. Mike’s pursuit of excellence drives him on and I’m proud to have travelled some of that journey beside him.

A PRACTICAL GUIDE

PURPOSE

The book has two subjects. The first is how I direct. The second is the relationship between actors and directors. Combining them, this book suggests ways for us to collaborate. But techniques and processes risk becoming arbitrary unless they’re framed within some cohesive ‘philosophy’ of what theatre is. Specific methods of preparation and rehearsal should logically derive from – and aim towards the fulfilment of – what we believe makes theatre intrinsically what it is, rather than something else. What follows then is my vision of what theatre is or could be, and how I try to achieve it: ways of working and ways of thinking about work; practice and theory; modus operandi and modus vivendi.

ORGANISATION

In the first part, I set out my wares, which include my own learning curve, my idea of theatre’s purpose, its vital elements and the broad belief system that frames how I function.

The second describes in detail the concepts of the techniques I use in rehearsal, with examples of how they work.

The third describes the work of the pre-production period: preparing the text, planning the rehearsals and casting.

The fourth describes the practical application of those techniques from the first day of rehearsal to the final performance, together with consideration of some technical matters.

The fifth describes the troubleshooting that accompanies the rehearsal work and offers some ethical considerations in connection with this.

The sixth, a brief coda, consists of a résumé of the main principles guiding the work, a glossary for quick reference and some suggestions for further reading (which, together, could spare you reading the rest of the book).

STYLE

GENDER

‘Actor’ refers to both genders. I use ‘actress’ when it seems appropriate to make that distinction. To avoid the self-consciousness of alternating even-handedly between she and he, him and her, hers and his or of even more self-consciously trying to compensate for centuries of injustice by ‘privileging’ she, her and hers, or of using either the laborious he-or-she or the ugly, unpronounceable s/he, I’m attempting to stick to they, them and their.

TYPEFACE

Points of emphasis, foreign terms and titles are in italics. SMALL CAPITALS indicate topics that are dealt with fully further ahead in the text and more concisely in the glossary.

FOOTNOTES

The footnotes are not vital to the flow or understanding of the main text. They’re asides in which I’ve succumbed to the urge to elaborate on detail, illustrate a point from my own experience or indulge in a diatribe on matters adjacent to what I’m currently pursuing.

ADDRESS

Most of the time, I’m addressing the director; but sometimes I talk to the actor and at all times, of course, to the reader.

DEFINITIONS

PLAY

Although I refer consistently to plays, the techniques I describe can, with intelligent adjustments, be applied equally well to devised work and adaptations of non-dramatic material.

STAGE

When I refer to the ‘stage’, it implies any space where acting takes place.

THEATRE

Within the text I of course describe in considerable detail what I believe theatre to be, but I’ll define it here briefly as an event in which one group of human beings, in the presence of another group of human beings and on their behalf, transform themselves into yet another group of human beings who pursue objectives through actions that involve them in conflict.

ART

Where I use the words ‘art’ or ‘artist’, it’s not in any elitist sense, but rather to suggest the aspiration to create something of excellence.

PRACTICAL WORK

PREPARATION – REHEARSAL TECHNIQUES – EXERCISES – IMPROVISATIONS

All practical work is set in boxes and is found in the central three sections. Anyone can go directly to these, should they wish, and ignore the verbiage surrounding them.

INTERPRETATION

The interpretive suggestions I make for the choice of actions and objectives in my examples of text analysis are just that, reasonable conjectures, and in no way meant to be definitive.

PLAY REFERENCES

I’m focusing mainly on Chekhov’s Seagull and, to a lesser extent, his Cherry Orchard to illustrate techniques and processes. The translations are my own. Along the way, I refer to other classic texts that I trust are reasonably familiar.

ARGUMENT

To pursue my argument for a particular way of working as vividly as possible, I deliberately contrast it with a completely different tradition of going about things. But, in theatre practice, things are never quite so cut-and-dried as this might imply. For example, when discussing the interpretation of plays, I stipulate that there are two basic approaches: one – that I criticise – imposes a concept on the text; the other – that I espouse – allows the text to reveal itself. Of course, directors don’t neatly divide up on one side or the other. They practise their craft in endless variations on a spectrum between these two extremes. But wherever directors fall along this continuum, I’m suggesting that they should be examining their true intentions (why they work the way they do). I’m fully aware of the necessary pragmatism imposed on us by the circumstances of most of the theatres we work in. But I see no point in letting us off the hook with excuses for not doing the work we should be doing. Similarly, in order to make my point firmly when I describe certain behaviour patterns of actors and directors, I sometimes amalgamate several connected tendencies into one syndrome.

HEALTH AND SAFETY WARNINGS

Health Warning: Danger from Words

This is a book about theatre. That means it’s first and foremost a book about acting. But a book about acting is a contradiction in terms. Acting means doing. It’s as it says, active, physical. Actors are athletes. A book of acting techniques is a poor substitute for experiencing them on stage or in the rehearsal room. It won’t work like a manual for building a garden shed, from which, if you follow the instructions accurately, you’ll get predictable results. To expect predictable results from an actor is as unrealistic as expecting a garden shed to build itself. It’s also undesirable. Actors are, paradoxically, their own instrument: they are at once artist and creation, doer and done-to, fingers and keyboard, feet and football, programmer and programme . . . Like the rest of us, they live inside themselves. There’s no way in which they can extract themselves from the delusion of objectivity under which we all seem to exist, in order to observe themselves from the outside. We’d like to think we operate predominantly through common sense and reason, but the larger part of our functioning is autonomic and unconscious. Therefore, there’s a limit to how much control actors can have over their creative – unconscious – selves.

Human beings – and who should be more in touch with their humanity than actors? – are holistic: bodies, feelings, needs, thoughts are not discrete elements that can each be dealt with independent of the others. We’re hard-wired by billions of nerve cells that interconnect in ways we still scarcely understand. The danger of reading a lot of words about acting is that it may lead you to believe that learning to act is a matter of using your head, that ratiocination will solve the problems of acting. This isn’t so. Words are helpful only so far as they point you towards other areas of understanding – experiential, visceral, in the muscle, in the gut. What’s clear is that too many words can disconnect us from the rest of ourselves: from our physicality, our spontaneity, our instinct, our imagination – those very channels, in fact, that might tap those unconscious parts of ourselves where true creativity lies dormant, waiting to be woken up. Too much discussion blocks action. Too much talk encourages evasion. Actors become head-bound and their instincts immobilised.

Nor is language always precise enough to pinpoint the nuances of motives, feelings and impulses involved in acting. Besides, people translate what they hear and what they read subjectively within their own frames of experience. Most often, the intellectual understanding comes after the doing and experiencing. The sequence is: do, experience, then understand. This is a problem for many directors who love words and love listening to themselves using them. Inevitably they ask actors for direct results, making their appeal from head to head, bypassing the rest of an actor’s holistic self on the way. So I would suggest, for the good of your artistic health – especially if you’re an actor, more especially if you’re a director – that while reading this book, you periodically remind yourself that the ultimate aim of all these words is to activate the instinct.

However, true to myself as a director, I’d love these words to be ‘heard’. I’d love them to be useful to both actors and directors and of interest to anyone curious about acting.

Safety Warning

LIVE ACTORS: HANDLE WITH CARE. AVOID BLOCKING CURRENTS OF ENERGY.

1

INTRODUCTIONS

CURRICULUM VITAE

I’m a director. I’ve staged some two hundred productions in about fifty years. Once I did as many as twelve in a year; now I restrict myself to no more than two. Most of my life I’ve spent running companies or being in some way involved with the same group of actors over a sustained period. Parallel with this I’ve maintained a career as a teacher both of directors and of actors. I’ve translated and adapted many of the texts of my productions. I was born in the United Kingdom, trained in the United States and have worked in eight other countries.

As a child, I wanted to act. Rotting in some attic – or so I hope and pray – is a home movie of me, aged six, impersonating Carmen Miranda, in a turban of real fruit and a towel, with multi-coloured plastic rings, the sort for identifying chickens, dangling from my ears. My first stage appearance – or half appearance – was as the third of a trio of bluebells in a school pantomime. We wore gauzy blue costumes with floppy hats. Due to the incompetence of the first bluebell, or her malice, I barely got out of the wings. (Big disappointment of parents: ‘Why didn’t you push?’) In the following year’s school play, I was promoted to the role of Amundsen, of whom I’d never heard, and had one line: ‘My name is Amundsen and I’m going to get to the South Pole before anyone else.’ Then, bearing the Norwegian flag, I had to run in a circle faster than the boy playing Scott who was running around in the opposite direction with the Union Jack. Auntie Bea, the headmistress who conducted rehearsals, asked me what I’d eaten for lunch. ‘Cod,’ I replied. ‘Well, you’re acting like a stuffed cod,’ she said. (Directors, our jibes go deep and last for years.) At grammar school, I played Madam Wang in Lady Precious Stream and Raina in Shaw’s Arms and the Man. I was probably appalling – but I read well. There was a one-act verse play whose name I’ve forgotten, something on the lines of Phoebe or The Spartan Maid in which I played the title role in a borrowed maid’s uniform. It was some arch 1920s parody of Greek Tragedy, but whatever it was went right over my head. I was about to be relieved of travestie by playing Jaques in As You Like It (my voice was breaking), but the performance dates conflicted with my Bar Mitzvah. So my official break with drag was delayed until I joined a local amateur group a couple of years later, for whom, good Jewish boy that I was, I played – in a church – St Cuthman in Christopher Fry’s The Boy with a Cart. I was so nervous that all I can remember is inverting words, making hills roll down stones. An actors’ agent, a friend of the family, came to see the performance. She arranged a screen test for me to play the boy king Ptolemy in a film version of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, starring Vivien Leigh with whom I was totally smitten. I was so overcome by terror that on the scheduled day I pretended to be ill. The agent, undaunted, gave me a copy of Stanislavsky’s An Actor Prepares, of which, ironically, I could then make neither head nor tail. This key that eventually unlocked some basic truths about acting for me remained unturned on my bookshelf for ten years. I continued to perform with the local amateur group with increasing self-consciousness.

My growing awkwardness on stage chimed with, or maybe was the reason for, my new ambition to become a playwright. From the age of eleven I’d become a regular theatregoer, so that by the age of eighteen, when I went off to do my National Service, I’d seen a lot of productions and read a lot of plays. At that time, London theatre was uncomplicated – just the West End plus a couple of what were then called Little Theatres, specialising in gloomy foreign muck. Consequently, I saw a lot of light comedies (a genre which, like intimate revue, has long since passed away). I have a file with the yellowing first few pages of my earliest attempts at playwriting which begin: ‘Act One Scene One. A Country House. Through the French windows enters . . . ’ I thought Hay Fever and Private Lives were the funniest plays imaginable and read them over and over again. When my mother, some years later, rather unwisely asked Noel Coward to read a play of mine, he did so and wrote back suggesting ‘he try writing one off his own bat’.

Directing, then called producing, meant little to me, although I was aware of Peter Brook and did see several of his earliest productions, including Ring Round the Moon which I precociously didn’t find as stylish as I’d been led to expect. I was already starting to develop a critical eye of my own and – though I then couldn’t have stated it in this way – a sense of theatrical truth. During this period I saw Peggy Ashcroft in The Deep Blue Sea and Sam Wanamaker and Michael Redgrave in Winter Journey (the English title for Clifford Odets’ The Country Girl), and was profoundly stirred by the deep sexuality of her performance and the spontaneity and danger of theirs. I saw the Oliviers in The School for Scandal, which revealed that classic texts could be immediate and accessible. Their playing of the ‘screen scene’ unveiled another thrilling possibility: comedy and tragedy could exist within the selfsame moment.

When I ended up in the RAF in Singapore, I started a film club and began reading about film direction. I was excited by the discovery that the manipulation of composition, light and movement could suggest meanings beyond their literal purposes. I understood that film (and by implication theatre) could be about more than its surfaces. ‘One of those bells that now and then rings’ rang for me. This was what I wanted to do. Direct. Films.

So instead of returning to the UK, I managed, with laborious cutting of red tape, to get myself demobbed in Singapore and took a cargo boat across the Pacific to Hollywood. I got work at MGM as an office boy in the Tom & Jerry cartoon department; then, after two weeks, made gloriously rapid promotion onto the Main Lot as an apprentice in the Publicity Department. I thought there was no stopping me. There was. My attempts to move myself yet further, into the Production Department, came to nought. My days were spent giving VIPs special tours of the studio, which, as well as taking them onto the sound stages to watch shooting and to be photographed with none-too-willing stars, included showing them dresses that Garbo had worn in Camille and pointing out Elizabeth Taylor in the commissary. My evenings, however, were spent directing for one of the theatre companies that mushroomed around Los Angeles, providing potential showcases for the thousands of aspiring movie stars that came West in the unreasonable hope of being discovered. My first production was of a one-act play by Tennessee Williams called Hello From Bertha, about a whore dying of a broken heart in a New Orleans brothel – a long way from my native Maida Vale! Nevertheless, it won ‘The Southern California Theatre’s Jesse Lasky Award for Best Production’ and seemed to confirm me in my third choice of career. My next endeavour was an ambitious triple bill. It comprised an adaptation, by me, of a Kenneth Tynan piece on bullfighting, The Death of Manolete, and a translation, by me, of Cocteau’s The Human Voice, a one-act play for a woman and a telephone, in which I cast a Swedish actress who planned to be the next Ingrid Bergman. (In the perilous shoals of Hollywood she sank without trace.) The third item was a farce by Molnar called One, Two, Three, for which, during the intermission, I – single-handed – converted the seating from an end-on configuration to one in-the-round. The evening was successful but long, a description that has accompanied much of my work down the years.

It was successful enough to encourage me to take off and study in New York and subsequently at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, then Carnegie Institute of Technology, in whose theatre department I began to learn my craft and to whom I am, as they say, eternally grateful. The training was intense and intensive, firmly balanced between practice and theory. We worked eighteen-hour days, acting, directing, building scenery, making costumes, writing plays, stage managing, assistant-directing, preparing research papers, analysing texts and – as neophyte directors – doing endless exercises in composition, focus, balance and picturisation. While training, I found, to my dismay, that my instinct for directing, which had served me so well up to this point, sank under the weight of the techniques I was acquiring. For a while, my work was correct, but unspontaneous. Over time, I absorbed these techniques and eventually, to my relief, my instinct resurfaced, strengthened by my new skills. I came to realise that in theatre the absorption of processes takes its own good time and cannot be hurried. I learned that it’s useless, apart from being quite wrong, to expect immediate results from actors, except of the most practical sort.

In the summer vacations, I went as a stage manager to a summer stock theatre in Kennebunkport, Maine, which did a different musical, operetta or opera each of its eleven weeks. The director for the season had to leave early, and I was offered the last two shows to direct which I did well enough to be asked back as director for the following season. I learned to deal with a large cast of some forty performers, to focus on essentials, communicate precisely and to get a show on efficiently in record time – approximately nine hours. Mornings were devoted to music rehearsals and staging dance numbers. I got to block the first half of the show on Wednesday afternoons, the second on Thursday afternoons and pull the whole thing together on Friday afternoons. Saturdays there were matinees, so we couldn’t rehearse. Mondays, we did technicals and, the next day, dress rehearsals in a state of hysteria, weeping with helpless laughter and sobbing with frustration. By some miracle, every Tuesday-night opening was as smooth as the proverbially unruffled lake.

When I graduated, a group of student colleagues and myself set up a winter stock theatre in Tucson, Arizona, which lasted an ill-fated single production. Then, at 26, I became artistic director of the Cincinnati Playhouse-in-the-Park where I directed fourteen plays in nine months, including Hamlet, The Seagull, Hedda Gabler, Volpone, Heartbreak House, La Ronde, A View from the Bridge, The Servant of Two Masters, Ionesco’s The Chairs and Sartre’s No Exit. Some of these plays became part of a personal repertoire that I’ve since directed frequently, with ever-increasing pleasure. I had a permanent company and learned painfully to deal with the challenges of several Methodised actors. Their moments of truth were stunning, but were always about themselves and not their characters. I also learned to work out my daily rehearsal schedules according to who had slept with whom the night before and who had broken up with whom. My job, unofficially, included rushing downtown to the Greyhound Bus Station in the middle of the night to drag actors off departing buses when they’d suddenly decided they just had to get back to New York. It was a period of intense apprenticeship for a very young artistic director. My learning curve was steep. I came to understand that directing was as much about dealing with people as with texts.

When I started directing, I worked conventionally, blocking the actors. I had a clear idea of how every moment should be played and tried to push the actors towards these very detailed results which I then set. I had, I believe, a good instinct for what was meant by the word ‘style’ and was meticulous in my research and preparation. However, part of my training had been in The Method, at its peak at that time, and amidst its confusions and indulgences, I was struck by the recurring exhortations to ‘Play the moment’, ‘Be in the moment.’ I was also greatly thrilled by reading accounts of the rehearsal processes of Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov, Tairov and Meyerhold. Their conditions of work seemed to come from another planet where they had access to full costumes and scenery from the start of rehearsals and worked on one production for as long as they needed, sometimes for more than a year – a far cry from our prevailing one-to-four-week schedules. I had taken a directing class in New York at the now defunct American Theater Wing, given by a playwright, Joseph Kramm, whose claim to fame was a play called The Shrike. Twice a week we brought in scenes we’d prepared, begging and borrowing actors wherever we could. After we’d shown them, he would ask the actors what their objectives were. Almost without fail, when the scenes were replayed, they came vividly to life, their previously blurred images pulled sharply into focus. Another of those profound bells tolled the good tidings that objectives were vital to the life of theatre. Through these various influences, I gradually discovered greater and greater freedom in working with actors. From Kramm, I also discovered that good plays were not just what they literally seemed to be about, but were metaphorical.

I came back to England in 1962. The theatre there beckoned with an exciting new energy emanating from the Royal Court. When a good Cincinnati lady had come up to me gushing, ‘I just love Isben’, I did begin to wonder what I was doing in the Mid-West. I came back to England. And promptly stopped working. Despite my three-year training, some forty productions and the fact that I’d run three companies, I was treated as if I’d just dropped off the moon. I had an interview with Hazel Vincent Wallace, then a doyenne of the English repertory system, who ran the Sybil Thorndike Theatre in Leatherhead. ‘You’ve done quite a lot,’ she conceded grudgingly and then, as if she were holding up a dead rat, ‘but in America!’ Within six months, from an ebullient and confident 28-year-old, armed with good reviews and a fairly impressive résumé (American for CV), I became a bitter-and-twisted recluse, full of resentment towards the British theatre establishment, who let me know that I was already passé and that they were only interested in recent Oxbridge graduates. That resentment and sense of not really belonging has never entirely left me. The first directing job I did get, a dreadful Peter Ustinov play called Photo Finish, at the Churchill Theatre, Bromley, was conducted for its two weeks’ rehearsal with icy politeness between myself and the cast, who let me know that they were having no truck with any American nonsense like improvisation and seemed mainly concerned as to whether they were going to be centre stage, lit in surprise pink or special lavender. I swore to myself that if this was English theatre, I wanted none of it.

I did a variety of odd jobs. I was one of a bevy of stage managers for a Night of a Thousand Stars, an annual charity event at the London Palladium. It was a Night of the Thousand Humiliations for me. I upset John Mills and was the only one not wearing a dinner jacket. I knew nothing of the rigid etiquette then still pervading English theatre, where stage management mirrored a below-stairs class structure, the company stage manager functioning as the butler, and assistant stage managers ordered around like tweenies. I caught sight of Edith Evans rehearsing, hatted, gloved, suited and bejewelled as if for lunch at Claridges. At Frinton Rep, I steered a husband-and-wife team called Hannah Watt and Roderick Lovell through their adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses in which they played all the roles. They were a handsome, imposing couple, rather large and rather old for the cast of decadents and innocents they’d chosen to embody. I assisted on a musical called What Goes Up! at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, notable for its very jolly company and the aura of Joan Littlewood which I imagined permeated the very walls around us. The production had nothing to do with her company, Theatre Workshop, but I did, with awe, glimpse her one day, through the half-open door of her office, wearing what looked like a knitted tea cosy. I also directed some small-scale touring operas, including Die Fledermaus for a company run by two rather hearty ladies, one of whom went rock-climbing between singing bouts, the other, a lady-in-waiting with very long arms and a limply regal handshake, who played the piano; she had to sit quite far from her instrument to do so. I directed a touring production of La Traviata for the Welsh National Opera and had digs in Cardiff with a Mrs Price who used to keep her lodgers up-to-date by reading them items from the morning paper. ‘Ngaio Marsh, the novelist, has died,’ she informed us all as we chewed our way through eggs, beans, bacon, fried bread and sausages. Most of my time, however, I spent in a bedsit, watching my hairline recede and convincing myself my life was over.

I slowly regained my creative health when I began teaching and directing at LAMDA (The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art). While there, I came to discover that I was a natural teacher and began to take the steps that evolved into the way I structure my work today. As soon as I started teaching, certain things about the nature of acting, which were still confusing me when I left Carnegie Tech, suddenly became clear. I realised (another bell rang!) that during the three apparently fallow years in which I’d scarcely worked, the unconscious had somehow been freed to solve problems that up to then had eluded conscious solution. This led me to certain ideas about the essentially anti-creative nature of accepted rehearsal structures, more of which later. While at LAMDA, I was hugely influenced by Philip Hedley who was also teaching there. He showed me a lot of liberating techniques from East 15 Acting School and Stratford Theatre Royal, run, of course, by the lady in the tea cosy. Her productions, alive, freewheeling, honest, spontaneous and, in the best sense of the word, popular (never populist), and those of William Gaskill, meticulous, honed to their essentials and equally honest, were strong influences on me at that time and have, I hope, remained so.

My time at LAMDA was interspersed with occasional sorties into rep. Some people, rather discouragingly, still think that Lady Be Good, a Gershwin musical I directed at the old Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury, is the best thing I’ve ever done! While at LAMDA, I collaborated with their singing teacher, Anthony Bowles, a multi-talented musician, on two musicals for the students; I contributed the book and lyrics. One of them played at the Edinburgh Festival from where, thanks to excellent reviews, it was taken up by a West End theatre management who wouldn’t let me direct it. For two years of innumerable rewrites and a mediocre provincial tryout, we spent a life of misery in the hope that our suffering would be compensated by fame and fortune when the production reached London. It eventually staggered into the West End, unrecognisable from the show it had first been. It received the sort of notices one could only wish for one’s worst enemies. The period involved with this show introduced me to a theatre that was about the abuse of power, the humiliation of actors and, possibly, ways of creating a tax loss. Seeing, at last, my name outside a West End theatre was like ashes in my mouth. It was a turning point for me. The possibility of success weighed against a world apparently devoid of decency, I decided, was an unequal trade-off. I knew then that I wanted to work only where I could try to do what I believed in with like-minded people. Career (success, money) would have to take second place to vocation. The glamour of the West End was a mirage left over from the theatregoing days of my childhood. Since then, forming my own companies is one of the ways I’ve tried to create my own terms and conditions of work.

After five healthy and productive drama school years, I decided that LAMDA was becoming a cosy womb from which I would never be delivered if I stayed any longer. I somehow knew that clinging to security leads nowhere but backwards. You have to trust that if one door closes, another will open. Sometimes, you have to initiate that possibility by firmly closing one of those doors behind you, yourself. With regrets and immense gratitude, I left LAMDA with no jobs in view, no reputation to speak of, but a growing knowledge of how to work and a great confidence in what I believed theatre should be.

I was unemployed for three months, and then I went to work in Israel. For some while, a lot of offers had been beckoning me in that direction until I thought that maybe some Old Testament deity was nudging me rather heavily to go, not before time, and check out my Jewishness. Oded Kotler, an actor who ran The Actors’ Stage, then the most interesting alternative company in Tel Aviv, had seen my work at LAMDA, where his wife had been a student, and gave me my first opportunities there. I was made welcome, learned Hebrew, soon got my own company and theatre, the Jerusalem Khan, created a lot of original material, had a warm response to my work, won prizes and, most important, was able to develop the techniques and processes I’d begun at LAMDA. This was helped in no small way by the Israeli tradition of immensely long rehearsals, inherited from its roots in Russian theatre, the thrilling accounts of which had so inspired me at the start of my career. A sort of creative longing had unexpectedly come full circle. I now consider long rehearsals a necessity and a right, not something for which you should express gratitude, as so many actors, well-meaning but erroneous, think they should (‘We’re so lucky!’ they cry when they discover they have five weeks rather than four). I become anxious and aggrieved if I have anything less than ten weeks. A long way from those weekly musicals in Kennebunkport! Though from them I know I can get a show on in short order should the necessity arise. One project at the Khan, a political documentary about Jerusalem, got me into trouble with various authorities. A newspaper editorial described me as ‘foreign poison’, and arts journalists who had professed themselves my advocates retreated clumsily from my requests for support. For a while, I had a very faint taste of what it must feel like to be a dissident in a dictatorship. I was vindicated when the Yom Kippur War, a few months later, proved the foresight of our show which, amongst other matters, questioned the public assumption that since 1967, under Israeli authority, the Palestinian population had never had it so good.

For five years I had managed to retain my English calm amidst excitable Levantine temperament, but when I found myself starting to scream at actors and throw props at them (more effective than words), I decided, once more with regret and gratitude, to be on the move again. Yahweh, incidentally, had not revealed Himself to me.

I came back to London very confident in my abilities to start my own company alongside the many alternative theatre groups that were then driving the theatre forward at that time. I formed Shared Experience and ran it for thirteen years. Peter James, then artistic director of the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, had seen my work in Israel and generously gave me the opportunity, budget and space to launch the company from his theatre. Our first show, telling stories from The Arabian Nights, was a tremendous success and got us unusually rapid revenue funding from the Arts Council of Great Britain. The early years of Shared Experience were the most creative of my career. We did one project a year and had long rehearsal periods as well as long tours in which we continued to develop our work. We won awards and an enthusiastic following. I made what I think were genuine discoveries about creating an ensemble, solving complex acting problems, telling stories, adapting novels, playing Chekhov and, most important of all, realising the purpose for the company: my belief that you need nothing else but actors in order to create good theatre. For five years, we did shows in any space we were offered, without any design or technology whatsoever. It was theatre at its purest, stripped to its vital elements: actors and audience sharing the same evenly lit and totally empty space, with the actors transforming themselves into other people in order to act out whatever material – be it story, improvisation or play – we had chosen to perform for the audience.

Eventually, the company became trapped in its own structures and on an Arts Council touring treadmill. At the moment when we were getting the greatest recognition, our work, I felt, was becoming less interesting. I left Shared Experience for the National Theatre, lured there by a vision of art and career. At that time there was a policy of directors with their own companies producing repertoires within the National’s framework. First, I directed a successful Cherry Orchard for the Ian McKellen–Edward Petherbridge company. Then Peter Hall offered me a company of my own. Whereupon I had two four-hour flops: The Wandering Jew, adapted from an immense nineteenth-century popular French potboiler, and Countrymania, a trilogy by Goldoni, that emptied, respectively, the Lyttelton and the Olivier Theatres. The following year, I worked in China, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, a period rich in experiences. When I came back to London, I felt persona non grata, out in the theatrical cold, and did a variety of rather undistinguished jobs from which I learned nothing.

I had never been happy freelancing, so when I had the chance to run the middle-scale touring Cambridge Theatre Company (later converted to Method & Madness) I grabbed it. Naively, I now see, I thought that I could change the nature of what was acceptable in middle-scale theatres and spent almost a decade increasingly ruing my miscalculation. Despite a very joyful collaboration with playwright Philip Osment, resulting in four fine plays; despite two stimulating co-directing stints, one with Neil Bartlett, the other with David Glass, both of whom taught me a lot, as I’d hoped when I invited them to team up with me (my work was rewardingly refreshed by observing it within the context of theirs); despite half-a-dozen engrossing adaptations, and winning a TMA Director-of-the-Year Award, it was a downhill struggle. Eventually, in our eighth year, total lack of support from the touring circuit, ranging from indifference to unsheathed hostility, forced us – after twenty months of the very special three-year project we’d initiated – to disband the ten actors who had courageously pledged themselves to it. I spent a further few months trying to reimagine – reinvent – the company, then gave up and resigned.

I found myself surprisingly happy without a company – words I never believed I’d hear myself even think. I’d been released from the concerns of budgets and bookings, and Arts Council demands for mission statements and staff evaluations, quarterly returns, annual reports, three-year business plans, five-year assessments, marketing policies and ‘gesture’ education schemes, all the increasingly time- and energy-consuming burdens of most artistic directors. I was free to come and go as I wished and to respond to a variety of offers, both at home and abroad. One from Mark Rylance at Shakespeare’s Globe gave me the chance to begin to learn about Shakespeare and to tackle the challenging potential of the Globe stage. There, I encountered what up to then I’d only experienced in Israel – audiences that exercised their right to be part of the performance.

This seems not to be a time for companies. But I still believe that the best theatre comes from a committed ensemble. And what follows will, I hope, explain why.

THE PRIMACY OF THE ACTOR

The Reason Why

Theatre is predominantly the domain of actors. We speak tautologically of live theatre; we proclaim live-ness as its greatest attraction. Rightly so, for without any life theres no theatre, at least not theatre that honours its true nature. And no one brings the theatre to life or, to be more accurate, brings life to the theatre but actors. Before actors come on stage, everything about theatre is abstract, theoretical, potential. Actors are the ones who make theatre happen, who turn ideas into experience. Theyre the artists through whom all other elements of theatre are mediated: they embody the playwrights words and the directors intentions; a good set is incomplete until actors inhabit it; it is actors who make contact with the audience. Actors are the sine qua non of theatre.

In fact, actors are its raison dtre. We go to the theatre because of them. Actors are more than mere executors of other peoples ideas. More vitally, and in their own right, they manifest the extraordinary human phenomenon of acting: the ability to embody another person. I believe that at the deepest level of our theatregoing experience, we long to witness this special evidence of our humanity in action. Apart from actors and audiences, everyone else in theatre (and therefore everything else except what actors do) is expendable.

A Little List

Quite some time ago, on one of those not infrequent occasions when I become convinced that live theatre has finally died but just wont lie down, I sat down and made lists of what different performance disciplines had to offer. I wanted to discover what was unique or whether there was anything unique to theatre. What, if anything, made theatre truly itself? Did it have its own purity? Or, as I suspected, might it be no more than a collection of elements begged, borrowed and stolen or dumped on it from other art forms?