Meisner in Practice E-Book

Nick Moseley

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

Seitenzahl: 291

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

A step-by-step introduction to the key features of the Meisner Technique, including a full set of practical exercises. The Meisner Technique is at the forefront of actor training today: with its radical simplicity it has the power to reconnect actors with their bodies and emotions. Developed by the teacher and actor Sanford Meisner, the technique places emphasis on truthful interaction between actors. The aim is for the actor 'to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances' – to remain truly 'in the moment'. In Meisner in Practice, Nick Moseley offers actors a step-by-step introduction to the salient features of the technique, and puts these to the test through a succession of increasingly challenging practical exercises. He also addresses certain pitfalls and problems that he has encountered over many years of teaching Meisner in drama schools. This book will be of immense value to students, teachers and practitioners in exploring a technique that is becoming increasingly recognised as a core element of actor training.

Leseprobe

Nick Moseley

MEISNER

in Practice

A Guide for Actors, Directors and Teachers

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Foreword

1 The Need for Meisner

2 The First Exercise

3 Simple Repetition

4 Standard Repetition

5 Psychological Repetition

6 Objectives and Activities

7 The Knock on the Door

8 Emotion

9 Playing with Text

10 Exploring Character

11 Meisner and Shakespeare

12 Meisner Ongoing

About the Author

Copyright Information

Foreword

Sanford Meisner, actor and actor trainer, was born in Brooklyn in 1905, and from the early 1930s until the 1990s taught acting in New York, first at the Group Theatre alongside Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler, and later at the Actors Studio and the Neighbourhood Playhouse. He continued teaching at the Playhouse until a few years before his death in 1997.

Meisner’s work, like Strasberg’s, derives from the theory and practice of Konstantin Stanislavsky, but unlike Strasberg, Meisner places emphasis on truthful interaction between actors in imaginary circumstances rather than on searching one’s own past for emotions or sensations in order to find a connection with the character.

Over the years, Meisner Technique evolved into a detailed training process which has been documented by former colleagues and students, and which is still practised worldwide by a variety of practitioners, many of whom studied with Meisner himself.

The purpose of this book is to offer students and practitioners a detailed theoretical and practical account of the most useful aspects of Meisner Technique, based both on reports of Meisner’s own practice and on my own reflections and observations while teaching this technique over a period of more than ten years.

While being an enthusiastic proponent of many aspects of this technique, I do not see it as a complete actor-training process in itself, but as an essential part of more comprehensive training programmes – and as a useful complement to Stanislavsky-based training elements.

Through description, analysis and practical example, I will attempt to take the reader through various stages of Meisner training, including the pitfalls and problems that I have encountered in my own teaching of the technique. At points I will also explain how I have adapted some of the exercises to make them work better, or faster.

My hope is that in the fullness of time, Meisner Technique will cease to be seen as something separate, alternative or self-contained, and will become more integrated into the broader canon of actor-training processes, where I believe it will be of immense value.

Nick Moseley

1 The Need for Meisner

‘The foundation of acting is the reality of doing’

The Need for Meisner

During the latter part of the twentieth century, as film and television have gradually taken over from live theatre as the most popular form of drama, there has been an ever-increasing demand within the English-speaking world for actors to be more ‘real’. With the camera able to capture every gesture, reaction and thought in high definition, the heightened and rather gestural acting style of the early-twentieth-century theatre now appears laughably stilted and out of date, despite its claim to be ‘naturalistic’.

The term ‘real’, when we apply it to acting today, now implies a deeper and fuller immersion of the actor, both in the role and in the world of the play. It also implies – just as significantly – a more organic and immediate connection to the other actors, so that what the audience sees and hears is not just a theatrical retelling of a dialogue, but an actual and present event in which the real and involuntary physical and vocal reactions of the actors to one another seduce (rather than cajole) the audience into suspending their disbelief.

There is actually no such thing as realism in drama, if by realism we mean something that accurately reproduces real life. Real life is chaotic, confused and unbounded, while actors naturally seek to give their work clarity, meaning and form. What passes for realism in any era depends on the taste and sensibility of the audiences. In each era we have a slightly different understanding of what we mean by realistic acting, in the sense that we may find some acting convincing, gripping and moving, and other acting (which might possibly have impressed our ancestors) contrived, stilted and inorganic. Today’s actors are therefore required to do whatever it takes to make the audience feel they are experiencing something real.

In this age of the camera, and indeed of the small, intimate auditorium, everything has tended towards a more detailed and believable (if not actually more accurate) representation of life in all its disorder and mess. Writers of gritty modern realism often try to recreate the disjointed, repetitious, overlapping dialogue of real life. Actors no longer get to finish their characters’ sentences or complete their thoughts. In modern-day realism, the rhythm of the text depends not on whichever actor happens to be speaking, but on the way two or more actors get into rhythm with one another.

If actors are to do this, they have to give up some measure of control. They still can, and must, work very hard on preparing a role, yet both in rehearsal and performance they need to find a connection with their scene partners so that, moment to moment, it is not just the choices made in rehearsal, but the real-life reactions of one human being to another, which dictate how the actor speaks, thinks and moves.

To train an actor to do this might seem remarkably simple. After all, we talk easily and naturally to one another all the time in real life, and we effortlessly allow ourselves to respond organically to the ebb and flow of the conversation. To do this as actors, however, is much harder. In a drama we are usually working not with our own words, but with a text written by someone else. We find it hard to accept the idea that someone else’s text can possibly emerge spontaneously from our mouths in response to a real moment that we have experienced. As the text is contrived by a writer, we reason, so must the motivation for speaking it be contrived by the director and actors in rehearsal. So we don’t engage with the other actor as we would in real life, because we assume that we already have everything we need to deliver what is required of us. We do, of course, require the physical presence of the other actor so that our lines can be spoken to someone, and so that our cues can be received in the right order, but nothing is actually being negotiated – it has all been agreed beforehand!

Ten years ago I was struggling with this problem within my own acting classes. We were using tried-and-tested Stanislavskian techniques based on the Method of Physical Action. Our actors were building their inner life, and they understood the landscape of the play and their own scenes. Yet it seemed that whatever method we used and however well the actors were prepared, some key element was lacking in the end product. There was something false, contrived, about the dialogues, even when they made perfect sense, as if the actors were musicians playing well, but just ever so slightly out of time with each other. It was hard to define – it just felt wrong. In other words, we didn’t quite believe that the conversation was happening in front of us. It was more like a re-enactment of a conversation that had happened at another time, in another place, which was being replayed to us to give us a broad idea of what the conversation was and how it looked and sounded.

Of course, we knew what the problem was. Everyone has the ability to have ‘real’ conversations which are truly in the ‘here and now’, but when we do this in our own lives, we have no text and we (usually) have a personal reason for being in the conversation. What we say in each moment, and how we say it, cannot be decided other than through our understanding of the moment and our reading of the other person. If the other person is talkative, we may be searching for a moment to get a word in edgeways; if they are monosyllabic, we may be trying to stimulate them to a more enlivened response. We don’t know what they are going to say, or how they will say it, and we are responsive to the smallest changes in them that tell us how they are hearing us.

The actor who has learned his lines and worked on his character, however, is in a very different place. He knows that whatever he may observe and understand in the moment of performance, the words he and his scene partners speak will still be the words of the play, and the outcome of the scene will not change. This means that the motivation to listen to his fellow actor and genuinely respond – cognitively and physically – to what he observes, is much weaker than his motivation to ‘act well’, which in this case probably means to speak clearly and perform the lines and moves with accuracy and conviction.

Ironically, of course, by not responding to the other actor in a natural, unforced way, the actor unwittingly stops himself from acting well. His work may be crisp, well-formed, clear in motivation and meaning, he may make use of an impressive vocal and physical range, and he may even be emotionally available – but somehow we won’t quite believe him.

In my attempts to train my actors to respond to each other on this level, I have always reminded them that no matter how much is fixed within a production, there is always space for the actor’s creativity, by which I mean the creative, impulsive response of the actor to his fellow actor. Even if the play has been blocked down to the last move and gesture, there should be variations in the way the actor experiences each performance, however minute and apparently imperceptible.

Many actors seem to forget this. They assume that their job is to inhabit what has been set, rather than to use what has been set as a basis from which they can focus on the relationship with the other actor. Moreover, even if they do realise the value of that moment-to-moment connection, many find it very hard to achieve it. This is because, although they have trained their bodies and voices to be clear, uncluttered and heightened performative signifiers, in so doing they have lost the ability to remain open and flexible, and to be continually and unconsciously adjusting to their surroundings.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that, in real life, this process of continual adjustment can manifest itself as fidgeting, shifting – physical and vocal ‘ers’ and ‘ums’ – which can have the effect of dispersing energy and cluttering the audience’s experience with excess information. This is exactly what the training has taught the actor not to do. The second reason is that when the trained body, with its open breath and released musculature, starts to become responsive to other similarly trained bodies, there can be startling emotional responses, which the actor may find quite uncomfortable, and therefore seek to avoid.

The blocks thereby created are hard to remove: just wanting to remove them is not enough. Acting teachers and directors use many techniques to get actors to respond more organically to one another, including different forms of physical improvisation. For example, if two actors are working on a scene which involves them in a verbal or intellectual conflict, they can start a rehearsal exploring the physical/visceral side of the conflict by pitting their physical strength against each other, and then play the scene with the physical memory of that conflict still present in the body. These exercises can work very well – they get the breath deeper into the body and allow the actor to feel a new intensity and a heightened connection to other actors. Unfortunately, the effects tend to be short-lived, because the moment the physical memory fades, so, usually, does this feeling.

The Meisner Technique, provided it is pursued relentlessly over an extended period of time, can offer a solution. Within clear structures and safe exercises, it slowly and methodically reconditions the habits of the actor, bridging the gap between real life and the acting space, and slowly but surely shifting the ‘default’ setting of the actor from ‘closed’ to ‘open’. Little by little it removes the fear of the moment, so that the actor learns to make his trained body open and responsive, despite the emotional risk.

The beauty of the technique lies in its simplicity and its insistence on genuine, truthful responses. If well-taught, it can permanently affect the way an actor works in the space, often without the actor really being conscious of the changes taking place.

However, like most actor-training techniques, it cannot be applied indiscriminately or simply delivered as a package. As Meisner himself was aware, the process is endlessly diagnostic, and each actor engaging in it has to be side-coached and nurtured through each stage, otherwise the work can result in little more than confusion and frustration.

This book is therefore devoted to an exploration of what the techniques are, how the exercises work practically, and how the acting teacher guides his students through the process and ensures that effective learning takes place.

2 The First Exercise

‘What you do doesn’t depend on you – it depends on the other fellow’

The First Exercise

Repetition exercises are probably the most memorable and unique aspects of Meisner Technique. I do not think they have any equivalent within the whole canon of actor-training exercises. They are designed to strip away the artificiality of the theatre and return you to one of your most basic human abilities – to receive and respond to messages from others, and to allow the actions of others to be the principal determinant of how you yourselves act.

Most of the repetition exercises described in the first half of this book would have belonged in the first year of an original Meisner training programme. Meisner classes build and develop from simple exercises to much more complex ones, the idea being that the habits ingrained at the start of the training are carried forward into scene work and performance. While I would seek to maintain this trajectory within a Meisner programme, I would also make one proviso. I do not believe that an actor can get the best out of even the simplest of these exercises without at least a year of prior training, in voice, movement, concentration, stamina and articulation, amongst other skills. For this reason I have never attempted to introduce Meisner into the curriculum before the second year of a three-year programme. Actors need some basic skills and habits in place before they start this work, otherwise it can become head-based, emotionally disconnected and lacking in energy.

Early repetition exercises often take place on chairs, with two actors sitting facing each other and remaining seated throughout the whole exercise. There are no characters, no story, no script, no props other than the clothes the actors are wearing. There is nothing to hide behind – no masks, no assumed gestures, no beautiful language, no stylistic quality. There is nothing except the actors themselves.

This may sound very exposing, and on one level it is, but you shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming that just because the trappings of the theatre are absent, this is therefore any more real, as a situation, than a scene from a play. A repetition exercise is as fictional as any other encounter that takes place within the theatrical space, and therefore should operate with the same boundaries and the same level of personal ‘safety’. The fiction lies not in imaginary worlds and stories, but in the fact that the relationship set up with the other actor, and everything that takes place within it, belongs to the exercise and not to the real world. If you can trust in this, you will be free – if you doubt it, then fear will hold you back.

(In all the examples in Chapters 2–6, the participating actors appear to be male, but this is for convenience only, and in each example, one or both of the actors could just as easily be female.)

Before starting the first Meisner exercise, I normally ask all the actors in the room to pair off and practise sitting opposite one another and just looking, without words, for several minutes at a time. In each pair, I ask them to number themselves as Actor 1 and Actor 2. For a few minutes, both actors in each pair have the task of just looking at the other. The results are usually predictable and fairly consistent. Among other things, I observe:

• Laughter, mainly through shared embarrassment, but sometimes where one actor makes silly faces to entertain the other, or both set up a kind of amused complicity.

• Status levels, where one actor becomes the observer and the other the observed.

• Boredom, where the actors switch off from one another, or let their attention wander to other pairs.

• Staring games, where one or both actors try to intimidate the other.

• Trances, where one or both actors get locked into a kind of hypnotic eye contact.

When I ask actors to talk about their experiences, it often emerges that they feel very uncomfortable being observed, and employ one or more of the above tactics to try to avoid the feeling of exposure. This is perfectly understandable, and I tell them so. Even trainee actors, about to embark on a career that is all about being looked at, rarely feel comfortable being observed in this way – out of role, devoid of activity or words.

In the next stage of the exercise, I tell each pair that Actor 1 is the observer, Actor 2 the observed. This time the Actor 1s are completely different. Although some still laugh at times, most of them are now attentive, relaxed and purposeful. The Actor 2s, by contrast, are self-conscious, embarrassed and giggly. They close their body language, shift uncomfortably and fidget. One very high-status Actor 2 refuses to accept the role of the observed, and tries to intimidate his partner.

After a while I switch round, allowing Actor 2 to be the observer, and the same thing happens in reverse. Finally, I tell them that they are both in role as observers, and interestingly, although a certain amount of self-consciousness creeps back in at times, most actors manage to keep the focus off themselves and on their partner, at least for a while. After a few minutes, however, there is simply not enough to occupy the actors’ attention, and it begins to wander.

The point of all this, as most actors agree, is that it doesn’t matter who is watching you, provided you are not watching yourself, or even watching someone watching you. In other words, if you can train yourself to keep the focus elsewhere, and stay relaxed, you can avoid the tension which so often creeps into your body and stops you being responsive, released and real.

Meisner exercises offer both a reason for keeping that focus away from yourself, and a simple ongoing task that keeps the relationship alive, dynamic and changing, so that you don’t ever have to get bored or lose focus.

Mechanical Repetition

In the first exercise, you and another actor sit on chairs facing each other, at a distance from one another that allows you to see not just the face of your partner, but their whole body. After a while, one of you makes a simple statement about something you notice about the other actor. This will be a physical, irrefutable fact, such as ‘red socks’. The other actor repeats the phrase back to you exactly as you have said it, copying your intonation, volume and pronunciation exactly. You then do the same, repeating not what you think you said the first time, but what you hear from the other actor, and so it goes on until the teacher stops the exercise.

With this understanding, you can embark on the first and simplest of the Meisner repetition exercises.

The purpose of this exercise is to create a situation in which your only guiding principle in moving the encounter forward is the instruction to reproduce what you hear as exactly as possible. This forces you to listen and to process, so that what emerges is directly influenced by the stimulus the other actor has given you. This is the first step in allowing the other actor, rather than yourself, to determine your actions.

The beauty of the first exercise lies in its simplicity. It is a task that is well within your scope and yet requires enough of your attention to keep you interested and engaged. Each moment is different from the last, and each moment influences the next moment.

Example 1

The first time we do the exercise, it starts well, but after a while I stop it and ask the group why I have stopped. One or two of the sharper ones have spotted the problem. The phrase Actor 1 started with was ‘green shirt’, and the intonation we heard was quite chirpy and enthusiastic, a quality Actor 2 heard and tried to reproduce. As a group, however, we were able to hear the differences between the way Actor 1 spoke the phrase and how Actor 2 repeated it. That in itself was not a problem, because Actor 2 was genuinely trying to repeat what he heard.

What Actor 1 then did was to repeat, not Actor 2’s intonation, but his own initial offer. This happened several times, and we were left with the impression of a teacher trying to correct a not very able pupil.

Actor 1 is surprised to have this pointed out, and (because some people within the group seem very pleased with themselves for spotting the error) a little put out and defensive. I remind the group that everyone will be doing the exercise at some point, and that their observations need to be supportive. What this has shown us is that within the acting space we like to find ways of maintaining status and control, probably in order to counter our fear and sense of exposure. We do this unconsciously, as a habit, which means that we must consciously seek to undo it.

We start again, this time with a comment from Actor 2 – ‘brown eyes’. After about eight or nine exchanges I stop it again, and most of the group can see the problem. Actor 1 has been trying to reproduce what he hears, but because there are people watching he has tended to over-articulate, to demonstrate his reproduction rather than simply doing it. It is almost as if he wants to show the group how good he is at picking up the nuances of what he hears, but the result is actually inaccurate because it is heightened and exaggerated. By performing his ability to do the task he is not actually doing it – rather he is commenting on it. I ask both actors to take the performance out of the work and just carry out the task. We start again with ‘wavy hair’.

This time, each tries hard to reproduce what he hears rather than pushing his own version or commenting. We do get some genuine responses, but after only a few exchanges the phrase becomes quieter and more mumbled, until it is virtually inaudible. Once again we stop. Once again I consult the group to find out what went wrong.

The answer comes back that neither actor seemed particularly bothered. It is certainly true that each time they repeated it, the phrase lost a little more of its initial energy, but I suspect there has been no conscious desire to undermine or disrespect the exercise. It is just that the task seems so small, so lacking in drama, that they have unconsciously made the choice to work with low energy. In particular, they are not breathing as actors, which means that the voices lack resonance and power, and the bodies are not engaged. The exercise has become ‘head-bound’ and consequently the actors, and we, have lost interest.

I now ask the group why they think that the forward energy, commitment and emotional engagement of the actors is so lacking in this moment. The answer comes back loud and clear. They are unable to commit because they have no emotional investment. Stripped of the slightly competitive approach they took the first time round, they have become demotivated, bored and disconnected. In other words, despite having a simple task to perform, neither actually wants anything from the other actor.

For me this is a first principle of all repetition exercises – there must be a level of engagement with the other actor, or the exercises quickly become meaningless. If you are told to improvise a scene in character, the story usually provides you with an objective that is strong enough to lift your energy, support your voice and engage your body in what you are doing. The problem with the simpler repetition exercises is that you have no story, no objective, not even a character to give you those permissions. On one level you are too bored to engage because you can’t see what’s in it for you; on another level you are too scared to engage because you would be engaging as yourself.

Your Stanislavskian training has taught you that the objective is the primary motivator of the actor. It clarifies and lends meaning to every word spoken, every event experienced. It energises you, heightens your perceptions, and creates a connection to the other actor. Without it you are stripped firstly of desire and secondly of permission. To engage with someone from whom you want nothing feels false – at best a social game, at worst a social gaffe.

But what if I say to you that despite its lack of fictional circumstances, characters and situations, the acting space in which you do the repetition exercises is still a fictional space? What is more, because it is so, you can find within it a fictional objective which requires neither character nor backstory, and which will confer upon the actors the permissions of the fictional world.

The fiction you employ here is simple, easy to believe in, and consistent with the actor’s exploratory persona. It is this: in this world, which consists of two chairs in a space, the other actor is the most important person in your life, partly because there is no one else, and partly because within the nature of the task, he or she is the sole determinant of your next act – the repetition of the chosen phrase – and the sole recipient of that act. Everything you do is because of, and for, the other actor.

Your objective is therefore ‘I want to know this person better.’ The reason you have this objective is because the other actor is not only the only person other than yourself in this world, but is to a large extent an unknown and unpredictable quantity.

The given circumstances are that you are sitting facing each other on two chairs on which you have to stay seated, and that you can only converse by reproducing in every detail exactly what the other person says.

That’s all very well, you may say, but exactly how can I pursue my objective when I am thus restricted? Many of the strategies you might have used to further a relationship – including language, physical contact and specific gestures – are closed to you. My response to you is that all encounters between two human beings are played out within specific and often restrictive circumstances. Two people trying to speak over loud music, or while travelling on a crowded bus, or while dancing a waltz, might experience equivalent problems. There are many situations in which you might feel frustration at these restrictions, where your objective cries out for more scope and freedom, yet very often it is the acceptance of those circumstances that allows you to make the most of what you have. You cannot always be ‘pushing’ towards your objective in the most direct and obvious way – sometimes you simply have to follow the steps and trust.

Mechanical Repetition forces you to think about the objective not in terms of yourself but in terms of the other actor. Your objective, if you can call it that, is to reproduce exactly what your partner says, and if you follow that instruction to the letter, you will discover that the only way you can fulfil the task is by listening with your body, bypassing the judgemental, analytical part of your brain (which only gets in the way) and allowing the body to mirror your partner’s, so it is not just the sound but their whole presence to which you are responding.

Reproducing within a less tense and yet more intense environment, you start to ‘breathe in’ the other actor and accept his or her presence on a deeper level. We the audience can hear that, beneath the simplicity of the words ‘red socks’ or ‘brown hair’, there is subtext and an unspoken need for connection, which manifests itself in the desire to reproduce what you hear. You have begun to understand Meisner.

3 Simple Repetition

‘You’ve got control over what you’re saying and I say he has to have control’

Simple Repetition

The move from Mechanical to Simple Repetition is a slight one in terms of the rules and circumstances, but it is a massive leap for the actor. In this ‘simple’ version of the exercise, the actor has to give up even more conscious control and allow the other actor to dictate his responses. In the process, most actors come up against their own barriers and defence mechanisms, sometimes for the first time.

Simple Repetition

The basic set-up is the same as before – you and your partner sit on two chairs facing each other. Once again you look at each other from head to toe. Once again a comment emerges from one of you, but this time it is personalised: ‘You have red socks,’ or ‘You’ve got a black jumper.’ This time, the second actor repeats the phrase back in a reversed form. ‘I have red socks,’ or ‘I’ve got a black jumper,’ so that the comment continues to be about the same thing and, as importantly, continues to be true.

In this exercise, however, you should make no attempt to reproduce the intonation of what you hear. You repeat the words, and you try to do so in a way which is open, responsive and organic to the situation. In other words, you do not impose anything on your response, but you allow the other person to affect the way in which your response comes out.

It should also be emphasised here that, whatever phrase is chosen, the actors should not attach too much literal significance to the socks, the jumper, or whatever. The significance must therefore lie in the subtext, which is often not about the black jumper itself but about the actual interaction taking place, whatever that may be.

The comments should also avoid any ‘in-jokes’ or concealed meanings within the chosen comment, which lie outside of the space, because they rely on the two actors’ own knowledge of one another; otherwise the exercise becomes about the real lives of the participants, which is not the object.

By the time you start Simple Repetition you will have become quite adept at observing and analysing the work of other actors. This is important, because in Meisner work you will learn a great deal from observing others. It is often difficult to spot your problems while you are actually doing the exercises, but if you watch others intently and find ways of describing what you see, this will help you understand and accept what others say about you.

Example 1

The first pair starts the exercise with a simple factual comment, yet they fall almost immediately into one of the more common errors. I stop them, look expectantly over at the group, and am immediately told what the problem is. The two actors have sat down, looked at one another and, in a tacit yet entirely complicit way, agreed on their respective roles before even a word is spoken. Here we have the stern schoolteacher and the meek pupil. The schoolteacher chooses the line ‘Your ears are pierced,’ the pupil responds accordingly with ‘My ears are pierced,’ and already the roles and the story are fixed. Both actors seem comfortable with these roles and the whole thing quickly gets stuck in that transaction.

A1 (Firm and authoritative.) Your ears are pierced.

A2 (Surprised, unaware it was a problem.) My ears are pierced.

A1 (Spelling it out.) Your ears are pierced.

A2 (Embarrassed.) My ears are pierced.

A1 (Accusing.) Your ears are pierced.

A2 (Apologising.) My ears are pierced.

A1 (Scolding.) Your ears are pierced.

A2 (Repentant.) My ears are pierced.

A1 (Furious.) Your ears are pierced!

A2 (Grovelling.) My ears are pierced.

A1 (Dismissive.) Your ears are pierced.

A2 (Seeking forgiveness.) My ears are pierced.

A1 (Making the best of a bad situation.) Your ears are pierced.

The story thus played out is comprehensible and entertaining, but it is not real. It is a safe little improvised playlet, whose parameters are clear and immovable from the start. By assuming these status roles, both actors have ensured that they will not have to operate outside of the preordained transaction. It might of course have been possible for Actor 2 to challenge the authority of Actor 1, but such a move lies beyond her personal permissions, and she shies away from it.

The group is, of course, already familiar with that particular kind of role-play from both partners. Actor 1 is a leading force within the group, a motivator and disciplinarian. Actor 2 is playing out a meeker and more submissive role, which the group has seen many times before in different contexts.

What this has highlighted, as I point out to the group, is the extent to which trainee actors’ fixed status roles within the group, whether in a three-year conservatoire programme or a six-week evening class, can seep into the work and determine their responses to one another in a way that predetermines and ultimately restricts the exercises. ‘But I’m naturally submissive,’ protests one. ‘I can be bold when I’m playing a character but this is just me.’