The Acting Book E-Book

John Abbott

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A 'fast-forward' acting course covering all the essential techniques an actor needs to know and use - with a suite of exercises to put each technique into practice. The Acting Book offers various ways to analyse a text and to create character, using not only the established processes of Stanislavsky and Meisner, but also new ones developed by the author over many years of teaching drama students. It also sets out a wide range of rehearsal techniques and improvisations, and it brims over with inventive practical exercises designed to stimulate the actor's imagination and build confidence. The book will be invaluable to student actors as an accompaniment to their training, to established actors who wish to refresh their technique, and to drama teachers at every level. 'A fine source of ideas and information for drama teachers - a potted acting course, with plenty of practical exercises.' Teaching Drama

Leseprobe

Dedication

Author’s Note

Foreword

Introduction

1 Storytelling

2 Lonelyhearts

3 The Text

4 Research

5 Creating a Character

6 Group Discussions

7 Exploring the Text

8 Exits and Entrances

9 Rehearsing a Scene

10 Rehearsal Improvisations

11 Meisner Training

12 Meisner in Application

Epilogue

Index of Exercises

About the Author

Copyright Information

IMUST HAVE WORKED WITH THOUSANDS OF ACTORS OVER the years and they are an amazing bunch of people. I would like to mention them all by name, but that’s impossible, of course. So here are a few of the actors who have made me sit up, listen and want to be like them:

Philip Voss, who made me understand the difference between amateur and professional acting when he shouted ‘Zounds’ as the dying Mercutio (Ipswich Arts Theatre, 1963).

Chris Crooks, my drama school (and life-long) buddy whose camel was legendary. As was his Hamlet (Central School of Speech and Drama, 1967–69, and The Century Theatre, 1971).

Ian Richardson, whose passion, voice and commitment to performing enthralled me and audiences alike (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1972).

Lawrence Werber, strong, steadfast and honorable both as a friend and as an actor (Phoebus Cart, 1991).

And Mark Rylance, who has stunned a whole generation of actors and theatregoers (Phoebus Cart and Sonnet Walks, 1990s).

Also, I’ve got to mention my kids, Nick and Katie, who had to grow up with an actor dad. ‘What does your father do for a living?’ asked a teacher. ‘He goes for interviews,’ said Katie. Neither Nick nor Katie ever wanted to go on the stage or anywhere near it! (Although Nick likes to build film sets.)

Finally, never-ending thanks to Nick Hern for his rigorous (but always apposite) editorial comments; Matt Applewhite for conversations and advice, and without whom this book wouldn’t exist; Jodi Gray for making the pages look great; and to all the rest of the people at Nick Hern Books for their various book-publishing talents and friendly faces.

John Abbott

THIS BOOK IS FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE INTERESTED IN HOW actors prepare for performances.

For teachers it is a recipe book of techniques and processes.

For directors it could also be an insight into the way that actors think.

And for actors it is an introduction to some new techniques and a reminder of techniques they may once have learned but have long since forgotten.

This book is about the way we teach acting at ArtsEd, the drama school where I’ve worked for the past twelve years. It started life as a handbook for our students. A checklist of taught techniques. But people outside the school discovered it, found it useful and asked if they could have a copy. At that point it was simply a summary of the training, because the exercises were not described in detail. There was no need to do so because the students had been taught them in class. Then my publisher, Nick Hern, who described the handbook as ‘a fast-forward acting course’, asked me to retain the outline structure but fill in the detail. The result is this book.

Its main purpose is to describe how to support and strengthen an actor’s artistic intentions and build their confidence. It describes various ways to analyse a text, create a character and develop character relationships. It includes a range of rehearsal techniques and improvisations, and it introduces an assortment of exercises to stimulate the actor’s imagination.

But basically it is an outline of some of the things that actors can do to create memorable performances that will captivate their audiences.

‘All Art is Useless’

GOOD OLD OSCAR WILDE. YOU’VE GOT TO LOVE HIM. SOME of the things he said just hang there in your mind and make you wish you’d said them yourself.

He’s undeniably right, of course: Art is useless because it doesn’t ‘do’ anything. But after smiling at his cheek and admiring his wit, you realise that he’s making a positive statement about Art. He actually loves the uselessness of it. It doesn’t help you gather food. It doesn’t keep you warm and dry. It doesn’t make you healthy and strong. It doesn’t keep body and soul together.

Or does it?

Possibly the earliest form of Art was storytelling. Who knows? It could arguably have been cave painting, but for that you need to have invented some sort of paint and devised a way of applying it to the walls of the cave. For storytelling you don’t need to have invented anything at all. Except language. And perhaps a story. I can imagine these cavemen sitting around the fire after a hunting trip and telling everyone what happened during the hunt. They probably embellished the details and exaggerated the characters just like we do today: ‘So-and-so was really brave. He grabbed the mammoth by his tail and wouldn’t let go’… ‘And then What’s-his-name fell over a tree trunk as usual and we all laughed’… ‘Yes, but Who’s-it was absolutely useless. He’s been in a dreamworld ever since he fell in love with Her-over-there.’ And you know how it is when you tell a good story: you want to show people what happened, so you get up and start acting out various incidents. In all probability the people in the hunt got up and started acting out whole scenes together. And, of course, a really good story could be told again and again, and each time they told it they would have got better and better at acting out the good bits. Then some people listening to the story may have wanted to tell it to a completely different group of people, so they had to tell it in the third person. And as they acted it out maybe they pretended to be the people who were originally in the hunt. Some of those old cave-dwellers may have become really good storytellers. And some others probably become expert actors as they acted out the incidents for their cave-dwelling audiences.

You see what I’m getting at, don’t you?

Drama. Theatre. Acting.

And what makes a good storyteller? Well, for a start, it’s someone who can make the characters in the story clear, unique and detailed, because everyone is different, and human beings have always been interested in the way that other human beings behave. But a good storyteller is also someone who makes the story come alive for the listeners so their imaginations can become fully engaged. Maybe the best storyteller is someone who performs the acted-out bits as realistically as possible, and who brings truth to the emotional experience of the characters, because that makes the listeners think deeply about what it is to be human. They may even ponder philosophical questions like ‘Who are we?’ and ‘What is the meaning of life?’

As far as I can tell, people who are good at acting things out have always tried to make their acting seem real. Even good joke-tellers in the pub will often start off by making you think they are telling a true story about themselves or about a friend of theirs. A clown spraying fake tears over the first few rows of the audience will get more laughs if he has an inner truth of sadness as he does it. If you look at photographs of Henry Irving, the first actor to be knighted, he used extreme physical gestures when he performed: his hands are stretched sideways, his fingers splayed and his eyes are wild with emotion. But strangely enough, all the reviewers at the time commended him on his naturalism. So what was going on? Well, I think Henry Irving must have had that ‘inner truth’ as he acted. Don’t forget that theatres were lit by gaslight in those days, and it must have been pretty hard for the people in the upper gallery to see the actors’ faces. Perhaps Irving used exaggerated gestures in order to project his character’s inner life to the people in the gods. And look at Shakespeare, who was making theatre four hundred years ago. In Hamlet’s speech to the troupe of players visiting Elsinore, he asks them to hold ‘the mirror up to nature’ when they act. In other words, to be natural. I suspect that naturalism has always been at the core of great acting. It’s instinctive to act with truth because stories always work better that way.

A hundred years ago along came Konstantin Stanislavsky, the godfather of drama training, who spent his life analysing and quantifying the artistic instincts of the best actors, so that all the other actors could do what they do. Since then there have been loads of different ‘methods’, ‘techniques’ and ‘cults’ about actor training, but they all go back to Stanislavsky in the end. And the whole thing is quite simple.

• Analyse the text and examine the details so you know what the writer had in mind.

• Create a character that both the actor and the audience can believe in.

• Then perform the play as truthfully as possible, with all the actors listening and responding to each other.

That’s all there is to it. Thanks, Konstantin.

But, of course, that’s like saying that all Michelangelo had to do was find a nice piece of marble, chip out the shape he wanted and smooth off the surface!

When I started to teach acting, I read loads of books, from Stanislavsky to Michael Chekhov, through Grotowski, Augusto Boal, Keith Johnstone and others. I even read David Mamet, who thinks that actor training is rubbish and all you have to do is to stand still and say the lines as written. (‘Know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture,’ said Noël Coward. But he was joking!)

In order to create my first classes, I used bits and pieces from all the books I’d read, but as the years passed I began to adapt other people’s exercises and invent techniques of my own. Without noticing it I had developed my own style of teaching. It was the same with directing. To start with I used all sorts of tried-and-tested rehearsal techniques, anything that might solve a problem. Stanislavsky. Michael Chekhov. Mike Alfreds. It took me ages to get my head around ‘units and objectives’. Everyone I met seemed to have a different theory about what they were, so I finally came up with a version that seemed to work for me and I started teaching that. Some people got it and some didn’t. And it was especially hard for people who had been taught a different version by previous drama teachers.

Then I started using improvisation in rehearsals to create characters and relationships. Most people loved it, but others just wanted to be told their ‘moves’ so they could decide how they were going to say their lines.

Also, I discovered that some people loved to research and find out as much as they could about the background of the play and the characters, while others hardly bothered at all. They just used their ‘feelings’ about these things. Their instincts.

Some people liked to ‘action’ the text, while others loved the Meisner technique. Some people used the study of animals to create their characters, while others put on their costumes to see how particular clothing affected their character’s physicality.

I realised that some things work for some people and other things work for others. And I realised that some things work on some plays and other things work on other plays. Or that some things work with a certain bunch of actors and other things with other bunches. There is no method for acting that is universal and foolproof, despite what some gurus may postulate, because all plays are different. All characters are different. And all actors are different. They are creative artists, so what can you expect? Imagine if everyone painted like Hockney, how boring the art world would be. I mean, I love David Hockney, but imagine how it would be if all artists made pictures like him. No Tracey Emin. No Banksy. No Lucian Freud or Lowry or Francis Bacon…

Most of these people, including David Hockney, went to art school where they learned how to reflect on their artistic vision as well as how to manipulate the tools of their trade. With the proper training in artistic possibilities combined with an understanding of practical techniques, they were able to give life to their unique vision.

For me, that’s what drama training is all about for actors. As I’ve just tried to show, acting is pretty straightforward in outline, but in detail it’s as complicated and varied as the personalities of all the people who act.

Techniques

In this book I will be talking about both analytical and artistic techniques, and explaining how they are mutually beneficial. Actors are artists, and like all artists they have to combine a technical understanding of their craft with an unbridled, free-flowing, creative instinct.

Where I teach we have struggled to come to terms with how to combine our training in the intellectual analysis of a text with the free-flowing responsive methods of the Meisner technique. And at first glance they seem to be at odds. But if you look at the diagrammatic representation of the yin and the yang you will find that it is made of two shapes: one is jet black with a white dot in the middle and the other is pure white with a black dot in the middle. They are total opposites.

But each shape, unsatisfactory as it is in isolation, fits snugly against the other to create a perfect circle. And the circle has traditionally been used as the diagrammatic representation of harmony and completeness.

So while we try to understand and develop the artistic intentions of our student actors, we also introduce them to a whole suite of productive methods to help them realise their inner creative vision. Some of the methods we use are tried and tested and will be familiar; a few of them are invented; and others are still in the experimental stage. But all these methods can sometimes be useful, although not for everyone all the time. The best advice I can give to anyone using this book is to try things out and see what happens. I once suggested to a very experienced actor that we ‘hot-seated’ his character, which means the actor has to answer random questions in character, without preparation. ‘Oh, John, I don’t need to do that! That’s drama-school stuff,’ he said. ‘Try it,’ I said. ‘Okaaay,’ he answered with a resigned sigh.

He began answering my questions with a certain reluctance, but after a while he became more animated, and I could see his character start to come to life. When we finished he was bubbling over with enthusiasm. ‘That was great,’ he said. ‘I really enjoyed it. I never realised that my character…’, etc., etc., and I couldn’t stop him talking for ages.

So my advice is:

Use the exercises with enthusiasm and you might be surprised by the results.

Subtext

The subtext is basically the desires, thoughts and emotions that a character might feel, even when they are having an apparently innocuous conversation. Sometimes in real life people find it hard to express what they really feel, either because it would be socially unacceptable for them to do so or because they don’t want anyone else to know too much about them. So they use half-truths and evasions, or talk about other things to disguise their inner feelings. And these inner feelings are the subtext. Writers like Chekhov and Harold Pinter have consciously used subtext when writing dialogue, and the word ‘subtext’ is often used to refer literally to the hidden thoughts behind the text of a play. But I will be using the term in a broader context, meaning the unspoken thoughts behind any spoken words, be they in a play, a film, or in real life.

Of course, an actor has to have a good understanding of their character’s subtext, but the biggest danger is to try to ‘act out’ the subtext so it is clear to the audience. In real life, people usually try to keep their subtext hidden. It’s there but you can’t perceive it. In fact, people are often desperately trying to conceal their thoughts and emotions. And that is how actors should use subtext. They should understand it, know it, feel it, and then suppress it. You could say, ‘Why bother with it in the first place if you are going to keep it hidden?’, but that would be underestimating the audience’s perceptive skills. If an actor feels an emotion, the audience will pick up on it, however deeply the emotion is hidden, and that will make them feel involved. But if you bring the subtext to the surface and spoon-feed it to the audience then you are not allowing them to participate and they will soon lose interest.

The bottom line is:

Keep the subtext ‘sub’. Don’t act it, or it will just become a new ‘text’.

Lonelyhearts

One of the first things our students at ArtsEd do is to create characters from scratch. They start with very little information and then, through a process of observation and improvisation, they each develop a fully rounded, truthful character. These lonelyhearts sessions were originally devised by Jane Harrison, who based some of the creative process on the techniques of Mike Leigh, but over the years these sessions have developed into the series of exercises described in Chapter 2. Thanks to Jane Harrison for describing this to me, but also, many thanks to Charlie Barker, who is the Head of Acting for the ArtEd BA in Musical Theatre, because she added her own particular flavour to this process and has allowed me to include some additional material which is all her own.

Improvisation

There are many forms of improvisation, from cooking to playing jazz to performing in front of an audience. Improvisation just means that people are making things up on the spot without any preparation or preconception.

The improvisations that I talk about in this book are improvisations to help actors explore various aspects of a script, and as such they should always be played truthfully. They are not about entertaining the other actors, impressing the director or being funny. They are a means of exploiting the actors’ ability to ‘pretend’ in order to help them develop their characters, explore relationships within the script and ultimately present a multilayered version of life in their performances.

At ArtsEd we teach the students how to improvise dialogue both truthfully and creatively. It’s not as simple as it seems, because actors can often produce very bland conversations when you take away their instinct to entertain. Their improvisations may be very realistic but they are not learning anything new. So we teach them how to replace that instinct to entertain with something more creative. They learn how to make up stories about their characters and build complex relationships by making on-the-spot decisions without any fear. There is a brief outline of this in Chapter 10, but you will find an in-depth description of our improvisation training in The Improvisation Book.

In short, it is important to remember:

Keep the improvisations real. They are to help the actors, not to entertain the audience.

Meisner

Sanford Meisner developed a technique to help actors connect with each other and respond ‘in the moment’. This is the basis of good acting because it tells the story with truth and dynamism, and because the performances are being created as the audience watches.

The Meisner technique as outlined in Chapters 11 and 12 would not be considered to be pure Meisner by some practitioners. Our second-year acting tutor, Aileen Gonsalves, has developed and refined the technique in order to make her own explorations and to solve her own rehearsal challenges. So, although her process is based on Meisner, it is, in fact, her own interpretation of the technique. I would like to thank her for the time she spent giving me a detailed description of her work, and to point out that Chapters 11 and 12 were devised and written by both of us.

Film and Television

At ArtsEd we give the students a very thorough training in acting for film and television because we realise the abundance of professional opportunities in this area. More and more British actors are getting work in American films and television series; there are a growing number of low-budget films being made by young directors; and the internet is an open house for new creative ideas for both drama and comedy. Of course, acting is acting, and a lot of the basic training we give applies to both stage and screen, so I have tried to describe the techniques and exercises in this book in a way that is not specific to either theatre or film. Sometimes this may sound a bit heavy-handed and awkward. For instance, rather than talking about ‘plays’ or ‘film scripts’, I use ‘scripts’ or ‘texts’ as cover-all words. On a few occasions the techniques are specific to theatre, particularly since film and television work can often have a rather skimpy rehearsal schedule. But none of the exercises are specific to acting for the camera. That is another book.

Shakespeare

I have included some quotations from Shakespeare as a fun way of introducing each chapter of this book. It’s amazing how he has something to say about almost any subject you can imagine! But I have also used references to popular Shakespeare plays and characters when I need to illustrate particular points. I’ve done this because, of all the playwrights that I could have chosen, Shakespeare is the one that most people will be familiar with.

I have also used Chekhov’s plays to illustrate points, as well as American plays and films from the 1950s, because the writers and actors in both those eras were experimenting with naturalism. This makes them ideal vehicles for exercises in exploration and discovery.

The Confidence Trick

I suppose the most important aspect of our training at ArtsEd is positivity. It’s a belief that the students we teach already have the right instincts and talent for acting, so all we have to do is to help them believe in themselves and introduce them to various techniques to realise their artistic vision. They know how they want to act: they sometimes just don’t know how to go about it. The trouble with acting is that the actor can’t see the results of his or her work unless they are making a film, and even then their judgement is clouded because they usually just focus on their own performance. As an actor they are part of a creative team, but it is very difficult for them to have an objective view of their contribution to the play or the film. They are each cogs in the creative wheel and all they can do is to ‘feel’ how their performance has gone. Perhaps they can judge from the audience reaction, but even that is subjective. Laughter from the audience may convey a certain amount of enjoyment, but what happens when an actor is playing in a tragedy? Best to hope there will be no laughter. No, apart from relying on their own instincts and feelings, actors have to depend on the feedback of trusted professionals. Directors. Teachers. Voice coaches. People with an objective view who can help actors visualise their performances and understand the effect they have on an audience. I don’t mean, though, that a director or a teacher should beat an actor into submission by relentlessly criticising their work and overpowering them with their own methodology. On the contrary, at ArtsEd we believe that an actor needs to understand what is right about their work, and if they understand that, then the wrong will just disappear.

I first met Jane Harrison when she was teaching on a foundation course in acting at the City and Islington College, and I was amazed when she kept telling her students that they were brilliant. I’d never come across such positivity in my life. But the funny thing was, her students just got better and better. Her positivity worked. At first I thought it was a trick and that she didn’t really mean it. But she did. She genuinely believed her students were brilliant.

And of course it was true. They were. People are brilliant if they are allowed to be. Unfortunately they lose their sparkle if they are constantly being degraded and abused. Kick a rough diamond around and it stays rough, but if you examine its structure, carefully release its potential, and polish its unique facets, it shines and glitters with a thousand colours.

Of course, there is no point in lying. If an actor is mumbling their lines incoherently, it would be stupid to say, ‘That was brilliant, I heard every word.’ What good would that do? But if you praise the actor for the insightful depth of character creation (if it’s true), and then point out that it works best when the audience can understand the subtleties of dialogue as well as they can understand the subtleties of character, then the actor will automatically want to convey the meaning of every single word. Both Marlon Brando and James Dean were criticised for a certain amount of vocal incoherence in their early work, but if you listen to them from the perspective of the twenty-first century, you realise that, while they were at odds with what was then the accepted method of speaking dialogue, they made sure that the audience understood everything they wanted the audience to understand. People accused Marlon Brando of mumbling, but listen again to him in his early films. That’s not a mumble: it’s his way of investing the written dialogue with the natural rhythms of human speech. If the director Elia Kazan had said to him: ‘Marlon, I didn’t hear all the words. You’re a useless actor. You’ve got to speak more clearly,’ then On the Waterfront would have been forgotten long ago.

But he didn’t. Kazan gave Brando confidence to explore a new depth of acting while making sure that he was still telling the story with emotional clarity and truth. Kazan focused on the positives. And that’s what we do at ArtsEd. That’s our technique. It helps the students to believe in themselves. Call it a trick if you like, but it works. It gives them confidence.

It’s a confidence trick.

HAMLET.… My lord, you play’d once i’ th’ university, you say?

POLONIUS. That I did, my lord, and was accounted a good actor.

Hamlet (3.2)

AFEW YEARS AGO I GOT A JOB DIRECTING SECOND-YEAR acting students at the Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts. I had to direct a play and teach the students how to be actors at the same time. The play I chose was The Vortex by Noël Coward. It was written in 1924 when Coward was a young man, and it concerns the problems of taking drugs and how your relationship with your parents changes when you leave home. All in all I thought it was a subject that acting students could easily relate to.

At the time I was living in Chiswick, which is in West London. Mountview is in North London, so each day I drove round the North Circular Road on my motorbike to get to work. In his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig describes a journey he made both physically, on his motorbike, and philosophically – into his consciousness. He uses a Native American word to describe this journey. He calls it a Chautauqua. There appear to be many definitions of the word ‘Chautauqua’ but I’ve taken it to mean: ‘Philosophical thoughts you have while travelling’. It’s a great word.

So anyway, as I was travelling round the North Circular Road I was puzzling over how I could teach these Mountview students to become actors, and I came up with these two thoughts:

‘Work like a Trojan.

Play like a child.’

The words kept ringing in my ears.

And as I travelled on between the lanes of crawling cars, other ideas came into my head, so when I got to Mountview I quickly wrote everything down. Later I refined it and reworked it, but essentially the thoughts I had on that journey – my Chautauqua – eventually became what I now call ‘The Ego Paradox’. It looks like a poem, but it’s not. It’s just a set of instructions on how to be an actor.

The Ego Paradox

Work like a Trojan

Play like a child

Have the imagination of a poet

The gusto of an abstract expressionist

And the courage of a gambler

Research like a detective

Experiment like a mad scientist

Think like a philosopher

And practise like a magician

Focus your concentration like an athlete in the Olympic Games

Believe in yourself as completely as the President of the United States

And always perform with the passionate commitment of a sanctified mystic.

Let me explain.

First of all the title. ‘The Ego Paradox’. What’s that all about?

It describes the paradox that an actor faces. In order to be able to stand up in front of hundreds of people and have them watch you pretend to be someone else, you have to have a pretty strong sense of who you are. You have to have a strong ego. But on the other hand, when you are playing a role, you have to suppress your own ego and take on the ego of the character you are playing. Therein lies the paradox.

Work like a TrojanPlay like a child

Being an actor is hard work, both physically and mentally, but actors should never lose sight of how childish it is and how much fun it can be. Children take their play very seriously, and so should actors. Work like Trojans? Well, I’d heard the expression before and assumed it meant to work very hard indeed. Anyway, that’s what I meant it to mean.

Have the imagination of a poet