The Layers of Performance
Forgive my awful handwriting, but I was inspired and wanted to write it down authentically…
At the base layer of an actor’s performance is the story of the play/screenplay, entwined with the plot structure. This provides the macro level direction to the actor’s performance, the spine of the performance.
The next level is skeleton of the performance, which is created as a score of (psychophysical) essential action, this is analysed and formed on the strength of our analysis. It provides a score, just like a musical score, which the actors can ‘play’ just like notes. Actions are not just plain activities, they are psychologically imbued, motivated actions, living objectives, not just something you want, but the combination of want and action, action with intention.
At the next layer, we must take action and practice accomplishing that action/intention. Working off your scene partners. Using them as the fuel for your scene. This gives us a chance to embody the bones of the scene.
At the next level we add the word, unadulterated, let it happen and get out of it’s way. Go for your action, let the words work for you.
Then there’s the director shaping the performance. Hopefully, without spoiling.
Lastly, there’s the moment, the seat of immediacy, the final guide to how you should behave. Here is something you can’t rehearse, you can practice, we prepare, as Mamet says, to improvise.
Here in the spontaneous moment, is the test of your preparation.
To You, The Best!Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010
Playwrights You Should Read
Today is my wedding day, I won’t be blogging as normal until 20th September. Instead, I’ve written some blogs in advance to make sure you have a steady stream of blogs whilst I get wed and go away on my honeymoon.
Today’s blog is short but I’d like to offer you the chance to catch up on your reading. I get really mad when people won’t buy plays. Plays are your training ground, even if you work in film, the playwright can teach you a lot about dealing with different writing styles.
These are some playwrights and their play I think you should read. This list is by no means exhaustive:
- Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Nights’ Dream.
- Dario Fo: Accidental Death of an Anarchist.
- David Hare: Skylight
- David Mamet: Oleanna
- Neil Labute: The Shape of Things
- Ann Marie di Mambro: Tally’s Blood
- Zinnie Harris: Further than the Furthest Thing.
- David Greig: The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union.
- Gregory Burke: Black Watch
- Moliere: Tartuffe
- Arthur Miller: All my Sons
- Mark Ravenhill: Paradise Lost
- Edward Albee: The Zoo Story
- Tennessee Williams – A Street Car Named Desire
- Caryl Churchill: A Number
- Howard Brenton: Magnificence
- Kwame Kwei-Armah: Elmina’s Kitchen
- Sophocles: Antigone
- Tony Kushner: Angels in America
- Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Ernest.
- John Patrick Shanley: Doubt, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea.
- Henrik Ibsen: Ghosts
- August Strindberg: The Stronger
- Anton Chekhov: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya.
And that’s just to get you started. Come on, educate yourself!
To You, The Best!Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010
Being Off Book
If you work or train with me, you’ll know I do things differently. Not to be controversial but because it’s more effective.
One of the main ways that I differ is that I insist that the actors come to the first day of rehearsal with lines learned, not generally, not quite well, so they can paraphrase but perfectly verbatim.
To counteract the (likely) chance that the actors will stick with early choices for intonation, we ask them to learn it cold, like the word have no special meaning.
This is quite a feat and it goes against the learning through repetition in rehearsal that actors usually rely on.
Imagine coming to rehearsal and on day one, everyone is off book. No stressing over lines, no scaring the crap out of other cast members with your failure to deliver cue lines.
Instead, from day one, you are ready to play, ready to act, which doesn’t really start happening for most actors until maybe the dress rehearsal or later. Of course on set, you HAVE to know your lines on day of filming. Opera singers always come to rehearsal with lines well learned.
When you work with a company of actors that are off book from day one, you experience freedom, you see them work fearlessly and the lines come falling out easily, because they just know. Here is a freedom far too few actors know.
Leaving it late is lazy and self-indulgent. Learn the lines early, get off book and fly from day one.
Top Books on Acting
Most books on acting are complete nonsense, these are the books that I personally recommend:
True and False -David Mamet
Practical Handbook for the Actor – Bruder et Al.
Action – The Actor’s Thesaurus – Lloyd-Williams and Calderone.
The Power of the Actor – Ivana Chubbuck
The Intent to Live – Larry Moss
The Monologue Audition – Karen Kohlhaas
The Sanford Meisner Approach – Vol 1 – Larry Silverberg.
The Actor’s Art and Craft – William Esper.
Playing Shakespeare – John Barton
The Right to Speak – Patsy Rodenberg
Not a long list, but my personal guide to books on acting that are worth reading.
Excerpt from An Interview with Mark Westbrook
This is an interview I did a while ago (but didn’t end up getting published)… It’s just an excerpt. Hope you enjoy it.
When I met Mark Westbrook to interview him, he was not how I imagined him to be. Some of the pictures on his website show a rotund bearded man, in his 30s, jolly, well dressed, full of laughter and enthusiasm. The man sitting waiting for me, drinking a cup of tea and reading a book about Feminism, was wearing jeans and a martial arts hoodie. He spoke enthusiastically about his passion for acting and actors.
RM: Mark, how did you become an acting coach?
MW: Some of my friends were actors, I was a director and had taught acting for several years, but didn’t consider myself an acting coach. Many of my actor friends seemed really at sea when it came to the very basics of their craft, no matter how much they had worked, or where they had trained.
RM: What do you mean by ‘all at sea’?
MW: They didn’t seem to have a way of working that would help them consistently, there was no ABC of acting for them, and that worried me, because I thought Drama Schools should be providing that type of educating.
RM: And you believe that they’re not?
MW: I don’t just believe it, it’s borne out by experience, the craft of the actor seems to be missing from the modern actor’s toolbox, they don’t even have a toolbox. They face a script almost completely clueless, or the methods and techniques they’ve learned are so contrived or impractical, they just don’t work.
RM: What’s a toolbox?
MW: A set of tools that they use in their job. Just like a plumber.
RM: So an actor should have certain tools they use for…
MW: For certain tasks.
RM: So you started coaching actors because you felt they were missing some important tools for doing their job?
MW: Yes, and not only that they were missing tools, but that the tools they had didn’t work, or served only to create very stiff or fake acting.
RM: You’re saying that what they teach in drama schools, doesn’t work?
MW: For the most part.
RM: That’s a pretty arrogant thing to say, isn’t it?
MW: It’s only arrogant if it isn’t true.
RM: But you yourself, you went to drama school?
MW: Yes, college, university, drama school and an acting conservatory in New York.
RM: So some of it must have worked.
MW: I think I was able to pick and choose what worked and what didn’t and forge it into an approach that can help actors to work better for and by themselves.
RM: Right, so you’re not anti-drama school?
MW: No, not really, I think actors need to learn their craft somewhere.
RM: Some might say that you don’t have a background as an actor, how can you know this stuff, aren’t you just being provocative?
MW: I’m not just being provocative, I am being provocative because I believe that what I’m doing helps actors, and my experience is that if most actors could swop three years of training for a year with me, they’d be a lot better off.
RM: Well, you would say that.
MW: That’s true, I would. Again, experience in the studio shows that actors that work using the tools that ACS provides, they can work with greater confidence.
RM: Do you teach complete beginners?
MW: Sure, everyone has to start somewhere.
RM: What about middle aged people?
MW: Yes.
RM: Surely, they’re never going to have a successful career, they’re competing against people that have been in the business for years.
MW: That’s true. But no one really cares about that, if the person can do it, they can do it. If a casting director sees that person and they fit the bill, and they’re professional, and they’re gifted, and they’re not a dick, then, that’s all that matters.
RM: But aren’t you just giving people false hope?
MW: There’s nothing certain about being in the acting industry, from the top to the bottom, I’m helping people have a full on, two hundred percent stab at something that they want to do. I’m really sensitive to people’s aspirations, because there’s a lot of charlatans out there that will milk aspirational people for all their worth, I’m not into that. I can help actors at all levels, but they’re not just cash machines for me, their careers and potential careers are important to me, and essentially my success rests on their own.
To You, The Best!Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010
A Handy Guide to Acting Emotions with Steven Seagal
Steven has always been one of my favourite actors 
Thought you would all enjoy the chance to learn from the master.
Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010
Method Acting and Practical Aesthetics: What’s the Difference?
For Oliver.
One of my students asked about the difference between Method Acting and Practical Aesthetics:
First off, let’s make clear a point of similarity. All acting techniques have the same goal, to produce truthful acting by freeing the actor from self-consciousness and physical tension.
A second point is that they are both derived from the life’s work of Konstantin Stanislavsky, Russian actor, director and theorist. However, whilst Method Acting was shaped in America by Lee Strasberg, a devotee of Stanislavsky who never directly studied with the man, Practical Aesthetics is influenced strongly by Sanford Meisner, a contemporary of Strasberg, who chose to focus on behaviour and doing as a route to truthful acting, rather than Strasberg’s focus on Emotion.
I will be generalizing throughout this blog, in order to refrain from writing a PhD thesis here.
First off, the Strasberg-Meisner difference is at the heart of the difference between Practical Aesthetics and Method Acting. Acting for us is based in what Meisner called the reality of doing and the truth of the moment. This is a focus on the actor’s actual reality, not pretend circumstances. This is a focus on the actor’s subjective view of the truth of the moment and not a belief in the imaginary circumstances, which results in Scenic or Dramatic Truth. A truth based on the actor’s capacity to delude themselves that fictional things are real.
Next, the Practical Aesthetics (PA) is writer-centred, the creator is the writer, they do the job of making things up, the actor is a creative interpreter but not a creator in the same way that a writer is. Method Acting (whatever that means) is more actor centered. We are most interested in serving the writing, this cannot be said of the Method Actor, who creates a character built from details of the script but also from their imagination. They may also serve the writer, but they do so by trying to create a ‘truthful’ fully dimensional character.
To the Practical Aesthetics actor, there is no character. It cannot be created, the writer has already given you everything you need to act the role by suggestions made in the script. The illusion of character is created when the writer’s words mixes with the performer’s actions and is born in the audience’s mind.
The Practical Aesthetics trained actor, does not look for emotional connection to the text or character, instead, they find the commonality in action. We are interested in how the character fulfils their intent. It is about truthfully carrying out the character’s actions, although note that we are not talking about walking, talking or eating breakfast, we are talking about objectives fuelled by intention and manifested through the truthful performance of psychophysical actions.
The Method Actor creates from the self, the actor is the start and end point. For us, it is the text and the other people in the scene. We are not infinitely fascinated by our own creative capacity, but firmly focused on the Other. They (writer/text/other actors) are our fuel source, everything we do is motivated by a concretely achievable goal (we call an Essential Action) and based in the subjective truth of each moment. It is not ‘does my character smoke?’ but instead ‘what can I do to change the behaviour of my scene partner?’.
Quite often, less experienced students will confuse the method by which we connect to the scene and the role known as the ‘As-If’ with Emotional Memory. First of all, in Method Acting, actors are trained to recall the memory of their senses, this is later used to help stimulate the recall of emotion through provocative memories.
The goal is emotional truth and a connection to the inner life of the character.
In the As-If exercise, the goal is a personal connection, an understanding of what performing the Essential action is like to you. We often use analogous (past) circumstances to help relate to the action, but we do not look for emotionally stimulating memories, especially when a daydream will do instead. We are reliving nothing as we believe it removes one from the scene. We work out what the action means to us and use the memory or daydream as a memory aid, to remind us how to behave, not feel, but how to act.
One is a tool for stimulating truthful emotion (I have not set out my objections to this here) and the other is a stimulus to action. Quite different intention and practical application.
Practical Aesthetics is also not a ‘system’, it is a few simple principles to bypass the common day bullshit of actor training and rehearsal. Of course , the philosophy that surrounds PA is entirely different from that of other acting techniques too.
Rehearsing a play with Practical Aesthetics is entirely different too, much simpler and yet with deeply affecting results nonetheless. How? Because challenging the dominant acting ideology does not mean replacing it with something devoid of beautiful, affecting. Practical Aesthetics is just as effective and affective.
For us, it is not the actor that should undergo the great emotional journey but the audience. It is they that should feel.
Whereas the actor and their character is centre stage in the Method Actor’s performance, the Practical Aesthetics trained actor gives a truthful performance, which steps aside and allows the story to be told, rather than featuring emotional oases demonstrating the actor’s capacity to ‘feel’ on command.
In Practical Aesthetics, a simple motto:
Invent Nothing, Deny Nothing, Accept Everything and Get On With It!
Preparation
From today our studio has a new motto, Preparation, Preparation, Preparation.
As an actor, you cannot be prepared enough. Preparation comes in all different forms but it is the most important word in the actor’s vocabulary, for without solid preparation, all the rest is irrelevant.
I have nothing else to say on the matter, excuses are for the weak, be prepared, arrive on time, tell someone else your sob stories and get on with your job, a job you are privileged to have and that three dozen people would kill you for.
Seriously now, be prepared or get out.
The Beauty of Truth
I love watching performance. There’s something magical that I’m drawn to in the actor’s art of storytelling. But most of the time, I confess, what I see is little short of rubbish. Sometimes the play is intellectual at the cost of the story, sometimes the ideas thrust upon the actors by the director are faulty and give the performance a pretentious or unnecessary edge which spoils what you see. And sometimes, the acting is no good. Correction, most of the time, the acting is no good.
What do I mean by ‘no good?’ Well, I mean that it was artificial, mechanical, empty, disconnected and most of all, it was bullshit. I use that as a technical term, bullshit is when I can sense the actor’s are lying to me. Something in their performance is not truthful, it is fraudulent and it stinks of artifice and even worse, the vilest sin of PRETEND.
I crave truthful performance. It is one of the most beautiful things that one can see. It often goes unnoticed because it is not showy, it is not marked by a sense of ‘performing’ or ‘acting’, it is subtle, unadulterated and most of all truthful.
Many acting techniques falsely believe that truth can be achieved through faith. If you just believe in the circumstances of the character enough, you’ll create truthful acting. That is pure nonsense. You are already truthful. The art of the actor, is NOT to work hard enough to create truth, it is instead, to reveal truth, the real whole truth of the moment to the audience. This is an act of courage and bravery that many actors find very difficult.
I was recently watching a rehearsal for a friend’s show at the Edinburgh Festival this year. I watched the performance and the actors all gave good ‘performances’, but that’s what they were ‘performances’, there was not a scrap of truth involved. But one actor’s performance, my friend, as it happens was so subtle that often, her fellow actors responded to her as if there was a problem and she had broken out of the performance, so truthful was her performance, so subtle, that even her colleagues, hearing the words they had heard a hundred times didn’t recognise the truth when they saw it. Or perhaps they did, and thought that she had stopped acting – which is of course exactly what she had done.
The beauty of truth is that it allows us to enjoy a ripping good story and not focus on the individual actor’s performance, which – in the end, is why they come.
To You, The Best!Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010
The Other
“The best way to be in contact with the audience is to be in close relationship with the other characters in the play” Stanislavski
The Other is the most important person in your scene. For Stanislavski, the Other was the other characters, but for us, the Other are the actors in your scene. By placing our attention lightly on our scene partners and by seeking an action from them, we develop a less selfish type of acting, self consciousness dissipates and your engagement with the Other makes you engaging to watch.
Stanislavski himself believed that we should show ‘limitless attention to our scene partner’. When I teach acting, I do not ask the actor to imagine or pretend that the Other is someone imaginary or fictional, I ask them to deal with truth of the moment, deal with the person in front of them in that moment, not in rehearsal, but in every moment. This means every moment is different and every moment is truthful. In this case we mean that the actor responds directly to what they see from the Other. They do not make up their response based on something they did in rehearsal and project it out regardless of what The Other is doing.
In my acting masterclasses for professional actors, I constantly repeat ‘It’s NOT about You’. It’s an important lesson to remember, one that actors find quite funny since they know their habit for self-absorption. Taking your attention off yourself and placing it in the pursuit of a goal through action is the best way to relieve stage fright, to develop captivating action and to give the performance you wish to give.
The ‘Other’ is the key to a spontaneous and improvisational style of acting. By improvisational, we do not mean that you make up the words, but that you spontaneously react to what the other is doing. Each moment is different, inside the sandbox of the circumstances of the play. The other person in your scene gives you one of the most important elements of acting, something to react off, a way to behave, a way to act, the ‘HOW’. The Other is the fuel of the scene. Whatever the other fellow in your scene does, it provides you with material to work from in the scene, even if they do nothing. If the other actor is being difficult or pouts or rolls their eyes, you immediately have something to work off. How do you know HOW to deliver the lines? You don’t. You deliver your lines based on what the OTHER is doing within the given circumstances of the play.
Seek your goal from the OTHER, commit to your tactic and the truth of the moment will be your guide. But it takes bravery and courage.
‘You may play well or you may play badly; the important thing is that you play truly’ Shchepkin
The truth of the moment, the truth of the scene, the key to truthful acting is DOING REAL THINGS to REAL PEOPLE.
To You, The Best!Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010
Just Say the Lines
My experiences as a writer are that given enough rope, the actors will labour the lines to death. They’ve also develop an assumption through popular culture or training that they are superior to the words in some way, and can (and often do) request changes to the text based on ‘what sounds better’ or the removal of something that doesn’t ‘ring true’. My point is this. Shut up and say the lines. If you were asked to bring your editorial skills to the table by the playwright/screenwriter, then by all means, please do. In film of course, the director and the actors regularly shit all over the writer’s work. In the name of ‘what works’, or ‘what rings true’, or basically, some deficiency in the actor that means they can’t say the line the way it is written. Here’s a trick. The writer, through fluke or gift or training or none, is actually probably quite good at their job and has been paid money to produce the words. If as an actor, you think you can do better, please do. Otherwise, just say the lines.
An excerpt from a 2008 article in The Independent makes this point for me: “The uncanny exactitude of Mamet’s notation is borne out by a story told by the actors David Suchet and Lia Williams, who played the professor and the student in that production. At the start of rehearsals, they found the carefully positioned emphases inhibiting. So Pinter asked the author for a script without the underscoring. Mamet declined on the grounds that the stressings were all in the right place and necessary. Pinter stuck to his guns and an unmarked script was provided. The telling point is that when the actors re-consulted the marked script four weeks into rehearsal, they discovered that they were in fact playing virtually every emphasis originally indicated there.”
Say the lines, don’t labour them, and enjoy the benefits of the writer’s own talents, add yours to theirs, rather than trying to avoid doing your job by taking on their job too.
To You, The Best!Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010
Illusion
Acting, the performance of an actor is the performance of action which creates an illusion, which is carried out with the complicity of the audience. No one thinks *real* magic is occurring, we just admire the work of a very gifted and hard grafting magician.
Character is illusion too, it does not require belief on the part of the actor, although self confidence is a must. When you perform the words of the writer, with something like the same intent as the character, then the illusion of character is created.
To create character is the job of the writer, to live fully the actions of the character, with great emotional availability, in the moment, in response to what your partners are doing now, that is acting. And the rest is children’s games and poppycock.
We are makers of magic, illusionists, not wizards. And with this knowledge a great weight and an impossible responsibility is lifted.
To You, The Best!Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010
Rehearsal: A Demonstration of Excess and Waste
Our rehearsal process is a demonstration of excess and waste. We often waste the three weeks of rehearsal common to most subsidised shows by fannying about for two weeks and then panicking like crazy for the final week. It’s what the film director Werner Hertzog refers to as ‘what starts as aesthetics ends in athletics‘.
We waste so much time. We talk endlessly in circles about irrelevant issues that cannot be acted upon. We listen to the director’s vision, which is less actable than the discussion, we do character work. I’m not even sure what that means. We try to become part of the creative team by ‘creating characters’, that basically involves ‘writing’ whilst standing up and talking and improvising about things that do not have any impact on the scene. Ah yes, but we must improvise the previous circumstances of the scene. Bullshit. That will be great fun, but in essence, entirely wasteful.
Much of the things that we do in the rehearsal period are not helpful in putting on the play. They do not help the actors to act the scenes, instead, they are a wasted time. Activities like these are things that I call PARLOUR GAMES or FAKE WORK,, they feel like creative work, but actually, they are not supported by the text, nor do they support the work on the text. These games and exercises are little more than fannying about with good intentions. This is often a form of well-meaning hippie crap that masquerades as acting or performance training. Improvising around the circumstances, total. waste. of. time. Hot Seating: Nonsense. These are tools of improvisers and devisers and is a completely different skill to acting. We answer inane and ridiculous questions about what colour, shape, flower, animal, fizzy drink that our characters are, it’s all complete twaddle. It is unnecessary, it does not make you an artist, it makes you FEEL like an artist. If helps you to tell yourself that lie. But it is a lie.
This is how to spend your time rehearsing a show
- Learn the Lines in advance of the first rehearsal (completely devoid of intonation)
- Read the Play Lots
- Understand the Script as a Whole by Asking Some simple questions that will unlock the essence of the play.
- Analyse each scene of the play for action (the actable parts of the script) with simple tools again
- Practice the actions of the play without the script, on real life scene partners
- Build relationships between the actors
- Add the words.
- Block the Play
- Run the Play until the actors are comfortable with what they have to do.
- Perform the Play, live in the moment, make it different every night.
- All else is waste and does not contribute to the performance, but to the actor’s belief that they are doing some good, hard work, fake work, pretend work.
And before you get there before me, it doesn’t make us any less of an artist because we don’t stroke our egos by thinking we are creative artists equal to the writer, we are interpreters, creative, dramatic interpreters, it is not our job to ‘work on the play’, it is our job to tell the story to the best of our ability.
To You, The Best!Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010
The Final Curtain
All shows end, some well, some not so well, but we all mourn the loss of our temporary family and their unique bond. Whether a long running tv show like Friends or a short Fringe show, through desperate and fabulous times we bond with these people. They are your friends, family, co-workers, and sometimes we fight and sometimes we excel ourselves.
Never forget that when the final curtain comes down, and we move on to our next temporary company, we have to build again, remain open minded, don’t compare, don’t bore them with war stories of past acting buddies and companies, instead start afresh, new friends, new adventures, new highs, new lows and thank any deity you please that you chose to be an actor and not some sensible thing.
An Essential Lesson
If there is one thing that I must impart, it is about lines. In my career to date, there is one issue that I come up against time and time again, lines.
Look, you are an actor, your lines are vital to your performance. Learn them all dead cold, with no intonation and do it before rehearsals/filming begins. The freedom you will feel for doing this is elating.
It is not acceptable to sort of know them, to paraphrase, to wait until the last minute. Sit down and learn them, and learn them verbatim.
And verbatim means verbatim. Not kinda or sorta, verbatim. If you want to make up lines, go be a writer! And then see how you feel when actors fuck with your lines, paraphrasing and hacking up your precious words.
“But I don’t know how, I don’t know the best ways.” Well, here is a tip, it is not magic, just sit down and memorize them until you learn them. Cover and speak, use a dictaphone, get an iPhone app, write them out or use memory hooks like pictures.
You cannot know your lines well enough. You cannot over-learn them, that’s a bullshit myth. If you want your lines to be truthful and fresh, learn
I hear lots of excuses, I believe none of them. If you sit down long enough, you remember them, if you don’t, you wont. They will not ‘go in during rehearsals’, that’s not the purpose of rehearsal. The purpose of rehearsal is for the actors to practice the actions of the character. If this is held up by your paraphrasing, stuttering unlearned excuse making, stumbling, then you are holding everyone else back.
I can barely believe that I have to write a blog about this, isn’t this a given? From my experience, it is not. How sad.
As Spencer Tracey once said about acting ‘learn your lines and don’t bump into the furniture’.
The Secret of Text Analysis
What is the Secret of Text Analysis?
Regarding text analysis, there aren’t any ‘correct’ answers, there are just answers that can acted upon and answers that can’t.
The results of the text analysis should lead you the actor towards action. Anything that leads you back into inexpressive reaches of the inside of your head is not useful to actors, actors are active, not waiters or thinkers.
But where do these answers come from? The script. You’d think that was obvious but many actors look for magical answers and there aren’t any, just those evidenced by the script, discovered and revealed by asking the right questions.
Unfortunately many actors think this is the time to engage creatively and they are wrong. This no time for creative work, this is time to understand the work of another creative artist, the writer.
And without a robust technique to apply, the actor is not armed to tackle the text, and yet so many actors leave college, conservatory or drama school without rudimentary technique, sometimes because it isn’t taught, sometimes through laziness. Sometimes both.
And yet discovering the actable part of the script comes directly from your understanding of that script. That is the secret, and of course, it’s not a secret, it’s quite rudimentary, but you must learn it, and if you do not know the right questions to ask, well, you can always look for an acting coach.
So if you there’s a skill you need to work on this autumn, it’s text analysis.
To You, The Best!Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010
The Character Myth
The creation of character is achieved through the augmentation and the suppression of aspects of your own personality. Whether the reason for this is based on the facts of the play, your own imaginings, the rumbling in your stomach or the advice of the director, the creation of character is a relatively simple idea that is often over-complicated..
Whatever process that you are using or that you believe that you are using, running in the backgroud is the simplest of systems, the manipulation of your own personality to suit the needs of the play.
Let me posit a controvserial idea made popular by David Mamet. ‘There is no character.’ The character only exists as a collection of lines in a script. Character does not become fully tangible until the words of the playwright and the physical action of an actor have been coupled with the complicit audience’s imagination.
To borrow a metaphor from Mamet, the actor and the magician aren’t so dissimilar. The actor creates the illusion of character in collusion with the writer and the audience. The magician trains long and hard to produce the illusion, they sell the illusion to the audience with their skill and the audience’s complicity.
The actor works in the same way, their skill works in complicity with the audience’s imagination to create the magic of theatre. The magician does not need to believe in the trick, although it helps if they have faith in themselves. They do not first need to get themselves into a state where they can actually believe that they can perform some kind of magic. The aim of their practice is to perform the trick in such a way that the audience are completely sold on it. This takes long hard practice and a skill for creating illusion. Their aim is not to believes that they are capable of scorcery.
Yet for many actors, their goal is to fool themselves that their invented circumstances are real. Even the most successful must have days whilst trying to pretend something that isn’t real is real when they think ‘what the hell am I doing’? This is not France, I’m not the Third Duke of Albany and I cannot stand that girl playing my wife in this play. Sooner or later, common sense kicks in. When common sense kicks in two things happen. First the actor berates themselves for not ‘staying in character’ a state they were never in in the first place, and secondly they try to force themselves to believe the plainly ridiculous. Have you ever tried not to think of an elephant or stop feeling sad? The mind cannot be willed in this way and it certainly cannot be forced to pretend that the make believe is real.
For this type of actor, the great skill is not in convincing the audience that they are the Third Duke of Albany, but themselves! When they have achieved this level of self-deception, they claim they are ‘in character’. I would be posit that they were ‘mid-delusion’ instead. Anything so self-centred leads them away from the audience and towards a sort of selfish self obsession. It does not serve the play, or the audience. At best this work acts as a catalyst for the wrong focus during rehearsals and as worst it serves the actors ego. In the Common Sense approach, the actor is a magician, creating an illusion. The illusion of character is created for and with the audience’s collusion. The skills of an illusionist can be learned, repeated, developed, improved upon and performed. In more traditional Stanislavski-inspired approaches, the actor is a wizard creating real magic. The magic of character is that it comes from nowhere, is unexplainable, cannot be explained or reproduced.
Playing Real People
Of course, playing real people throws up additional challenges. The desire to be historically accurate may lead the actor on a wild goose chase. This actor is serviced by the desire to read or hear glorious praise as to authentic facsimilie of the real figure that they have achieved.
They will be lauded for getting the ‘hands right’, or the ‘mannerism’s or whatever. Whilst this is laudable, it is surely not the essential aspect of a script about this person, surely it is their story that the audience loves, not a test of the actor’s capacity for impersonation of historical personages.
There is an inheritent problem in playing real characters. An actor playing the role of the Nazi Minister for Propaganda ‘Goebbels’ can do all of the research on that real person that they like, but the character in the play is not really Goebbels, they are an imaginary character in a work of fiction. This barely crosses most minds, actor nor audience. This character may represent Goebbels, may use the real Nazi’s words, but is still a literary device in a piece of dramatic fiction.
The one positive route is that with some historical figures, it is possible to read about or watch footage of them moving and their behaviour. This gives the actor a physical skin to wear during the rehearsal and performance of the play. However, the danger here is to ignore the inner life of the character, the desire and the actions they take to achieve it, instead preferring to take self pleasure in achieving an admirable level of impersonation. At the end of the day, impersonation is not immediately helpful to us either because all of this hard work does not answer the simple question:
What’s happening in the scene?
Instead this impersonation work simply fills valuable time. I’m not for a second saying it can’t add significant depth in helping the actor create the illusion of a character However, because the real person and the fictional person are entirely different in their essence, all the physical work does not help the actor to play the scene. The fictional character has completely different needs from the real person, if these are not address all the ground work in the world won’t really help the actor. If they have not prepared the groundwork with a thorough understanding of the scene, this physical work on the authentic reproduction of the character becomes a shield with which the actor will eventually use to hide from the role and the scene itself. Another danger is ‘creating the character’ through improvisation and exercises. Whilst these may be valuable rehearsal tools, they are also widely used to fill time. Since many directors are unsure of what to do help the actors to perform the roles they have been chosen for, well meaning games and exercises aim to tease and tempt the actor’s muse into delivering on their end of the contracted bargain. Character cannot be built outwith the scene and then imported in. First this type of actor fully fools themselves (pretends) that they are the character. They falsely believe that the deeper the state of self-delusion the more readily they will have prepared themselves to truthfully live the character’s responses to the given circumstances. The irony of someone in a state of self-delusion trying to truthfully do anything should not be overlooked.
Many actors struggle with the process of ‘finding their character’ in rehearsal. They feel guilty that their well trained creative powers have failed them on this occasion and they feel, unworthy of the role bestowed upon them. Most of them never think to look in the text of the play for the answer. There was once a highly regarded and experienced actor who sat in his dressing room before the dress rehearsal, desperately trying to find a link to their character. Falsely believing that their job as an actor was about creating another personality, they had tried and tried to do this but could not. Finally after this long silent stare, he decided to shave his head and cut off his beard. There! That was the character. This was what he had been missing. He had found his character and strode onto the stage with confidence. But what had really happened? What was the problem he really faced and why did his highly spontaneous act of hair removal give him such confidence?
The real problem was not that he could not find his character. There was really no character to find. His real problem was one that so many actors would share. He was afraid. He was afraid because he didn’t know what to do. This was the real problem. He didn’t suffiently comprehend what he had to do.
But is this possible? Surely an actor who has spent his life on the stage knows what to do. I would say not. If his long experience has taught him anything, it’s that his way of working is based on impulse and instinct, a thrilling ride, but highly inconsistent. It has lead him to make radical and bold artistic choices, none of which were connected to the play being performed. He was probably lauded for those choices though. He has some ideas of how to be entertaining, how to say the lines, how to demonstrate his indepedent acts of creativity, but he had no solid technique that could help him perform the scene.
Learning to play the scene in the moment as it happens is the real gift to the actor. Truthfully responding to what you see happening in front of you, based on the circumstances of the play.
Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010
Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage…
If only more people would heed this advice…
To You, The Best!Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010
Why most actors make lousy acting teachers
I know, I know, you just think I’m bring controversial or annoying, but from my experience and that of many of my peers that their favourite and most influential acting teachers were not actors but writers and directors.
Why and how could this be?
Firstly, actors are often far too close to the process of acting and cannot get the distance to examine what they are doing on an objective level. Many actors have reached the heights of their career without ever being consciously aware of precisely what makes them a great actor. They are unconsciously competent and that makes it very difficult to step back and codify the process of acting.
Not all. I don’t mean all actors, but in my experience of directing and teaching for almost twenty years now, most can talk about it, usually in ways that are not practicable, but they cannot actually teach others to do it. They convince themselves otherwise, because who could bear to live with the knowledge that one was a charlatan and our role little more than that of a flim-flam man.
I know this because I’ve spoken to actors that have become teachers and they couldn’t teach acting to save their lives and when questioned fail to move beyond the realms of the mysterious intangible bullshit that mires our beautiful craft in such nonsense.
Why can directors and writers do it better? Because they often have the ability to step back and consciously move to a more objective perspective. They see how the mechanics of the scene works and how the actor can best achieve the desired results. Of course, we have to be righteously defensive against results playing itself, but teaching is much more like directing than acting is. Those that think teaching is some kind of performance do not understand the process of education.
The acting teacher must be able to instruct the actor in how they work from scratch, unfortunately many focus on the wrong things.
There is one and only one thing the actor needs to know how to do, Play The Scene. Play the Scene. Everything else either serves this idea, adds to the actor’s capacity to play the scene for the audience or it’s a waste of your time.
The Last Moment of a Monologue
So many actors kill their monologues in the last few moments. A few things can happen. Sometimes there’s a moment where it finishes and they look embarrassed with themselves, that usually kills the moment. Another thing is when they break the moment and immediately look at the panel, like a small child who has just finished using the toilet. Others rush the end, to get it finished and to put it beyond them. All of these and more ways exist to kill the moment and leave the auditiors/panel feeling cheated. The people watching you are always a few moments behind you in comprehending what you are saying. If you end abruptly, without a moment to let it sink in, you cheat them, and they won’t thank you for it.
End the monologue with purpose. Finish with strength, leave an impression.
To You, The Best!Looking for Acting Classes in Glasgow? Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels. His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2010
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