The Acting Blog

Mamet on Acting: Part 3 – The Final Part

So, this is it, the final part of the 3-part Mamet on Acting. In our glasgow acting classes, we often talk about Mamet and I try to inspire the students with some of his more useful suggestions and maxims. His new play RACE looks like it might ignite Broadway when it opens officially. Thanks again to JAG for the PlayBill )

When asked about what he meant by ‘stick to the action’ by Matthew Roudane in a wonderful interview in 1984 Mamet said:

“The action is what the character is doing. That’s what the actor must do. Acting has absolutely nothing to do with emotion or feeling emotional. It has as little to do with emotion as playing a violin does.’

Mamet’s pet hate is emotional performance. I guess, many people then believe he thinks acting should be emotionless. This isn’t true. It’s just that he believes that it’s the audience that should be feeling something. The pursuit of emotions or emotional truth ends in self-indulgence, self-consciousness and self-pleasuring – yes, it’s a kind of masturbation. Anyone who has ever ‘stuck to the action’ long enough to try to get it from someone in a scene will realise, when their defenses are down, that they will feel, that emotion will appear, but it shouldn’t be chased. Of course, a lover spurned and trying to get a second chance will be emotional, but their foremost concern will be to get the second chance, and they will be looking hard at the other person, desperate for signs of success or failure, and they will often do ANYTHING, and I mean ANYTHING to get what they want. When emotion comes, they won’t be in control of it, but they won’t give up the fight for that second chance either.

On the same subject, in True and False – Mamet says: “If we learn to think solely in terms of the objective, all concerns of belief, feeling, emotion, characterisation, substitution, become irrelevant. It is not that we “forget” them, but that something else nbecomes more important than they.”

I like this next passage very much and remember, I’m an acting teacher: “A word about teachers. Most of them are charlatans. Few of the exercises I have seen, in what were advertised as acting schools, teach anything other than gullability. Don’t leave your common sense at the door…” Provocative words, but let’s face it, we all know it to be true. For my own students, the next time you enter the Acting Studio, look above the door and see what it says.

Finally, an our last word from Mamet for a while and I encourage any of my students to do this with me, because if I truly believe in what I teach and if for a second I thought I was turning into one of the charlatans that Mamet despises, I would pack up my business and go run a book shop or something: “If you don’t understand the teacher, make the teacher explain. If they are incapable of either explaining or demonstrating to your satisfaction the worth of their insights, they do not what what they are doing.”

I have to say that I’m sitting here at 01:10am in the morning, re-reading Mamet’s incredible book on acting True and False, and marveling again just how right he got it. Extreme? Yeah, maybe. But that doesn’t stop it from being true. If you don’t have a copy of it, get a copy, it won’t hurt you to read what this guy has to say on your craft. He’ll probably make you spitting mad, but if like me, you read it again and again, it starts to make sense, common sense.

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

Tweet me

Tags: acting teachers are charlatans, Emotional Acting, hate my acting teacher, Mamet Acting Technique, Mamet on Acting, Matthew Roudane

Mamet on Acting – Part 2

Well, it was Mamet’s birthday on 30th November (St.Andrew’s Day) so to celebrate, here’s Part 2 of our blog series of Mamet on Acting:

From an interview in 1994 with John Lahr:

LAHR: Character is?

MAMET “It’s action, as Aristotle said.  That’s all that it is.  Exactly what a person does.  It’s not what they ‘think’, because we don’t know what they think.  It’s not what they say, it’s what they do. Which is exactly the same we that understand a person in life, not by what they say, but by what they do.”

Here Mamet is expressing his Aristotelian belief that character is action, character is the sum of their characteristics, the things that they do, their actions.  Character is Action.

Mamet on the basic task of the actor.

“What they should do is they should learn their lines, understand very, very simply what the character in the script is doing, and try to find a congruent action for themselves, which is physically capable of being done.”

Many people have taken this quote and tried to undo Mamet’s logic – oh is THIS all acting is, oh come on, Dave, surely that’s not true.  He’s trying to simplify.  It’s the opposite of what the other approaches do, which is to complicate the actor’s craft to a level of voodoo so convoluted that no one can actually do it, so they experience various shades of failure.

“Most of the Stanislavski system is a Practical Aesthetic for the actor, based on the Aristotelian idea of unity’.

Mamet believes that the Stanislavski created a practicable (capable of being put to use) aesthetic (a theory of art) which based on the principles that Aristotle expressed that drama featured unity of time, place and action.  Mamet would of course, favour the idea of unity of action.  One action, one scene.

(1986 – First time I could find in print Mamet mentioning the term ‘Practical Aesthetic’ – if anyone out there in Tinterwebland can correct me on this, I’d be very happy)

“What is necessary is intention, clarity and intention.  And the rest is just… as I used to say to my students, the words are just gibberish.  They really are.  Not to the audience, but to the actor”. Mamet offers us his definition of what’s really necessary, a clarity of work, a focused specificity, not generality and understanding intention.  To him, even as a playwright, to him the actor should consider the words as gibberish, first and foremost, it’s intention, and how we attempt to get what we want.

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

Tweet me

Tags: Mamet on Acting, Mamet on Actu

Mamet on Acting – Part 1

It would hard for anyone to read my blog and not read in my obvious admiration for the contribution to drama, theatre, film, and acting that David Mamet has made.  His ideas certainly have inspired me greatly over the years as a director, acting coach and writer and they still do.  I don’t always agree with him, or some of his highly provocative statements (“Repetition is BULLSHIT” – to a recent Atlantic Theater Company Acting School class*) but there’s a lot that can be gleaned from him.  His word is not law, but many times, it inspires and agitates, and it makes us question, that’s the important bit.  Coming up with the answer can take a life time, and that’s okay.

Here are some of my favourite moments of David Mamet talking about the topic of acting, and these I do agree with.

“The theatre is a profession of mountebanks and misfits, much like myself, who’ve come in through the backdoor because no one else would have them and learned to find a place in society by getting up on the stage and doing plays that people need to hear, doing them well in an interesting, provocative and unusual manner.  Who haven’t had the life bred out of them.” I think any of us that work in the arts know this feeling, a feeling of being an outsider, and many still are outsiders to the outsiders, those who live on the fringe of the misfits.  Perhaps these days, the gate keepers are employed to keep people from coming in the backdoor quite so readily.

Mamet talks about organic acting and relates it to objectives, this is important for Practical Aesthetics practitioners, this is great for scene analysis, As-Iffing or playing the scene:

“A child who doesn’t want to go to bed.  A lover who wants a second chance.  A man or woman who wants a job.  Someone who wants to get laid.  There’s nothing that these people won’t do.  And that’s called having an objective.  Having an objective is just a fancy word for wanting something real, real bad.  When all of us, or any of us, are in these situations, there’s nothing we won’t do.  All our attention is on the other person.   And we’ll change horses in the middle of the stream to do anything to get them to give us what we want.  Now when you see that in an actor on the stage it’s awfully damned compelling.  Because what the great actor is doing on stage is changing his or her tactics to get what they need from the other person on stage, rather than performing what they dreamed up at home.”

*And let’s face it, whilst it was Meisner that created the exercise, it’s Mamet that taught it to his original NYU Practical Aesthetics Workshop class, and part of Practical Aesthetics it has become, perhaps these days, he doesn’t think it works, I’ll do some investigating and see what I can find out!

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

Tweet me

Tags: David Mamet, Mamet on Acting, Practical Aesthetics

Mamet on Acting and Emotion in Film Acting

Hello, just a brief one to recommend this brilliant article on acting and emotion in film written by David Mamet in The Guardian back in 2003.  It’s one of my favourite articles on film acting relating to emotion.  Of course, it will piss off all the Method-ists but it fully expresses what we teach at Acting Coach Scotland in our regularly acting classes in Glasgow and our acting masterclasses across Scotland and beyond.

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

Tweet me

Tags: Acting Classes in Glasgow, Acting Emotion in Film Acting, Emotion and Acting, Mamet on Acting