The Acting Blog

True and False: The Difference between Truth and Pretending in Acting

Hi and welcome to today’s blog on Pretending and the Truth in Acting.

This is a topic on which I have given three lectures this week and so this blog comes to you by way of me having to explain myself three different ways on three different days.  I hope you find it useful to help you think about acting.  I’m sure it may challenging your ideas on acting, don’t take it too personally, I don’t know you, so if you have a different opinion, that’s cool, I appreciate it.  My perspective is taken from working with actors as a director and coach and teaching them and seeing that acting can be different.

So, I’m talking about truthful acting and pretending.  And I think I’m starting from the point that pretending always looks like pretending.  You have to be, you have to be exceptional actor to be able to pretend well enough not to be pushing, not to be letting your ‘performance’ show through, to hide your pretense.  It’s very difficult, it’s a very difficult job and our capacity to pretend is not equal, that’s for sure.  If you’re not good at it, your show off signs that it’s a show, that it’s a performance, little things.  If I go to the theatre, I may just be very aware that I’m indulging them.  I’m indulging them because what they’re doing, it isn’t organic, there’s too many signs of artifice, it isn’t honest.  So not only do I have to pay, I have to go and indulge them.  But they’re the professionals and I’m paying their wages, and I want to be entertained.  I guess I find that upsetting.

But then pretending is the norm and pretending is the tradition, so I guess I must be wrong?  What’s the alternative?  For so long there wasn’t one.  The ‘pretendy’ actor and teachers has all that history and tradition to fall back on.  But you know the pretendy actor starts from a position of truth, they really do, they’re already truthful and organic, but what emerges from that is pretend.  They would say that, it’s not pretending, it is scenic truth, creative truth, dramatic truth, so in other words – lying, I guess – you know, pretending.  And they’re going to get paid good money to deceive the audience.  And let’s face it, unless they’re exceptionally good, won’t be much of a deception, so the audience will have to indulge them, which seems like a painful way to spend an evening, indulging others.  Like having those friends you met on holiday once visit you.

And I suppose the other choice is the truth.  Simple as that.  You start from the position of understanding that you are truthful right now, you’re a real person but the circumstances under which you are going to act are imaginary, they are the pretend element.   But what emerges from you through that, is the truth… truthful acting.  And that’s very rare.  When you’re telling the truth, there aren’t those little signs of pretense, they don’t have anything to indulge.  It takes a lot of pain out of going to the theatre.  You pay £17, you really start having to indulge actors in pretending.  I think, I guess I think that it doesn’t need to happen.  Indulgence doesn’t need to occur, pretend doesn’t need to happen.  Just because we have a long tradition, doesn’t make it right.  We used to think the world was flat, well, now that seems stupid, doesn’t it.

Telling the truth, what does that mean? Let’s not get philosophical about it, I can coach you to do it, but I’m not an academic anymore and I’m not going to engage in a theoretical debate, I can coach people to tell the truth in front of the camera or on stage, and no amount of conversation will prevent that from being true.

So what does it mean?  Well, we have our standard PA definition of acting ‘Living truthfully under the imaginary circumstances of the play’ from Sanford Meisner, but to me, actually, I have a much more simple definition.  To act is to do, to be in the process of doing is acting, to be acting is to be taking action, those that take action are actors.  It’s that simple.  It’s simple, and that doesn’t make it wrong.  When you’re a truthful actor,  you learn to take the focus off yourself, relieving you of a whole lot of mental junk and you give yourself something concrete and real to do.  DO is the important word there.  Do.  Because doing is done through the body and acting is a physical craft, like a sport and doing is truthful because the body is uncapable of lying.  If you raise your arm, you raise your arm.  It doesn’t matter what was going through your mind at the time.  Action, the focus of the truthful actor is what drives the truth because in order to act truthfully you need to know what’s driving you.

Truthful acting is made up, not of a string of faked emotional states, or emotional states that are real that have been conned from yourself through emotional blackmail, but from a string of tiny moments of psycho-physical actives.  I call them ‘actives’, they are tactics, transitive verbs, they bring the actor to life because by ‘doing’ the actives, by taking action in order to do that thing to another person, what you are doing is truthful, it is not conjured from artifice, it is not an attempt to deceive, it is an attempt to reveal the truth.  And when I see that, when I see the truth being revealed by actors who are able to live truthfully in their performance, that’s a pretty special thing.

To You, The Best!

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 2009

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Tags: actors are liars?, is acting lying?, pretending and acting, pretending and truth in acting, Truth in Acting

Acting Books

I own a lot of books on acting, as you might imagine.  I bought a couple of acting books over the holidays, one that I always meant to buy and one relatively new one.  I’m not going to assist the authors with their sales by talking specifically about them, because that’s not the aim of this blog post.

I’ve read hundreds of books on acting but since reading True and False, I can’t help it, but I find most of them full of shit.  I’ve tried to put it differently, but that’s what I mean.  These two new books are no exception, they are deeply disappointing.  Why are they disappointing?  Because they cannot help you act, not in a million years.

Now to be fair, all of these books carry a warning, they say ‘you cannot learn to act from a book’.  They’re absolutely true and they should also say ‘you cannot learn to act from a book – so don’t buy this book’.

My problem is that having read all those books, I truly believe that most of the advice found in these books isn’t particularly helpful.  It sounds good, it may even have merit, but I just… find it impractical.  Don’t misunderstand me, by impractical, I don’t mean that it’s theory, instead I mean that it is not capable of being put to use.  And this I suppose is my main point – whatever the contents of the book, most of it is not capable of being put to use for the betterment of actors.  This is where most of these books become problematic.  The craft of acting is learned in the body of the actor, a book is an interesting commentary, but it’s advice is often impractical to the point of frustration.  And so the reader feels idiotic.

So am I saying that all acting books are awful? No, I’m not.  Some are very, very good.  Am I willing to tell you what they are, yes, I am willing to tell you which books on acting are really worth buying because I believe they are absolutely not full of shit.

A Practical Handbook for the Actor – Melissa Bruder

True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor – David Mamet

Actions: – The Actors’ Thesaurus – Maria Caldarone & Maggie Lloyd-Williams

The Monologue Audition – Karen Kohlhaas

The Actors’ Art and Craft – William Esper

Yes, the link is clickable, yes, I’ll make 3 pence off something that you buy, but at least the book will help you, and that’s got to be worth more than 3p.

Tags: Acting Books, Books on Acting, Emotion in Acting, Truth in Acting