ee Preparation ‘The job’s yours. “The period that follows is delicious, a honeymoon: all future. There’s 0 much to look forward to, and a wonderful sense of security, without any of the difficulties and despair that the work, however exhilarating it may be, will bring with it. It’s tempting not to look at the play at all. In fact, though, the work has already begun. You read the play again and again, resisting the urge to think about your own part. Now is the time to form an image of the play, the whole play, which must be the reference point of all your subsequent labours, ‘You need to get an impression of its character ~ its personality. When an image has crystallized, you lob it into the pool of your unconscious, and watch the ripples. Wherever they go, you follow. Everything and anything that they suggest is worth pursuing. This haphazard research. is one of the crowning joys of the whole business. It gives you the ‘opportunity to spend huge sums of money on anything that might provoke thought: books, records, journeys. Often enough the books remain only glanced through, of symbolic rather than practical inspira- tion, like Mustim prayer rolls; the records listened to with half an ear; the journeys taken with someone far too distracting; but your mind opens up in a certain direction, and the least fragment ~ a picture in a ‘book a particular sound in a piece of music will remain asa sensation. Finally, that’s ll that matters. Until ideas become translated into sensa~ tions, they’re of no use whatever to acting. ‘What you're aiming to evoke at this stage is the world of the play; its aura, almost its force-field. ‘The work of the rehearsal will be to give 156tangible organic life to the ciphers on the page: to restore them to life, that is; to defrost them, to rehydrate them. To do this, you need to enter into the same creative state the author experienced when he first gave birth to them, so the richer your input the better. When you're reading your own part, you do it with your inner ear wide open. Eventually, a certain voice will insist Who is this? You strain to hear (it’s like sitting round a ouija board). Oh god, yes! It’s X! Well, is the character anything like X? In what way? Like Debussy’s sunken cathedral, the part begins to emerge. That’s the ideal state in which you should arrive at the first readthrough: imminent. ‘These are some notes I scribbled down in March 1978 after a first reading of Titus Andronicus, a part I agreed to play without having previously read or seen it: * A ravaged Rome, the Goths at the gates, but Rome itself is almost Barbarian. Social behaviour has sunk to a basic, tribal level. Death, rape. Unqualified self-interest rules. A punk scenario, almost. * Titus brings his misfortunes on himself by insisting on the death of Alarbus. * Ayoung man’s play. What, writes about he has not lived through: it’s in the head: an established genre that he tries his hand at. Hlence the relative formality, coolness. * Why was the play so popular with the Elizabethans? What was their attitude to violence? * During the play’s run, the heads of ten rebels were stuck on pikes along, the length of Westminster Bridge. * Revenge. No confidence in ability of law to settle righteous grudges: revenge regarded as legitimate (Cf. vigilantes). * Honour. Cf. Punk boy who killed a man who smiled at him. °E was bringing me down in front of me mates.’ * Dismemberment. Cf. young Getty’s ear from his kidnappers. * The play evokes and to some extent celebrates a recent past in which the fittest survived ~ the strong slugged it out, blow for blow. (Sam Peckinpah) Exuberant. * Written during Plague Years93~4. When willthisfearfulsumberhave an end?" Who are the Goths: the play’s final resolution embodies a compromise with the Goths. Has Lucius/Rome sold out? * Nor ritual * Why did the play stop being popular? ~becauseit stopped answering to people’s conception of psychological reality introduced by S. himself. 157‘Should you learn your lines?, you anxiously ask. Everything depends on the size of the part. It would, for example, be fatal to learn a small part whose interest you have to eke out over an eight-week rehearsal. Equally, it would be fatal, I have come increasingly to believe, not to Jearn a large or even a medium part. The amount of work needed on such a role requires every second of the rehearsal period, and time spent clutching the book ~ f believe, contrary to the Edith Evans and Stanis- lavaky schools ~ is time wasted. It merely delays the moment at which the thought patterns of the part become your thought patterns, at which the impulses of the character become your impulses. Moreover, as it is the words which will provide the clue to yout entire conception, the sooner they are passing through your brain and flowing across your lips, the sooner they will yield their secrets and their sensations. I've never been able to go beyond the surface when I’m reading from a page. It’s only when I have to rack my brains and ask what word comes next what word must come next? ~ that I start to work seriously. ‘The age-old question asked of actors is: how do you remember the lines? (The other question is: what do you do during the day? To which there can only be one reply: mind your own business.) Michel Mac- Liamméir used to say: ‘By forgetting everything else,” which is in fact areply to the question, how do you recall your lines? How you memorize them in the first place is a more urgent question. My reply to that is, because you have to. The undertaking is of the order of grocers knowing how much a pound of carrots is just by looking at them. It’s a part of the brain which comes into play when you need it. That’s all. Of course, we vary wildly in our proficiency. Learning lines is known as study, and an actor is either a quick study or a slow one. There are those among us, whom it is hard to love, who have photographic memories. In some obscure way one feels this is cheating, and that such actors will come to no good: a false proposition. I think I’m glad, however, that I’m not a human xerox, because the laborious process by whiclt I learn has certain advantages. The method isas above: learn the first line, and from then on simply ask what is the next line, and why? Obviously this involves discovering the character’s thought processes, and how he’s relating to the other characters. The revelations of character are im- mense ~ and the physical sensation of his words on your tongue im- mediately passes into the rest of your body. ‘The next day, you will think you've forgotten every word, but the brain is smarter than that. A glance at the page will bring most of it flooding back. It’s unrealistic to expect to be word perfect on the first 158| day of rehearsal. The reality of being on the floor with the other actors will throw you completely ~ and quite rightly. By an equation quite difficult to balance, you must be wholly responsive to whatever sur- prising impulses they may direct towards you, while at the same time being wholly positive in what you offer them. This chicken-egg inter~ play should ideally go on until the last day of the run. Some darling friend must perform the intimate task of ‘hearing your lines’. This requires tact, patience and modesty. You're not interested in their creative interpretations. Flat simple utterance, cutting the long speeches when they occur, and the discretion to know to correct when you've gone seriously wrongand not to pull you up over every misplaced syllable: these are what is required of this nonpareil. Greater love hath no man, woman or child. Bill Gaskill has said that his definition of a great actor is one who comes to the first readthrough with his lines learned’. On the other hand, I have never been able to follow Laurence Olivier’s example (and Gaskill was talking about him) and come toa readthrough with my entire performance. For me, the whole point of learning the lines isto be as free to offer alternative possibilities as can be. If you’re struggling with lines, your mind is only half-creating — it’s mostly sending desperate fishing lines down into murky ponds of words. Sadly in our theatre, the first rendthrough is followed by immediate rehearsal - very occasionally by another readthrough, then rehearsal. How immensely valuable it would be if the readthrough took place two or three weeks before rehearsals began, so that the image of the play and the particular colour of the other actors were slowly filtering through your brain as you worked on it in isolation, Work, in the sense of labour, isn’t quite the word: the preparation period is more like dreaming, relevant dreaming. 159A Good Performance A feeling of power, but not power over anyone or anything: simply energy flowing uninterrupted and unforced through your body and your mind, You are the agent. You ate above the performance: ~ it is performing, not you, You sense the audience’s collective identity and You speak directly to it: Oh you liked that, did you? Well just wait ill You hear shis~ not what I will do, but what will happen. You are always 199forward moving: the thread unbroken, no matter how much laughter o what kind of pauses. You are the master of time and rhythm, and you play with them lik. 8 jazz musician. You create a pleasurable tension and then you reliev. it pleasurably. You hear everything as if for the first time. The per formance is not so much new as newly revealed, the varnish stripped off the paint bright again, detail discernible, Such performances alway. seem very quick, though in actual clock time they're the same or perhaps Jonger (because of more laughs or more flexible pauses). You feel quite unexhausted by them, ‘The play has played you. Your relationship to the play is that of rider to horse. Iris the energy You are the direction. You must be above it and on top of it. If you are the horse, you lose touch with the audience, The text is sunk into your bones, so that it comes unbidden: it is the inevitable, the only, response to whats said to you, You become nothing but a pair of ears. ‘No matter how intense or painful the emotions of apart, the more you ‘enter into them ina good performance, the less you are affected by them, Ic is they and nothing else which are activated. The emotion passes through you, Above all, there is dazzling mental clarity. The chambers of the brain open up, one by one. The number of levels on which you are thinking is uncountable. One of these levels may be running through tomorrow's shopping. It’s a shocking proposition, but it’s true. In a sense, an actor giving a good performance is the human being functioning at its highest level. Not its deepest; simply being exercised in a very demanding way: callisthenics of the psyche. All these things ~ brain, body, heart in perfect working order, doing somersaults, back- flips and headstands. Te’s this that makes it such a dangerous profession for its acolytes: where else will you get the same workout? What other chance do you have to feel the energy pumping through your every faculty, the whole ‘human machine? Life can sometimes seem a sad second,A Bad Performance ‘The Opposite, Disjointed, stale; behind the beat all the times sluggish. Excess external emotion, mental fog. Self-consciousness. Awareness of the audience out there, and the lack of communication with them. A. sense of being out-of-focus, as if, musically, you were slightly flat or slightly sharp. Uncoordinated. On these performances, you bump into the furniture, trample on other actors’ lines, walk through such laughs ag there might accidentally be. Above all, the time is out of joint, Time is the crucial dimension. The nearest experience in daily life to what an actor feels in performance is the successful timing of a joke: the sense of inevitability about it, the way in which space seems to exist around it, the waves of emotion that it releases in its audience, the sort of halo that descends on its utterer. Having created that kind of effect, for however long, one feels sainted, glowing, somehow bigger. Alas, it fades, and the next person telling a joke inherits the halo. Imagine the halo descending for two and a half hours, and you have the sensation of a good performance. The sensation of a bad performance is exactly that of a joke falling flat through mis-timing. The humiliation, self- consciousness ~ those burning cheeks ~ and desire to be suddenly elsewhere are what consume you during your bad performance. In fact, of course, most performances consist of a mingling of the elements, or exist on an inglorious plane of competence and crafts- manship. ‘There is a story of Laurence Olivier which bears on all this. He gave a performance of Othello one night long into the run so brilliant that the cast applauded him at the curtain call, When it was over, he tore back to his dressing room in a towering rage and slammed the door behind him. One of the actors timidly knocked on the door and said: ‘What's the matter. Larry ~ don’t you know you were brilliant?” And he said, “Of course I fuckin’ know ~ but I don’t know why.’ And you never do: no matter what you do, the performance can go one way or the other and as you rake the embers looking for reasons, the evidence is all contradictory. I didn’t have lunch before the show today and I was marvellous; so tomorrow I go without lunch and I’m terrible. T had sex this afternoon and I was wonderful: 1 have 201sex tomorrow afternoon and I’m terrible; and so on. The auditorium is too hot; it’s too cold. For actors as for farmers, nothing’s ever FightThirly years after graduating, T made @ Speech to The Association of Drama Schools. It was later printed in the Drama Centre Prospectus, ‘There’s a well-worn story about acting which rather sums up the prevailing view. Father to son: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?” Son: ‘An actor? Father: “You can’t be both.’ In fact, acting is a very grown-up job indeed, Skilled and sometimes upsetting. Hard, difficult work, underpinned by three firm foundations ~ example, experience an education ‘The first of the foundation stones ~ example (or tradition) - was an ever. present factor until quite recently; a great line of succession which could be traced unbroken back fo Shakespeare’s actors, Burbage and Kemp, Somehow, somewhere around the 1970s and early 1980s, for a vaticly of reasons, the succession was broken, There were no applicants for the job of Leader of the British Theaire. The very idea seemed outmoded, ‘undemocratic. Good actors, wonderful actors, appeared, but no one wanted to lead from the front, They left that to the directors. Actors abdi- cated from the position of being (tae phrase is unavoidable) role models, ‘The second pillar of the British theatre, experience — practising the job ‘was, also until quite recently, widely available not only in the metropolis, with the largest number of theatres of any city in the world, but across the country in an even larger number of theatres: every town liad its ‘own, and many of them had permanent acting companies, as much a part of the town’s identity as the local football team, in which the actors would develop and grow before the very eyes of the audience. There were touring companies, too, and many Theatre-in-Education groups. hot- sands and thousands of opportunities for actors to consolidate their craft and to forge their individual contribution to the theatre as a whole. All this has not totally disappeared, but itis a shadow of what it was. There is no longer a training ground or a breeding ground for actors. With the erosion of these two flagstones, the third foundation — education ~ has become all the more important. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the theatre was essentially a family business; actors were, in the most literal sense, born and not made, Training, a relatively revent 12 absetae My LIPE (IN PIECES development in England, came, at the turn of the twentieth century, out of the profession itself. Supported by all the leading actors of the day and many of its playwrights, the early drama schools boldly trumpeted the seriousness of the profession’s intention of working on itself. Soon, & whole new generation of trained players emerged, which in a very short space of time brought on what is now spoken of as.a golden age of actors ~ Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson, Guinness, Ashroft —all of whom trained in some form of drama school. What did they have that their untrained predecessors lacked? | would put it in a simple phrase: the possibility of going further. The old sethod of learning how fo be an actor was built on observation and imi- tation; it was, essentially, an apprenticeship. You entered the profession ata lowly level, you learned how to make the mast of what you'd got, you watched the leading actors like a hawk, sceing how they got their effects You developed by doing, You formed your own ideas about what the job enlailed, You discovered what worked and what didn’t. Sometimes you gol advice. It was a pragmatic, rough and ready, Darwinian survival-of- the-filtest sort of a business. Like anyone struggling with a language, you expressed what you were able to express ~ not what you wanted fo say- Most people settled for what they felt comfortable with, Extraordinary {ulents and personalities emerged, of course, but the majority of the pro- fession was resigned to filling in, to being a backdrop; the sense of an ensemble, of a group of people working together to create the theatrical moment, all contributing something unique, was elusive, The extraordi- nary ones — the geniuses ~ dide’t need training (although it wouldn’t have harmed ther). It was the rest of us who did — the other 97.5 per cent. ‘The first and most important thing about training is that it enables an acior to work on him or herself within a controlled and protected envi- ronment. In enables you to make a fool of yourself, to expose yourself, among equally exposed and vulnerable people under the guidance of someone who knows. It enables you to develop ~ physically, vocally, expressively ~ over a period of time during which you will at first be expocied {o deliver nothing, to show nothing and to prove nothing. You will be learning, growing, exploring on a carefully planned journey towards certain clear goals, each stage of which is noted and built on. You will discover — we all discover ~ that some things come easy and sorte hard you will learn which is which and how lo make the most of the one and to work against the other. 13SIMON CALLOW You will, inevitably, find out a great deal about yourself which may at first be bewildering and unwelcome, but which will almost certainly in the end liberate you, as the truth, squarely faced, invariably does. Your time at drama school enables you to engender certain habits of mind, an approach and an analysis which enables you to delve deep into the play and character on which you may be working, to ask questions and maybe find answers about the kind of theatre that you believe in. You will learn to live with language in all its many forms in a way that the whole temper of the times denies. You will learn how to access and use parts of your body and your brain and your emotions that you scarcely knew existed. You will discover rythm and tempo, absent for the most part from daily life. You will learn to look at life with the keen eye of someone who has fo reproduce it. You will learn, as Brecht said, to drink a cup of tea in forly different ways. You will spend three years with the same group of peo- ple, watching them develop, learning how to accommodate fo them and adjust to them and how to challenge them in an unthreatening way. You will discover the different responsibilities of carrying a play as the lead- ing actor, and of providing its support and foundation in a stnall, perhaps wordless role. You will have to think about history, about the past, the present and the future, and you will have to ask why the theatre has been central to the life of society for more than two-and-a-half thousand years, And at the end of it all, you will just about be able to say, ‘The carria awaits, my lord.” But if you can say itas if you meant it, in such a way that we know who you are and where you've come from and why you're there; that we have an inkling of which sort of society you belong to and what sort of play you've in; if you are able to command our interes! absolutely but without deawing irrelevant attention to yourself — then you will have done brilliantly out of your three years’ training, Everything that Pve said applies just as much to film acting as it does to the theatre, but not only do I entirely endorse the well-lnown observation. that if you can act on stage, you can act on film, but by no means neces- sarily vice versa, [also believe that the theatre has a special importance because it sa much more democratic art than film. It is often denounced aselitist, by which people mean if costs too much (and of course it does), but it is the opposite of elitist because it is above all an interactive a I happens live in front of an audience, whose input becomes a crucial part of the show, ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Max Wall used to say every night al the end of his show, ‘you have been half? And they are. At the very least 14MY LIFE IN PIECES ‘The theatre offers itself up for judgement and response, and it cannot ignore either of these things. Theatre stands up on its own two feet and says: Look at this, ladies and gentlement This is what life is like?’ invit- ing the immemorial response: ‘Oh no it isn’t? But the debate has been | engaged in the most vivid, the most physical terms; the model of society | is flesh and blood, not mechanical. ‘Theatre in the West grew out of democracy, was an essential part of it ‘The whole city, without exception, came to see the play. It was their story. And it stil is The city demands actors who are up to its cruel demands, aclors Who have the stamina to offer their brilliant skills and deep human truths, in the flesh, night after night. And that is what training is for, J left the Drama Cenire a week before the end of my final term. Com- Pletely to my surprise, I had got a job, not from any of the thousand companies to whom I had sent my very attractive photo and fascinating personal particulars, nor from any of the terminally depressed directors for whom I had auditioned, but from a visiting director who had seen a second-year acting exercise I had done and had decided that I was ripe Jor his company, the Young Lyceum in Edinburgh. This wise, perceptive, inspired individual was Peter Faraga, to whom I remain for ever indebted. 15