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Sanford Meisner - The Reality On Doing, 2010
Sanford Meisner - The Reality On Doing, 2010
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On: 30 October 2012, At: 11:45
Publisher: Routledge
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To cite this article: David Shirley (2010): ‘The Reality of Doing’: Meisner Technique and British Actor training, Theatre,
Dance and Performance Training, 1:2, 199-213
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Theatre, Dance and Performance Training,
Vol. 1(2), 2010, 199–213
Starting with an exploration of the key exercises underpinning the Meisner Technique, this
article goes on to examine some of the principles and creative values that helped shape Sanford
Meisner’s artistic vision and his approach to actor training. Alongside a discussion of the extent
to which the methods he adopted take account of interpretative factors related to theatrical
convention, performance style and dramatic genre, the discussion also assesses the growing
impact of Meisner’s work in various British drama schools. What are the tensions between the
American Method-based system, from which Meisner’s techniques emerged, and the traditions
on which British training regimes are (or have been) based and how are these resolved? Finally,
the discussion attempts to gauge the extent to which the increasing fascination with Meisner’s
work signals a shift in our understanding of the role of the professional actor in modern theatre
and screen performance.
Theatre, Dance and Performance Training ISSN 1944-3927 print/ISSN 1944-3919 online
! 2010 Taylor & Francis http://www.informaworld.com
DOI: 10.1080/19443927.2010.505005
200 D. Shirley
Figure 1 Scott Williams (centre), of the Impulse Company in London, working with
professional actors on Meisner’s Repetition Exercise. Photo James Albrecht, July 2009.
Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 203
libretto, Meisner suggests that the actor’s function is similar to that of the
composer who ‘adds music in an opera’ (Meisner and Longwell 1987, p. 179).
Always anxious to ensure that scenic relationships remained spontaneous
and alive, he encouraged his students to develop strong personal connections
to the text:
The first thing you have to do when you read a text is to find yourself – really
find yourself. First you find yourself, then you find a way of doing the part which
strikes you as being in character. Then, based on that reality, you have the
nucleus of the role. (ibid., p.178)
For Meisner, the actor’s use of emotion – like the composer’s use of music –
serves to enliven the dramatic text and animate the relationships that are
reflected in it. Indeed it was in the attempt to encourage performers to
access and work sensitively and expressively with human emotion that much
of his work as a teacher was addressed.
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What I am saying is that what you are looking for is not necessarily confined to
the reality of your own life. It can be in your imagination. If you allow it
freedom – with no inhibitions, no properties . . . your imagination is, in all
likelihood, deeper and more persuasive than the real experience. (Meisner and
Longwell 1987, p. 79)
The text is like a canoe, and the river on which it sits is the emotion. The text
floats on the river. If the water on the river is turbulent, the words will come
out like a canoe on a rough river. It all depends on the flow of the river which is
your emotion. The text takes on the character of your emotion. (ibid., p. 115)
Acting in my terms, in all our terms except for the English – the Americans, the
Russians, the Germans – is an emotional creation. It has an inner content.
Unlike the English, who know intellectually what the character should be feeling
and indicate this through the way they verbally handle the text, we work from
living truthfully under imaginary circumstances. (ibid., p. 136)
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[He so wholly transformed] himself into his part, and putting off himself with his
clothes as he never . . . assumed himself until the play was done, there being as
much difference betwixt him and our common actors as between a ballad-
singer who only mouths it and an excellent singer who knows all his graces and
can artfully modulate his voice, even to know how much breath he is to give
every syllable. He had all the parts of an excellent orator, animating his words
with speaking, and speech with acting [gesture]. (Benedetti 2005, p. 35)
intimacy. This view is echoed by Nick Moseley, who leads the Acting for
Stage and Screen strand of the BA (Hons) Acting programme at Central
School of Speech and Drama:
British acting in the first half of the 20th Century ultimately had to fade away as
TV and film became the dominant media. The work is often still crafted and
resonant but it has to be also minutely responsive because it is hard to fake a
reaction when the camera is on you. (Nick Moseley, personal communication,
4 June 2009)
Scott Williams, who, through his work with the Actors Centre in 1996, is
credited with introducing the Meisner Technique to the UK, points to the
11. References taken from growth of digitised film and recorded media performance as one possible
statements made by explanation for the increasing popularity of the technique. Alongside this,
Williams during the
course of a personal Williams also suggests that the longevity of modern TV shows and theatre
interview with the productions intensifies the need for actors to develop interpretative
author on 3 June 2009.
strategies that will empower spontaneous and truthful performances:11
Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 209
The 21st Century actor faces two challenges no previous generation has:
specifically, the contract to appear on stage in a role week in and week out for a
year or more, and the appearance of digitized film technology, which makes
possible multiple takes or more ‘casual’ shooting arrangements. In both cases,
new demands are made on the actor. Traditional ‘Method’ approaches which
require practitioners to re-live past and often painful experiences in order to
bring a sense of truthfulness to the present are found wanting, because in
reality an actor cannot be ‘Method’ in the thirteenth month of their run, or on
the 94th take before the camera. (Scott Williams, interview with the author,
3 June 2009)
attitudes. So much so that, for many young actors, working in the theatre
becomes an option only when they are unable to find work on screen.
If one of the effects of the dominance of the television and screen
industries in the UK has resulted in changes to where actors work, then
another has witnessed alterations in how they work. Where the art of the
actor was once located in the ability to ‘transform’ – both physically and
emotionally – the aesthetics of the screen and the camera’s resistance
to ‘theatricalised’ modes of performance is slowly beginning to prompt a
Figure 2 Scott Williams discussing the Meisner Technique with a group of professional actors
at the Impulse Company in London. Photo James Albrecht, July 2009.
210 D. Shirley
re-evaluation of the nature and function of an actor’s craft. This idea is also
resonant in post-modern performance practice, much of which seeks to
expose the ‘artificial’ nature of the acting process in preference for less
contrived modes of performance that foreground the presence of the ‘real’
self of the performer rather than ‘unreal’ one of the character. Indeed it is
perhaps this seemingly insatiable appetite for ‘actuality’ as opposed to
‘fiction’ that has helped spawn the huge popularity of ‘reality television’.
In a populist cultural environment where so-called ‘reality’ and ‘ordinari-
ness’ are valued for their ‘authenticity’ and ‘truthfulness’, the transformative
and representational skills of the actor as story-teller can often appear both
artificial and anachronistic. With its rejection of the ‘superficial’ or the
‘imposed’ in preference for a profound emphasis on ‘spontaneity’ and
‘truthfulness’, it is easy to see why new generations of actors are drawn to
Meisner’s work.
Whatever theories might be offered as a means of explaining the
increasing popularity of the Meisner Technique in Britain, it is interesting to
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note that amongst those that have adopted his teaching methods, agreement
about how they should be taught is far from unanimous. Despite a realisation
that the system he developed is derived from the work of Stanislavsky, the
extent to which Meisner believed it should sit alongside other elements of
the Stanislavskian methodology is not always clear. Scott Williams, of the
Impulse Company, for instance, prefers to focus almost exclusively on
Meisner’s own exercises and teaching methods, arguing that the approach is
so self-contained that the need for actors to identify objectives/super-
objectives etc. becomes redundant (Scott Williams, personal interview with
the author, 3 June 2009). Whilst he stops short of attempting to argue that
this was a view shared by Meisner himself, it is worth noting that very little
space is given over to this aspect of Stanislavsky’s work in Meisner’s own
book.
Interestingly, in direct contrast to some of the convictions held by Meisner
himself, Williams finds that the British emphasis on technical training for
actors can be a real advantage when seeking to introduce them to Meisner’s
work:
One of the reasons I enjoy working with British actors is their innate respect
for craft and discipline. With their highly developed skills in voice and
movement it’s fascinating to watch them approach my work in a manner that
harnesses their technical virtuosity to spontaneity and truthfulness in
performance. In short, I teach a technique for truthfulness that seems to suit
the modern British actor. (Scott Williams, interview with the author, 3 June
2009)
That there may well be an officially approved way of teaching the Meisner
Technique is suggested by Tom Radcliffe’s biographical entry on the Website
12. Information about The for the Actors Temple, of which he is both a co-director and teacher: ‘Tom is
Actors Temple Available one of only three Sanford Meisner acting students in the world to be granted
from: http://
www.actorstemple.com/ permission by Meisner himself to teach the Meisner Technique indepen-
about/tom_radcliffe dently.’12
[Accessed 26 June
2009]. Notwithstanding the current fascination with his methodology, the
implications of such a statement suggest that Meisner was clearly keen to
Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 211
I value greatly its encouragement of spontaneity and focusing away from oneself
onto the other; on the other hand, in my own practicing of the technique as an
actor I couldn’t get past what seemed to be a suppression of playing one’s
objective (‘use it to bring you to the door and then leave it’). (Kim Durham,
personal communication, 20 June 2009)
Meisner, I believe, should kick in at the beginning of the second year [of a
conservatoire actor training programme], when vocal/breath technique is
becoming more secure and when students already have a clear process in place,
so that they see it as being in addition to Stanislavsky not instead of . . . .I
remind students that there are still objectives and given circumstances present
which are influencing the action, but that these are contained or generated
within the exercise itself rather than outside it. (Nick Moseley, personal
communication, 4 June 2009)
I use a lot of Meisner when I teach; it sits alongside Stanislavsky. I have changed
how certain [Stanislavskian] exercises are explored by incorporating Meisner
into them. We still cover the basic actors questions, objectives, actions etc but
these are at the heart of the Meisner technique anyway. (Thomasina Unsworth,
personal communication, 5 June 2009)
That said, in common with Moseley, Unsworth is keen to point out that the
application of Meisner’s work to even the most tightly structured plays
proves invaluable in helping to generate a sense of liveness and spontaneity in
performance that might otherwise prove elusive:
I don’t think with certain texts you would be wholly successful approaching
them only through the Meisner Technique. However, without it I find that
performance can be quite empty. Always it helps the actor hear the text and
observe what is around him/her. I have found that the Meisner Technique really
ignites an actor; it encourages the imagination and it gets rid of superficiality.
(Thomasina Unsworth, personal communication, 5 June 2009)
Despite its initial obscurity, the growing popularity and influence of the
Meisner Technique during the past 10 to 15 years has proved something of a
British phenomenon. In the face of a rapidly changing profession where the
demand for authenticity and realism is constantly increasing and always
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References