Different Every Night

Objectives are strategies. They are the fuel that ignites characters into action. Objectives generate actions. You cannot literally play an objective. Your objectives stimulate you to play actions. (Actions are the only thing an actor can actually play.)

I want, I do, I feel. This is the ‘system’ in a nutshell. It is simple, obvious, and it is how we function in life. Any good psychological techniques we apply on stage are conscious recreations of how we function naturally. They create specific, recognisable behaviour in the actor from which the audience is able to recognise, interpret or intuit what is going on within the character. This liberates actors from any need to demonstrate or ‘explain’ their characters.

It’s a sort of miracle that productions ever come to fruition, let alone achieve any degree of excellence. You could describe many rehearsal experiences as a group of people who have probably never before worked together, cooped up for far too brief a period in a frequently disagreeable, dark, dirty and noisy space, without a shared language or a shared vision of what they believe theatre to be, in order to create something as profound and complex and as intimate as a performance.

The process of acting is elusive, hard to define, and whatever language does exist is notoriously imprecise.

actors themselves are complicit in undervaluing their own craft. They aren’t much good at talking about their work and they don’t much help matters when they do. When interviewed, they indulge in anecdotes about dropping props, ‘drying’ (forgetting lines) or ‘corpsing’ (laughing uncontrollably when something goes wrong on stage – a sort of hysteria), all of which merely trivialises their work.

The cliché, ‘How do you remember all those words?’ suggests that all they can pinpoint as the actor’s actual job is the learning of text; everything else is presumed to come naturally.

As part of the audience, I could feel our collective discomfort during a realistic production when a well-known actor’s hat fell from his lap to the floor. He never attempted to pick it up but sat trying to pretend it hadn’t happened. The hat lay there commanding greater and greater focus from the audience the longer it remained undealt with, sucking all the energy out of the moment, a dumb but embarrassingly expressive condemnation of the falsity and deadness of this performance in which spontaneous life had been denied.

I think of the actor as a sort of sacrificial being who, on our behalf and for our benefit, undergoes a sequence of experiences, terrifying, tragic, sad, funny, ridiculous, joyful, celebratory, as though saying to us, ‘This is what life’s like, isn’t it? Do you recognise this? Have you ever thought of life in this way?’ The actor manifests our capacity to be vulnerable and daring, sensitive and strong, perceptive and compassionate, to be expressive and to be beautiful. The actor not only stimulates our empathic imagination but also reminds us of our inexhaustible potential as human beings. We all have something of everyone else within us.

Every person is born with the instinct to act and the potential to imagine. The actor has the particular talent to embody this act of imagination.

I believe that at the deepest level of our theatregoing experience, we long to witness this special evidence of our humanity in action.