Tightrope

Sanford Meisner, the acting teacher who first devised those repetition exercises we do each week at the Actors' Bothy used to have a little known quotation by the Germanic poet-playwright, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, displayed on the wall outside his Neighbourhood Theatre office in New York. And sometimes, especially at the end of a frustrating teaching day, Goethe's epigram sums up (better than anything else I can think of) my feelings about the arrogance and laziness of most would-be 'actors'.

"I wish the stage were as narrow as the wire of the tightrope dancer, so that no incompetent would dare step upon it."


Swingeing... And all the more delicious for it. :-))

Remembering Love

I know first-hand the agonies of being trapped in a pedestrian, workmanlike production in which I have little faith or any sense of real commitment. This will happen far more often than I care to admit even to myself. I hope once more that this will not be the case with the play I am about to start work on. But no matter how noble or high-minded I may profess to be, there's always that nagging fear that I can fall from grace, that my enthusiasm and spirit, my talent will be disfigured permanently by involvement in a ‘turkey’. So it remains tempting to resign myself to such truisms as ‘We always fail’, 'Perfection is an impossibility', or ‘Enough is enough’, particularly in a non-professional production. ‘We are tightrope walkers, and we’re bound to fall off sooner or later’. And if we are honest this failure is as much our own fault as it is our collaborators, the business-mentality, the “fucking" director (I don't mean you, Marta!), or the audience.

But what I say is this:

If we cannot change others then we still have a moral and artistic duty at least to change ourselves.

That is the grown-up actor's response.

We have to be honest. We actors are frequently driven by our own petty, selfish, superficial (if understandable) motives: the itch to keep busy or “ticking over”, ambitions of “raising our profile”, mere habit, garnering critical acclamations for own talents, striving to be a “success”, a star. Whatever it may be that appears to keep us going we can so easily end up chasing our own tail. Perhaps more often it’s just some muddled combination of all of those petty motives that keeps us tail-chasing- obsessively questing after our old fire, all that youthful enthusiasm that drew us into the theatre in the first place. But whether it’s because of stubbornness, habit, self-denial, stupidity, nostalgia or just a refusal to wake up and smell the roses, still we stubbornly cling on. We become like priests who continue leading congregational prayer even though we have long since stopped being able to hear the voice of God. We are shamans who know our magic is a sham. We are leaders voted in on electoral promises we know will not be honoured. Yet we persist; we cling on.

But why? Why do we cling on? After all, we aren’t hypocrites; we are trying to tell the truth, aren’t we? We are not drudges; we’re artists! We are not empty vessels- in fact we suffer from the opposite problem; we are too full, filled to overflowing with the need to say…to say… something true!
I think the reason we cling on is because of Love. Love, pure and simple. Of course you may think that sounds like a vague aphorism, a cliché, and you’d be right. So vague it might seem virtually meaningless. “Love? Love of what exactly?” But I have come to believe your work as an actor lies in trying to find out what it is you love. The answer is utterly unique to every one of us, and indeed you may never define the precise nature of that love of which I write here. But it is our Purpose.

And your point is, caller?

Beyond the idea that the actor loves the theatre is the notion that Love is, or at least should be, the basis of all stage emotion. A character who expresses hatred in a play is not a real person in everyday life but a character on the stage, a fiction. The actor shouldn't be feeling "real" hatred but hatred as an artistic emotion, a hatred grounded in love. By providing the ground for this expression, love creates a distance, another dimension, which allows the actor to not become identified with the hatred but to present it, in effect as an art object. With this attitude of "love" we have the possibility of entering into all manifestations of life. That's what we as actors must do. The process does not have judgement of the character as its aim but a much, much deeper awareness. By noticing the differences between the self and The Other, the actor offers a space for that 'Other' to manifest whilst keeping a clear sense of difference. There is no possession here, where the self is taken over by the other (a la Strasberg). The actor is not a medium, nor is the other reduced to the everyday personality of the actor who happens to be playing him or her. Self and ‘the Other’ are allies in the creation of the performance. That relationship opens out further to include not just actor and character but also actor and actor; actor and audience. Allies in the creation of the performance. Not competitors, not enemies.
You must urge your higher self to be completely connected (that word again) with all your characters say and do, and connected by love. Without it you will always fall off the tightrope.

This is why I don't seek fame and I don't seek money per se. And even though it would be nice to have recognition and to be paid to act, for me it has always been more about love. I am still idealistic/ foolish enough to believe that if I get that right the rest will inevitably follow.

To finish, a couple of my favourite bits from Harold Clurman’s wonderful account of the history of the Group Theatre, "The Fervent Years".

"The world was and still is run by people for whom, whether they admit it or not, know it or not, life is printed on dollar bills. They are the people whose impulse and goal is power, the specific symbol of which is possessions and money. This is their supreme ideal, their philosophy, their religion. For the rest of the world, whether they confess it or not, the impulse and goal is one of love. There is a deep struggle forever in progress between the representative of these two impulses, just as there is a corresponding struggle in the hearts of most individual men."

"The objective of all our creative forces today must be- what it always was- to make man’s hands work in conformity with the movement of his free spirit, to make his active life the reflection of his noblest dreams, to make the deeds of all his days rise from the springs of his love. The tragedy of modern life is the forced separation and contradiction between the “way of the world” and the “way of man”, between the power motif of our external machinations and the love motif of our subjective desire. This ideal- to unite the world of spirit with the world of fact so that one is the mirror or consequence of the other- is thus both aesthetic and social. If this ideal lay at the roots of the artistic and social movements of the thirties, then both artist and man of action have a common ground from which to approach the great problems of our time.
If the theatre has no incentive or goal beyond that which prevails in any ordinary business, the theatre must lapse into the peculiar condition it is in at present. And if society itself eschews every ideal except that which is merely a matter of lip service- without roots in our deepest personal experience- it is unlikely that such ideals will ever find expression in the theatre. "

Bang on, Harold, my man. Bang on.

Tango by Slawomir Mrozek

I'm preparing for tomorrow's first read-through at the Ramshorn Theatre of Tango, in which I have been cast as Stomil-an avant garde experimental theatre artist. It is very rare for me to be asked to play comedy, and although this play happens to be an esoteric, absurdist piece from Poland (dealing with weighty themes such as Formalism, chaos, ethical/social entropy within a dysfunctional family), it is- well, in a nominal sense at least- a farce, and will hopefully provide me with an unusual opportunity to be funny, anarchic and- for once- playful! Of course this gig is non-professional, but it will also provide me with a chance to demonstrate my wares to prospective agents, having been summarily dumped by West End Management at the weekend (Apparently my drama teaching commitments 'conflict with my availablity for professional acting work').

I've been wrestling with my Life Purpose of late, doubtless fuelled by Hollywood acting coach Bernard Hiller's 3-day "Success in Acting" workshop in Edinburgh last weekend. That experience was an epic wake-up tsunami for the 20 of us who signed up for it, and challenged each one of us to confront our fears and blocks and to ask ourselves deep questions about where we were on our artistic/career/soul paths, and why we appeared to be squandering our God-given talents by remaining in Scotland. Harsh, exacting questions- yet highly apposite ones!

Now I've never really harboured any genuine ambition to be famous, but I do still intend to be the very best actor I can be, to work with the very best. Despite Glasgow being a lovely place to live, it isn't by any stretch of the imagination the epicentre of acting excellence. And Bernie was quite uncompromising on this issue... He urged on us that if you are genuinely serious then you will be prepared to make all the requisite sacrifices, and go wherever in the world the opportunities happened to be in order to fulfil your vision. For him this happened to be the Hollywood hills, although I think for me it would have to be London, or New York i.e. where the best theatre is. The principle still holds though. Bernie did some private coaching with me on the last evening, and encouraged me to think big, and "stop coasting", suggesting that I was utilising just 60% of my true potential. I needed to be pushed to do much more, he said. Like Karen says I am really just "a big fish in a small pond", and I've got lazy.

And the bastard was right, goddamn it. I do need to be pushed harder in order to go further- both as an artist and as a professional. He offered me a job teaching alongside him when he comes to Glasgow next time, which would at least give me the chance to work with better students than the teenage kids I teach at present. (Back to school on Monday :-( )

Flattering as this offer was, I will have to think about whether this is really what I want to do. I live to act, for that is where my talent lies. Of course I can direct, I can teach, I can write, but acting is my truest and most abiding love. So just how much am I prepared to give up in order to remain faithful to my dream?

What acting is for me

Why do I act?

Because I love it. And when you love something you bring the best of yourself to it.

Acting is my preferred M.O. for engaging in dialogue with my soul- a sort of active meditation/prayer technique perhaps. At the risk of sounding pretentious (Moi?!) it’s a meta-physical process where I explore and negotiate the interplay of belief, action, intelligence, imagination, feeling and the higher will in order to effect soul-transformation. It makes me feel more; feel more whole, feel more useful.

And I love it all the more because I’ve started to get quite good at it over these last 30 years!

All great acting is fuelled by Love. At its best theatre can provide deep spiritual healing for the audience as well as the artist himself. That is what makes it useful- some might even say vitally necessary to humanity.

The crucial need to share and communicate Love in its many different forms is what drives me as an artist. I work to visualise, imagine and radiate that energy via the character’s thoughts, actions and words. Love is always the prime mover behind the process- whether you’re consciously aware of it or not. Actually it’s very important to remind oneself of this often if you are an actor- because the work can get bloody frustrating and terribly difficult at times. Acting and Love are exercises in compassion. They both involve putting oneself in another’s shoes, and they both require enormous reserves of imagination. The better you can imagine the realer it becomes; the better you become, the better the other (or audience) becomes.

It transforms us.

Pablo Picasso: “Whatever you imagine is real”.

At the start of rehearsals I will explore the usual “Magic If” questions (Stanislavsky): “What would I do if I were in this situation? If. IF What does the character do- and why? What conditions would make me behave in precisely the same way as my character? Speak the same words?” By the end of the rehearsals I am no longer asking those questions because through my imagination I have convinced most of my being through repetition and concentrated attention that he, the character, is now me and I am the character. His problems are now my problems, his attachments are my attachments, his ambitions my ambitions etc.

I will usually employ psychophysical techniques – an intricate dialogue between the Spirit/ Mind/ Feelings/ Imagination and the Body and Senses to refine that love energy and hopefully communicate my Higher Self. It’s two-way traffic between inner and outer space. The invisible internal blockages and differences between myself and the character are acknowledged and then discarded as I start to arrive at solutions that are more or less satisfying to me as an artist and I can hopefully create a characterisation that appears easy, apparently natural, appropriate and truthful, and hence ‘beautiful’ because it has a universal application and relevance.

Rather than adding external things to my personality to create character (which is the “outside → in” approach as I understand it) I usually look inside myself for elements that I share with the character’s emotional make-up and then enlarge them, whilst at the same time eliminating those elements that have nothing in common with him. The rest is, as they say, funny voices. To do it “outside → in” strikes me as cheating and somehow ‘dishonest’, even fake; a cheap trick. Sometimes it is necessary, because it appears to save time and effort, but it is usually a false economy because the results are nearly always inferior. I guess what I’m talking about here is the difference between end-of-the-pier conjuring and the real magic of the genuinely supernatural.

I like to create very high stakes for myself as an actor and as the character, imagining that there are shattering consequences, fatal repercussions if I should fail to reach the character’s objectives and aims. But by the same token the rewards for succeeding are pure, unmitigated bliss... Like gambling your house in a poker game with the devil in the hope of winning the gift of eternal life.

Now I’m aware I keep on using similes and (mixed) metaphors to describe the ephemeral process we call acting. It isn’t just that it is easier to talk about in terms of other things but that it is through the medium of metaphor that the actor-artist works. He becomes an expert in finding and then inhabiting correspondences in the outer world for what is going on in the invisible universe of the inner.

So if I had to nail my colours to the wall and say whether I was an ‘Outside → in actor’ or an ‘Inside → out actor’ I would have to say the latter. I normally start from the inner and then work my way outward. For me thoughts beget the magic, a philosophy now popularised by the cosmic ordering New Age mob in fact, but something which actors have always known and been teaching us for centuries.

The Objective Reality of the Imagination (Michael Chekhov’s phrase), and the power that comes through it, is made manifest through the actor. The process starts with the imagination and works its way through to the actor’s instrument- his/her body- and ultimately communicates itself to the audience in what Brook calls holy theatre, in a shared experience. Usually this experience of true connection is fleeting and momentary at best at the start of rehearsals- (as well as in the final performances most of the time, if we’re honest with ourselves!), but sometimes those moments become like pearls threaded on a necklace (another metaphor! - this time borrowed from Stanislavsky)- a so- called through-line of action is achieved- and everything begins to feel as if it is somehow slotting into its proper place. This is where taste, choice and discernment play a very important part in my process. The outcome I am looking for is to feel in some way that the role is actually playing me; that a higher, wiser and greater power is directing and guiding the performance- a form of transcendental, psychic Channelling (Not possession- that would be really crazy!). Although I am still conscious (in fact very much so! Super-Conscious even), it is like I am hovering several feet above the theatre space, watching myself - like the shaman witnessing his own inner animal dancing round the fire. I am more likely to achieve this state of creative flow when I have a profoundly resonant personal investment in the message communicated through the drama, as well as an inspiring super-objective supporting and fuelling my actions. I look for something invisible but vitally important that I must make manifest and real to my audience. Without that all-consuming intention, that need (and at least the hope of its fulfilment) I am lost. In my ideal state of creative flow the super- objective will often be labelled “To Reveal the Truth”, or “To Open up my Heart”, “To Change the Heart and Mind of Another”, “To Give, or to Receive, Love” in my conscious mind. The character and me, the actor, come to share the same aim. It becomes a sort of meta-acting in fact where the performance I give is a comment on the acting itself, and the role itself becomes a living, breathing metaphor for the actor’s soul, a perfect paradigm for existence. From this a limitlessly self-perpetuating fountain of abundant creativity starts to flow up from what Jung calls the Collective Unconscious. It’s as if the characterisation vibrates in harmony and sympathy with what I know the audience needs (not necessarily wants!) from moment to moment, and they start to create the performance with you. In this way I come to terms somehow with the awkward self-consciousness and the artificiality of being in a theatre, under strange coloured lights, in a silly costume in front of strangers, and they become intimately involved in ‘the ritual’, even necessary to my circle of attention, and rather than a potential distraction- they shape the performance with me, becoming co-creators of the magic. It’s almost supernatural, certainly a spiritual phenomenon, and feels perfect and completely right when it works- like intricate harmony in a Bach concerto must feel like to the musician I imagine. A sort of spiritual orgasm! It is a deeply satisfying state/process to be in and one that I am continually chasing through my work.

I am worried that this makes me sound like what’s known as a “method actor”. Actually such labels make me squirm. For me the term conjures up images of a brooding and intense James Dean figure repeatedly banging his head off a brick wall until he draws real blood. This isn’t acting. It is pointless martyrdom, and nothing to do with joyful creativity. This particular brand of actor is not braver than the ham (“Try acting, dear boy!” As Laurence Olivier reportedly said to Dustin Hoffman). The so- called method actor is actually terrified that his own imagination will not be enough, and has convinced himself that the only way to make an audience believe he is in pain is through actually hurting himself. What he has not learned to appreciate is that ultimately it is the audience’s job to feel the character’s pain- not necessarily the actor himself- (and by that I not suggesting the actor bashes the audience’s heads against a wall until they bleed either!). The audience and actor need to feel through imagining. It is my firm belief that the audience feel more if they are coaxed into imagining their worst nightmares- not witnessing or living through them. The sophisticated spectator- and we always have to assume the audience are very sophisticated, sensitive and intelligent- is more thrilled by well- acted, fictional violence for example than actually seeing a man or woman actually shot and bleeding to death. If it is a real person the audience might well feel deeply upset for the person, want to help save them, feel justifiably frightened, horrified even. But that is all. Conversely if it is a fictional but well acted death it becomes a metaphor for the possibility of their own death, and it becomes universalised and, paradoxically, at the same moment totally personal to them. And they also experience genuine compassion- not just “Oh my God, is he going to shoot me next?!” That is why the snuff movie or the porno video is anti-art. They appeal to the deranged psychotic, the imaginatively impoverished. It isn’t a collective experience either, but a private individual one. The Truth we are looking for in Art has a capital T- and that means- for want of a better phrase- the poetic distillation of reality shared. We are looking to understand the meaning behind life, the meaning behind death through art and drama. This involves a deeper examination of the Invisible which is somehow made tangible and Real to us through the frame we call Art.

The realm of the Invisible lies within, and that must be the place where artistic process must start.

Perhaps this is why I so often find the process of improvisation less satisfying than text-based theatre. Improvisation is a skill not an art, and it rarely has the qualities I expect from great theatre. It’s too haphazard and only becomes art by accident, rarely by design. And if it should be by design it is surely just cheating then- not truly spontaneous improvisation. Art as I said should be a distillation and a refinement of the real- a diamond crystal that has been honed, shaped and polished over time. Despite the immediacy, the cheap excitement, fun and spontaneity of improv it frequently falls far short of what I require from genuine art- where the Invisible is made Visible, rather than simply the no-brainer visible-made-visible found in improv.

It comes down to taste I guess.