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.
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. "
"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.
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