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.