Wounded Egos

I was delighted to receive a wee comment from my friend Sarah in response to my "Acting is Compassion” posting a couple of says ago.

She writes-

“Very close to what has been going on in my head recently, though I can’t even begin to express it! Definitely to do with the renunciation of ego so you can understand the interplay of another’s ego and higher self… How do we do this? How do we take the ego out of the rehearsal room when to a certain extent the whole industry is BUILT around the wounded ego? This is what I would like to even begin to figure out”.

Mmmm. This opens up a huge can of worms for me. So if you’re ready, take a deep breath and…

Here goes…!

You’re absolutely right, Sarah. Today’s theatre industry is indeed built around what you call the ‘Wounded Ego’. This whole issue is a real biggie for me, so please excuse the length of my response.

When I thought over what you wrote I was surprised to discover (somewhat uncharacteristically perhaps!) that I actually have a more optimistic view of things.

Everyone is wounded… Everyone has an ego, not just actors and directors. I am not sure it’s entirely helpful to subscribe to the idea that our profession is any more ego-wounded than any other sphere of human experience is. It’s just that the rehearsal room and the stage tend to vibrate at a high-frequency oscillation of fear and excitement, and it is very public too. Plenty is at stake, and the potent psychic energy can bring out the worst in some folk, and the very best in others.

Embracing the inevitability of misunderstandings and the resolving of conflicts at the inter-personal level in a spirit of calm acceptance will usually yield better results in the end, rather than seeing yourself as a heroic Soul going into battle against the huge forces of Ego. Squaring up to kill wounded egos in face-to-face combat will end up in a bloody mess, as we can both perhaps testify from our own experience! We could choose to delude ourselves into believing the only alternative is to become so embittered and disillusioned we no longer wish to be artists at all, but that is a crime against ouselves and our audience, not to mention our Creator who blessed us with our gifts!

I hold to the belief that the men and women who get drawn to this work in the first place tend to be magnetised by the mystery of intimacy with the Higher Self (which is actually the polar opposite of Egoism, if you understand me correctly) and this is whether they are aware of it or not. These intuitive and sensitive individuals, in my experience at least, tend to be extremely high-principled on the whole, but manage to combine this with a refreshingly down-to-earth sense of humour about their own damaged egos when it’s pointed out to them. They have a sense of how to live their lives adventurously (That’s why our culture seems to venerate them, and at the same time envy them and want to bring them off their pedestals). Actors are attracted to the flow of deep play (“Not real work though, is it, mate?”), and are more than willing to take on enormous risks to improvise in the Now as an act of spiritual practice. Those who are motivated for lesser reasons lose the will to continue much beyond the age of 30 in my experience. I’m by no means suggesting that those that are left will always be pure, ego-renunciative mystics- of course not, far from it!- but it is enough for me that they should want to be better, that they yearn to encourage and inspire others to be better, to become more.
I will always want to work with that because it raises my game too! It is that profound desire for growth which is the stimulus for human transformation. And the best way to achieve that is actually through humility and forgiveness, although admittedly that can be a long and painful lesson for us to learn.

Michael Chekhov reminds us that this transformation is the actor-artist's ultimate goal: the transformation of self, transformation of others, transformation of the world.

Great acting turns our scars into beauty marks, to borrow a phrase from our current heroine Marianne Williamson!

:-)

Now, these are high and noble spiritual objectives and easily derided and satirised (more of which later), but that's probably because this drive for transformation constitutes a serious threat to the lower Ego’s tyranny, its stultifying status quo, both at the micro and macro levels. Actors and directors are frequently caricatured in our society as egotistical 'luvvie' monsters, and some may very well be just that (I can certainly think of a few we have worked with!), but in my experience they tend to be in the minority and they always make for the worst artists, although they generate the loudest noise and the biggest splashes. As a director of course you always have a free choice not to cast them. The higher your own spiritual wisdom the more you are likely to attract the right collaborators anyway. The wounded egos won’t be able to bear the light and will shrink away to nurse their scars and slag you off in a bar somewhere when they're not cast!
As an actor it is always going to be slightly trickier because you are at the mercy of a director who may or may not have the awareness or skills to negotiate ego issues in the rehearsal room (Moreover (s)he's just as likely to suffer from a few of his/her own!) but as a professional actor you can do your best to lead by example as an ensemble player- doing your best work whilst still remaining a decent, respectful and loving human being. You just have to believe and trust that through your own small influence that others will eventually come round. You have to believe that, or will you fold or collapse.

The “Luvvie”- shorthand for "Ego-Driven Ac-Tor", is a modern archetype invented by Ian Hislop in his satirical Private Eye magazine in the early 90s and quickly caught the public imagination. It is just another nickname for that wounded, egoic actor you refer to. I suspect that this archetype has been around since the days of Aristotle. In fact the term ‘thesp’ is an abbreviation of the Greek word thespian (devotee of Thespis) and has always carried similar derogatory connotations to the neologism “luvvie”.
So perhaps this Wounded Ego Luvvie behaviour was always with us, and in our increasingly superficial culture it’s probably going to continue getting worse and worse before it gets better. I suspect that this is largely because Time and Money have always been the perennial scarcities in showbusiness. This double-act breeds a culture of scarcity and meanness, which breeds competition, which in turn breeds fear, the fear of lack; the fear of failure, and then paradoxiacally,the fear of success (what if others try to take it away from me?):, and eventually the fear of… well, fear. Fear is ego: Ego is fear. A Course in Miiracles teaches us that the two are interchangeable, identical. Fear leads inevitably to overt and covert ego-conflict... And this will more often than not give birth to a shit show eventually… maybe an average one if you’re lucky. The theatre is potentially a chain-reaction chamber and it will produce a high level of toxicity rather than creation if we let it, unless a miracle occurs to prevent it. And unpopular, obvious and lame as it will sound to most of the world that healing miracle begins with forgiveness. Forgiveness of ourselves first of all, and then of others.

The artist must always be about loving service to the God’s truth, at least if he or she is to have any meaningful or lasting contribution to make to humanity. Serving the highest good of the audience. This is a fundamental prerequisite for creating the Ideal future for theatre as an art form. Breathing the flow of love into the audience in all its infinite variety. This is ridiculed when we are labelled luvvies. The idea of an artist as a humble servant surrendering his ego to the greater good and service of the audience invites accusations of pretentiousness even from within (especially from within!) the profession itself. Pay no attention!

Time and money... Mmm. Of course we could take money out of the equation entirely and do totally amateur productions with no costumes or set, which no one pays to see- Brook’s Holy Theatre in an empty space- which no one ends up wanting to see! We could even insist on having an unlimited amount of rehearsal time. However I suspect that wounded egos would still wreak havoc. We are as I say all wounded people. But actually in my own experience actors are far less wounded than most. If any other profession had anywhere near as much insecurity as the acting profession the level of insecurty woulf be much higher. It’s just that more pressure is put on them because more is at stake in terms of personal dignity and dare I say it, the death of the Ego, when they are seen to fail!

Most professional theatre practitioners sneer at such a ‘luvvie’ idea as Love. It's derided as sentimental, misguided; either terribly quaint and old-fashioned, or New-Age-crazy. What's more, there is an astonishing but largely unconscious resistance to the notion that the theatre experience must fundamentally- and almost by definition- be a shared one. It amazes me that in today’s industry I can be pilloried when I’ve offered my perspective on this to fellow actors/directors. “Giving it up to the audience? Well, it might work in panto, maybe Brecht’s stuff, one-man shows... Commedia at a stretch, but what else?” The last time I ventured this view in public was (ironically enough as it turned out) at a 2-day ‘Spirituality of Acting Workshop’ in Glasgow at the end of October 2007 led by one John______. And as soon as I stuck up for this idea of giving over the performance to the audience, it was like a box of fireworks had been let off in the room! The workshop leader had been telling us that the way to keep lower ego out of the mix was to go so far inward that the audience was effectively forgotten. The theory was that if you were connected only to your character and your scene partner then a fourth wall could descend in the imagination, a wall that isolated you from the need to play out and parade one's ego. This is a very common misconception of what constitutes great modern acting. (The whole concept of great acting is actually an invention of audiences and critics, if you think about it, and is suspect to change every quarter of a century or so! Sir Larry Olivier for instance would be a joke on the modern stage. Charlie Chaplin would barely raise a snigger.). John _____ seemed to be equating great acting with Not-acting, to my mind. He was an advocate for a passing fad. This was utter anethema to me, and I rose to challenge this idea. I was shot down for it by John and virtually all the other workshop participants, who all asserted that even acknowledging or recognising the audience’s presence would automatically render any performance inauthentic and stagey, hammy. The only motive for such acting was, as far they were concerned, a vain attempt on behalf of the actor to impress the audience with his talents. And this was (God-forbid!) totally anti-Method. I began to feel what it must have been like to have been subpoenaed by Senator McCarthy or the Spanish Inquisition. Their reaction to my questioning their assumptions said more to me about their egos than it did about mine. When I tried to aver that I wasn’t for a moment suggesting an egoic or show-off kind of acting I was pilloried because they all seemed to believe I was tragically misguided. It was clear to me that they adhered to an unspoken assumption that paying any attention at all to the audience’s needs was just plain wrong, the antithesis of annything that might resemble authentic dramatic art. Their attitude struck me as coming from the very heights of egoism and self-involvement. And the worst of it was- they couldn't see it.! Talk about "There's an elephant in the room"!

I think that the future of theatre has to counteract this false notion that good acting is about sustaining the illusion that no acting is really happening, or that the audience should be somehow excluded from the alchemy of performance or just reduced to dumb and obedient witnesses to the process as they are in TV and films. The spiritual value, integrity and continued relevance of the modern theatre experience requires a meta-theatrical approach, one that says, "OK, this is a theatre; yes, I am an actor, but what is being seen here is more remarkable than the everyday, more adventurous, more true- and more present than a movie". Watching two characters on a naturalistic set talking naturalistically at a true-to-life bus stop is a poor form of art, though it is for some reason OK in movies. It makes for deeply egoic and selfish theatre though. Theatre should focus our attention on the human condition in a heightened, sharper way. Stylised drama potentially enriches us because of its form and conventions, its ambiguities, its carefully constructed tensions, etc. Two "characters" mumbling inanities and non sequiturs at a bus-stop just like they do in life can really only be taken at face value. It is not drama most people would pay money to see, because they can see it every day in the street, and at no cost either. The accceptability of this kind of drivel is a sad reflection on the limited dramatic vision of many young actors/writers/directors now. In the end neither John_______ nor anyone else in the room could begin to understand that great acting is always co-created with an audience. But to admit this would be (...the horror, the horror!) to surrender their egoic stranglehold on the medium. But they misinterpreted my aesthetic philosophy as “a sell out”, which they felt led to mugging and playing off the audience’s reactions in order to charm laughs out of them, or milk tears etc. How could I ever be inwardly connected to my role if I appeared so preoccupied with pandering to the audience’s predilections? They only just stopped short of baying, "Heresy! Heresy! Burn him!"!!

With the objectivity of hindsight I remembered, as Vakhtangov and Michael Chekhov taught, that “people often want to experience something other than that which they need to experience” (from Michael Chekhov’s On the Technique of Acting. My italics.) That goes for actors too, not just audiences it seems. I wasn't suggesting we ‘give people what they want’; what I was actually talking about was giving audiences what they need- something quite, quite different. And that need can only be properly determined and answered when the actor puts his wounded, short-sighted egoism to one side. I worry that John________’s philosophy masks an insidious and unchallenged shibboleth that is really a dangerously subtle, thoroughly egoic misconception of what 'great acting' is.

I'm not just advocating a revision of the commonly-accepted forms of drama or their presentation. Actually I'm suggesting something far more radical- a fundamental overhaul at a broad cultural and societal level- which involves a complete deconstruction of our motives for creating and/or watching theatre at the beginning of the 21st century. Theatre will remain unique and irreplaceable as an art form in our technologically saturated wolrd because it involves a moment-to–moment, organic, human connection with the audience. Any trace of Mr. Wounded Ego interrupting that living flow of energy will ensure the Holy Spirit never shows up at the party. The magic of true presence can be cheated in movies, cheated on the telly; but there's no cheating a live audience. What John_______ failed to grasp was that the special connection with the audience that exists in theatre has to consist of strong invisible rays and prana emanating from the actor's Higher Self radiating out into the audience, and then the audience radiating back again. It is only in that mysterious hinterland, in that in-between "space" which links actor and audience in the living moment that we can begin to feel the dance, the alchemy of communion, the transformative power of total theatre. It is only when we develop a real sensitivity to this wavelength, and a proper vocabulary for it, that we can begin to accurately diagnose in rehearsal exactly where woundedness of ego may be muffling the voice of inspiration with its spoiler signals, cutting off the harmonic vibration with the Divine. Very precise and delicate handling is required by the director and the actors, a new language, if they are not to simply make the problem worse in a clumsy effort to correct things prematurely, or in an insensitive way.

Who said the work was easy?

Here are a few ideas off the top of my head for the rehearsal room which might help keep the effects of wounded egoism at bay.

• Start each rehearsal with a 10-minute group silence. (Tune into the divine source. Breathe in Love. Whatever works!)
• Introduce a starting ritual of irradiating the space, and work to be done within it, with the intentions of the Higher Self
• Focus on the invisible, not the visible stuff in the early days of rehearsal
• Group warm-ups are an absolute must
• Sanford Meisner repetition exercises- can be both meditative and a form of reflective listening. Very healing actually.
• Hatha Yoga warm up
• A gentle, non-intrusive style of directing which provides a model to the actors of patient not-knowing, reflecting and demonstrating the wisdom of holding off from trying to resolve ambiguities too early on. This approach is very Quakerly, but beware it can cause panic in even the most experienced actors if continued into production week!
• Each company needs a wise spiritual director, not just an artistic director.

Time is limited and the company will demand results, and fast. The whole industry is results driven. It is not called process-business, it’s show-business, after all. And it is a business. As we well know, with stress in the mix, egos are far more prone to rear their ugly heads. People get tetchy and tired; pride and competition start to come into it. And fears begin to nag at us of course. Actors have become frightened of audiences these days. Harold Pinter is on record as saying he hates them. A shocking number of my actor friends feel the same way. They are often very likely to blame the audiences for a poor performance before they ever blame themselves. Ah blame- yet another ego construct. Its names are legion...!

Let me finish this diatribe by offering a real-life example of how not to do things. There is an actor (We both know him very well, Sarah.) who is an acknowledged master of creating toxic atmospheres in the rehearsal room. A wounded ego extraordinaire- moody, taciturn and passive-aggressive, the lot. This particular individual reacts very badly to feeling undervalued, patronised or ignored by his peers. He resents the ever-present danger of being humiliated for taking risks and failing. And he can be extremely difficult for other actors to work around because his own disabling fear generates so much fear and trepidation in others. This particular actor manages to yield results not because of this behaviour, but in spite of it. If he could one day become convinced that his habitual and egoic responses stood in the way of achieving his full potential as an artist, then he could be a truly remarkable actor, instead of just doing plays at the Ramshorn and writing a pretentious blog telling other people how to do it!

Whatever else he may be, this particular actor is straightforward and trustable though. And he's slowly getting better. Flawed still, but trying! (Very trying!)

Trouble is, being a luvvie, he will keep carping on about the sheer utter ghaaaastliness of his chosen crucifixion (-I mean profession), but he's aiming for transfiguration, bless his cotton socks. You have to trust he does, at the end of the day, mean well!
:-)