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I'm going to be reckless here and admit 
I am so fucking tired of acting theory. And the mood I am in at the moment I don't care how 'practical' the theories are purported to be. My apologies to my new pal Mark Westbrook who led such an interesting workshop at the Bothy at the weekend, and who has agreed to coach me on my audition speeches tomorrow afternoon, for the rant that follows. Judging by the stuff he wrote in his blog today about not having a particular axe to grind about Mamet, Practical Aesthetics and Sanford Meisner I hopefully won’t risk upsetting him too much, even though he uses a lot of the theory in his work as an acting coach. But I need to get this off my chest. And the last thing I would want to do is upset my pal Jimmy Watson and all my other friends and colleagues at the Bothy either with whom I meet and work on the Meisner repetition exercises each Saturday. I put the following out there on the old interweb just to provoke some debate and this off my chest. I’m trying to work things through in my own mind that’s all… These theories have stuff to offer, and God knows I have borrowed enough from them all to various degrees in the past, but I am cranky today. :-)
When I questioned him about Practical Aesthetics Mark did admit to me that when he first read the True and False book he too was incensed by it, and then slowly grew to accept the truth of what the great man said. But I am still at the stage of being incensed by much of what Mamet proposes, 9 years after the book came out. I would love to think the tide is turning and there is going to be a backlash against the rigid modalities of these oh so fashionable ‘practicable paradigms’ such as Meisner, Bogart’s Viewpoints and the Practical Aesthetics mob, and all the others. But somehow I doubt it. Character acting has had its day I fear, probably for the next 40 years- if style cycles are anything to go by. The theorists I mention are all very interesting and have a contribution to make but none of them can offer an all-embracing MO. Each become, ultimately, dreary scientific and reductionist formulae- that in my view inexorably lead to deep spiritual stasis and a creative cul-de-sac. It is simply NEVER enough to go on as oneself, with a strong action/intention, and say the lines so they can hear you at the back. It just isn’t. These ‘down-to-earth’ guys who try to eliminate the alchemy and enchantment from the process, (-and I can hear the Mamet guys snickering as I type this, but they are the poorer. Lennon’s phrase: “laughing in the face of love” comes to mind as I write this) and replace the magic with a primitive (Please note, I never said simple), common-sense overview- essentially a series of intellectual, semantic conjuring tricks- are killing our theatre. They are all false panaceas. This whole jaded creed is founded on a fashionable and sophisticated kind of disillusionment with what it terms “Bullshit” or “Vagueness”, i.e. anything that might engage the imagination and threaten to bring the actor out of his/her own egoic state/stasis. The problem is it leads to flat, boring theatre. The exercises aim to place the emphasis on the Other, by which they mean the scene partner, the other actor, as opposed to the actor’s own relationship with the character (a la Stanislavski). This is also their attempt at correcting the problem of self-involvement that characterises the Method (Strasberg). What all of these philosophies consistently fail to take into account is the poor fucking audience who end up paying money to see their theatre-wank. There is the assumption that if the actors are deeply connected and engaged in each others’ performances then so will the audience be, as long as they speak up. A nice idea, except it doesn’t necessarily follow that this “amaaaaaazing connection, (maaan)” which the actors have orgasms over in the dressing room afterwards communicates itself, or indeed means anything at all to the audience. Oh Mamet pays lip service to honouring the audience in his True and False manifesto, but that is all. It still offers no guarantee that anyone goes away enriched by the experience- except the actors- and even that is up for question. In fact, because of the flatness of the acting style which his simplistic, “heretical” methodology leads to, the audience are just as likely either to notice no difference, or- more likely- to feel utterly excluded from the actor-character dynamic. I agree whenhe seems to assert that the audience create the Great Acting with the actors. That is true. But he atkes the piss out of the notion of great acting. That is old-fashioned. I would like to think that this “True and False” manifesto is not championed by genuine artists, at least not by the great ones- nor by audiences. It is a philosophy adopted and promoted by writers, directors and academics who are too lazy and/or afraid to explore the challenges of going beyond the natural and the mundane. Those who lack the moral courage and the confidence to penetrate the realms of the extraordinary, and cannot trust that something divine can be in control, lap it up though. I would assert that there is an intense and profound mystery that informs the work of the great actor- and that it is created in tandem with the audience and the other actors. The individual actor cannot claim ownership of it.
If acting were all as simple and reducible as these modern academicians propound, if it were truly so easy to act, then everybody would be able to do it. Fact is, they can’t. That is why the public queue up and pay to see great actors in the flesh. If these theorist wankers had the key to the secret mystery then they would not be writing philosophical books about how to do it. They would not be claiming every other acting theory to be the emperor’s new clothes. They would not be arrogantly asserting to their readers and students that there are no secrets: they would be on the stage or screen themselves changing the hearts, minds and spirits of a human race that continues to butcher, rape, maim and murder each other. They would teach a Love and Compassion through acting instead.
I am getting so tired of university academics and formalist fucking dramaturgs muscling in on something they can only theorise about but are incapable of participating in. Practical Aesthetics appears on the surface to sweep away a lot of the “bullshit” and intellectualising about the actor’s process, and maybe that is something that is needed. But Mamet is in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I do see it’s potential appeal to those who have little tolerance for the complex or the ambiguous- for the serious, esoteric work with the mystical and the ineffable. Practical Aesthetics has got a funky name- and sounds like something one can do a module in and become an expert in if you have half a brain . Unfortunately it all adds up to little more than sly, witty, clever-clever reductionism ( “There’s no such thing as character…” “There are only the lines on the page…” “All the rest is bullshit…”) It is as if the Newtonian-Cartesian model was being used to crush one of the last bastions of intuition and creative flow- namely the theatre- and reducing it to a predictable, rational, small-minded, mean-spirited and empirical science. “Turn up, say the lines, say them loud enough and be present. This will result in the truth.” The implication being that this “ truth” will immediately merit the status of Art and Beauty. Except it doesn’t. It results in naturalism- realism if you’re lucky- but ultimately it will be merely “truth with a small t”, especially in the hands of artisans who’ll never understand or possess that ineffable and unquantifiable something called Talent. Practical Aesthetics would have us believe that it’s the easiest thing in the world to be talented. Talent is 10 a penny. But this rather begs the question why are there so many bland, mediocre and shit actors in the profession? Surely not because they are all labouring under a basic misapprehension that would be remedied by taking a short course Practical Aesthetics? The whole ethos behind the technique eschews the poetic sensibility (not nearly macho enough); anything that might (God forbid!) have the potential to transport the audience into the realms of the abstract, the majesty of the spiritual. The very things that attract human beings to art in the first place, the very things that can offer us redemption are squeezed out to make way for a mundane, lacklustre quotidian. This new dogma would have all aver that the mere act of pretending is plain wrong. Imagination is seen to be inferior to reality. But this idea is merely fashion. It is not universal. It is not eternal. I know that if I fork out £25.00 for a ticket only to witness everyday truth recreated on stage when I could quite easily see it for nothing by standing outside watching people in the street, I will feel cheated. The experience won’t teach me how to live my life more authentically- as good art should: it will teach me to be lazy, to accept that this is all there is, that it would be vain and stupid for me to seek any more from existence than the here and now. There is no transformative power in this very modern idea that leads to a style of performance that appears to repudiate all concept of ‘theme’, or ‘character’ or even ‘subtext’ until there are only words on the page. I don’t want to work in such a medium where character acting is mocked as mere “funny voices”.
I am so fucking tired of acting theory. And the mood I am in at the moment I don't care how 'practical' the theories are purported to be. My apologies to my new pal Mark Westbrook who led such an interesting workshop at the Bothy at the weekend, and who has agreed to coach me on my audition speeches tomorrow afternoon, for the rant that follows. Judging by the stuff he wrote in his blog today about not having a particular axe to grind about Mamet, Practical Aesthetics and Sanford Meisner I hopefully won’t risk upsetting him too much, even though he uses a lot of the theory in his work as an acting coach. But I need to get this off my chest. And the last thing I would want to do is upset my pal Jimmy Watson and all my other friends and colleagues at the Bothy either with whom I meet and work on the Meisner repetition exercises each Saturday. I put the following out there on the old interweb just to provoke some debate and this off my chest. I’m trying to work things through in my own mind that’s all… These theories have stuff to offer, and God knows I have borrowed enough from them all to various degrees in the past, but I am cranky today. :-)When I questioned him about Practical Aesthetics Mark did admit to me that when he first read the True and False book he too was incensed by it, and then slowly grew to accept the truth of what the great man said. But I am still at the stage of being incensed by much of what Mamet proposes, 9 years after the book came out. I would love to think the tide is turning and there is going to be a backlash against the rigid modalities of these oh so fashionable ‘practicable paradigms’ such as Meisner, Bogart’s Viewpoints and the Practical Aesthetics mob, and all the others. But somehow I doubt it. Character acting has had its day I fear, probably for the next 40 years- if style cycles are anything to go by. The theorists I mention are all very interesting and have a contribution to make but none of them can offer an all-embracing MO. Each become, ultimately, dreary scientific and reductionist formulae- that in my view inexorably lead to deep spiritual stasis and a creative cul-de-sac. It is simply NEVER enough to go on as oneself, with a strong action/intention, and say the lines so they can hear you at the back. It just isn’t. These ‘down-to-earth’ guys who try to eliminate the alchemy and enchantment from the process, (-and I can hear the Mamet guys snickering as I type this, but they are the poorer. Lennon’s phrase: “laughing in the face of love” comes to mind as I write this) and replace the magic with a primitive (Please note, I never said simple), common-sense overview- essentially a series of intellectual, semantic conjuring tricks- are killing our theatre. They are all false panaceas. This whole jaded creed is founded on a fashionable and sophisticated kind of disillusionment with what it terms “Bullshit” or “Vagueness”, i.e. anything that might engage the imagination and threaten to bring the actor out of his/her own egoic state/stasis. The problem is it leads to flat, boring theatre. The exercises aim to place the emphasis on the Other, by which they mean the scene partner, the other actor, as opposed to the actor’s own relationship with the character (a la Stanislavski). This is also their attempt at correcting the problem of self-involvement that characterises the Method (Strasberg). What all of these philosophies consistently fail to take into account is the poor fucking audience who end up paying money to see their theatre-wank. There is the assumption that if the actors are deeply connected and engaged in each others’ performances then so will the audience be, as long as they speak up. A nice idea, except it doesn’t necessarily follow that this “amaaaaaazing connection, (maaan)” which the actors have orgasms over in the dressing room afterwards communicates itself, or indeed means anything at all to the audience. Oh Mamet pays lip service to honouring the audience in his True and False manifesto, but that is all. It still offers no guarantee that anyone goes away enriched by the experience- except the actors- and even that is up for question. In fact, because of the flatness of the acting style which his simplistic, “heretical” methodology leads to, the audience are just as likely either to notice no difference, or- more likely- to feel utterly excluded from the actor-character dynamic. I agree whenhe seems to assert that the audience create the Great Acting with the actors. That is true. But he atkes the piss out of the notion of great acting. That is old-fashioned. I would like to think that this “True and False” manifesto is not championed by genuine artists, at least not by the great ones- nor by audiences. It is a philosophy adopted and promoted by writers, directors and academics who are too lazy and/or afraid to explore the challenges of going beyond the natural and the mundane. Those who lack the moral courage and the confidence to penetrate the realms of the extraordinary, and cannot trust that something divine can be in control, lap it up though. I would assert that there is an intense and profound mystery that informs the work of the great actor- and that it is created in tandem with the audience and the other actors. The individual actor cannot claim ownership of it.
If acting were all as simple and reducible as these modern academicians propound, if it were truly so easy to act, then everybody would be able to do it. Fact is, they can’t. That is why the public queue up and pay to see great actors in the flesh. If these theorist wankers had the key to the secret mystery then they would not be writing philosophical books about how to do it. They would not be claiming every other acting theory to be the emperor’s new clothes. They would not be arrogantly asserting to their readers and students that there are no secrets: they would be on the stage or screen themselves changing the hearts, minds and spirits of a human race that continues to butcher, rape, maim and murder each other. They would teach a Love and Compassion through acting instead.
I am getting so tired of university academics and formalist fucking dramaturgs muscling in on something they can only theorise about but are incapable of participating in. Practical Aesthetics appears on the surface to sweep away a lot of the “bullshit” and intellectualising about the actor’s process, and maybe that is something that is needed. But Mamet is in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I do see it’s potential appeal to those who have little tolerance for the complex or the ambiguous- for the serious, esoteric work with the mystical and the ineffable. Practical Aesthetics has got a funky name- and sounds like something one can do a module in and become an expert in if you have half a brain . Unfortunately it all adds up to little more than sly, witty, clever-clever reductionism ( “There’s no such thing as character…” “There are only the lines on the page…” “All the rest is bullshit…”) It is as if the Newtonian-Cartesian model was being used to crush one of the last bastions of intuition and creative flow- namely the theatre- and reducing it to a predictable, rational, small-minded, mean-spirited and empirical science. “Turn up, say the lines, say them loud enough and be present. This will result in the truth.” The implication being that this “ truth” will immediately merit the status of Art and Beauty. Except it doesn’t. It results in naturalism- realism if you’re lucky- but ultimately it will be merely “truth with a small t”, especially in the hands of artisans who’ll never understand or possess that ineffable and unquantifiable something called Talent. Practical Aesthetics would have us believe that it’s the easiest thing in the world to be talented. Talent is 10 a penny. But this rather begs the question why are there so many bland, mediocre and shit actors in the profession? Surely not because they are all labouring under a basic misapprehension that would be remedied by taking a short course Practical Aesthetics? The whole ethos behind the technique eschews the poetic sensibility (not nearly macho enough); anything that might (God forbid!) have the potential to transport the audience into the realms of the abstract, the majesty of the spiritual. The very things that attract human beings to art in the first place, the very things that can offer us redemption are squeezed out to make way for a mundane, lacklustre quotidian. This new dogma would have all aver that the mere act of pretending is plain wrong. Imagination is seen to be inferior to reality. But this idea is merely fashion. It is not universal. It is not eternal. I know that if I fork out £25.00 for a ticket only to witness everyday truth recreated on stage when I could quite easily see it for nothing by standing outside watching people in the street, I will feel cheated. The experience won’t teach me how to live my life more authentically- as good art should: it will teach me to be lazy, to accept that this is all there is, that it would be vain and stupid for me to seek any more from existence than the here and now. There is no transformative power in this very modern idea that leads to a style of performance that appears to repudiate all concept of ‘theme’, or ‘character’ or even ‘subtext’ until there are only words on the page. I don’t want to work in such a medium where character acting is mocked as mere “funny voices”.
Timon of Athens (John Gilmore)- ranting (2005) STG
I had a meeting last night, after my HOBA rehearsal with a lovely Canadian actor/director, Rebecca Pearson, who is new to the city and whom I taught in a workshop in at Bothy last month on “Wants”. She had asked to meet me through a mutual friend because she had been intrigued by what I had said at the very end of that workshop about Love and the Actor. We chatted for a couple of hours, and I offered her advice and suggested names of theatre directors/producers to contact in Scotland. She’s pregnant right now, which I guess will limit her options for the foreseeable future, although she plans to stay for another 3 or 4 years while her husband, a geographer completes his PhD at Glasgow Uni, and is keen to do something maybe next year. This is the third person who has been intrigued by my ethos related to the spirituality of acting in the last couple of weeks. I received a succession of emails from another actor whom I worked with at the Citz several years back and who had stumbled across my website and he shared a great deal of personal stuff about the crisis he was having in his life and work, detailing his spiritual/existential struggles as an actor. He said he’d found this blog of mine “explanatory and inspiring” (sic). He mentioned directors we had both worked with at different times in the past who had “praised (my) acting shenanigans to the skies”! The web is proving to be such a useful place to make connections. I hope to meet up with him very soon. At least there are still some people out there who are unafraid to accept that acting at its best is a esoteric and mystical art, not a Newtonian science.
Sorry, But I’ve a bee in my bonnet.
Sorry, But I’ve a bee in my bonnet.
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