An Actor Prepares...

The following is from a recent article I wrote for a Glasgow Quaker magazine, Elmbank Events. A week before I go to drama school it summarises the journey that has brought me to this watershed moment in my life.

“I don't care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, it can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I'll tell you a terrible secret—Are you listening to me?…There isn't anyone anywhere that isn't Seymour's Fat Lady. Don't you know that? Don't you know that goddam secret yet? And don't you know—listen to me, now—don't you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It's Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.” (J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey)


On Monday 28th September I will leave my job as a school teacher in Hamilton to become a student on the MA course at the RSAMD in Contemporary & Classical Text.

It’s 33 years since I nervously stepped on stage for the first time, aged 16, in Theatre Workshop for Youth’s production of Pinter’s The Birthday Party. And I’ve continued to act in theatre ever since- in literally hundreds of amateur and professional tours and productions. Yet only now, at the grand old age of 49, am I grasping the nettle, investing my life savings and fulfilling a lifelong dream by going to drama school.

And before you even think it- no, this isn't just some mad, mid-life crisis! Actually it's a decision that has been made after decades of prayer, soul-searching and meditation. I was very keen to ensure I wasn’t just doing this for egoic reasons but from a more profound need to serve others. Maybe that's why it’s taken me so long to get round to it. But over the last couple of years since attending my first Quaker meeting the Advice and Query about “living adventurously”, and” letting your life speak” (Quaker Faith & Practice; 1.02, 27) has really spoken to my condition. Having got so used to putting security far too high up on my list of priorities it was high time I started living more authentically, got my inner and outward life into alignment, and trusted that God would support that!

I feel like some terrible ‘luvvie’ confessing this, but increasingly over the years the art of acting has become for me a kind of spiritual quest. In fact it’s really an exceptionally potent form of praise and worship for me, founded on concentrated compassion and empathy- at least when it’s done well! (Quaker Benjamin Lloyd writes brilliantly about the actor as a conduit for spiritual energy in his epistolary novel, “The Actor’s Way”.) And so I am finally going to drama school to learn how to act better! And it’s a quantum leap. Acting utilizes the power of Imagination to effect transformation and transcendence- for the actor AND his audience. A very high calling indeed! Many of my friends (with a small f) outside the meeting- many of whom work in theatre- have expressed concern that I may be taking too big a gamble, that it's a bad time, I have to be prepared to fail, that it will be awfully difficult financially, that I may well be disappointed... and- think of the debt! etc. Well, yes, I know all this; but still I’m determined to remain hopeful and optimistic. I would like to thank Friends in the Glasgow meeting for their advice in this matter. You have all been incredibly positive, supportive and affirming when I have discussed my decision with you.

God makes us custodian of Light, wardens of our talents so they can be used for the benefit others. Of course it would be perfectly possible for me to continue serving Him and sharing my gifts through teaching and in many other ways, but I am now convinced that that would really be a craven compromise. I serve Him and others best when I am on the stage playing characters.

God doesn’t mind so much that we make mistakes (and God knows I’ve made a good few in my time!) but I think He must get very disappointed with our apathy, when we don’t try to do our very best with what we are given. So I take this leap in faith; only He knows what lies ahead. The challenge of living my life with greater authenticity and courage instead of remaining in a cocoon of stagnancy and safe employment feels huge and very, very scary right now, even trusting the promise that God will be with me throughout this time and beyond!

Still, my wife Karen, and I would greatly welcome your prayers at this time.

In Friendship,

Mark Coleman

The Green Man of Rouken Glen

"Everything you can imagine is real."

Inside -Out
Rouken Glen, August 2009

From Angeles Arrien's "The Four Fold Way"

To cultivate:

1. Show up and be present.
2. Pay attention to what has heart and meaning.
3. Tell the truth without judgment or blame.
4. Be open to outcome, but not attached to outcome.

To avoid:

Addiction to intensity.
Addiction to the myth of perfection.
Addiction to focusing on what’s not working.
Addiction to having to know."

-from Angeles Arrien’s “The Four-Fold Way”.

The Virtues of Faith, Empathy, Service + Love= Great Acting

I have spent last few weeks trying to think about the practicalities and financial aspects of the course I am about to take. All this is daunting enough, but I have also thought a great deal about WHY I am making this choice to go to drama school. I made this decision with my heart, not with my head, but it seems important that I unravel what is really going on in me before I properly start, so I know what to aim for. I know that one of the things that prompted the decision in firast place was my becoming a Quaker and taking on board the advice given in "Faith and Practice" about"living adventurously" and seeking the Inner Light, but there's more to it than that...

I would dearly wish my drama school training, which starts in less than a month (eek!), to be predicated on what my Quaker Friend Benjamin Lloyd calls a ‘virtue-based pedagogy’. I would also love my tutors to be heart-sensitive and expert counsellors and guides, leading us all to gently lay aside our egos and replace them with our higher, artistic souls; to nurse our sense of spiritual vocation as artist in pursuit of beauty. But let's face it, that's hardly likely to happen. After all, that would be far too religious and woolly for an academic institution. Institutions that train professional actors are necessarily advocates of obedience to the director, hitting your marks, speaking up, getting paid... Certainly not much to do with nourishing and freeing souls from existential burdens and seeking the divine!

Whenever I speak or write about acting being a mysterious thing, an ineffably spiritual process, I always risk being laughed at and shot down in flames. I have even been told recently that if I want to bring about deep spiritual reconciliation, forgiveness and transcendence then I should join the church; that there is no place for such pie-in-the-sky thinking in the “reality of entertainment industry"(sic!). I frequently end up feeling a bit bonkers, or like some haughty ‘Nicholas Craig’ character when i do let loose with my ideas. So I tend to keep quiet rather than be accused of trying to mystify what many insist is really only a straightforward and uncomplicated process. I am accused of using ‘obscure spiritual ideology’, and mystical-sounding terminology to exclude 'lesser mortals'. But it IS a high calling, for fuck sake! I don’t say these things to make less talented actors feel excluded. I will confess though that I do want to discourage those who have no real vocation to serve others through the medium of theatre, or lack any sense of purpose founded on the desire to connect at the deepest level with an audience, to seek answers to the profoundest questions about what life is or at least might be. That's what serious artist DO, after all!

It IS a simple and undeniable truth that some people are better actors than others. That is usually because they desperately WANT to be better, and are willing to do anything to make that possible. Life’s unfair, yes! And some have an extraordinary talent for it. I would be tempted to call it a divine gift, but that’s just me- I believe in God! That belief doesn’t mean I receive any extra help! And it certainly doesn’t mean I think that certain aspects of this ‘alchemy’ can’t be learned or even taught. I wouldn’t have taught drama or coached other actors over the past 15 years if I thought nothing at all could be gained from it unless you were already ‘touched by God’.

Again at the risk of being a pretentious twat, I believe that over the course of the last 30 odd years my own acting career, at its best, has been an exploration of the virtues of FAITH through EMPATHY and SERVICE, marinated and communicated in LOVE. Those four virtues constitute the simplest and most accurate recipe I can articulate for what I am attempting to embody as an actor. Of course there are basic vocal and simple physical techniques and elementary principles- principles which are picked up in a matter of weeks, if not days, by the student actor- but no one in their right mind is going to call these basics a recipe for greatness. Sanford Meisner’s maxim comes to mind: "It takes 20 years to become a master actor". Focusing on the virtues of faith, empathy, service and love is what will eventually turn somebody into a great master actor. I’ve always believed that the qualities which constitute a great Soul are exactly the same ones that create great acting talent. If that opens me up to accusations of religiosity and wanky mysticism, well then so be it.


The prioblem is, how can you begin to measure these ‘virtues’- faith, empathy, service or love? (-And, come to that, where are the curricula for teaching them within the present drama school system?) Certainly not by trying to bend and shape the actor’s talent according to an intellectual design or formulation. Objectively measurable targets and standard modes of evaluating its efficacy will always fail because acting IS really a metaphysical and, dare I say it, SPIRITUAL discipline. (And yet, paradoxically, even a lazy actor can sometimes move an audience more than one who works his butt off.) But to pretend otherwise severely compromises theatre’s potential power, and only leads to bland journeywork, not great art. It’s a betrayal of the sacred foundations of theatre, a secularising reductionism of all that is central and vital to the drama form to pretend otherwise. It is my view that for drama schools to avoid going any further than simply passing on a range of one-size-fits-all exercises and techniques and then charging people the earth for it constitutes a scandalous calumny.

I am not for one moment saying that the student is obliged to align the work with spiritual dogma or creeds- of any kind. He or she doesn’t have to believe in God or Buddha or Allah or the Tooth Fairy. It’s just that having been a teacher of drama for 15 years it feels to me as though most of that time I have just been attempting to stuff round pegs into square holes- a totally quixotic enterprise- when I am obliged to reduce everything to a basic level of ‘playing actions’, spoon-feeding ‘received Stanislavskian wisdoms’ rather than talk about what the work really means, what it’s really FOR. My pupils don’t become more talented when they are made to follow the limited and facile curriculum I am obliged to promulgate. At best they merely learn to pass their exams. It certainly doesn’t make them into great actors... or even into better people if I'm honest. Because of this I feel so relieved to be getting out, but just hope it's not a case of me leaping out of the frying pan and into the fire. Somehow I want to cling onto these virtues I hold so dear, as well as my belief in the application of spiritual core values and processes when I go to study at the Academy. Hopefully it should be easier for me to do this on the MA course, where I am more responsible for my own learning than I might be expected to be on a BA course; and also with all my age and experience they won’t be trying to spoon-feed me.

It has taken me many years to come to realise what is really important to me about the work; why I do this strange thing called acting. I am trusting that this next year gives me the best grounding for refining this understanding, and ways of approaching the work in my own unique way with far greater confidence.

I am so excited I can't begin to tell you.