Love @ the Bothy, and Titus Andronicus

I have been attending the Actors’ Bothy at the CCA every week for almost two years now. It helped me through difficult times, especially when I first joined and it helped restore my confidence after the company I had helped to found had fallen to bits. Going along for the first time, feeling very vulnerable, forlorn and lonely took a lot of guts, but I am very grateful for how welcome they made me feel. I have since remained a loyal member and during the time I have been attending I definitely feel I have matured as an artist, as a soul, and I feel they have played at least some part in re-stimulating some of my belief in myself as an artist. I’ve grown quite fond of many of the other actors. I look forward to meeting up with the friends I've made there, indulging in social gossip/networking when sharing a beer or two in the bar afterwards, as much as the classes themselves. The staple work we do there under the auspices of the Bothy’s founder, Jimmy Watson, consists of Sanford Meisner repetition exercises. Now I must confess I have only a fitful regard for this particular approach, and find its of limited use, but I continue to attend each week, trusting that the exercises are doing me some good anyway at some level or other. Besides, every now and again we get to do other stuff, e.g. Michael Chekhov (including archetypes and centres and psychological gesture and ensemble-building exercises in the weeks I get to lead), or maybe Rudolf Laban, objectives and super-objectives, play-reading or unitting texts, Practical Aesthetics, improvisation skills, physical theatre or Complicité games. Yesterday, in Jimmy’s absence, Anne Lothian was leading half a dozen of us in a fascinating workshop, the theme of which was actors’ ways and means of accessing and/or generating feelings. Usually I prefer to think of stage emotion as something bred as a natural by-product of executing actions. I have become less and less able to access or employ personal/so-called ‘emotional' memories to fuel feeling states for my characters the older I get. I rely on physical action and sensation, qualities of movement and centres in the imaginary body to coax feelings from the heart that are much more universal and complete somehow. This is a far more dependable and much safer way for me than attempting to remember how it felt splitting up with an ex-girlfriend, or getting my dog put down when I was 14! But we all have our different ways, and there was some discussion about this “Method and madness”, Diderot blah blah blah thing amongst the participants at the start of the evening. But then after a vigorous group warm-up and an exercise in commenting on each others’ posture, body language and physical habits, with each actor taking it in turns to stand in front of our peers to be observed for 5 minutes, we devoted the rest of our time to a fantastic but very simple paired exercise.

As Anne herself said afterwards, its great that we have the luxury of time to explore ideas and techniques. You just don't get that opportunity in rehearsals. So sitting opposite our partner we were asked to repeat a given a ‘feeling statement’, to be directed with increasing levels of intensity, using the simple objective of making ourselves believable/believed by our partner, e.g. “I miss you”, “I detest you” or “You embarrass me”. Since there were so few of us in attendance we had an opportunity to observe the other pairs, rather all do it at the same time, before Lindsey McNab and I finally got up to do the exercise.

She was given the statement “I’m scared”. Starting from a level one intensity she had to build, step by step, up to level ten. As Lindsey partner I was permitted to comment, encourage, and feedback during the exercise according to whether I believed her or not. If I did then she could ascend to the next level. If not she had to go further and deeper with her intention to communicate authentic fear before going to the next level. After 4 or 5 minutes she looked pretty goddamn terrified and had got up to something like level 7 or 8 at which point Anne stopped us! After a bit of group discussion it was my turn.

I had first done a similar exercise over 20 years ago while working on The Deal at the Arts Centre with American Connexion (e.g.“-I want justice!”. “-Well, you can’t have it!” etc, repeated again and again as way of galvanising us into playing our objectives at full pelt for every unit in the text). Yesterday I found myself secretly praying I might be given a statement such as “I want to hurt you” or “I want to maim and/or kill you”, anticpating this might be practical preparation for getting a soaked up in Titus’ toxic rage, the role I am currently in the midst of rehearsing with Strathclyde Theatre Group, but in the end that was deemed too similar to “I detest you” which we’d already seen my friend Kenny do with Robert.

I was given the sentence: “I love you”.

Now I’ve known Lindsey over 10 years. I first worked with her when playing her husband in J.B. Priestly’s Time and the Conways at the Arches in 1999. She was also in an Alison Peebles film with Karen 3 or 4 years ago, so I suppose I know her quite well. I like her; she’s a kind and caring person, quite beautiful, but I wouldn’t say we were what you would call particularly close.

By the time I’d reached up to level 6 tears were appearing in her eyes. By 7 she had flung her arms round me as I repeated “I love you” with greater ardour, longing and intensity. I had started by focusing on her sparkly green eye make-up and then moved onto her face, then her tender vulnerability, then her heart and her inner light, her soul... Going ever deeper. My entreaties became directed, in my imagination, to an amalgamation of all the women I have ever loved, my profound gratitude to them for what they had meant to me, a desire to bless and affirm them for the gifts they had brought of themselves and the love I had shared with them, but then it began to morph into a deeper, even more universal love for God as expressed in my connection with Lindsey as another human soul. Images of me being a fountain of love radiating light from my heart and flooding her spirit. All the while I was telling her “I love you” it felt like the most honest and candid I had ever been in my life. We ended up kissing passionately. When Anne brought the exercise to a close Lindsey slowly pulled away from me, laughing as she wiped away her snot and tears. “My God,” she said, “Why haven't I got a fucking boyfriend who can say that to me!?”

There was some applause from the group before Anne said, “Wow, Mark… You look like you’ve done that before!” And of course I have, but to be honest never with that degree of intensity. In life we hold back from expressing things with that much crazy passion and ardour, and unless we’re bonkers we don’t spend 5 minutes saying the same thing over and over again even to those we love! This exercise permitted one's guard to be dropped and the backlog of a lifetime's emotion burst out of me and it didn't let up.

The extension exercise involved both of us being physically held back by the rest of the class as we struggled to get across the room to the other. I had Robert, Kenny and Ralf- all much bigger, younger and stronger than I trying to restrain me as we repeated our “I love yous” and “I’m scareds” and Lindsey was restrained by Anna and Elaine at the other end of the room. In the end nothing was going to hold either of us back from embracing again, and that is exactly what we eventually did once we'd managed to wrestle free.

All very luvvie and self-indulgent to an outsider I’m sure but what a tremendous exercise!

The reason I mention all of this is that it is this ‘level 11’ intensity that is required for my Titus. His emotions are experienced at increasingly potent levels as the action of the play progresses. Just as you think he has reached the depths of existential anguish and hellish torment there is still another level to go. It would be very easy to peak too early leaving me nowhere else to go; or the opposite- never really connecting with the authentic emotion at all. Yesterday’s exercise wasn’t just self-indulgence because there was an action associated with it which was 'to be believed by the other'. Titus’ journey strains credibility at times, and the challenge for me is to carry the audience along on that roller coaster of increasingly heightened grief and woe. It took yesterday’s exercise to make me realise that there is no point in me trying as a pacifist Quaker to play murderous hatred because what really lies behind Titus' martial persona is actually a wounded soul clinging onto a fierce and violent love for his emperor and state, for his nearest and dearest and his unshakeable devotion to the ideals of Honour and Justice. There is a deeply poignant and profound loving heart which is actually exquisitely tender and beautiful despite all outward appearances to the contrary. Titus may be old, pig-headed, hideously violent, battle-scarred and ugly on the outside, but he is ablaze with an intense fidelity to Love. He is simply limited in his means of expression in the Yang-dominated culture of the Roman army, slaying Goths for 40 years.

But what I communicated with such fervour and conviction yesterday evening to Lindsey- a feeling in my body, in my emotions and in my soul- is actually the same as what lies at the heart of Titus. He personifies a hugely amplified, unstoppable force of nature, a deluge of Divine Love that floods the Empire. Everybody feels its compelling power. It is a fearless love that hopefully increases an audience sense of aliveness because all it is about is giving, giving and still more GIVING, with no thought for the consequences; transmitted through each and every cell- through my eyes, my words, my feelings, my touch, an unadulterated and distilled presence- an incandescent furnace of energy and power capable of burning up and transmuting everything. This for me is the key to Titus' soul. It is absolutely counterintuitive to the traditional idea of him being the hate-filled, blood-lusting Avenger archetype. It is Nuclear Love. I’m pretty sure Peter Lamb, the director, will disagree with me- but just in case you happen to be reading this Peter I want for the next wee while to look into this in greater depth, and hopefully bring you round!

Having said that it’s still early days of course. Peter is still blocking the play and we’re all still struggling to get off-book. The interaction and the nuances of character relationships- particularly between myself, Lavinia, Marcus, Lucius, Tamora and Saturninus- are far from clear 19 days before opening night. It is still very much a work in progress, and I know I haven’t even begun to skim the surface. Others are much further on than I by all accounts. But by the end of this week we’ll have had the chance to run the whole thing and see what needs most attention. It would be foolish to hope for much at this stage; after all it’s been almost 3 weeks since I last rehearsed Act 1, and I can barely remember anything about it! No, my main focus in the next week or so has got to be remembering lines, cues and moves, although I would like to think I will be able to attend to what others are doing around me too, and maybe capture some of the flavour of Titus’ depth of feeling and passion. I long for this to be a very intense emotional experience for every member of the audience in performance. This will demand superhuman levels of emotional and physical stamina fromme, and an intense focus from the audience if that goal is to be attained, but nothing gets my juices going more as an actor than the carrot of impossible objectives! :-)

Sorry, but I've a Bee in My Bonnet

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”.

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.