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There’s a huge amount of pretentious nonsense spouted about producing great drama: the most vital thing you can do on stage is actually BE there – and I mean, really be there – the root of that old cliché, ‘presence.’

Why do you want to leap onstage? I always say to my students: what is it you think you have to offer? What can you do better than anyone else? Why should we look at you, particularly? These are important questions!

Intentionality – an oft-repeated word of mine – relates to the above: what do you intend: in each action, each word – you do have to mean something, intend something in order to arrest and earn an audience!

I think we often find ourselves watching actors act – which itself is quite diverting and tragic-comical, as they crank mechanically across the stage or screen, but we’re not getting anywhere near becoming involved in their characters – how can we, when they’re miles away from their character themselves?

Miscasting can sabotage what should be, artistically, a crucial project: – film adaptations of stunning books which should be honoured by pin-sharp casting have been ruined by the eternal need for the Hollywood machine to cast so-called stars. I feel a list is due…”Great Miscastings of Our Age.”

When you peruse the Spotlight shots of an outgoing drama school cohort, there to catch the agents’ eyes, there are six or seven rows of ‘matinee idol’ men and women, and, of course, they’re all good actors. There then follows about four shots of the plainer looking character actors: and in my experience, they tend to be the truly outstanding all-round performers…a shot across the bows of all aspiring actors.

I hate corpsing – my immediate response is: go back to the dressing-up box.

So many actors do belong in the dressing-up box – quite big stars are still metaphorically trailing about in Mum and Dad’s over-sized patent leathers, chiffon evening wear and moth-eaten feather boa’s.

When I see a famous name do a witless telly ad, I think of the conservatory its paying for, and almost understand. Why are they not aware though, that such self-pimping can be fatal to a otherwise carefully constructed image?

For the most part, we role-play through every second of our lives, we just narrow down the parts we play into a few comfortable – and hopefully fairly honest guises – that we tend to reprise until we die. Unlike the rest of us, actors put together a whole library of characters, some of which they can actually make a success of, but, often, they lose sight of what anchored them to what is loosely called ‘self’ – put concisely, it’s dangerous to be able to smile to order.

Actors all have nervous ticks on stage but they can’t tell you what they are and don’t really believe they have them until they’re filmed in the act.

Narcissism is never beautiful.

The all-time worst trait onstage is self-indulgence – it is an overt narcissism in which the actor is offering himself to the audience as some kind of supreme and sickly delicacy: in reality, he is not fit for human consumption and should be ignored to death, (or sent back to the chef).

I’m tiring of some of the extreme understatement we see in some screen acting. You CAN do lots of too little. Pure self-indulgence, once again. The worst offender was Tilda Swinton in Derek’s Jarman’s 1989 “War Requiem” – she was asked to cry on screen for about ten minutes – and, horrendously, duly
did.

Lee Strasberg, worshipped from near and far with some good reason, nevertheless took a lot of actors too far psychologically and humiliated them in the process: humiliation is mistakenly thought to be a prerequisite of forcing actors to bare their souls and prepare them, in the process, for the horrors of multiple rejections in the ice-cold wast-waters of show business. But the process is actually a massive act of egotism on the part of the practitioner, in this case, Mr Strasberg, in assuming that the soul so bared will be capable of any reconstructive or creative energy and that it will not merely stand as a piece of bomb-damaged architecture, incapable of sheltering the creative soul within. And it has to be said, that it is sado-masochistic on the part of the actor – I’m thinking here of a vilely exploitative rehearsal scene between Strasberg and Ellen Burstyn. There are plenty of examples of this kind of humiliation – and they are a type of psychological pornography.

If the spelling wasn’t so vulnerable to misprints, I’d start up ‘The No Cant School of Drama.’

Posted in Acting Advice