Words Into Action

by William Gaskill

  When I start preparing a production I always work from the text outwards. What is in the text is essential to the performance of the play. I think I always understood this, but seeing the Berliner Ensemble, and then working with George Devine at the Royal Court and particularly with Jocelyn Herbert, the designer, made it an absolute basis. Jocelyn was remarkable; she was the creator and guardian of the Royal Court style. Her whole career was centred in the work and purpose of that theatre. She was as equally at home with Brecht as she was with Beckett, whose chosen designer she became. Writers who knew little of the stage, but made huge demands on it, set her tasks for which she would always find the answer. Wesker’s The Kitchen, with its cast of thirty kitchen staff, requires an entire kitchen with various stations for the different chefs, all of which had to be in the sight lines of the Royal Court’s narrow stage. The first production was on a Sunday night and had no budget. The chef’s stations were created with tea chests, covered in black material and arranged in a projecting angled form. The stage was stripped bare to the back wall. Andy Phillips, the lighting designer, hung his lamps over the set in exactly the same configuration as the onstage structure, and so created an individual style. When it was peopled by the waiters and the chefs in frenzied action it was thrilling—and beautiful.

  The style that evolved was never minimalism for its own sake, bleak and without atmosphere. Jocelyn would find the beauty in the simplest things just as Helene Weigel had done with her props. Her designs for my production of Brecht’s first play, Baal, were breathtaking: over twenty different locations, each one suggested by the barest means but created with loving care. (‘Red willows hanging down’ was one of them.) Many of her productions, such as Storey’s The Changing Room and Wesker’s trilogy, needed detailed naturalism, but somehow she found the poetic element in realism just as she would find realism in poetry. The combination of writer/director/designer was of a unique quality. The imagining and filling of the stage space was shared between Storey/Anderson/Herbert and Wesker/Dexter/Herbert to make a series of unforgettable pieces of ensemble work. Most plays can be done perfectly adequately without scenery, though not without costume or props. A good dramatist will somehow know the potential of the physical life of his or her play without necessarily being able to describe it. Some writers—Alan Ayckbourn is a supreme example—know the theatre so well professionally that they have an exact idea of how the play will be on stage. But all writers want their words and actions to be unimpeded by the visual presentation.

  7

  Action for the Actor

  There is an acting method called ‘actioning’ which is used and described by Mike Alfreds and Max Stafford-Clark, among others. During a close reading of the play, usually taking several days, the director works through the text with the actors. The actor has to describe aloud each line of his or her part as an action with a transitive verb. He or she announces the action in the first person—‘I cajole’, ‘I implore’, ‘I reproach’—and then says the line to demonstrate the action he has described. The method has many virtues. It prevents the actor living inside himself in a search for character, it produces an outgoing energy towards the other actors, and it makes for a variety of expression and colour. It is used in conjunction with a statement of an objective for the whole scene as analysed by Stanislavsky.

  Stanislavsky in his theory uses the word ‘objective’ to describe the character’s search, the need that drives him or her to action. An objective may be expressed in a single line but it is more likely to develop over several lines, a whole speech, a section of a scene or the entire scene. It may well not go forward in a straight line. The exploration of the objective gives you a ‘through-line’, a dynamic, which makes you feel free to explore the forward development of the action. The objective may change or be modified or blocked by the situation or the objectives of the other characters. (Stanislavsky thought the objectives were part of a larger movement he called the ‘super-objective’, though searching for this can be risky and misleading.) Actioning leads one into thinking of each line as a completed unit to be replaced by the next. And so in an intellectual sense it is. But an actor may feel his action as an unbroken movement moving through many lines of text. Making an action of each line tends to create a mechanical progression rather like those drawings where you join up numbered dots to reveal the hidden picture. There are no curves or bends; everything proceeds in straight lines. Most of all, it doesn’t probe the intention of the action, it only describes the activity itself. With an objective, the energy goes beyond the end of the line and becomes part of the flow of the play. It is the identification with the intention, according to Stanislavsky, which gives the actor energy and truth.

  Actioning is more valuable in the dialogue of a contemporary play than in a classic. It works least well in soliloquies. Unless you accept the gung-ho idea of talking directly to the audience, most soliloquies have no objects of a transitive verb. The method is inadequate to describe the movement of meditation or deliberation that is so essential to Shakespeare. He is concerned with the character’s shift between his relation to the outside world and his communication with himself in response to that world. These shifts are not a conscious drive but more a response to a fluid situation. The best actors arrive at the modulation in a long speech by the ear in response to the text. By ‘ear’ I do not mean an awareness of the beauty of sound but an intuitive response to the emotional and intellectual moods expressed by the verbal shifts in the writing. The actor feels the changes and charts his or her way through it. This sounds vague and woolly compared to the methodical listing of actions, but the attempts I have seen to apply the actioning method to Hamlet’s soliloquies destroyed the flow of the speech. The poetry had gone.

  The shift between the inner and outer world is equally apparent in scenes of dialogue. In the second scene of Twelfth Night Viola has been shipwrecked. She enters the scene with the sailors who have rescued her.

  VIOLA. What country, friends, is this?

  CAPTAIN. This is Illyria, lady.

  VIOLA. And what should I do in Illyria?

  My brother he is in Elysium.

  Perchance he is not drowned. What think you sailors?

  CAPTAIN. It is perchance that you yourself were saved.

  VIOLA. O, my poor brother!—and so perchance may he be.

  (Twelfth Night 1.2)

  Viola’s opening question to the sailors is a direct outward action. The second is reflective to herself, and is triggered by the name ‘Illyria’. Viola responds to the name to make a pun in an emotional situation, a typical Shakespearean device. The ear is listening to the words before the emotion forms itself. The in/out movement is like the water in which her brother may or may not be drowned. Viola surfaces to ask another direct question and again the reply sends her back into herself; then she pulls herself out of the water and back into the play. I suggest that this process is a poetic one not easily described as conscious actions.

  You can see it as the movement between transmitting and receiving. Actors often tend to see their part as a series of transmitting actions: nothing is received; there are no reactions. Playing the reaction to a line, a thought or a feeling is much more difficult for most actors than the transmitting. It is always easier for an actor to shout at his partner; he feels like he has done something, got somewhere, the blood runs through him, he goes red in the face: surely he is acting? As I say to my actors ten times a day: ‘Anger is the easiest emotion to express. Find something else.’ Great acting in the past was built round the moments of receiving and were usually silent—Irving hearing the bells which accuse him of his murder, Duse blushing when listening to a former lover, Garrick’s start when he sees the Ghost of Hamlet’s father. These were as consciously prepared as any action.

  I am not an actor. I can only guess at how the process works. But I am certain of one thing: when you prepare your performance you don’t decide how you will say each line. It is in the moment before you say the line, or m
ore often a sequence of lines, that the acting happens. In this I am at one with the actioneers. In the moment the first word is said the direction and mood of a speech is already there, and moving. That moment cannot be expressed as a bare statement of a transitive verb and once the impulse, the action, if you like, is released it does not need more verbs to keep it alive. It has its own life and momentum.

  Ken Tynan, in a moment of rare insight, described John Gielgud’s approach to speaking in the words of Alexander Pope:

  The spider’s touch, so exquisitely fine!

  Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.

  (An Essay on Man)

  The actor creates an unbroken flow, even when there may be violent changes of mood or thought. The preparation may be a conscious focus on the events leading up to the moment in time—the given circumstances, the immediate pressure on the character—but then the energy is released. A long preparation, nothing, and then the action. An athlete on the starting blocks is not thinking ‘I must win this race. I must be faster than the others.’ He is not thinking anything and then he runs. I do not believe that if I am playing Hamlet and waiting for the King and the court to leave at the end of the second scene, that it helps to think ‘I share with the audience my desire to be water,’ or any other verbalisation you would care to offer of Hamlet’s feeling at that particular moment.

  Most of the chapters in this book are about getting to understand how the words of a play work, how they are used by the writer and how, therefore, they are useful to the actor. I do not claim to know how to act or how to teach anyone else to act. All methods are inadequate—Stanislavsky, Laban, Alexander, Suzuki. They offer partial insights but cannot give the actor his craft. Only experience will do that.

  8

  Action and Intention

  CLOWN. For here lies the point: if I drown myself wittingly, it argues an act, and an act hath three branches; it is, to act, to do, and to perform.

  (Hamlet 5.1)

  The Clown/Gravedigger is trying to establish the truth about Ophelia’s suicide. Did she mean to drown herself? Was she aware of her own actions?

  CLOWN. Give me leave. Here lies the water—good. Here stands the man—good. If the man go to the water and drown himself, it is, will he nill he, he goes; mark you that. But if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself. Argal, he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life.

  Can an action be true without understanding the intention of the character? Can you understand any action without knowing where it is going? Or where it is coming from? In the theatre the latter less than the former perhaps. We know that Iago means to destroy Othello. The action of the play is driven by his need to accomplish that destruction. We are never completely satisfied by the reasons he gives: that he has been passed over for the lieutenantship in favour of Cassio, or that Othello may have slept with his wife, which seems very unlikely. Coleridge famously called it ‘motiveless malignity’. The psychoanalysts tell us that Iago has an unconscious homosexual passion for Othello, but though an actor can colour his performance to convey this, the focus of the actor must be on the ‘What’ rather than the ‘Why’. For the audience the focus, the excitement, is on ‘What is happening? How does he do it?’ There must be a ‘Why’ to drive Iago to destroy Othello with such ruthlessness, but in the theatre we don’t worry too much about it. Drama exists in the action that lies between the motivation of the past and the achievement of the future.

  Can we detach action from motivation? Dr Johnson said:

  Moral good depends on the motive from which we act. If I fling half a crown at a beggar with the intention to break his head, and he picks it up and buys victuals with it, the physical effect is good; but with respect to me, the action is very wrong. In the same way, religious services, if not performed with an intention to please God, avail us nothing.

  Johnson is not concerned with the character of the action, only its moral worth. In the theatre is the moral evaluation our prime concern? The actor is concerned with what he does. If an actor tried to demonstrate Johnson’s example, the motivation would change the nature of the action. Throwing a coin to break the beggar’s head is a different action from throwing it to feed him. If we imagine a third possibility—for example, I throw the coin to win admiration for my charity—we see that the action could be varied again. An actor could make this clear in performance. Acting is often concerned with just such refinements. The actor’s search is how to define exactly the action itself, not to alter the emotional state. The Method people would disagree, arguing that the exact emotional state will produce the right action. I feel the actor must always be, to some extent, detached from his action.

  The pressures of a situation on a character in Shakespeare could not, in themselves, produce the language he speaks. Imagine a Method preparation for Macbeth hearing of his wife’s death. The director suggests the given circumstances: ‘Your castle is surrounded by your own people, who hate you, and the English forces; you have no chance of escape; the wife who helped you seize the crown and on whom you were dependent but from whom you are estranged has gone mad. You hear a cry of women offstage. Someone tells you the Queen is dead. What do you say?’ No actor in an improvisation is going to come up with ‘She should have died hereafter, There would have been a time for such a word.’ The words are given you by the writer. He has imagined something he wants the character to say, which may or may not be something he, the writer, wants to say. The actor has to find an attitude in which those words might be said. To do so he may have to get rid of the ego, the ‘I’, beloved of Stanislavsky, always difficult for the actor. He cannot force an interpretation on the speech.

  An interesting example of action and intention occurred during my work on The Caucasian Chalk Circle (RSC, 1962). I begged a cigarette (it was in the days when we all smoked) from one of the actors and then asked the cast for descriptions of my action. All the answers given were concerned with the psychology of the individual, ‘The actor is sucking up to you’, etc. I pointed out that though this may have been an element, what happened in fact was an unremarkable social transaction based on the then low cost of the cigarette and not on our individual psychology. I used this as a starting point for analysing actions from the point of view of social and economic relationships in the play. Many years later, working on David Hare’s Fanshen (Joint Stock, 1975), a play about the socialising of a group of peasants in a Chinese village, we took the analysis further—to the political outcome of the action. Not what the action was but what effect it had and what we, as actors, wanted to show by it.

  When the Stanislavsky Method was adopted in America, actors tended to stress the Freudian elements, to analyse motivation rather than the outcome, political or otherwise. This self-analysis, encouraged by the therapist/teacher and the therapist/director, developed the enormous egos of the Method actors, and contributed to their often very striking performances. It was usually based on Emotion Memory, a very limited part of the original Stanislavsky teaching. A more external actor like Olivier also splashed in the Freudian puddle in the 1930s. Under the influence of Tyrone Guthrie, the director, and Ernest Jones, the leading British Freudian of the time, he played Iago as sexually in love with Othello (without telling the Othello, Ralph Richardson), and his Hamlet had an Oedipus complex. Hamlet delays because he would like to have killed his father and made love to his mother. You see some traces of this in the film Olivier directed in 1948, with himself as Hamlet. The action takes place in a phallic tower at the top of which Hamlet meets the Ghost, says ‘To be or not to be’, and to which he is carried by the four soldiers at the end. But, for Olivier, a psychoanalytical approach was probably as external as, for instance, the dyed hair or false nose or Jewish accent which he adopted before he could start work on any part. He was a man of action; the future was always more important than the past; and this gave his performances their ruthless dynamic quality. He could create a sudden movement without any apparent prepara
tion, as when he grabbed Tyrrell’s neck in the crook of his arm in Richard III and orders the murder of the two princes: ‘Go, by this token.’ It may have been a trick but it was also his absorption in the purity of action. It was the concentration of the athlete or the gymnast.

  When he came to play Othello himself in 1964 he approached the part, as he always did, from the point of view of a man of action. He was remarkable in much of it, but there was a basic premise that he could never quite accept: that Othello is essentially passive to the actions of Iago and that the glory of the part is the richness of his emotional poetry in response to them. When he came to ‘O now for ever Farewell the tranquil mind. Farewell content. Farewell the plumèd troops and the big wars That make ambition virtue. O farewell’, he drove the speech to a kind of hysterical climax, clapping his hands like a sportsman on ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone’, driving the character to some future development, rather than bidding farewell to the past. Olivier in his own life cared little for the past; he was not nostalgic (unlike his rival Gielgud, who loved anecdotes about old actors), and he could not identify with a speech built on regret. Nor could we feel pity for the character in the situation. It needed the sad organ tones of Paul Robeson.

  When you look at Shakespeare’s tragic heroes most of them are responding to circumstances rather than creating them. Like the protagonists in Greek tragedy they delude themselves by thinking they are in charge of their destiny. True, Lear sets in motion the action which drives the rest of the play, but its greatness is in his moments of realisation. Only Coriolanus, the man of pure action, has no soliloquies and goes on no journey of self-awareness.

  We look at action from the past and from the future. We ask, ‘Why do you do this?’—either meaning, ‘What in your past makes you do this now?’ or ‘What result do you hope to achieve in the future?’ The first will tend to a psychoanalytic view of character, the second to a utilitarian approach. When Richard III woos Lady Anne what practical purpose does it serve for the future? To test his powers to manipulate others? There is no need in the narrative for him to marry Lady Anne; the play has not moved forward one inch by the end of it, but it’s a great scene, the audience love being in on the villainy, and no one would ever dream of cutting it. It has a pure energy like the energy of clowns in a circus. He does it because he enjoys doing it. In the soliloquy at the end of Henry VI, Part 3, some of which Olivier interpolated into the first soliloquy of Richard III, Gloucester analyses the reason for his actions: ‘Because I am so malformed I have no alternative outlet for my energy.’ But it is commented on from the outside, not experienced as a mental torment and so Olivier played it.