‘Probably nothing is more fundamental indeed to theatre than the setting off of its particular space from the space of everyday life, so that a potential audience is aware that the material “set off” is to be regarded in a special way.’28
For the dramatist, the idea that there can ever be an immutable definition of what it is to write for a particular audience is a 28 ‘Indexical Space in the Theatre’ by Marvin Carlson ( ASSAPH Studies in the Theatre, Section C, No. 10; Faculty of Visual and Performing Arts, Tel Aviv University, 1994), p. 2.
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distraction from the convention-defined specifics of writing drama.
It is possible to argue that, in a sense, any potential audience is, or will always or inevitably be, inscribed within the text of the play.
The cluster of interests, approaches, source material and style of writing, which compose the resources and materials of the dramatist and then become part of the text, ‘speak’ to the audience. An enhanced consciousness of one’s sources is, inevitably, a subliminal sense of ‘audience’, though it is rarely, if ever, seen in this way. The dramatist has no more direct control over the audience than does a poet or a novelist and can therefore never really either predict the audience’s response or second guess it in the writing.
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4 The text from the other side: director
and performer
Director and performer approach the written text from points of view diametrically opposite to that of the dramatist. First, to state the obvious, they each receive a conceptually completed text, the result of a great deal of time and effort and thought. This does not apply in quite the same way to devised or workshop-written drama.
Nevertheless, the dramatist is never a mere scribe or tape recorder.
No matter how much material is generated in group processes, there are important moments of separation all the way through when the dramatist’s imaginative and conceptual skills take charge. While the dramatist is responsible for every voice and for the overarching shape (structure), the director’s responsibility is to the process of mediation between dramatic and performance text, and the performer’s responsibility is primarily to his/her own role, in the context of the drama as a whole.
There are parallels between theatre performers and musicians.
Each instrumentalist plays his/her own part, with relevant and varying degrees of knowledge of the overall piece. Each plays from written music, with rests where he/she is silent; occasionally there might be a tiny musical cue written in to signal where, in the ensemble piece, his/her contribution comes. The modern theatre performer has the entire script, but learns only his/her part. It is –
theoretically – possible for both musician and performer to learn only his/her own part, without regard to the rest of the work.
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Whether this produces better or worse performances is a matter for debate.
The director
The director, however, must know it all. One of the lesser clichés around is that the director, at his/her best, is there to realise the dramatist’s ‘vision’. Insofar as this applies to the director’s careful reading of, and thinking about, the text, clearly this has some resonance. But it is an unreliable cliché, since it suggests that there is something inherently mystical about the way a director might read through the text, as if the director were a mind reader, trying to second guess the inner thoughts of the dramatist. The director must be able to read, not the dramatist’s mind but what is on the page. Of course, there may be matters to clarify/discuss with the dramatist and changes to be made, but unless a director can enter the verbal (i.e., written) drama-on-the-page, the working relationship between dramatist and director is likely to be uncertain, if not difficult.
The director may confer with the dramatist, the two may have very good rapport and the dramatist may be content that the director has read his/her work and understands it well, but in the end the director must take the text and work it within the rehearsal and production process. The author here is clearly not Dead, but merely somewhere else. Unless, that is, she/he is acting in his/her own drama in performance, or even directing it. This tends to be a relatively rare event.
The director carries the most comprehensive aesthetic responsibility – whether as individual director in a production, or as the artistic director of a theatre, responsible for choosing and commissioning new writing. Just as schools of new playwriting develop because of the entrepreneurship and encouragement of directors, so do radical innovations in theories of acting. Edward Braun’s history
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of theatre directors makes this very clear: ‘Most of the directors in this book are acknowledged today as major forces in the development of the modern theatre and are identified with the various “traditions” they inaugurated.’1
The performer, acting and the text
In the previous chapter, outlining the remits of performance theory, there was one element only referred to in passing: the performer.
While most performance-based semiology has addressed the objects on the stage, Elam has offered a more precise, multi-factorial approach, in ‘the dialectic between the animate and the inanimate, or, better, between the subjective and the objective on stage. It is almost unavoidable, when thinking about dramatic representation, to draw a firm and automatic distinction between the active subject, embodied by the actor, and the objects to which he relates and which participate in the action through his agency.’2
Constantin Stanislavsky, actor and director, evolved what is generally considered to be the basis of modern, realistic stage acting.
His book, An Actor Prepares, first published in 1936, codified his approach and many of his formulations are now in familiar usage, encapsulating some of the basics of how to approach performance; terms such as units and objectives, emotion memory, the super-objective, are widely used in drama schools and in rehearsals.
Stanislavsky’s starting point was based on the principle that the physical and emotional were absolutely intertwined. He was convinced that muscular tension interfered with the performer’s ability to access and convey ‘emotion’, and physical and vocal
‘warming-up’ in rehearsal and before performances is now an assumed practices.
1 Braun, op. cit., p. 201.
2 Ibid., p. 165.
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Perhaps the most widely popularised legacy from Stanislavsky is the idea that the performer must draw from his/her own personal, actual and emotional memories, in order to ‘find’ emotional and psychological ‘truth’ to mould into the reality of the character she/he is playing. The concept of ‘emotion memory’ certainly suggests such a formulation, but the interest and importance of Stanislavsky’s work – his theory of performance, as it were – is much more than this.
Work on a play, he suggested, ‘begins with the use of if . . .’ which
‘acts as a lever to lift us out of the world of actuality into the realm of imagination’.3 This is already at a very fundamental remove from the hermetic world of the performer’s own experiences. This is followed by a grounding in ‘facts’: ‘Every invention of the actor’s imagination must be thoroughly worked out and solidly built on a basis of facts. It must be able to answer all the questions (when, where, why, how) . . .’4 All this evidence must first be drawn from the written text itself. In drama schools this commonly follows a painstaking process where students first comb the written dramatic text for factual answers to relevant questions. It is only after these have been found (or found not to be present) that more detailed emotional and psychological motivational expl
oration (i.e., invention) begins to take place.
Stanislavsky’s second basic principle lay in a carefully detailed structural analysis of the text, and positioning of the performer/
character within that analytical understanding. Segmental analysis of structural elements within scenes, through the concept of units and objectives, takes place within a grasp of the overall shape of the writing: ‘The part and the play must not remain in fragments.’5 Overall, there is a ‘super-objective’, which he suggested can be formulated relatively simply: ‘What is the core of the play 3 An Actor Prepares, translated by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (Methuen, 2006), pp.
54 and 46. First published in Britain in 1937.
4 Ibid., p. 70.
5 Ibid., p. 115.
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– the thing without which it cannot exist? . . . What is essential to it?’6
This integrationist approach, of binding together structure and performer is, in different ways, something which both director and performer must carry out: ‘In a play the whole stream of individual, minor objectives, all the imaginative thoughts and feelings and actions of an actor, should converge to carry out the super-objective of the plot. The common bond must be so strong that even the most insignificant detail, if it is not related to the super-objective, will stand out as superfluous or wrong.’7 Voice and text coach Cicely Berry has confirmed the importance of this structural analysis: ‘I think every play has what I call a centre line, and by that I mean the thought which expresses the bottom line of the play, and this centre line is in its way a symbol of the whole.’8
The individuated work of the performer, drawing on emotional memory and experience, is then applied to the internality of the performance. With an understanding of the ‘ through-going action and the super-objective . . .’9 and a sense of how each moment is part of the whole, the performer must have what is described as a ‘point of attention’, or a ‘circle of attention’, which, supremely interestingly, ‘must not be in the auditorium’ – that is, the focus of the performer’s work must be entirely on and within the stage/performance space.10 The ‘objectives’, as worked in rehearsal, must, therefore ‘be directed toward the other actors, and not towards the spectators’.11
We can see here how Brecht’s polemical attitude to the drama’s effects on an audience seems to be diametrically opposed to the idea of the ‘circle of attention’. However, Brecht’s own dramas ironically depend precisely on the power of performers to hold their own 6 Ibid., p. 116.
7 Ibid., p. 271.
8 Text in Action (Virgin, 2001), p. 254.
9 Stanislavsky, op. cit., p. 274.
10 Ibid., p. 75.
11 Ibid., p. 118.
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circle of attention onstage, against which to pitch those elements which seem (by contrast) to be addressed directly to the audience.
The fourth wall
The central paradox of the way performance ‘works’ takes us back to the concept of the fourth wall: ‘If actors really mean to hold the attention of a large audience they must make every effort to maintain an uninterrupted exchange of feelings, thoughts and actions among themselves.’12 While Stanislavsky is rightly credited with developing ‘realistic’ performances, which drew on performers’
‘personal’ experiences and related emotions, at the same time the super-objective of his ‘method’ (to borrow his own phrase) was to place such results at the service of the imaginative, the fictional, the dramatic ‘illusion’, as contained within the written text – an impersonal and shared goal – and then contained within the imaginary world onstage.
Returning to the fourth wall from the point of view of the director/performer enables a different focus on this invisible and exciting divider. Herbert Blau’s trenchant comment that all experiments in performance, from Brecht onwards, do not abolish the fourth wall, but merely vary the modes of interacting in relation to it, are reinforced from a different perspective. The realm of the imagination, into which the performer leaps as an act of faith (the if ) is extended into the constructed world of the play, which, paradoxical as it might sometimes seem, is predicated precisely on the shared illusion (the collusion) which is always there between performers and audience. Each side ‘pretends’ (from their own point of view) that the other is not aware of its presence; at the same time the presence of each is predicated on the presence of the other. Both participate in the ‘ if ’, the one by making it into its performed 12 Ibid., p. 197.
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illusion, the other by watching the prepared work, as if eaves-dropping, as if overlooking.
After Stanislavsky – new objectivism
More recent theatre practitioners, responding to both the benefits and the myths which constitute the legacies of Stanislavsky’s approach, have interestingly aimed to reintroduce what one might call an objectivist approach to performance and what happens on the stage. These are different ways of effecting a closer rapprochement with the fundamental fictionality of the onstage world. Declan Donnellan, challenging the supremacy of a totalist interiorising psychological and emotional approach, has asserted that the performer should always direct everything to a ‘target’: ‘The target is always specific . . . The target is always transforming . . . The target is always active . . .’13 Like Stanislavsky, however, he reinforces the ‘attention’ needed from the performer and directed to another performer onstage: ‘The target always exists outside, and at a measurable distance . . .’14
David Mamet, actor, playwright and director, has been even more down to earth and matter of fact, declaring that the ‘Stanislavsky
“Method” and the technique of the schools derived from it, is nonsense’.15 Provocatively, and usefully, he has asserted, ‘The actor is onstage to communicate the play to the audience. That is the beginning and the end of his and her job. To do so the actor needs a strong voice, superb diction, a supple, well-proportioned body, and rudimentary understanding of the play.’16
Mamet’s reaction to the mystique created by the idea that the character, the personality and personal experience of the performer 13 The Actor and the Target (Nick Hern Books, 2005), pp. 22, 23, 24.
14 Ibid., p. 20.
15 True and False (Vintage, 1999), p. 6. First published 1997.
16 Ibid., p. 9.
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are somehow welded together is directly informed by his experiences as dramatist and director: ‘When the actual courage of the actor is coupled with the lines of the playwright, the illusion of character is created. . . . There is no character. There are just lines on the page.’17 While not referring directly to the concept of the circle of attention onstage, Mamet has implied it in his assertion that the actor should be ‘outwardly directed . . . The more a person’s concentration is outward, the prematurely interesting that person becomes.’18
All these reinforce the imperative of the self-contained relative autonomy of performance, transmuted across the fourth wall. Both in the shared timescale of the performance space and time continuum, there is (whatever the internal chronology of the narrative) the immediacy of the moment of performance (live or recorded). The stress is on the immediacy of the here and now, the fleeting, constantly fleeting presentness of performance. As Keith Johnstone remarked in his book, Impro for Storytellers, ‘I tried to keep the students’ attention on what was actually happening, rather than on what had already happened or was about to.’19
Conclusions: performance and immediacy
Directors and performers are, at all times, aware of the immediacy, of the present-ness of the moment of performance, of an illusion of spontaneity, which m
ust be carefully prepared in rehearsal and re-created in every performance, or for every take in recorded drama.
As we shall see later, this consists of a distinctive approach to the representation of time, which is carried by the voice and body of the performer. It is via this medium that meanings are conveyed, however (and by whomever) they are then interpreted: as Raymond 17 Ibid., pp. 52 and 21.
18 Ibid., p. 95.
19 Faber, 1999, p. 155. First published 1994.
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Williams pointed out: ‘Every aspect of the performance is governed by the denotation-connotation dialectic etc.: the set, the actor’s body, his movements and speech determine and are determined by a constantly shifting network of primary and secondary meanings,’20
and Keir Elam developed this to remind us that in the Western performance tradition, the ‘apex of the hierarchy is occupied by the actor’.21
20 Writing in Society (Verso, 1991), p. 11.
21 Elam, op. cit., p. 17.
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5 The novel and the drama
As part of the preparation for, and exploration of, writing drama, a writerly awareness of the distinction between the novel and the drama as literary conventions is crucial. Some of this understanding can (and should) be gained from literature study and analysis.
However, this understanding needs to be experienced and ‘learned’
anew within the practice of writing itself. The student needs to know the distinction between the novel and the drama in moving from his/her imagination to the page, from the perspective of the praxis of writing – a combination of theory and practice. In turn, this understanding needs to be translated and infused into work in the classroom/seminar. Some of the distinctions direct us back to the so-called ‘problem’ of how to read (and, by extrapolation, how to write) the dramatic text.
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