The Happiest Little Town by Barbara Hannay

Author:Barbara Hannay [Hannay, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

It was a very different speech and drama lesson from Tilly’s previous experience. In Cairns, her teacher Mrs Jackson had mostly just given her instructions about how to deliver her lines. Stop fiddling. Big voice. Big eyes. Give me a better ‘t’ on latest. Now, we need a smug, smarty-pants face.

The first difference was that this teacher, Olivia, who said she would prefer not to be called Mrs Matthews, was really quite old. She wasn’t wrinkly, exactly, but her hair and her eyebrows were silvery white and she moved very carefully with the big boot thing on her foot.

So far, in this lesson, Olivia had not yet taken out the Next Stop Mars script, so she hadn’t paid any attention to the few lines Tilly had to deliver. Instead, she’d been talking about what went on in an actor’s head when they tried to be someone else. What was going on in their body?

‘The message the audience receives isn’t just about the words you’re saying, Tilly. It’s all about the behaviour underneath the scene.’

‘The way I move?’ asked Tilly.

‘The way you move. The way you stand still. The expression on your face. How you act in the gap between the words.’ Olivia smiled. ‘Silence on stage can be very powerful.’

Tilly nodded. ‘That’s when you have to show emotion?’

‘Among other things, yes.’

‘My teacher in Cairns told us to think about something in our own lives that made us feel a certain way.’

‘Yes, that’s called method acting.’ Olivia lifted an eyebrow. ‘Did it work for you?’

‘Sort of. I mean, it’s easy enough to think of something that makes me happy.’ Or at least it had been easy enough back when she and Zara were still great friends. ‘I’m not sure it would work now, though. I mean, if I’m supposed to be sad, I’d have to think about something really sad that’s happened to me. And then I’d start thinking about my mum – and I —’

Even just trying to explain this to Olivia made Tilly’s voice crack and her eyes sting. ‘I just couldn’t.’

‘No,’ Olivia agreed gently. ‘That would be very difficult. Too difficult, I’m sure.’ The woman’s face was a mirror of Tilly’s sadness now. Even her eyes had a teary sheen and Tilly supposed this was because she was a very good actor. After all, everyone had said she was, although Tilly couldn’t help wondering if Olivia was actually remembering something terribly sad that had happened in her own life.

Olivia even looked away for a moment and seemed to give herself a little shake, but when she turned back to Tilly, her smile still held a tremor of sadness. ‘For most of us, there are certain things we can’t afford to think about when we’re on stage.’

Tilly nodded, relieved that she and her teacher agreed about this.

‘The approach I prefer is slightly different,’ Olivia went on to say next. ‘It’s a technique I learned in the UK, where an actor decides on the character’s objective for the scene. In other words, we think about what the character wants to achieve.

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