Being an Actor, Revised and Expanded Edition by Simon Callow

Author:Simon Callow [Callow, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2007-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

Rehearsal 5

When the wallowing ends, and you emerge from the swamp of sensation, you go into Action. From now on, every moment of the play must become active: you must always be doing something to another character – or yourself, if you’re alone – and you must find a million ways of doing it; a million characteristic ways, that is. This is where real virtuosity in acting lies. Having challenged your inner life to the utmost in the swamp-period, you now challenge your physical and mental capacities to the utmost. At first you feel laboured as each variation follows the other with a terrible grinding of gears. You work unceasingly for the ripple of impulses which will finally take over by themselves.

There are a number of distinct phases in the rehearsal which introduce new elements into the work. First is the runthrough. This may occur, depending on directorial inclination, early or late. Either way, it’s a shock to the system. What has been slowly assembled is now placed on a kind of moving belt which leaves you gasping for breath. Nine tenths of your painstaking work seems somehow to have evaporated. Your confidence in your capacity to totter across the room is shattered, and it’s back to all fours. At the same time, however, you have learned many valuable things: a sense of the overall shape of the play, what variations must be introduced, what areas of the role are opaque and which work. For a long time, runthroughs will be like those early aviators running along the ground with their wings, taking off for a minute and a half and then crashing to the ground in flames. The aviators – if they didn’t die, that is – would I’m sure say that it was all worth it for those airborne minutes, that by examining them one would surely find the secret of sustained flight. So it is with the play. Curiously, many things which appear not to work at all fall into place once a degree of speed has been attained. My image for this with Amadeus was a spinning top which doesn’t hum until it reaches a particular speed.

Another runthrough, which is obligatory, is the one for the technicians – the lighting designer, the sound man, probably the press officer and sundry others. This runthrough has a suicidal effect on all the participants. Experience has taught you to try to ignore it, but the dead silence, the apparently appalled expressions, sometimes the sleep and usually the chain-smoking of the little audience have one reaching for the cyanide before it’s over. The general feeling is of being on trial for great crimes against humanity. I call these Nuremberg runthroughs.

Each one though, even the Nuremberg, tells you a great deal. The play is dismantled and put back together again – pipes are unblocked, the energy flow from thought to thought, impulse to impulse, is released. The play is closely examined for narrative clarity, precision of intention and rightness of gesture. If character is at fault, there is grave cause for anxiety.

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