So You Want to Be an Actor? by Timothy West

Author:Timothy West
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nick Hern Books

DIRECTORS

Directors come from all quarters: there are writers who want to interpret their own work, academics who want to lift the play from page to stage, there are actors-turned-directors, teachers-turned-directors, training-school graduates, and, of course, natural directors.

In the course of their professional lives, actors may come in contact with several hundred different directors, few of whom, however, will have seen any of their own fellows at work. So they tend to do things in their chosen way, whilst the actor gets used to adapting to the different methods of one director after another.

I worked once with an American director who, although he was very brilliant and ultimately achieved an excellent production, used a vocabulary in rehearsal that struck some of us as pretentious, baffling and impractical. Such instructions as ‘You two should have a focus on that line’, we would learn to translate as meaning that we might at that point exchange a glance. ‘We need to create a physical re-orientation,’ he would decide, which provoked a terse response, ‘You mean you want me to move?’ We erected reactionary barriers because as actors we are wary of any sort of directorial approach that seems to threaten our fragile security. Improvisation, role-swapping and games of various kinds all have occasional use in rehearsal, but an intelligent director will be reluctant to introduce such devices until he or she has earned the full confidence of the cast.

Equally of course, it’s up to the actors to be generous and not to withhold that confidence. Directors can be just as thin-skinned as actors, we can all benefit by learning new methods, and the essential thing is to feel that everybody is working towards the same end. The director’s task is to recognise and to synthesise the various qualities and energies offered by each member of the cast, and to do so in a spirit of harmony. People sometimes ask, ’What happens if you find you’re in serious disagreement with a director?’ In my experience, it’s hardly ever happened. The autocratic days of Erich von Stroheim and Basil Dean are long gone, but you may occasionally come across someone who believes that their own directorial imprint on the play is far more important than the play itself. If you know you’re going to be fundamentally in opposition to a director’s attitude even before you start, then you shouldn’t do the play. Otherwise, try hard to make things work for you the director’s way before confessing that you’re defeated.

I need to be looked after in rehearsal; encouraged, challenged, pushed; and essentially to be made to feel that I can play the part. I don’t care how rigorous or unconventional the method of rehearsal; as long as I remain convinced of the director’s belief in me, I’m happy.

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