WEEK FOUR IN THE ACTORS' STUDIO

“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.” We walked into the studio this week to encounter this quote written in large letters of A3 pieces of paper lying across the floor. It’s Peter Brook (of course! I knew that! Duh!), that wizened little white-haired grand-daddy elf of avante garde theatre. The opening lines of his book, yes, you guessed it, ‘The Empty Space’. We were left to discuss and then create a short improvisation inspired by it. Simple. AAAGGGHHHH. Despite being a trainee actor, improvisation is still as appealing to me as karaoke i.e. only after 2 bottles of wine.

I ended up in the slackers/losers group, a bunch of slightly idle misfits or good humour but generally washiness about them: somewhere I naturally fit whilst nursing vino in the local but am very against when in this kind of scenario. Mainly because at drama school, the torture of ‘group work’ ends in the horror of performing your ‘piece’ (although I prefer the word skit) in front of the rest of the class. So, it’s actually better, if you’re a slacker like me with few ideas and not the wit to carry them out, to get in a group with the strident Euro-trash and yanks or other keenos who will, at least get something done that the director will approve of. You can just go along with the ride. But what a painful ride that can be. It’s a kind of trade off: delayed grimness of the performance versus periodic grimness of being ordered around by a peer-know-it-all. Anyway, I’m sure you get the picture. Group dynamics, analysed for years by the sociologists in a nutshell: suck it up and survive or sit on your fat ass and suffer at the show down.

So, this time I got the slackers. We sat nonchalantly, some chewing gum (expressly forbidden by His Holiness the Latvian Director) mulling over the ‘empty space’ idea, of course not reaslising the irony that our so-called discussion was revealing just that that existed between our ears. Ah, had we but world enough and time, this laziness lady, were no crime. But, we didn’t have time. We sat and chewed it over, listening to the strident voices across the studio: ‘I mean, no space is really empty is it? That’s just imperialist colonialist prejudice. What the explorers found in the (fingers up for rabbit-ear scare quotes) new world, they thought was an empty space but it wasn’t ….:” Blah blah.

Fuck. Only 20 minutes left till show down. Others were rehearsing. We were still a veritable empty space itself. His Holiness looking on in unexpectant horror. In the end this dozer guy called Bill, who looks like he’s spent most of his time on a surf board stood up and did a monologue saying ‘you’re not really here, this space is empty’ whilst pointing at us with a fearful expression. It looked entirely like he was on drugs. He probably was/is. The others did some fairly impressive stuff given we had 50 minutes to prepare it. I’m beginning to think these idiots are smarter than they look. His Holiness then introduced us to Peter Brook’s idea of The Deadly Theatre. Say no more. He couldn’t even bear to look at us. I cringed so physically I’m surprised I didn’t flatten myself and crawl out under the door. New resolution: suck it up and survive.

WEEK THREE IN THE ACTORS' STUDIO

I’ve been given on hundred lines and a seriously withering look by our fearsome Latvian acting teacher. I’m in the dramatic dog house. Despite being sober as a judge this week (detoxing after last weeks’ Oliver Reedian excesses), I’ve managed to offend. Apparently Stanislavski’s ‘system’ is not the same as ‘method acting’. Oh what a novice I am. What a fool! There was a sharp intake of breath (particularly from the yanks in the group) when, in discussion, I conflated the two. Method acting is something of a dirty word so it turns out. I felt like I’d just surmised that there wasn’t much difference between Jesus and Mohammed to a bunch of fundamentalists (of either stripe).

These people are remarkably dogmatic given that Stan himself reportedly told an actor who’d taken many notes during endless rehearsals with him to burn them all and that each actor should keep reinventing himself. And they are bizarrely exacting given every teacher we have seems to say something contrary about him. ‘His ‘system’ is a technique-less technique’. ‘It’s complex but simple’. ‘It’s all about the body but you shouldn’t try and embody someone else’ but then again ‘you should deeply analyse your character’s emotions and motivations’. ‘It’s all about acting ‘as if’’, I can only conclude: ‘everything is acting, but there’s good acting and bad acting’. It’s about the most confusing method (!) of teaching I’ve ever been subject to.

Given the evangelism of those who write and talk about him I can’t help wondering if he wasn’t just a rather grand and daringly charismatic man who charmed/scared people into doing what he wanted? Just a good director? I might not propose that view quite yet in the seminars …

I keep having flashes of Ian McKellan in ‘Extras’ when describing to Ricky Gervaise his role as Gandalf: ‘How do I act so well? I pretend to be the person I am portraying in the film or play …. You are aware that I am not a wizard … I thought what it might be like to be a wizard and then acted like that on the day …. You are pretending, and that is acting”. Genius. And he got knighted. Perhaps I should stop trying to act and start pretending.

The remaining question of the week is what is Juliette Binoche doing trying to dance with Akram Khan at the National Theatre? Akram, Akram, get a grip on yourself! That and her mortifyingly bad charcoal portraits of friends and family emblazoned across the foyer in the BFI, and the retrospective of all her films at the BFI. What a south-bank-ego-fest. Embarrassing. At least this is something that we all managed to bond on, after a class trip to see her loveliness herself plieing across the stage (well, peeing and fighting is more accurate). Of course we’re not jealous of her stellar acting career, it’s just, stick to what you’re good at darling. Meeooow.