Acting and Magic

I’ve written a few times on the similarity between the actor and magician in how they should relate to their job. The magician is highly skilled and performs for the audience’s delight, but doesn’t ever believe they’re making real magic – like a wizard. The actor should be the same, highly skilled, performs to delight an audience and doesn’t need to believe they are actually someone else to do their job.

But that’s not the topic for today. This afternoon, I went to see my friend Paul Wilson give a performance at the Edinburgh Magic Festival. I visited the Festival last year, to introduce the Mamet film House of Games with Paul and this year I wanted to see the man himself perform his trade. Many of you will know Paul from the television show The Real Hustle, but you might not know that Paul is a world-renown magician and sleight of hand expert.

Whenever I’m with Paul, it always reminds me of the similarity between the actor and the magician. Paul confessed over sushi that his first performance of the day (which I did not see) had experienced some turbulence and that he’d had to think quickly on his feet to divert any real problems from occurring. Still, being a professional, with long years under his belt, he had given a great performance and the audience had gone home none the wiser.

This reminded me of the propensity of the moment to overwhelm and distract us. Even when we’ve done something a hundred times before, we can really have moments when a snag occurs and we have to deal with it. It’s just as true for the actor that we can lose our way during the performance and have to work very hard to get it back on track.

The thing is that you cannot really prepare for these moments, you need to maintain your confidence and ride them out. Accept them, don’t fight them, and adjust your behaviour according to the moment, because the audience are happily there to be fooled, they work in complicity with you if you allow them to and if they didn’t see the show before, they won’t see anything happening.

The problem is that our rehearsal process is one of repetition (antithetical to the nature of the illusion of immediacy that we attempt to create) and so when things don’t go according to plan, we are understandably freaked out. However, if you rehearse with uncertainty, if you allow things to change (within reason) from moment to moment, then you start to get used to dealing with the moment as it happens.

Of course, years of experience helps us deal with problems. There are no techniques for preparing for these things, a proper grounding in Improv will help a great deal for you to learn to embrace the ever changing moment, but that’s only good for those that are willing to face the fear of the terrifying unknown. Any number of exercises and games cannot really help with this unknown, because the unknown moment doesn’t ever come in the shape we predict. Improvising the lines isn’t the answer, so improv itself doesn’t help with that.

The unpredictable moment, as an actor, you have to learn to see it as an opportunity to give your performance something it never had before. It’s a blessing and not a curse, it’ just hard to see it like that when you’re so used to controlling the outcome of every moment.