Acting a Character
So, the Acting-Blog has moved to its new home, here as part of my Scottish studio’s new website. Swanky, I like what you’ve done with the place Coach: Well, thank you very much blog reader. I thought: New studio, new website, new home for the blog.
Today’s topic is an oldie, but an essential one. I rarely think about the subject of character these days to be honest, since character, characterisation, creating a character and all that, does not form a part of our acting lessons in Glasgow.
But recently, Catherine emailed me asking some more questions about character.
She asked: If you don’t believe in characters, what do you call the people the actors are playing?
It’s my opinion that the question reveals more than it asks. Catherine is asking whether I call characters – characters. But she asks what you call the people that the actors play.
Herein lies much of the confusion, a character is not a person, they are fiction entity, the representation of a person, but not a person at all. The audience must think of them as people, but as actors, we must not, we must learn how to create the illusion that they are people.
Character is a set of characteristics, things we do. Remember Aristotle says that character is habitual action, we are what we do habitually. Character is habitually stressing certain elements of ourself in front of the audience.The character is a set of recognisable habitual characteristics, we only know what they are by what they do. I have a whole chapter about this debunking the hokum around the Character Myth in my eBook Truth in Action.
I prefer the word ROLE instead. We all play roles in life, each one comes with its own set of behaviours. Parent, child, boss, teacher, we all make certain adjustments to play these roles, we accentuate, we augment, we repress or restrain certain aspects of our personality in order to fulfil these roles. Acting is precisely this, play the role we are given.
Catherine then asked:
I’m going to be playing Dunyasha from The Cherry Orchard. She’s younger than me, from a different country and from a different backround. I’ll be playing someone I’m not – is that not what a character is? Is this what you’re saying - That we can’t say things as someone else any different to how we would say it as ourselves? Am I basically playing myself but with those lines and a different accent? For my next show, I’m going to be playing a girl who’s mentally ill. As I’m not mentally ill, I don’t really know what its like to play a person who is so how would I go about being truthful in my representation of her?
You cannot be someone other than yourself. It’s simply impossible. Like it or not, no one has ever reached the mythical state of ‘being in character’. What you can do, is to play the role of Dunyasha, manipulating certain aspects of yourself to represent her.
You do not need to know what it’s like to be pre-revolutionary Russian gentry, you have no idea, no one does. What you can do is to understand what’s happening in the scene (we call this the LITERAL), find out what the character wants in the scene (WANT) and then to transform that fictional desire into an achievable real world action (TASK). When you pursue your TASK in the real world, working within the truth of the moment, working off your scene partners, the illusion of the character appears for the audience. It’s actually as simple as that. The more genuine you are, the more you reveal aspects of yourself to the audience. They see that as the deeper workings of the character. So acting isn’t so much putting on a mask, but taking one off.
You do not need to know anything about mental health problems to play that role. You need to understand what’s happening in the scene, find out what she wants and pursue something like it that’s achievable in the real world. Any elements of her mental health problems that are relevant to the scene are already in the scene.
This obsession with personal identification with aspects of the fictional character leads us not to truthful acting, but to quite the opposite, a self-consciousness that blocks us from really connecting with the other actors in a moment to moment way.
They told you that acting was about character, but that doesn’t make it true. I’m telling you it’s not. It’s about the truthful pursuit of an achievable goal, with certain conditions imposed by the given circumstances of the play, in relation to the other actors you are playing with on stage/screen.