For The Audience

One aspect of the actor’s job that they spend little time considering is their relationship to ‘the audience.’ Of course, there is no such thing as ‘the audience’, there is ‘an audience’ wherever there is a performance/screening of your work, but ‘the audience’ is how we refer to them in general, so I’ll stick to that name for now.

We must learn to make a little room for the audience in all of our performances. In the theatre, we make a physical space at one end of the room for them, we call it the auditorium or ‘hearing place’.

But more than just a physical space, we must make room for them in our actual performance, and this is something we rarely do.

An actor’s performance is not an attempt to paint the whole picture, but to show sketches of something that the audience can use their imagination to fill in. That’s the beauty of a theatrical performance, you show a big black empty space and say THAT’S the field of Agincourt, and the audience accept it as true. They want to, they are willing to, and the same is with your performance.

But since our early experiments in school with performing, we have been taught incorrectly to paint the picture for the audience. When you were ‘Sun’, you had to have a big smile on your face, paint your face yellow, and use your fingers to represent Sun’s rays. Since then you know you don’t need to go quite to those lengths, but if you watch the face of the average performer, you will see all feelings and thoughts spelt out for the audience. Even from a still photograph from the show, you can tell which actors were letting the audience in, and which actors were spelling it all out.

I’m not saying that you should give a dead pan performance, any feelings or emotions that arise from taking truthful action will inevitably create some real feelings and real emotion which will leak to the surface. But that’s not to ‘help’ the audience.

The worse thing an actor can do is presume that the audience need help with the meaning of the words or what the character might be feeling. They are smarter than us, and there’s more of them. They leap ahead of us and get bored very easily.

When we play, we play simply, leaving room for the audience to fill in the detail. When you work this way, you create a vacuum and the audience rushes in.

Bruno Bettelheim in the The Uses of Enchantment writes “the more you leave out, the more we see ourselves in the picture, the more we project our own thoughts onto it.”

When the actor leaves room for the audience in their performance, they let the audience in, they share in the performance, investing it with personal significance for themselves and boosting your performance to levels you could never achieve on your own. When the actor leaves no room for the audience, they stand outside the performance, and they praise you for your marvellous performance, but they could never be truly moved by the experience, as you never let them share it with you.

Be brave, let the audience in, they are not the enemy, they are a complicit friend.