The Beauty of Truth
I love watching performance. There’s something magical that I’m drawn to in the actor’s art of storytelling. But most of the time, I confess, what I see is little short of rubbish. Sometimes the play is intellectual at the cost of the story, sometimes the ideas thrust upon the actors by the director are faulty and give the performance a pretentious or unnecessary edge which spoils what you see. And sometimes, the acting is no good. Correction, most of the time, the acting is no good.
What do I mean by ‘no good?’ Well, I mean that it was artificial, mechanical, empty, disconnected and most of all, it was bullshit. I use that as a technical term, bullshit is when I can sense the actor’s are lying to me. Something in their performance is not truthful, it is fraudulent and it stinks of artifice and even worse, the vilest sin of PRETEND.
I crave truthful performance. It is one of the most beautiful things that one can see. It often goes unnoticed because it is not showy. It is not marked by a sense of ‘performing’ or ‘acting’, it is subtle, unadulterated and most of all truthful.
Many acting techniques falsely believe that truth can be achieved through faith. If you just believe in the circumstances of the character enough, you’ll create truthful acting. That is pure nonsense. You are already truthful. The art of the actor, is NOT to work hard enough to create truth, it is instead, to reveal truth, the real whole truth of the moment to the audience. This is an act of courage and bravery that many actors find very difficult.
I was recently watching a rehearsal for a friend’s show at the Edinburgh Festival this year. I watched the performance and the actors all gave good ‘performances’, but that’s what they were ‘performances’ – there was not a scrap of truth involved. But one actor’s performance, my friend as it happens, was so subtle that often, her fellow actors responded to her as if there was a problem and she had broken out of the performance. So truthful was her performance, so subtle, that even her colleagues, hearing the words they had heard a hundred times didn’t recognise the truth when they saw it. Or perhaps they did, and thought that she had stopped acting – which is of course exactly what she had done.
The beauty of truth is that it allows us to enjoy a ripping good story and not focus on the individual actor’s performance, which – in the end, is why they come.