Building a Character
It’s easy to see how the mistake was made all those years ago. You read a play and your imagination brought all the pieces therein together and made the characters seem like real people, particularly as the dialogue and style became more psychologically real.
Then, if you were playing a character in a play like that, it made sense that you would attempt to impersonate that character to the highest degree possible.
Here’s the trouble: impersonate means to assume the character of a person, to personify them, to pretend to be them.
But a character is not a person, therefore they cannot be impersonated.
Seen from the outside, an audience’s perspective, they SEEM like people, but people exist beyond the temporal limits of a play’s duration and people exist outside the space of a theatre or the confines of a page or screen.
Characters do not.
Characters are actually just a set of lines, fictionally they appear to have goals, actions and defining characteristics but actually all they are is a set of signs and symbols, think of them as… potential energy.
Now you ARE a person, and you have a character (your own persona) and when your character is asked to represent this set or series of signs and symbols, these cyphers fuse with you and your endless and constantly changing behavioural possibilities and creates the appearance of a third thing. Synthesis occurs and an audience sees this third thing as the character personified.
But it’s 80% accident and 20% design. And that’s what makes it special, it’s changing, evolving like a person, constantly and continually in flux.
The script and the requirements of the play, along with the director’s suggestions/demands/requirements provide the design element that prevents it from simply being an open ended improvisation and ensures that you fulfil your obligation to the author, who if they had anything important to tell you, should include it in the script rather than expecting you to achieve it by clairvoyance.
You cannot impersonate a fictional character, you can impersonate a fictional character representing a real person, but this IS an act of impersonation and not one of acting, they’re different skills. And for the most part, you will be studiously copying gesture, manner and voice in an attempt NOT to act well, but to ensure that you give an accurate impersonation.
But the basic doing, the ‘acting’ that happens in the present, in the here and now of the actor’s moment to moment existence, that’s what brings this synthesis alive for the audience. Not some mistaken attempt at embodying the fictional.
So yes, I guess I am saying that those schools and styles and methods and techniques that have the creation of a role as a separate intentional activity are wrong.
Someone has to say it.
You’ve got it wrong.
Training actors to create character is wrong. Forcing actors to do the job of creative writing and calling it characterisation or building a character is wrong. And blaming actors when they can’t do it is a mistake. Or when they can’t fuse with this creative writing project on the theme of the play, it’s a mistake. And it just gets in the way and makes the actor’s job not difficult but impossible.
And all the games and all the exercises and befriending the character and going outside yourself and all that well-intentioned voodoo is just a placebo because they won’t admit that they have no fucking clue what to do.
They are still labouring under this same old mistake. Are you? You can change things. You can.
To You, The Best!
Mark Westbrook
Senior Acting Coach
ACTING COACH SCOTLAND
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Mark Westbrook is a Professional Acting Coach and runs Acting Coach Scotland, a private acting studio offering acting classes in Glasgow, masterclasses, workshops and audition coaching for actors at all levels.
His acting studio is based in Glasgow, Scotland, although he teaches all across the United Kingdom. All Blog Posts © Mark Westbrook 2011