The Character Myth

The creation of character is achieved through the augmentation and the suppression of aspects of your own personality. Whether the reason for this is based on the facts of the play, your own imaginings, the rumbling in your stomach or the advice of the director, the creation of character is a relatively simple idea that is often over-complicated..
Whatever process that you are using or that you believe that you are using, running in the backgroud is the simplest of systems, the manipulation of your own personality to suit the needs of the play.

Let me posit a controvserial idea made popular by David Mamet. “There is no character.” The character only exists as a collection of lines in a script. Character does not become fully tangible until the words of the playwright and the physical action of an actor have been coupled with the complicit audience’s imagination.

To borrow a metaphor from Mamet, the actor and the magician aren’t so dissimilar. The actor creates the illusion of character in collusion with the writer and the audience. The magician trains long and hard to produce the illusion, they sell the illusion to the audience with their skill and the audience’s complicity.

The actor works in the same way, their skill works in complicity with the audience’s imagination to create the magic of theatre. The magician does not need to believe in the trick, although it helps if they have faith in themselves. They do not first need to get themselves into a state where they can actually believe that they can perform some kind of magic. The aim of their practice is to perform the trick in such a way that the audience are completely sold on it. This takes long hard practice and a skill for creating illusion. Their aim is not to believes that they are capable of scorcery.

Yet for many actors, their goal is to fool themselves that their invented circumstances are real. Even the most successful must have days whilst trying to pretend something that isn’t real is real when they think “what the hell am I doing?” This is not France, I’m not the Third Duke of Albany and I cannot stand that girl playing my wife in this play. Sooner or later, common sense kicks in. When common sense kicks in two things happen. First the actor berates themselves for not ‘staying in character’ a state they were never in in the first place, and secondly they try to force themselves to believe the plainly ridiculous. Have you ever tried not to think of an elephant or stop feeling sad? The mind cannot be willed in this way and it certainly cannot be forced to pretend that the make believe is real.

For this type of actor, the great skill is not in convincing the audience that they are the Third Duke of Albany, but themselves!   When they have achieved this level of self-deception, they claim they are ‘in character’. I would be posit that they were ‘mid-delusion’ instead. Anything so self-centred leads them away from the audience and towards a sort of selfish self obsession. It does not serve the play, or the audience. At best this work acts as a catalyst for the wrong focus during rehearsals and as worst it serves the actors ego. In the Common Sense approach, the actor is a magician, creating an illusion. The illusion of character is created for and with the audience’s collusion. The skills of an illusionist can be learned, repeated, developed, improved upon and performed.  In more traditional Stanislavski-inspired approaches, the actor is a wizard creating real magic. The magic of character is that it comes from nowhere, is unexplainable, cannot be explained or reproduced.

Playing Real People

Of course, playing real people throws up additional challenges. The desire to be historically accurate may lead the actor on a wild goose chase. This actor is serviced by the desire to read or hear glorious praise as to authentic facsimilie of the real figure that they have achieved.
They will be lauded for getting the ‘hands right’, or the mannerism’s or whatever. Whilst this is laudable, it is surely not the essential aspect of a script about this person, surely it is their story that the audience loves, not a test of the actor’s capacity for impersonation of historical personages.
There is an inheritent problem in playing real characters. An actor playing the role of the Nazi Minister for Propaganda ‘Goebbels’ can do all of the research on that real person that they like, but the character in the play is not really Goebbels, they are an imaginary character in a work of fiction. This barely crosses most minds, actor nor audience. This character may represent Goebbels, may use the real Nazi’s words, but is still a literary device in a piece of dramatic fiction.

The one positive route is that with some historical figures, it is possible to read about or watch footage of them moving and their behaviour. This gives the actor a physical skin to wear during the rehearsal and performance of the play. However, the danger here is to ignore the inner life of the character, the desire and the actions they take to achieve it, instead preferring to take self pleasure in achieving an admirable level of impersonation. At the end of the day, impersonation is not immediately helpful to us either because all of this hard work does not answer the simple question:

What’s happening in the scene?

Instead this impersonation work simply fills valuable time. I’m not for a second saying it can’t add significant depth in helping the actor create the illusion of a character However, because the real person and the fictional person are entirely different in their essence, all the physical work does not help the actor to play the scene. The fictional character has completely different needs from the real person, if these are not address all the ground work in the world won’t really help the actor. If they have not prepared the groundwork with a thorough understanding of the scene, this physical work on the authentic reproduction of the character becomes a shield with which the actor will eventually use to hide from the role and the scene itself. Another danger is “creating the character” through improvisation and exercises. Whilst these may be valuable rehearsal tools, they are also widely used to fill time. Since many directors are unsure of what to do help the actors to perform the roles they have been chosen for, well meaning games and exercises aim to tease and tempt the actor’s muse into delivering on their end of the contracted bargain.  Character cannot be built outwith the scene and then imported in. First this type of actor fully fools themselves (pretends) that they are the character. They falsely believe that the deeper the state of self-delusion the more readily they will have prepared themselves to truthfully live the character’s responses to the given circumstances. The irony of someone in a state of self-delusion trying to truthfully do anything should not be overlooked.

Many actors struggle with the process of “finding their character” in rehearsal. They feel guilty that their well trained creative powers have failed them on this occasion and they feel, unworthy of the role bestowed upon them. Most of them never think to look in the text of the play for the answer. There was once a highly regarded and experienced actor who sat in his dressing room before the dress rehearsal, desperately trying to find a link to their character. Falsely believing that their job as an actor was about creating another personality, they had tried and tried to do this but could not. Finally after this long silent stare, he decided to shave his head and cut off his beard. There! That was the character. This was what he had been missing. He had found his character and strode onto the stage with confidence. But what had really happened? What was the problem he really faced and why did his highly spontaneous act of hair removal give him such confidence?

The real problem was not that he could not find his character. There was really no character to find. His real problem was one that so many actors would share. He was afraid. He was afraid because he didn’t know what to do. This was the real problem. He didn’t suffiently comprehend what he had to do.

But is this possible? Surely an actor who has spent his life on the stage knows what to do. I would say not. If his long experience has taught him anything, it’s that his way of working is based on impulse and instinct, a thrilling ride, but highly inconsistent. It has lead him to make radical and bold artistic choices, none of which were connected to the play being performed. He was probably lauded for those choices though.   He has some ideas of how to be entertaining, how to say the lines, how to demonstrate his indepedent acts of creativity, but he had no solid technique that could help him perform the scene.

Learning to play the scene in the moment as it happens is the real gift to the actor.  Truthfully responding to what you see happening in front of you, based on the circumstances of the play.