Civilians

For the Taxi Drivers of Glasgow, who must now know more about acting than taxi drivers anywhere.

I’m endlessly surprised by the level of sophistication with which complete outsiders to our business discuss acting. The trouble, as John Harrop once pointed out, is that everyone has been in a school play.

Add to that the public interest in how an actor prepares for a role and the fetish of characterisation that has occurred since system/Method spawned its breed and we have a public that seems to know a lot about acting.

The thing is that they don’t. They have great opinions but no idea about how an actor goes about their craft.

But they’ve seen a lot of acting, good and bad over the years, so they think themselves experts, plus – they were Joseph in the nativity.

But what do they really know? They know they like to consider the performances of actors to be ‘true to life’. They know what they like and they praise believable acting, yet what that means seems hard to glean.

But what of how actors do what they do? What about the craft? They’ve heard of Method, and they think it means becoming the character, being the character. The actor is an artist who creates character, yet how escapes them. Nonetheless when you shake their strongly held beliefs, they do get a little annoyed.

That’s acceptable, they don’t need to know how to do it. But I started to wonder if there wasn’t more in common between the civilian and professional actor, and neither of them were particularly good at expressing what the craft of the actor was and both of whom confused the task of creating character as the actor’s responsibility.

You cannot create a persona and try it on like a new item of clothing. You are you, end of discussion. Your job is to stand in for the character, with such truthfulness that your actions are willingly accepted as those of the role you are playing. You provide the breath and body, you are a person already and your character stands in for the character’s and the audience willingly comply.

But both actors and civilians believe that the actor’s job involves some kind of magical transformative process, which can cannot be truly articulated and that exists only in the realm of those special chosen people, and we have so mythologised and fetishised this process that civilians and actors alike have bought it.

Audiences, it’s your job to believe, actors, it’s your job to MAKE believe. We should know more about our trade than civilians, and if we share the same beliefs, and make the same assumptions, what does that say about us??