The Fourth Wall for Actors

I often trawl the Internet looking for how other people are trying to teach people about acting and I found this interesting description of the Fourth Wall in an eBook about Method Acting.

“The fourth wall is a concentration effort by the actor to create an imaginary wall on stage between yourself and the audience. This removes the audience from your awareness and allows a private and personal scene. An actor who is unaware of the audience will not suffer from stage fright.” Method Acting eBook

Here are my thoughts on this:

That’s not an accurate description of the Fourth Wall.

The Fourth Wall is a term used (I believe) by Denis Diderot to describe the invisible screen between actor and audience. However, it is not anything that can be practicably applied. It is an idea, considerable in theory, but not applicable in practice. What the audience sees through the screen of the Fourth Wall is a fictional story, the actors carry out their tasks of telling the story and bringing the characters to life (for the audience) on their side of the screen. It is a room with one wall removed. The fourth wall is invisible and allows a slice of life to be seen through it.

Pretending that there is a wall present in the room is plain silly. There isn’t a wall and there is an audience. The only way to ‘ignore’ the audience (the people you’re being paid to communicate with) is to have something more compelling to DO.

It’s possible that an actor who is “unaware” of the audience may suffer a little less stage fright, but how does one achieve conscious unawareness? The audience are THERE, they are PRESENT and pretending they aren’t will take a massive (and frightening) capacity for SELF-DELUSION.

Of course, it would be great if the actor COULD perform like there was a Fourth Wall, but the presence of the audience NECESSITATES certain performance conventions that the actor cannot ignore such as projection, articulation, blocking, sight lines and general good stagecraft.

No performance is private; it is always for the spectator. Private Moment exercises seem to feed this nonsense that acting is about pretending to be alone. Many actors have got undressed in front of their classmates and teacher to prove that they could ignore people in the name of this silly exercise. It’s an abusive game that forces people to do something they would do in private, in public. It’s a form of abuse, and it’s completely unnecessary. Those of you who have been subjected to it have either succeeded because you gave yourself something for your attention to hang onto, or you’ve guiltily done the exercise and then lied because it didn’t work. Making you do such an exercise is abuse. Would you fail a student who REFUSED to submit to this exercise?

No no, they cry, it’s to develop a level of focus that excludes all outside of my realm of concentration. BULLSHIT. It massively increases your self-consciousness, the only time you will stop being self-conscious is when your mind has something else to focus upon. When you have a focus for your attention, it doesn’t matter whether there are people there or not, but you aren’t trying to consciously ignore them.

Back in 2005, I put up a gauze to represent the Fourth Wall in a production I directed at the Arches Theatre in Glasgow. Some hated it, some loved it, but when questioned, the actors were always very aware of the audience. SO even when a REAL Fourth Wall was placed on the stage, through which the audience could see but the actors could not see back, the actors were still very aware of the PRESENCE of the audience. The PRESENCE of the audience is an important part of the theatrical exchange that takes place between actor and audience member.

So what the actor needs is something that ACTS like a fourth wall, to keep their focus inside the fictional room. To do this, instead of pretending something ISN’T THERE, place your focus on achieving something that IS in the room. This will keep you busy enough not to concern yourself with what the audience are up to over there. Pretending something is NOT present is like not thinking of an Elephant. It can’t be done, the mind rejects the preposterous idea immediately. When you have a focus for your actions (a goal, if you like), something to actively achieve and a reason to achieve it, your focus will be drawn away from all that isn’t relevant to the task.

This claims to be from a Method Acting ebook, but it doesn’t seem to represent the brightest and best of the ideas from Method Acting. eBooks are an interesting idea. I’m planning and writing my own at present, but free eBooks tend to contain generalised advice, and it could be confusing and misleading like the quote above. Whatever my own feelings about Method Acting, I can’t believe that this type of advice represents the real wisdom of Lee Strasberg and his heirs.