Glasgow Acting Coach on… Dialogue

The great philosopher Cher once said “Words are like weapons, they wound sometimes.”

Dialogue is a contrived thing. It is not speech. Those that think it is, are sadly deluding themselves. It is a contrived representation of real human speech, assistance with the creation of the illusion of character.

Characters speak to achieve something. This can be very simple like fishing for a compliment or complex like trying to turn your brother against your own father. Words are used by people to achieve an end. Verbal communication is the human struggle to formalise thoughts and feelings which have no real shape. They are often inadequate. But to hear a character speak like we do in life would be tiresome and so the writer works to construct the illusion, holding ‘as t’were the mirror up to nature’. It is not an accident that the playWRIGHT is written as a maker of plays, scripts are WROUGHT, not written. Dialogue is a constructed thing.

But when it comes to the actor, they must bring the dialogue off the page and turn it into action, into acting, into performance. After all, the actor’s rarely get anything more than dialogue on which to perform their role. And so, dialogue is the key clue in discovering how to take action and take your character into performance.

Words are weapons and when they are used, they often leave an indelible impression on the person that hears them. ‘What’s said cannot be unsaid’. For the actor, the words are gibberish, they are tools in the pursuit of the character’s desires. It is not the words, but how they are said and why they are said that matters. Of course, at the same time, without over-acting and mugging the scene to death, there is also the moments when you are not speaking and whether or not you have any input as an actor in the subtext.

On subtext, I would say leave it alone. It doesn’t need your help. If one character asks ‘How are you?’ and you must answer ‘Fine’, then playing the tactic DODGE or DEFLECT will take care of the writer’s subtextual demands.

Many would-be actors cannot handle dialogue. They make it sound like poor narration. They can’t bring the words alive, because they do not see the relationship between the dialogue and REAL speech. Whilst it starts as the constructs of another creative, your job is to make it come to life. Understanding why they are speaking is essential, understanding what motivates their words, their reasoning, their choice of words helps you the actor to understand what you have to do with the words. Without this, you are reciting text, not breathing life into the script.