Hot Seating & Other Wastes of Time

If you’ve been involved in acting, you cannot have escaped this exercise. It is part of a plethora of tools used by the well meaning, to help to explore ‘character’. It’s aim is to help you learn more but in truth, it is a time wasting exercise, which prevents us from facing the real challenge: the script.

The game is essentially ‘in character’ Q&A, people ask the ‘character’ questions and they reply.

The trouble is that just like writing out your character’s fictional history, it does very little to help you do your job which is reveal the play to the audience, tell the story, act out the parts.

This exercise is one of improvisational cleverness and ad-hoc creativity, it does not help you ‘understand’ the character because that is not a requirement of your role.

Your role isn’t to come up with bright new fictions, but to thoroughly understand the fiction set out before you by the writer. And that’s usually quite hard and that’s why ‘doing a bit of hot seating’ is so popular, along with all the other work avoidance tactics that make up a rehearsal period.

When Antony Sher was rehearsing Primo, his one man show about Primo Levi, the director arranged for him to be driven around London in the back of a dirty van, while men shouted at him. This was somehow meant to help him understand what Primo Levi went through at the hands of the Nazis. Poppycock! And an insult to the Jews and masochistic self-pleasuring at it’s worst.

These exercises and character history and hot seating are fun things that feel like work, but they are not helpful and they are not real work, they are fake work and an insult to the actor’s intelligence

Do the play. Learn the lines, answer certain rudimentary questions that unlock the do-able in the script, act upon these answers and make good use of your precious little rehearsal time!