How to Make a Performance Different Every Time

Last night, I saw the hugely entertaining Shit-Faced Shakespeare at the CowBarn as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The idea is simple. Take a group of 6 professionally trained Shakespeare actors, have them rehearse a play, get a different one of them completely shit faced before each performance. It’s a hoot.

But I liked it for another reason. The drunken actor creates an element of danger and risk, a liveness that isn’t present in theatre any more because we rehearse the life out of things.

How can we encourage a performance to be different every time, without getting all of our cast shit-faced first?

Immediacy makes performance captivating. And yet it’s often missing from live performance. Our need for security and the traditional rehearsal process cause habitual line readings in an attempt to demonstrate the illusion that this is happening for the first time, and as we do so, we rehearse the life out of it.

Most of your performance is communicated non-verbally, so to bring immediacy to a performance means understanding how those elements impact on what happens. Non Verbal Communication elements include tone, rhythm, volume and pace of speech, body language, posture, eye contact, gestures. These elements change depending upon what we are trying to do.

How do you keep the lines fresh every night? By making the interactions about what how you feel about what’s happening in front of you. But not just how you feel, how you feel when you take on the mindset of the character, giving you a task to achieve.

Your task is to get forgiveness, – like if you cheated on your partner or spouse.

Now before you speak a line, or do anything, you look up at your scene partner.

They are smiling away. Do they already forgive me? Perhaps, so you don’t need to work too hard. And saying your next line becomes about trying to encourage that forgiveness which you see in their smile.

It doesn’t matter what the line is, if you have analysed the scene and you have chosen a task based on your understanding, then any behaviour associated with getting forgiveness will work in the scene. Now as you speak your first line you have 3 options. You can confirm the literal meaning of the line, you can modify it, or you can contradict it.

LITERAL:

The literal meaning is useless to actors really. The audience don’t really need help understanding it.

You could write this down and everyone would understand this meaning. Actors do not need to present the literal meaning of the lines – although they often do, they reinforce the literal meaning by acting out the literal meaning of the line.

CHRIS: This tea is cold.

LITERAL meaning the beverage in question is of a particular temperature.

MODIFIED:

The particular modification depends on what the other person was doing. You cannot say ‘this tea is cold’ like you mean ‘forgive me’. You can only intend to tug them and let those non-verbal elements do the rest. In this case, you want forgiveness but they are interrogating you.

CHRIS: This tea is cold. 

MODIFIED I don’t want to talk about this. A dodge.

They were doing something you wanted to avoid, so you dodged them by using this statement.

CONTRADICTED:

Technically this is just another form of modification, but it’s useful to know that it’s the opposite of the literal meaning.

CHRIS: This tea is cold.

CONTRADICTED Oh yeah, right, cold, it’s fucking boiling you idiot. A criticism. Unlikely to help you get forgiveness.

For actors working moment to moment, their lines should only be modified or contradicted. If you work from behaviour associated with the scene and you respond to what is happening in the other actor, the audience will experience something they rarely see, a living fresh performance, where what happens next, from moment to moment is unplanned, and yet always in line with the play and the writer’s intention.

And that’s how to make a performance different every time.

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Beware Your Knight in Shining Armour