How to Write A Back Story or Character History
“Class, today I want you to create a backstory for the character you’re playing…”
If you ever hear me say this, you can stand up and ask for your money back immediately. What’s more, you can have the shirt off my back and the keys to the studio!
The well-meaning acting teacher or director asks you to create a backstory for your character and when they do this, they do it thinking that if you fill in all the life details of your role, you will understand more about the character and this will help you to ‘create the role’ and live it truthfully upon the stage. In his third book, published in the West as ‘Creating a Role’, Constantin Stanislavski, the father of modern acting, explains to us that if one is playing Salieri, the main rival to Mozart, one should fill in the life details and I’d like to quote from the modern reworking of that book, now called An Actor’s Work on the Role, p96.
“The actor who plays Salieri should create not only the fragment of the character’s life the writer has provided, which we see on stage, but also the entire past, that is merely hinted at by a word here and there”.
This is in a section of the book entitled “In Practice: How to Create A Life (Role)”.
What a crock of shit. What a useless, ridiculous task. And yet, and yet, even as recently as a few years ago, I have heard a highly regarded professional director and also the principal of a highly regarded theatre school issue this task to their students. And I know that college lecturers and teachers of drama in school also ask their gullible students to perform this task.
You see the belief is, that if the actor fills in all of these details, they will truly create a ‘life’ – a real character upon the stage. Nonsense. As if writing down a few facts would help you to truly know someone enough to play them. It’s an academic activity at best, a chore at worst and closer to the study of creative writing than anything to do with the training of actors. What a ludicrous task, how insulting to the young minds that they instruct. And yet, they will comply, and why will they comply, because that’s what actors do, first in drama school, then in rehearsal.
Damn you Stanislavski, for coming up with such a stupid exercise that we have clung to like a life raft. The problem is when actors have no workable technique of acting, they cling to fucking anything. And so we resort to these parlour games.
Back story? If it’s not in the play, it’s not important. I am playing Sam McCoy in Law and Order, I wonder whether he was breast-fed? Ah! Yes! Of course! That’s why he’s so tenacious. Arbitrary Crap. And those teachers and directors that stand behind such insulting tasks are idiots. Yes, idiots. Because they also have fallen into the false belief that it will help and they daren’t question it because to question these long-held beliefs is to admit that we have been duped. And that’s the thing isn’t it. No one likes to admit they’ve been conned. But conned you have been – if you made someone do this task, and conned you have been if someone made you do that task in class or rehearsal.
It’s VOODOO. It’s a distraction from the truth and the truth is that the acting teacher has no clue how to make the actors better at what they do, but if they do this activity, they’ll at least be busy. The director who does this is like the football coach that asks their team to study their opponents off the field, find out all about them, this will not help, – what would help is a bit more practice and a little less chat.
It’s protection from the rain, it’s a spell created in the ‘hope’ that it will make the actor understand something they don’t need to understand. A task that’s done, that doesn’t need to be done. It feels like work, it looks like work, but unfortunately, it is the work of someone else.
Filling in a character history or a back story is a waste of your time. Try rehearsing the play. Ah. Now there’s the rub. If we spent more time rehearsing the play, we might not find the character. Find the character? Look in the play, there’s the character. It’s not your job to find the character, it’s your job to play the part written for you. If you don’t know how to do that without reverting to voodoo, you were trained by morons and you are consenting to be treated as a moron when you do it. The same with all the children’s games, what colour is my character? What scent? What piece of music? Confess you don’t know how to rehearse you frauds! You bullshitters.
Backstory my ass.