Learning Your Cues

Since actors first took to the stage, they have learned a simple rule of their craft, do not speak your line until the other fellow has spoken their cue line first. Proud parents laugh to themselves when someone else’s child speaks out of turn in the nativity, breaking this well known, common sense law.

It’s elementary, it shouldn’t be news to any of you. You’ve learned to wait for your cue and you’ve learned your lines and your cue lines as part of the task of the actor since the school play.

But there is something within this lesson that wrong-foots the actor and has done for thousands of years. It has placed the emphasis of actors, not on action but on the words. It is not the line cue that should initiate the actor’s speech-action, but something else.

The actor truly living in the moment learns to look for living cues, not in the deadening cue lines which never change, but something ever changing in the action of their fellow actor that requires, no – demands – a real living response which may include the next lines but only as a part of that response.

There are many wonderful actors that can animate the words of a script to life, to astound, captivate, amaze and move the audience. These are those actors that receive the lion’s share of the roles, the applause and the critical praise. The appreciation is based on their ability to use someone else’s words as if they were their own and do so with such meaning, feeling, personal conviction and connection that their skills should be lauded.

But the lessons of the stage have taught them that if they do this, they will be rewarded, and so most of them forego an essential part of the actor’s craft, the ability to work off the other actor with truth. They may fake it, they may do so very well, but it is always empty and deep down the audience know and countenance it, as part of believing the delicious lie of this actor’s performance.

What is missing is to react to the truthful action of their partners on the stage or set. To wait for the terrifying unknown action that signals their cue rather than the simple line cue which was as is ever the same night after night, since the writer wrote it down ’til the curtain goes down or the director shouts CUT!

This is the real business of learning your cues, to learn to wait for something entirely new, to find your cue to action in something new each time, and rarely does it come at the end of the other fellow’s line, meaning your reaction and the line are more than often entirely separate, and so to every action your fellow actor makes, you have your reaction to the living cue, your own action and the line and only the words of line should ever be the same as the previous take or last night’s performance. But leaving it until the last moment, not planning it, not testing it, not rehearsing it until the director approves, that takes real bravery, real guts.