The Lines Come Last

About six months ago, I discovered something. I must have known it all the time, but I finally started to see the real truth in it. The truth is that the individual lines of text in a script are important to two people, the writer and their audience.

But to the actor, to focus on the individual lines, is to miss the point. The actor needs to focus on the intention behind the lines. Why does the character say those lines? What are they trying to achieve? When you look at the script this way, the focus moves away from individual lines and onto whole chunks of the text. I understand this sounds like heresy, and as a writer, I can understand the sense of resistance that actors might have to this idea. But when you start to think of the lines last, you start to place your focus on something different. I will explain some more.

What do I mean by the lines come last? I mean, that you hold off on saying the words of the script for as long as possible. The actor’s in Shakespeare’s theatre had only a few days rehearsal and only had their ‘part’ of the script. So when they played their ‘part’, there was a great deal of excitement for them because they were not over-familiar with what they were saying. Yes, they had learned huge chunks of text, but they hadn’t rehearsed it very much with their fellow actors. This created a kind of improvisational frisson.

When I direct, I want the actors to deal with the lines last. I want them to learn them first. All entirely without intonation. It’s quite difficult that do it without the hooks that rhythm and intonation provide, but leaving the lines flat means they stay flexible for as long as possible. Once line readings creep in, you’re stuck with them. Instead, the lines need to be used by the actor, not spoken by them. I mean that the actor must use this line to affect the other actor, not trot out the way it was done a million times before, which has NO effect on the actor at all. Actors spend way too much time and attention trying to find good, funny or amusing ways to say their lines. This time is wasted.

In Japanese Noh theatre, the actors tend to rehearse separately, before coming together close to the show. This preserves a sense of ‘ichi-go ichi-e’ – ‘one chance one meeting’. In other words, immediacy. But the more time we spend on the script, I mean actually speaking those lines, the more time we inculcate line readings, the ‘perfect’ way to say the line. The excitement and immediacy of ‘one chance one meeting’ can be continued over a 6 month run, by ensuring that the actors always serve the intention and never the individual lines.

I do not believe the lines should be spoken more than half a dozen times in rehearsal. Two read throughs. And four run-throughs.

Yes, I understand your reaction.

There are ways to ensure that you know precisely what you are doing. You can improvise precisely the moment to moment interactions, with all the blocking, without going through the lines over and over again. This helps to leave the lines alone.

But what if the writer has intentional emphasis, what if they want you to say them in a specific way? Well, my initial reaction is to tell the writer to act it themselves if they want that. Unless you consult the writer about the precise intonation of every single line, you will never deliver the lines precisely how they are intended. Instead, if you burrow down deep, digging into the writer’s intention for the scene, you can get the intention right, and that’s what must be served not the individual lines.

So in rehearsal, we spend time improvising without the lines, not paraphrasing, just attempting to get from our fellow actors something like the character wants. But our desires are rooted firmly in the real world, so the actor never has to try to achieve a fictional goal.

I appreciate that some directors want you to speak certain lines in a certain way. That’s the control freak auteur in them. But they miss the point of you being a living breathing immediate entity. If they fix your interactions and the way you say your lines, they will become dead very quickly. Sure, people will praise you, but they praise the most terribly mundane and mediocre acting all of the time.

Leave the lines until last to keep them fresh. The play in performance is not the lines. Only 7% of communication is verbal, so only 7% of the focus of your audience is on what is being said. Therefore, more attention needs to be placed on the other 93%!

In film and television, there is often very little rehearsal. So getting used to using the lines only a little means getting used to being in the moment. Lumet rehearsed his actors for two or three weeks. Those days are almost gone.

In tomorrow’s blog, I will explain how rehearsing like this works in more detail. I’ve put the idea out there now. Tomorrow, I will explain how it is achieved.