Look! I’m acting!
For the past few days I have been on my yearly pilgrimage to the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford upon Avon and I have seen some wonderful performances in both The Tempest and Twelfth Night.
On the first afternoon in Stratford, we saw a production called A Tender Thing, top director, legendary actors, and a powerful reworking of the text of Romeo and Juliet (and a few other choice pieces) by Ben Power. Now as a piece of literature it was wonderful, but as a performance I found it horrible.
I do not blame the actors, nor the director. Instead I blame our love of empty performances. We love to see acting, I mean we love to see the actors ‘acting’, ‘pretending’ and we applauding, even standing.
There was simply no relationship between what was said and done by the actors. In fact, when I put my fingers in my ears (a common test in my studio) I could see nothing happening, every impulse denied, and the bodies of the performers utterly at odds with the beauty of the poetry they spoke.
They did nothing for real, it was all fakery, it was cheap, mugging and empty performing. They were desperately ‘acting’ to please the audience, painting a false picture with every line. We’re not even talking about heightening the performance to match the heightened language.
Instead, I am saying that there was not an ounce of truth behind what they said. And all the time, they squeezed out their performances, ‘acting up’ their performances to an audience that clapped like demented sea-lions.
Every moment of this performance screamed ‘look at me, I am acting for your pleasure, please love me!’
Am I too harsh? I love actors, I love these actors, but I hate what they are doing!
But why don’t I blame the actors for this? It is their performances I am criticising after all.
They don’t know any better, they don’t know that they can play heightened language with truth, without this ugly, empty mugging, for an audience that knows no better that loves to see ‘acting’ because it doesn’t know any better and delights in seeing the strings.
They don’t know any better because no one has taught them to do it any differently. But it is possible. It is, it really is, but first we must give up our love of spelling it out to the audience, to stop pandering to an audience’s love of feeling superior and speak and act as one with truth.