Pick’n’Mix

Many thanks to my student, assistant and good friend Ian Watt for coming up with a phrase to define this lamentable approach to actor training.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it refers to being given a bag in a sweet shop and filling it up with all manner of wonderful sweeties from numerous tubs and bottles, literally pick and mix.

This is the approach to actor training most frequently found in the UK and it is one that promotes a sort of phoney liberality, encouraging the actor to build their own approach from hundreds of tiny pieces. Sounds good, build your own approach, until you discover that it’s profoundly useless.

Any fool can string some exercises together and call it training and any fool can believe they are being trained by it. And then you will find that when you come to use it, you can’t and you return to the few Stanislavsky based exercises that were part of a technique but that no one actually thought to teach you as a spine to your training.

Now I don’t care if it’s a Stanislavsky or a Kermit the Frog approach but no one ever learned their craft in random, disjointed and disconnected fashion.

But these are the people that are wary of technique, they claim it makes for rigid actors, they believe it prevents the actor’s creative blah de blah.

And what they believe is rubbish. They do not take to technique because it requires time, experience and training and they were not trained that way and to admit that their half-hearted training was horseshit is to admit that they are poorly trained. And so they continue to peddle the same crap because they believe it work, they must! And when their students cannot magic gold out of manure, they criticise and complain.

I met a student of one of these Pick’n’Mixers, she said she’d done Meisner and next week they were doing Lecoq. She said she had been given a day of group training in Meisner, and she had been told if she was interested in learning more, she should read a book. So her expensive, lengthy training prepared her for work by letting her taste some different approaches very quickly and then read up on it, thank God that our builders, lawyers, doctors, electricians, musicians and dancers are not trained this way.

So why then are actors?