Strasberg’s Notes: Still Not Convinced

In The Lee Strasberg Notes, Lola Cohen attempts to show us more of Strasberg, master of method. I was told recently by a method actor that if I read this book, I would know just how wrong I was about method acting.

Having read everything published about or by Strasberg, I read this book vigorously, ready to have my mind changed, ready to be shown the true master as so many acting revisionists have emailed me about.

Yet, I see that this is the same Strasberg that I see in his own book A Dream of Passion, and that I have not misunderstood him at all. We just don’t agree about what makes good acting happen.

Let’s take a short extract as an example:

“the art of acting is, first, the creation of character, not the reading of the line or the playing of the scene. Your goal is to characterise on a level that is completely convincing, and this work on the character is separate from the work on the play. The character comes alive if you believe in what you’re doing.’(Strasberg in Cohen, 2010:43)

At the risk of some other famous pompous windbag method actor talking down at me again, let me say this:

I do not agree with one word of that quote. I actively disagree with it.

Why?

Because it is based on a set of presumptions about acting that are spoken as if they were commandments, but really, they are nothing more than beliefs and opinions.

Acting is not firstly about character, it is precisely about the playing of the scene. For what else is there to do on stage or screen?

Our goal is to be truthful to our audience, to convince them of our sincerity, and to do nothing to spoil their involvement in the story.

I would suggest that work that is not expressly done on the play is ‘something other than useful’ and that Strasberg’s focus on this simply perpetuates his master Stanislavsky’s mistake about the precise concerns of the actor’s job.

The character comes alive when the audience suspend their disbelief and accept what they see as true.

Week in and week out at our studio in Glasgow, we see moving, truthful, convincing performances by our students, none of whom have bought into the need for any of these things.

This IS a historically interesting book, a great deal of extra detail is now available. I enjoyed reading it, even if I can’t agree with 90% of it.