There Are No Heroes
I’ve been reading Mel Gordon’s excellent Stanislavsky in America, a sort of mirror edition of his wonderful The Stanislavsky Technique: Russia.
As a young man, I devoured the mix of history and exercises that filled this marvellous book and it took me years to stop taking it out of libraries and buy my own copy.
The new book is a similar mix of history lesson and practionercentric exercises. I’m still fascinated by the historical journey of systematic acting from it’s early conception to its post-Practical Aesthetics future.
But these days the exercises look ludicrous. They are examples of waste, of how incredibly gifted people tried in vain to convey the art and craft of acting from the inspirational to the aspirational, from the unconsciously competent to the unconsciously incompetent
As I read aloud these exercises I laughed. I felt guilty at laughing at the endeavour of my heroes but there was something ridiculous about it. This was the wisdom of those who believed the moon was made of cheese and the earth was flat. They were interesting enough diversions, perhaps even enjoyable activities but they were to acting what a halibut is to driving a bus.
This made me very sad. Have my great heroes spent all their years toiling, labouring under a fallacy? Very sadly I now believe they did.
These games are nonsense. They don’t work and they confuse the actor. What’s more, forcing actors to guiltily comply is tantamount to abuse. But they’re fun and so many actors enjoy doing them, although fucked if they know how to apply what they learned from all this fun and games.
We need less flimsy games based on flimsier acting theories. We need simple aesthetics, and killer working ethics.
Over the next two blog, I’ll outline what I mean by that.
Lastly, I want to leave you with something to ponder, why do so many people believe that they can act? Because the best actors make it look so fluid, so natural, so truthful that we don’t see any strings or joins. We see them in the words of Bobby Lewis just ‘walking and talking’ – and anyone can do that, right?