True and False: The Difference between Truth and Pretending in Acting

Hi and welcome to today’s blog on Pretending and the Truth in Acting.

This is a topic on which I have given three lectures this week and so this blog comes to you by way of me having to explain myself three different ways on three different days. I hope you find it useful to help you think about acting. I’m sure it may challenging your ideas on acting. Don’t take it too personally, I don’t know you, so if you have a different opinion, that’s cool, I appreciate it. My perspective is taken from working with actors as a director and coach and teaching them and seeing that acting can be different.

So, I’m talking about truthful acting and pretending. And I think I’m starting from the point that pretending always looks like pretending. You have to be an exceptional actor to be able to pretend well enough not to be pushing, not to be letting your ‘performance’ show through, to hide your pretense. It’s very difficult, it’s a very difficult job and our capacity to pretend is not equal, that’s for sure. If you’re not good at it, you show off signs that it’s a show, that it’s a performance, little things. If I go to the theatre, I may just be very aware that I’m indulging them. I’m indulging them because what they’re doing, it isn’t organic, there’s too many signs of artifice, it isn’t honest. So not only do I have to pay, I have to go and indulge them. But they’re the professionals and I’m paying their wages, and I want to be entertained. I guess I find that upsetting.

But then pretending is the norm and pretending is the tradition, so I guess I must be wrong? What’s the alternative? For so long there wasn’t one. The ‘pretendy’ actor and teacher has all that history and tradition to fall back on. But you know the pretendy actor starts from a position of truth, they really do, they’re already truthful and organic, but what emerges from that is pretend. They would say that, it’s not pretending, it is scenic truth, creative truth, dramatic truth, so in other words – lying, I guess – you know, pretending. And they’re going to get paid good money to deceive the audience. And let’s face it, unless they’re exceptionally good, won’t be much of a deception, so the audience will have to indulge them, which seems like a painful way to spend an evening, indulging others. Like having those friends you met on holiday once visit you.

And I suppose the other choice is the truth. Simple as that. You start from the position of understanding that you are truthful right now, you’re a real person but the circumstances under which you are going to act are imaginary, they are the pretend element.  But what emerges from you through that, is the truth… truthful acting. And that’s very rare. When you’re telling the truth, there aren’t those little signs of pretense, they don’t have anything to indulge. It takes a lot of pain out of going to the theatre. You pay £17, you really start having to indulge actors in pretending. I think, that it doesn’t need to happen. Indulgence doesn’t need to occur, pretend doesn’t need to happen. Just because we have a long tradition, doesn’t make it right. We used to think the world was flat, well, now that seems stupid, doesn’t it?

Telling the truth, what does that mean? Let’s not get philosophical about it, I can coach you to do it, but I’m not an academic anymore and I’m not going to engage in a theoretical debate. I can coach people to tell the truth in front of the camera or on stage, and no amount of conversation will prevent that from being true.

So what does it mean? Well, we have our standard PA definition of acting ‘Living truthfully under the imaginary circumstances of the play’ from Sanford Meisner, but to me, actually, I have a much more simple definition. To act is to do, to be in the process of doing is acting, to be acting is to be taking action, those that take action are actors. It’s that simple. It’s simple, and that doesn’t make it wrong. When you’re a truthful actor, you learn to take the focus off yourself, relieving you of a whole lot of mental junk and you give yourself something concrete and real to do. DO is the important word there. Do. Because doing is done through the body and acting is a physical craft, like a sport and doing is truthful because the body is uncapable of lying. If you raise your arm, you raise your arm. It doesn’t matter what was going through your mind at the time. Action, the focus of the truthful actor is what drives the truth because in order to act truthfully you need to know what’s driving you.

Truthful acting is made up, not of a string of faked emotional states, or emotional states that are real that have been conned from yourself through emotional blackmail, but from a string of tiny moments of psycho-physical actives. I call them ‘actives’, they are tactics, transitive verbs, they bring the actor to life because by ‘doing’ the actives, by taking action in order to do that thing to another person, what you are doing is truthful, it is not conjured from artifice, it is not an attempt to deceive, it is an attempt to reveal the truth. And when I see that, when I see the truth being revealed by actors who are able to live truthfully in their performance, that’s a pretty special thing.