From War to Peace

No point in being King Shit of Turd Island Newell Harry

That’s what the Harry artwork says on the wall of Andrew Upton and Cate Blanchett’s office at Sydney Theatre Company. I’ve been thinking a lot. I have been writing this blog for almost three and a half years and I was thinking a lot out it. Vacheron (real name unknown), an online critic of mine has often claimed that he only attacks me because of how I attack others. Brad Silby, an Oscar/BAFTA winning senior animator at Framestore told me when asked to describe my blog, he thought it was ‘angry’. Still that didn’t prevent them inviting me to work with them for a few days.

But I was angry. I see a world of actor coaching and training in which my friends, students and colleagues have been lied to, swindled and poorly trained. No, not everyone is a charlatan in the world of acting, but there are plenty of people making a dishonest living. And yes, it makes me angry. And then there are directors who poorly trained themselves bully actors or through pure lack of any actual skill, demand the actors pull them out of the shit time after time. And the actors tell me this and it makes me angry.

You see I didn’t set out to be angry, I just got angry trying to tell it like it is from my perspective. After all, that’s all a blog is, a personal expression of our experience of the world in whatever field. What gives me the right to say that an acting teacher is a ‘fucking idiot’, I have no right. But if they take ten thousand pounds from their students and leave them nothing but confused and upset, it makes sense to me, to attack these charlatans, if I perceive them as such.

I read book after book on acting, almost every day and what I read there seems outdated, well intentioned, but essentially nonsense, pages and pages of games and exercises that are founded on old, fixed thinking around acting that doesn’t stand up to any criticism at all. And I see that it confuses and frustrates actors and I want them to know that someone else out there gives a shit about it, and I get angry and I tell them it’s okay to be angry too.

And I receive emails, every day, thanking me for helping, thanking for offering a heretical view that counters a system that confuses actors and then blames them. How dare I? Well why shouldn’t I? I am entitled to an opinion and it’s allowed to be counter to all other voices if I choose, free speech after all is important. But I do not need to use my free speech just to attack.

And every day I receive the opposite, criticism, vitriol, equally angry people, desperate to silence someone they on the one hand write off, and at the same time expend significant energy attacking themselves. Now it took Vacheron to help me realise something. I started out as defender but when he accused me of things, I didn’t recognise his description of me, because I had always set out with the best of intention for actors and acting students. And now I was attacked for it,

But sometimes the defender became the aggressor.

I dont want to be that. I don’t want to be just an aggressor, that’s easy and mindless. I didn’t set out to be angry, I am just passionate, but if you come across as a dick, you are probably being a dick.

I have a busy studio, 22,000 blog readers, I’ve sold many many copies of my eBook, I have just finished working with Oscar and BAFTA Framestore, and about to lead my ensemble students in projects in Sydney, Glasgow and London. Why do I need to be a dick?

I am still angry. But there are better ways to promote the cause I represent. A different way of doing things. We’re no longer in a state of war, now we’re seeking dialogues.