The Wood for the Trees

Often when we’re working on a new scene, we find it difficult to get to the heart of it. Our acting techniques have been almost crippled by asking too many unnecessary and possibly academic questions and this really ends up with us missing the important parts of the scene, the actable bits. Not all of it IS actable to the same degree. When you find out that your character has been married twice and has two children, there’s nothing actable in there. Oh yes, but surely a man twice married behaves in a certain way. Maybe he’s MORE nervous around women than normal, maybe he’s over-protective of his daughters. Sure, they’re reasonable thoughts. But they’re not actable unless there’s a part of the script which allows you to reveal something of this.  And here lies a small problem actors have, they get an idea and they want to force it onto the script. But that’s not how it works, it usually just makes for very bad choices. Occasionally it will work, but more often than not, it’s just rubbish.

Pare back any scene, pull right back and get to see the most basic view of it. This will prevent your initial (sometimes wrong) view of the scene from colouring the potential for the many different ways to play a scene. Work to understand the basic human fundamentals going on within the scene, this will reveal to you the actable parts.

We must aim to get a clear understand of what we must DO in the scene. DO is the important word. DO is the essential word. Because acting is doing. It’s not thinking, it’s not pretending, it’s not creating, it’s just ‘doing’. And doing is acting: being in action.

To get to the heart of a scene we must ask:

QUESTION: What’s LITERALLY happening in this scene, in the most basic sense? Strip away all the detail, because it ends up confusing us. Within the scripted page, the simplest answer is there. Something simple and basic and universally human. This is the actable core of the scene. This leads to the next question:

QUESTION: What does your character WANT from the other character in the SCENE (AND what does your character want them to DO)? This is a simple definite goal of the character, but place it in the other character (or the other actor) in practice.

QUESTION: What is the ESSENTIAL ACTION? What is the essence of what the character is doing in the scene? The WANT will lead you to this answer. When you have this, you have all you have to do in a scene broken down into something terribly simple, but compelling, that has its core in the other character, and then the other actor. It something so simple and yet so challenging that you will be able to immediately act upon it.

Now you can see the Wood. If you still can’t see it, let me be your guide.