![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
Abstract
Current acting orthodoxy values immediacy and spontaneity above most other histrionic virtues. ‘Stanislavskian’ directors such as Mike Alfreds, Declan Donnellan and Katie Mitchell focus primarily on action-playing; others reject this emphasis and favour so-called “processional” acting, foregrounding intuitive reactions. Both approaches turn their backs on the idea of character as an entity distinct from the actor and (mis)direct the concept of character away from social and psychological categories. In so doing they are blind to the interpretative value of considering characters not only as individuals but also as representing a group. The paper argues that full embodiment transcends questions of individual behaviour and motivation and acknowledges the ‘typical’ dimensions of character. The paper further outlines an alternative (and older) understanding of character creation, which is essentially mimetic and entails an approach to acting foregrounding a psychophysical transformative process.
At the same time, recent discourse has brought back into view Bradleyan approaches to character analysis based on inference, while applications to acting of principles derived from cognitive science have sought to unify the two approaches of ‘character’ and ‘personality’ acting.
The paper therefore asks why this ageless debate refuses to go away and suggests that one answer might be found in considering acting in the context of recently-delineated frameworks derived from Deception Theory and Machiavellian Intelligence. Observed through this prism, a transformative process moves the act of theatre away from the naturalistic presentation of ‘behaviour’ and (back) towards an explicit, constructed theatricality in which acting is deliberately deceptive.
Notes
1. Douglas, The Ragman’s Son, 243.
2. Hussein, Eddie Redmayne in Theory of Everything Unfair to Disabled People, 1.
3. Donnellan, The Actor Training Reader, 83.
4. Echoing David Mamet: “the actor does not need to ‘become’ the character.… There is no character. There are only lines upon a page” (1999, 9).
5. Ibid., 5.
6. Alfreds, Different Every Night: Freeing the Actor; Mitchell, The Director’s Craft: A Handbook for the Theatre.
7. Donnellan, The Actor and the Target, 101.
8. Stafford-Clark, Letters to George: The Account of a Rehearsal.
9. Merlin, Beyond Stanislavsky: The Psycho-Physical Approach to Actor Training, 240 for a telling example.
10. Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, 127-8.
11. Merlin, 24 emphasis original.
12. See also Connolly and Ralley: “For Stanislavski, the actor’s behaviours must mirror the human being’s natural predispositions. And fundamentally these processes are seen as task-orientated. But how does one practically accomplish the mirroring of task-orientated processes? By avoiding ‘results’ and instead focusing upon ‘action’” (2007, 245).
13. Merlin, Beyond Stanislavsky; Jackson, “Twenty-first Century Actor Training: Active Analysis in the UK” 2011.
14. Shakespeare (in Yu and Shurgot, eds. 2012, 111–26).
15. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 311, 312.
16. Diego Arciniegas’s practice has powerful theoretical backing: see, for example, Zarilli 1995, 17.
17. “…the audience has not come to see Juliet. The audience has come to see Irina [the actress playing Juliet]. …Irina has no business trying to change herself” Donnellan, The Actor and the Target, 2002, 78.
18. “[I]n the messy, self-contradictory world of theatrical practice…”, writes Sharon Carnicke, “the actor creates a character as a work of art distinguishable from the self” (2009, 134-5) and quotes the philosopher R. I. G. Hughes’s observation that the key Stanislavskian concept of perezhivanie (“experiencing”) implies that “Even when the artist and artwork both inhabit the same body, the distinction between them still persists” Ibid, 135. One can argue that the actor imagines the character as a ‘theoretical model’ or ‘theoretical object’ in the way scientists construct theoretical models with little relationship to physical reality and then test these experimentally. Rehearsals are the testing ground of the model.
20. CARNICKE, Stanislavsky in Focus, 214.
21. see Coquelin in Cole and Chinoy, eds. 1970, 192-3.
22. cited in Benedetti, Stanislavski, 36.
23. Memoires of the Life of Ch. Macklin. Esq, 363–4.
24. Damasio, 17, italics original.
25. I use “constructed” in the same sense as Bella Merlin uses the notion of “composed” or “compositional” character to describe “the transition from the actor’s autobiographical self to a created role” (in Evans, ed. 2015, 119,121).
26. Chekhov, To The Actor, 87.
27. See Artaud “When an exhalation is rehearsed seven or twelve times it prepares us for the subtle quality of an outcry, for desperate soul demands” (1958, 93). Or Georgi Tovstonogov, in more concrete terms: “…if [the actor] for a long time performs actions which are peculiar not to him but to the character, making them his own, then, at a certain stage in the assimilation of the role, a leap in quality occurs and something new appears” (in Moore 1973, 69).
28. Kemp, Embodied Acting, xviii, 124.
29. Merlin, Beyond Stanislavsky, 215.
30. Stepper and Strack, Proprioceptive determinants of emotional and nonemotional feelings.
31. “The responses that make up emotion are most varied…Apparent: muscles in the face adopting the configurations typical of joy or sorrow or anger; the skin blanching at a reaction to bad news or flushing in a situation of embarrassment; body postures that signify joy, defiance, sadness, or discouragement, sweaty and clammy hands of apprehension; the racing heart associated with pride; or the slowing, near stillness of the heart in terror” Damasio,The Feeling of What Happens, 59.
32. Stanislavski, Creating a Role, 154.
33. Grotowski, Towards A Poor Theatre, 16.
34. I use the traditional distinction between inner and outer only as a convenient mental construct, not to deny the integrated nature of psychophysical embodiment. The resilience of these terms in the face of recent discourses on acting rooted in neuropsychology bears witness to the fact that they are fundamental to our conceptual thinking about the body as a “container” and should therefore be treated as a first-order metaphor in the sense described by Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 265–6.
35. Gordon, The Stanislavsky Technique, 164.
36. Edelman and Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness, 26.
37. Mirodan, 37 for this and other examples.
38. Scheflen, The Significance of Posture in Communication Systems; Scheflen, Communicational Structure; LaFrance and Broadbent, Group rapport. posture sharing as a non-verbal indicator.
39. Bull, Posture and Gesture, 65.
40. Ibid, 69.
41. Ibid, 83.
42. Spiegel and Machotka, Messages of the Body.
43. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 52.
44. Ibid, 179; LeDoux, The Emotional Brain, 28.
45. Byrne & Whiten, Machiavellian Intelligence, 56.
46. Chance and Mead, Social behaviour and primate evolution, 406.
47. Gregory Bateson, “Redundancy and coding”, 615. His research has been revised and in certain respects altered by Adam Kendon (1981, 1982, 2004) There is a considerable body of opinion which declares body movement and position (posture and gesture) to be revealing of inner psychological states: not only the ancient rhetorical or medieval patristic traditions, but also modern psychological thought, in both the psychoanalytical (see, for example, Deutsch, Analysis of postural behaviour; Deutsch, Thus speaks the body – an analysis of postural behaviour; Deutsch, Analytic posturology; Reich Character Analysis; Lowen, Physical Dynamics of Character Structure) and scientific traditions (e.g. Bull, Posture and Gesture).
48. Tempo in this sense is therefore not simply a matter of speed (Stanislavski, 1968, 183; Mitchell, The Director’s Craft, 160) but an all-encompassing “kinetic melody” (Luria, The Working Brain), the physical expression of the character. The idea of tempo as a psychophysical event emerges early among Stanislavskian disciples (see, for example, Boleslavski, Acting: The First Six Lessons,114; Lewis Method or Madness, 54); above all in Michael Chekhov’s refinement into “inner and outer” tempi reflecting, respectively, the psychological processes (“the change of thought, images, feelings, will impulses, etc.”) and their reflections in the (physical) “actions and speech” of the character (Chekhov, To The Actor, 83), with which the position outlined above is most closely aligned.
49. Trivers, Deceit and Self-Deception, 88; Leslie, 1987 cited by Premack in Byrne and Whiten, 1988, 171.
50. Trivers, Deceit and Self-Deception, 91.
51. De Paulo et al. Cues to Deception.
52. Trivers, Deceit and Self-Deception, 10.
53. Vrij, Why Professionals Fail to Catch Liars and How They Can Improve; Vrij et al. 2006; Morgan et al. 2009.
54. McConachie, Engaging Audiences, 14, 44.
55. Trivers, Deceit and Self-Deception, 42.
56. Inference is a much-debated subject, which from our perspective boils down to the question: can one and should one treat characters as if they were other or alternative human beings? The concept of presentism, a relatively recent addition to this ancient debate, has been described as “a commitment to the possibility of making general interpretations about the way people think and act that would be valid in different historical contexts” (Bristol, “…And I’m the King of France”, 47) and describes the process whereby the fictional character and its world are combined, filtered and coloured through the actor’s/reader’s own experiences. “Treating the characters as people you know or might meet is also a way of engaging seriously with them as ethical agents who struggle with and are shaped, or misshaped, by the enormous pressures – emotional to ideological – that their particular worlds impose upon them” (Yu in Yu and Shurgot eds. 2012, 7).
57. Gordon, The Stanislavsky Technique, 160).
58. Benedetti, Stanislavski, after 212.
59. Barba, The Paper Canoe, 16.
60. This Carnicke calls “Stanislavski’s oxymoron – real theatricality” (Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 106), recalling Stanislavski’s note to opera singers: “the more truthful [a production] the more theatrical” (Vinogradskaia 2000, 5, cited in Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 106). The perception of acting truth as replication of daily behaviour is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of what Stanislavski meant by truth.
61. Donnellan, The Actor and the Target, 81.
62. “When the curtain falls at the Moscow Art Theatre…one retains only an impression of 'types'. For Chekhov, the characters in The Cherry Orchard are the means and not the end. But in the Art Theatre the characters have become the end and the lyrical-mystical aspect of the play remains unrevealed” (Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, 29).
63. Ibid, 80.
64. Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 142–3.
65. Ibid 2009, 145.
66. (Stanislavski, trans. Hapgood 1968, 245).
67. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 130.
68. Byrne and Corp, Neocortex size predicts deception rate in primates; Trivers, Deceit and Self-Deception, 37.
69. Enthusiasm (Carnicke 2009, 3; McConachie 2011, 27, 72-3) for the implications of the discovery of mirror neurons as a possible physiological mechanism for empathy through mimesis (Ramachandran, Mirror Neurons and Imitation Learning as the Driving Force Behind ‘The Great Leap Forward” in Human Evolution; Gallese and Goodman, Mirror neurons and the simulation theory of mind-reading) must be tempered by the fact that their existence in humans is still to be convincingly proven (although see Uithol and Gallese, The role of the body in social cognition, 9-10 for a review of the evidence in support and Mukamel et al. 2010 for a possible, if partial and puzzling, breakthrough) and by an acknowledgment that their implications for performance continue to be a matter of lively debate (Shaughnessy, ed. 2013, loc.399-405 and loc.811-829 for a brief overview).
70. Gallese et al. A Unifying View of the Basis of Social Cognition.
71. Uithol and Gallese, 2015 for a review).
72. Gallese, 2003, 2007; Gallese and Sinigaglia 2011.
73. Ramachandran 2000, 3; Jacob and Jeannerod 2003, 227.
74. McConachie 2011, 3.
75. Jerison 1985 cited in Byrne and Whiten 1998, 61.
76. Connolly and Ralley, Laws of Normal Organic Life or Stanislavski Explained, 215.
77. An experimentally-sound psychological test which could examine empirically this hypothesis is yet to be constructed.
79. Jason Solomons, the film critic of the BBC, speaking about Christopher Lee’s death: “He was always Christopher Lee, whether they put a beard on him, or a hat or anything else…This is the secret of film acting, to be yourself” (BBC Radio 4, PM, 11 June 2015, my emphasis).
80. Chekhov, To The Actor, 28.
81. “It is a crime to chain and imprison an actor within the limits of his so-called “personality”, thus making him an enslaved labourer rather than an artist” (Chekhov, To The Actor, 27-8).