Do you remember saying those words when you were a nipper playing cowboys, or if you were a little girl, playing at being a nurse? In a way, "let's pretend" is what acting is all about; you have to go on stage in front of an audience and 'pretend' to be what you are not. At this point I must pause and allow some of my more pretentious fellow actors to compose themselves because there is a very strong creed running throughout theatre that actors must not pretend to be a character, they must become that character. Total tosh, of course! So how do you 'pretend' to be someone else? As an ex-amateur actor this is my very amateurish attempt to answer.
To begin with you need to analyse the text and answer four (apparently) simple questions:
1: What does your character say?
2: What does your character do?
3: What do the other characters say about you?
4: What do the other characters do about you?
Just from those four questions you will realise that in a play, exactly as in life, what people say and what people do are frequently different, and it is from those differences that you may glimpse their inner workings, so to speak. It goes further, because if another character in the play speaks of you, you will need to ascertain, as best you can from the text, what sort of character he is - and, sometimes just as important, to whom he or she is speaking. A man might speak openly and honestly to his valet but rather more discreetly, or even dishonestly, to his sovereign. All this detective work must be done alone at home as you learn your lines but as and when rehearsals begin you will get the chance to discuss your preliminary conclusions with the director and the other actors. It is usually around this point in the proceedings that the first blood is splashed onto the rehearsal-room walls! The greater the play, the greater the differences in interpretation, and at this point it will be necessary to judge the characters of your fellow actors and director, not in the roles they are playing but as they are in real life. Thus, if your director is a Left-wing Bolshie who sets Coriolanus in Hitler's Germany and is determined to paint the hero as a Fascist, then you will have to adjust accordingly, or better still, resign!
However, assuming, as usually happens, that the company meld together and gradually tease the characters from their different roles and do so in a way that is mutually helpful to each other, then you are now faced with the problem of how to express your particular character so that an audience will see it. Well, of course, the voice is paramount. The tone, the pitch, the delivery. With Shakespeare you are helped by his 'invisible hand' because most of what he wrote was in verse and if you understand the rhythms of iambic pentameter it is as though the man himself is standing before you conducting your delivery. Even so, beneath the rhythm there is the thought and the feeling, or if you like, the emotion. No matter how quickly we carry out an action it is always preceded by a thought. A child runs out into the street and you immediately shout "stop!", or at least you think it was immediate but you are never faster than the speed of light with which the messages from eye to brain, and then the thought from brain to vocal muscles, are transmitted. So, thinking always comes before speaking and it is the job of the actor to work out what those thoughts were which provoked those words and that will give him the clue as to the emotion he must emulate in order to deliver them in the proper way.
These considerations are not confined to the lucky devils playing the leads. Consider the role of First Messenger who must enter the chambers of his master, the 'Duke of Mummerset', and deliver, as best he may, his one and only line in the entire play, "Sire, his Majesty is below and requires your presence." Now, he could (and usually does!) simply walk in, deliver the line and leave. But a more thoughtful actor will, perhaps, go through the following thought process: Right, first of all I am purveying a message from THE KING! That means it's really important. The King is probably downstairs in the courtyard or the lobby waiting impatiently for my boss, the Duke, so I have probably run upstairs and along a corridor and burst into the Duke's presence with this urgent summons. So, it might be a good idea, as I stand in the wings waiting for my entrance, to hold my breath so that when I enter I am literally breathless. Also, perhaps I should stand back a little from my entrance point thus forcing myself to take a run at it and entering the stage in the right energetic mode. Poor chap, no-one will notice, he will never win a prize, all he will have is the satisfaction of knowing that he gave it his all.
The manner of that Messenger's entrance is important for another reason. In this day and age, visual images are hugely powerful. In Shakespeare's England it was the reverse of today. His audiences really listened because in an age before TV and film it was the words that counted. That is partly why Shakespeare was such a brilliant, dazzling wordsmith - because his audiences loved the word-play and followed and enjoyed the puns and the poetry. Today we are 'deafer' than his age and the visual is more important - as summed up in that old phrase 'a picture is worth a thousand words'. Of course, it is the director who will (hopefully!) help an actor by allowing him to move from A to B on stage, or allow him to take up a suitable and helpful position from which to deliver the lines. A simple example comes from my production of Hamlet in which, for Ophelia's mad scene, I arranged matters so that those on stage fell back into a semi-circle allowing the actress to hold centre stage as she ricocheted in her madness from one character to another. Even so, that still leaves it to the actress concerned to deliver her words in a way which expresses the complete internal collapse she has suffered and the insanity to which she has fled for shelter.
In order to get these indications of character and emotion across an actor needs to be constantly aware of the possibilities of every part of his or her body. I remember the late, great Walter Matthau explaining that the first thing he worked on was his character's walk - if he could get the walk right everything else fell into place. In my youthful amateurish way I thought that a wonderful insight which only faded much later when I realised that Matthau used exactly the same '10-to-2', flat-footed trudge in every film! However, it did teach me to consider my body as I acted. How, for example, would my character cross a room, sit down and drink a cup of tea? There are quite a different number of ways of executing this simple process and I, personally, without thinking about it would do it one way. But once you ask youself how your character would do it, then suddenly, all sorts of other possibilities come to mind. No-one in the audience will particularly remember how you did it but if it matches visually what they expect a character like that would do, then sub-consciously you have re-inforced to them the image you are trying to get across. How you stand, how you move, the way in which you use your arms, the hands and the fingers, the tilt of your head . . . the different possibilities go on and on, and the best actors will run the gamut but then, during rehearsals, they will begin to drop more and more of them as either superfluous or overly mannered. The best hone it down to the essentials.
All of this is what happens at, so to speak, stage level, but if the play is a great classic containing some hefty philosophical thoughts then certainly the leading actors and the director need to come to some conclusion as to what these thoughts are and how the production can best reproduce them. This sounds obvious but believe me you would be amazed at how often, particularly in amateur circles, it is ignored. King Lear provides a good example. In this play Shakespeare reminds us that anger is not only a deadly sin but also a fatal weakness. Lear begins the play angry and then moves on to furious, then to enraged and finally reaches the apoplectic. As you can imagine, to reproduce this takes enormous skill from an actor. The mounting rage that Lear exhibits is not a straight line progress, it rises, it falls back slightly, then mounts to further heights, falls back again, and eventually it reaches a climax, followed by madness and then a re-awakening to truth, and all rage is spent. For the actor it is the equivalent of playing one of the great instrumental concertos, the performance must move onward and upward to the heights but never in a straight line. And whilst the apoplectic fury must be demonstrated, inside the actor must remain cool and detached and analytical, or in other words, he must pretend!
If a play does contain some some profound propositions behind or beneath its text it is necessary for the actor to tease them out and for that he should turn to the literary critics, past and present. I remember vividly the shock I received from reading a book of Shakespearean analysis and criticism by one of the early and militant leaders of the American feminist movement, not, I confess, usually to be found on my reading list, but she completely up-ended my view of Measure for Measure and opened my eyes to the male/female relationships in Elizabethan England, and probably - nothing is certain - in Shakespeare's mind, too. I learned an enormous amount from her. Some of the critics, even the so-called 'great' critics are not always useful but you have to plough through them because suddenly, in a phrase or a paragraph, they will direct a shaft of light onto an aspect which had never before entered your head.
On top of all that, of course, you have to remember your lines! So, you see, this acting lark is dead easy, anyone could do it!
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