Bloom: Actors aren’t animals! They’re human beings!
Bialystock: Have you ever eaten with one? – The Producers
It all started with Stanislavski.
Konstantin Stanislavski. Muscovite. End of 19th and early 20th century. Father of a performance system that grew to be known as method acting. I remember, as a theatre student, reading his Building a Character and An Actor Prepares.
Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre toured the US in the 1920’s and the method lived on, adapted through the Group Theatre and the Actors’ Studio in New York (Al Pacino is to this day a co-president).
Roughly speaking – and this is personal reflection, not scholarly analysis – method acting is the close identification of the actor with the role. S/he gets inside the skin of their character in order to better portray them
Now some people (Oi – you, Daniel Day-Lewis, stop being somebody else and pay attention!) take things too far, beyond the approach advocated by Stanislavski and later gurus of method like Lee Strasberg.
It’s not just about staying in character off-set or offstage. The idea is to work out, through improvisation and other techniques, what motivates the character, put yourself in their position and adopt their attitudes towards what happens in the script.
You might also, in building your character, deduce what happens off-script – But, Mister Director, I’m holding my chin as I come on because I’ve just been to the dentist!
You act from the inside, emotionally, trying to feel your way towards behaving as naturally as the character.
Most of us are familiar with the method style from American film actors like Marlon Brando, Robert de Niro, Pacino et al.
De Niro, for instance, piled on 4 stones to become Jake La Motta, the boxer in Raging Bull. Charlize Theron added 2 stones for her role in The Monster. Maybe the Oscars they won for their performances made the subsequent dieting easier.
Contrast the method’s approach with a very different tradition – British acting style.
Laurence Olivier, it seems, gave up on method in the 1950’s. It then became more Give me a withered arm and I’m Richard III; a lisp and, hey presto, Malvolio in Twelfth Night.
Olivier told Dustin Hoffman, agonising over his role in The Marathon Man, Try acting; it’s so much easier.
The British way tends toward outside in, not inside out. It relies on a mixture of intuition, intelligence and imagination; it’s a sort of non-method. Pragmatic, flexible and inventive.
And, I suggest, this approach is practised even more by Scottish actors.
It’s not the actor’s job to be the character; instead they should cleverly pretend. The performance is built on situation, technique and ideas.
Objective rather than subjective, the actor thinks of the character they’re playing in the third person – how would s/he behave and how can I best convey that to the audience?
There are several reasons behind this difference – the theatre tradition’s stronger in Britain. Shakespeare must have something to do with it. His characters and scenarios are already out of the ordinary, the poetic language is heightened. It’s inherently theatrical, a conscious creation of another world, not a faithful simulation of real life.
Add to this the old weekly rep model which dominated stage production up to the 1960’s. No time to explore characterisation, you were lucky if you could learn the lines and not bump into the furniture.
Plus, in Scotland, there’s the major role played by Variety and Pantomime. And there’s been crossover from stand-up performers into theatre.
The straight-to-the-audience style of these immensely popular forms has bled into other types of theatre.
Some crossed both traditions – stars like Jimmy Logan, Rikki Fulton and Gerard Kelly, plus the dames at the Citizens’, Alex Norton and Peter Kelly, would play not just panto but also serious roles. Many actors working in Scotland today still do both over-the-top, two-dimensional shows and straight plays.
The upshot of all this is a free-wheeling, quick, flexible acting style here in Scotland. It’s the opposite of precious; actors can turn on a sixpence, switch to the best way of playing their part, with the minimum of fuss.
This alacrity means that watching actors here gives the play or show an energy of its own. It’s as if the actor wants to involve the spectator as much as their own egos.
The normal rules – the naturalistic fourth wall and suspension of disbelief – still exist in Scottish drama, but they are more prone to be breached, or bent, by a closer engagement with the public through acting style, attitude and an understanding that the whole experience is a shared one.
Is this why Scotland produces such great comic actors?
Just take a few examples like Maureen Carr, Karen Dunbar, Barbara Rafferty, Elaine C. Smith, Gail Watson, Jimmy Chisholm, Richard Conlon, Greg Hemphill, Ford Kiernan, Greg McHugh, Gavin Mitchell, Grant O’Rourke and Jonathan Watson and so many others, all of them with theatre a big part of their CV.
Back to Konstantin Stanislavski. He contrasted the art of experiencing with representation. That difference still holds true.
Method and ‘outside in’ acting styles: which is more effective, which more likely to bring out the truth of the character for an audience?
Hollywood and the King’s, Glasgow are miles apart in every sense.
All acting is a quest for authenticity. But I believe it’s wrong to see the introspective method actor who goes to extreme lengths to be their character as somehow deeper, more meaningful than the external, flick-of-the-wrist spirit of actors in this part of the world.
Just because it’s on the surface doesn’t mean it’s superficial.
Quick identification with the externals of a role, talent, skill and the ability not to take yourself too seriously all add up to a more rewarding result for audiences.
I’ve seen it happen thousands of times in Scottish theatres. I’m sure it’ll happen for a long time to come, thanks to our think-on-your-feet, get-on-with-it and connect-with-the-people performers.
I love Scottish acting.
by Paul Bassett, Glasgow, May 2020
Comments and feedback also welcome via e mail: stageleftblogscotland@gmail.com
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