The Actor and the Space E-Book

Declan Donnellan

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 273

Beschreibung

In his bestselling book The Actor and the Target, Declan Donnellan laid out a fresh and radical approach to acting that has inspired actors around the world. Now, in The Actor and the Space, he develops and extends those ideas, exploring that most profound source of vitality in life as well as performance: the space around us. Tackling fundamental questions that face any actor – What makes performance better? How do I create a space for my character to live in? How do I tap into that space, and draw energy from it? – Donnellan offers a universal set of keys to unlock the mysteries of performance. Full of insightful precepts, acute psychology and practical, hands-on advice, the book presents a bold new way of thinking about acting, illustrated throughout with line-by-line analysis of scenes from Macbeth to show how it works in rehearsal and performance. Essential reading for any actor or theatre director, The Actor and the Space is also a fascinating distillation of the work of a world-leading director that will reward and enrich anyone with an interest in theatre. 'A hand grenade of a book. It contains all the humility and chutzpah you need to work in the theatre.' Cate Blanchett 'A wonderful book. Few directors think as deeply or perceptively about the art of acting as Declan Donnellan. This is an essential text for the actor, supremely useful, practical, elegant and profound.' Matthew Macfadyen 'Beautifully clear. This generous vision takes a very complex art form and makes it all seem so simple. The whole book is a key. Unlocking the problems actors face as they try to accept another reality long enough to let the audience get a glimpse of the best our art can offer – a glimpse into themselves.' Adrian Lester 'Declan Donnellan's profound insight and point of departure is that great theatre, like a child's sandcastle, inhabits a vulnerable and ever-changing space between the safe and the dangerous. There is a whole lot of wisdom in this book – about tragedy, human psychology, words, dread and about how great acting really works – conveyed with remarkable clarity and simplicity. It's worth sharing with non-actor friends for its insights into Macbeth alone. Most of all, it's a distillation of hard-won lessons learned from decades of immersion in the mysteries of theatre by one of the great directors of our day.' James Shapiro, Shakespeare scholar and author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

1  Not True But Useful

2  A Starting Point

3  Sandcastles

4  False Friends

5  Green Glasses

6  The Crowded Space

7  Quarantine

8  The Other Space

9  Thresholds

10 Trying Out the Keys

11 Flow

12 Character

13 Predicament

14 Dread

15 False Words

16 The Political Actor

17 The Keys

Acknowledgements

Index

About the Authors

Copyright Information

Since The Actor and the Target was published more than twenty years ago, Nick Ormerod and I have continued to talk about theatre and acting, trying to see what makes performance better. And more importantly, what ‘better’ might mean. The Covid lockdowns forced us to stop working and gave us time to think about what we do, and this book is the result. It is largely based on interviews with Lucie Dawkins, without whose patience and eagle-eyed rigour it would never have happened.

All the ideas in this book were developed in conversation between myself and Nick. The words are from me, and the structure is mainly Lucie’s. It is a development of themes in The Actor and the Target, not a denial of them. Of course, neither of them is ‘right’, but they are both attempts to describe the indescribable from slightly different positions. Neither of them is a ‘how to’ book, but both suggest a different position from which to think about acting and theatre. They are emphatically not yet more rules to encumber us. In other words, they are not something to be got ‘right’.

Nick and I never sat down to cook up a theory or a method, or to create a theatre company to put it into practice. Quite the reverse. We both remain suspicious of any theory. Over the years we have often been pressed about our process, but we have always resisted the idea that we even had one. Our belief was that we needed to commit to the specific company of actors with the specific text. So for forty years we have avoided any pre-existing theory casting a shadow between us and the work we try to do.

However, we have somehow found ourselves continuing to return to the same theme: the importance of the space. That is fundamentally what this book is about.

So, what is this ‘space’? Well, there is no simple answer, but a story might help. Two young fish were playing, swimming around amongst the pondweed. An older fish happened to lumber past and remarked, ‘The water’s nice today.’ The old fish swam slowly on. A moment later one young fish stopped, turned to the other and asked, ‘What’s water?’

We often take the space we live in for granted. And yet, without it, like a fish out of water, we die.

The Actor and the Target followed Irina and Alex tackling Romeo and Juliet. And now, twenty years on, they find themselves rehearsing Macbeth. We are going to spend some time with them in rehearsal, but it is not essential to have read Macbeth because this book is not about the play. Nor is it about a particular interpretation of Macbeth. Some interpretation will inevitably creep in, but please try to ignore it. The book’s aim is to offer a different position from which to view acting and theatre. Irina and Alex could be rehearsing anything, but Macbeth seemed to us to be a suitable vehicle to discuss some of the more universal nuts and bolts of performance.

One last caveat: as in The Actor and the Target, nothing here is true. We just hope you find it useful.

Human beings are actors. It is hard-wired into our DNA. From toddlers playing make-believe to old-age pensioners sharing jokes in the pub, we need to perform. It’s an essential part of being human.

Acting starts early. We use it to develop our relationship with our mothers. We watch her in wonder, mirror her smiling and repeat the sounds she makes. She intones soothing noises. We copy her. We learn things by performing for her, and she performs for us. Does that mean we are lying to each other? Of course not. Performance is woven into the fabric of our lives. It’s as natural and important to us as breathing. Performance is not merely a habit humans keep repeating across millennia, languages and cultures. It is more fundamental than that. Performance is what it is to be human. It is the operating system for life.

So, if everyone is a natural actor, what is the problem? Why can’t we all walk on stage and just act brilliantly? Well, things don’t work out so smoothly when you stand in front of an audience with an already-written text. In real life, most people can make a good stab at improvising their allotted role of father, mother, nurse, lover, and so forth. But give them a script, and their performance rapidly dies. This is the basic problem we face in a rehearsal room. There is a series of black marks on white paper, a dead thing, and we need somehow to bring it to life.

‘Is it alive?’ is therefore a continuing question in rehearsal. Now, although we can’t define exactly what this ‘alive’ is, it becomes immediately obvious to everyone in a rehearsal room when a moment bursts into life – and it’s equally obvious when it’s dead. So where can we try to find this life? Well, we can take a tip from the experts. When scientists search for life on other planets, they don’t look for living organisms themselves. Instead, they search for the conditions that life needs: for example, in our universe, water, oxygen, carbon, and so on. They find life not by searching for life itself but instead by looking for a space that could support life.

All life depends on context, ultimately on the space around it. A child can pick a beautiful flower in the garden, take it into its bedroom and later be disappointed when it wilts and dies. When a bit older, the child will begin to understand that the flower depends on invisible things – its roots, sunlight, water and healthy earth – for life. The child is attracted by the brightness of the flower but doesn’t yet understand that, to live and grow, the flower needs a whole host of conditions which are not immediately obvious.

Everything that lives, including you and me, needs its context to bring it into life and to keep it alive. Imagine a megalomaniac inventor who wants to destroy the entire universe and leave only himself behind. He builds a mighty end-of-the-world machine. Then, when he is ready for his solo adventure, he presses the button. Hey presto! At that very moment he would indeed find that everything had disappeared. But also, at precisely the same moment, he would vanish too. He needs the world. Nothing survives in a void.

The space is the source of that precious life we are looking for in rehearsals, but we often forget it. This is not because the space is some difficult-to-grasp transcendental mystery, but because it is so utterly obvious. Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story called The Purloined Letter. Trying to recover a scandalous letter, the police tear apart a house. Their frantic and exhaustive search involves drilling holes in the wall and pulling the legs off a table to search for secret compartments.

But all the time, they fail to notice the obvious. The letter is in the one place they don’t think to look: it is pinned right in the centre of the wall, in plain sight. And they can’t see it for looking. Often the thing we desperately need and seek is hidden right in front of our nose.

So, what is this thing that we cannot see because it is so obvious? What is this crucial step we are missing? Like the fish in real life, you and I don’t need to think about this thing, we can take it for granted, but it’s quite different when we are acting another human being. Then we cannot take the space for granted.

When a scene feels dead, our first impulse can be to throw lots of energy at it. This is normally a disaster. When the TV isn’t working, we can play with the buttons and dials all we like. We can even kick it hard, but ultimately it will never flicker into life. First, we must realise that the TV is unplugged from the electric socket. If the actor is unplugged from the space, the work cannot be alive. When actors struggle in rehearsal, they need to plug themselves into their character’s space. And they need to do that first.

Actors sometimes plunge past this first crucial step and instead valiantly throw themselves into ‘acting’, meaning each word sincerely, desperately, deeply, indicating the slightest nuance and pouring energy into the performance. They can exhaust themselves (and indeed the audience), and yet it still feels dead. The issue is rarely that they have failed to discover the right feelings, or details, or characteristics of the part. The problem is simpler: the actor hasn’t done the imaginative work to create a new and different space for the character. Yes, although the actor has no option but to be somewhere (there, in the middle of the stage, sweating), the poor character is nowhere. No effort can be alive if it happens in a vacuum. It’s not just that the character is dead; the character hasn’t even started to exist.

And this is what all the advice in this book comes down to. It’s all about plugging into the space.

It seems to us that our most important job as theatre-makers is to encourage the flow of life on stage. So it follows that we need to think a little about what the experience of being alive is like.

Is it possible to make a useful generalisation? Well, this one has proved reliable over the years: life is largely about trying to fix the space. From the very moment we are born, we are already trying to make things better. We can’t breathe, so we take a gulp of oxygen. We feel hungry, so we scream to get fed. When we are wet, we cry. When we are cold, we snuggle up to our mother’s breast. When we are uncomfortable, we wriggle. We will do this even before we can focus our tiny eyes enough to see the world around us.

To begin with, we don’t have words for all these different feelings. But as we grow, our parents help us to label them as distinct experiences, called ‘hunger’, ‘discomfort’, ‘fear’, ‘rage’, and so on. We dislike these bad feelings, but they are tremendously useful. If hunger didn’t feel horrible, we would starve to death. These bad feelings keep us alive. They also give us something to do. And doing is the very stuff of life. If the baby ever stops wriggling or struggling to fix a bad feeling, and is awake but completely still, it’s a warning signal to their parents that something is wrong.

We have structured this book around a series of keys. These have helped us solve problems in rehearsal. The important thing about keys is that they are not sacred principles. They are only tools. Whatever you do, please do not turn this into a rule book for making a play. These keys are not sticks to beat yourself with in rehearsal. But when we feel stuck or discouraged it can feel a bit like being locked in a room. Hopefully one of these keys will unlock the door and release you. So let’s take this as our first key:

A character is always trying to fix the space.

This fixing will go on for our whole life. We never stop trying to make the space feel more comfortable. When we see a bully in the playground, we hide. When we come in from the rain feeling miserable, we put the kettle on and make toast. When the floor gets dirty, we clean it. Even in our smallest actions, we are always trying to improve the here and now. Of course, some of our solutions are more sensible than others. And even ignoring one problem, let’s say a leaking roof, probably means you are busily fixing something else as a distraction.

But we are condemned to keep on trying to fix the space until the last question about when the next dose of morphine is due. All spaces are different, very different, but they all have one thing in common. No space is ever ideal. Every space needs to be mended, however slightly. Indeed, advertisers make fortunes selling us perfect spaces. Not because they exist, but because we would pay anything to have one. Sadly, humans can never swim in totally calm water; there will always be some turbulence.

The space is never neutral.

Let’s think about sandcastles for a moment. There are at least three things that are fascinating about sandcastles. First, small children don’t need to be taught how to make them. Indeed, adults who try to teach them are normally sent packing. It seems to be one of those primordial games we are programmed to play. Secondly, ‘sandcastle’ is a misnomer, because it’s not really about the ‘castle’ bit at all. The simple cylinder of sand shaped by the bucket gets scant attention.

The structures that really interest the child are the runnels and walls and moats that surround the castle. The child delights in watching the waters gurgle round, wondering at the almighty sea being harnessed and controlled within their structures. Thirdly, and most importantly, the child prefers to build the castle in the tidal area where the water is coming and going. They choose the spot where their sandcastle will be destroyed by the tide. They choose the annihilation of their own creation.

Strangely, of all the many things that disappointed me as a child, coming back the next morning to find my sandcastle washed away was not one of them. Like most children, I cheerfully set about building a new one. Yes, there are a few ultra-sensible children who build their sandcastles to last for ever, way up on the dry sand well above the advancing line of the tide. Few beachcombers bother to inspect them except for dogs with loose bladders. Children tend to ignore those sophisticated structures, with their posh flags and dry battlements, erected away from the destructive power of the ocean. They’re built on water-free territory. Frankly, these castles feel safe, boring and dead. Most children prefer to watch the castles that are right on the edge of the tide. These are temporary, under threat, and therefore alive.

This is a game all about fixing the space. The children build their sandcastles in the in-between space between safe and dangerous, at the very edges of their power. They are bartering with the immensity of the ocean. This in-between space is thrilling because it is constantly changing. The tide keeps creeping up and down the shore, and so the rules are in flux. The children are caught up in a shifting contest of control over two things: time and space. They are exerting a tiny corner of control over the immense ocean, in a tiny corner of time when the tide is in just the right place for just the right fraction of the day. Just enough time to make a sandcastle, before it yields and is dashed to pieces by the waves.

This is the pattern of our lives. The space presents us with a series of challenges, sometimes small, sometimes overwhelming, and we are constantly trying to manage them. We must make peace with the fact that the world is always going to be more vast, more chaotic, more arbitrary and more powerful than we want it to be. We’re just struggling to control the little corner of space and time that we happen to be standing in. We’re trying to make ourselves feel safe. Just a bit safe, for now, at least.

Of course, another big part of the challenge is that the space around us is always changing. Nothing ever stands still. In fact, nothing can stand still. Everything is moving. Even a rock is just a very monotonous vibration. Everything, without exception, is in a process of change. And because the space is always changing, our attempts to fix it never finally work. We can never truly be in control. Our sandcastles will always be washed away.

Children who build sandcastles can therefore teach us a lot about acting and art and life. It’s all to do with facing destruction and accepting loss, and understanding that the only place where life may exist is in the narrow borderland between order and chaos. Children find life by building their sandcastles in the dangerous space and not the safe one. All characters in all scenes are making sandcastles on the edge of the shore. They are playing with a tiny patch of control, in a massive, continuously changing world. All the energy and life in any scene comes from this ever-failing struggle for control over the almighty space.

The space is always changing, so the character is never in control.

Let’s look at the rehearsal of Macbeth with Irina and Alex. As with every character, the Macbeths spend the whole play trying to fix the space. And, just like children building sandcastles, they soon discover that after every attempt, a new wave comes along and destroys their efforts. The space refuses to remain fixed. Their sandcastle is never secure. They start the play trying to control the space. They seem somehow dissatisfied because they are not king and queen. So they fix the space by murdering Duncan and putting themselves in his place. As soon as they do that, they discover that the space doesn’t feel more comfortable after all. So, they fix it again, and again, and again. They won’t stop until it finally kills them (and a lot of other Scots). This endless sandcastle-building is happening in every second of every scene.

Let’s look at the famous ‘dagger’ speech with our actor Alex. This is a moment just before he murders Duncan, as Macbeth lurks waiting for his wife’s signal. It will help Alex to think that all scenes essentially have the same pattern: they are a chain reaction of the characters trying to fix the space around them. The space changes faster than Macbeth can keep up with. It’s always hurling new problems at him which he must fix. He tries to come up with solutions, but ultimately they always fail. He never achieves full control. This is his text:

‘Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw.

Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going,

And such an instrument I was to use.

Mine eyes are made the fools o’ the other senses,

Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,

And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,

Which was not so before. There’s no such thing.

It is the bloody business which informs

Thus to mine eyes. Now o’er the one half-world

Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

The curtained sleep; witchcraft celebrates

Pale Hecate’s offerings, and withered Murder,

Alarumed by his sentinel, the wolf,

Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,

With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design

Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,

Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear

Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,

And take the present horror from the time

Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives:

Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives

A bell rings

I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.

Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell

That summons thee to heaven, or to hell.’

Macbeth is in the dark, with the whole Scottish government asleep in the castle around him. And he’s waiting. Alone. But suddenly he… sees something. Something that astounds him. He sees a dagger floating in mid-air. One moment, he is standing in an empty corridor. The next, he isn’t alone any more. At the very moment that he needs everything to go according to plan, he discovers that the space is doing something wildly outside his control. This is a problem he must absolutely fix. He turns to us in the audience and urgently asks:

‘Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand?’

If we can see the dagger too, then he’s not alone; there may be a logical solution, and he’s not insane. Perhaps we can all find it together with him, and something that had appeared to be extraordinary could be explained away. But of course, we won’t give him an answer as we sit politely in the auditorium. His attempted fix has failed. He scrabbles for a new solution. He tries to shore up his sandcastle. We hold our breath as we watch him search for what to do next. He decides that if he can grab the dagger, he can make sense of it, and maybe even sweep it away.

‘Come, let me clutch thee.’

But… his hand goes straight through it. The dagger which had appeared to be all too solid turns out to be the exact opposite. The space has changed wildly, again, because Macbeth has just discovered that the laws of physics no longer apply here. What can he possibly do now? His idea for a solution is to try to have a calm, sensible discussion with the dagger. He points out to it that it is behaving illogically. He tries to talk the situation back under control.

‘Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight?’

No response from the dagger. That didn’t work, so Macbeth needs a new fix. He tries to explain the hallucination away to himself and to the audience as a perfectly reasonable symptom of stress.

‘Or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?’

Again, the dagger doesn’t respond to Macbeth’s logic. It’s still there. New solution: Macbeth tries to measure it against the real dagger on his belt, to create some kind of anchor for reality.

‘I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw.’

A pattern has emerged. Macbeth keeps trying to apply logic to extricate himself from an irrational and deteriorating situation, but the dagger continually fails to do what he wants it to. He struggles to wrestle the space back under his control. But it refuses to obey his commands. Indeed, the dagger seems to become increasingly obtuse, increasingly defiant.

Then, with a horrifying lurch, the space changes dramatically again. The dagger suddenly moves towards Duncan’s bedroom. Macbeth scrambles to react.

‘Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going,

And such an instrument I was to use.’

Alex knows he must make a choice. The space has changed, and his character must respond to it. But the nature of the response is entirely up to Alex. In other words, he must make a change, but what that choice is, is his to decide. Alex decides that Macbeth sees the change as hopeful, that the dagger isn’t a bad omen after all, and it’s beckoning him, encouraging him to kill Duncan.

Unfortunately for Macbeth, the dagger refuses to submit to his little act of mastery. It keeps flashing its warning sign with another shocking transformation. Now it’s covered in blood:

‘I see thee still,

And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,

Which was not so before.’

Macbeth changes tack, fumbling for a new tactic to stop the nightmare. He tries denying its existence.

‘There’s no such thing.

It is the bloody business which informs

Thus to mine eyes.’

All at once, Macbeth changes his language radically, as if he has stepped into another play.

‘Now o’er the one half-world

Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

The curtained sleep; witchcraft celebrates

Pale Hecate’s offerings…’

He talks about ghosts and witches and nightmares, as if he is trying to scare a child. Alex should never explain these words away as ‘Shakespearean poetry’. These words are strange, but they are doing something. He is making himself believe he is the grown-up. ‘I am not the one who is spooked, I am spooking you! I am the one in control. I am not the frightened child; I am the adult in control!’ He is trying to out-spook the dagger.

The golden rule is that we should never ever leave our common sense with our coats at the door. Macbeth is a human being, not so different from me and you. Listen to the voice in your head that says, ‘What on earth makes a human being talk like this?’

Pay attention to your common-sense alarm.

Shakespeare knew that we are often at our most human when we are acting strangely. In fact, it’s often through our strangeness that we connect with each other. And Macbeth here is acting strangely. What is all this horror-film baloney? It may be because the space has become unbearable to Macbeth. So unbearable that he must exaggerate in order not to feel. It’s as if he’s whiffing some incantatory drug. He is using his words as a smokescreen to hide what he’s really doing. And he’s not just hiding these ugly facts from us, he’s trying not to see them himself. It’s very human. We often hide things by talking. We may notice this when we have an all-out argument in which we know we are in the wrong. We build ourselves a fortress of words.

Macbeth defends himself from reality by using exaggerated horror imagery. Suddenly, he imagines he is Murder personified in a medieval romance, and then again, he transforms into Tarquin, the tyrant of Ancient Rome, en route to rape Lucretia:

‘…and withered Murder,

Alarumed by his sentinel, the wolf,

Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,

With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design

Moves like a ghost.’

Our common sense should tell us that he has moved into that most dangerous mode where we dissociate from ourselves. We imagine we are someone else. We are not the person responsible. Macbeth cannot bear to face what he is doing in the here and now, so he puts himself in an entirely different space. He wants to be anywhere but here, in any time but now. He transposes himself to someone who is ‘there and then’, to an alternate version of reality where perhaps he might bring himself to murder the man who loves him like a father. Effectively, he’s claiming: ‘It’s not me murdering Duncan, it’s Tarquin!’

Of course, it’s all rubbish, so none of it works. Finally, he is driven to talking to the ground, the only thing left that still feels real and concrete.

‘Thou sure and firm-set earth,

Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear

Thy very stones prate of my whereabout.’

The problem for Macbeth is that the earth is all too firm-set and real. The bell rings and that changes the space again. His wife has given the signal for him to murder Duncan, and he realises time is running faster than he can. He feels that there are no choices left for him to make. He must go and kill Duncan, now. For all his efforts to put himself in control, he’s lost. The space wins. It always does.

Let’s look back at this soliloquy. Macbeth starts by hallucinating a dagger and ends up talking to the ground. That’s a pretty good snapshot of a man in psychological distress. Alex may quite reasonably diagnose Macbeth with paranoia. And of course, if Macbeth himself went to a psychiatrist and complained, ‘I have this terrible problem, I keep on seeing a dagger,’ the analyst would probably deduce he was suffering from delusions and then try to work out what was causing them. Alex and the psychiatrist can agree that Macbeth is experiencing some severe mental health issues. Macbeth is hallucinating, and the dagger is a projection of his own guilty mind – somewhere Macbeth does not want to kill Duncan, and somewhere his subconscious is frantically throwing obstacles in the way of his path to destruction.

This is true, but it is also a perfect example of something that may be true but not useful to the actor. It takes psychiatrists years of training to understand how humans experience these things, and it’s not for us as theatre-makers to dole out diagnoses. Our only job is to understand what this live experience feels like from Macbeth’s point of view.

Macbeth’s inner experience of the scene is that he is being extremely logical. Imagine a passenger on a plane having an anxiety attack that the plane will crash. Their friend travelling with them sees that it’s irrational, but for the person in the grip of panic, it doesn’t seem at all irrational. It seems logical that this hunk of metal could fall out of the sky. The wings could drop off. The pilot could have a heart attack. Inside irrational hysteria, you will always find a cathedral of logic.

Indeed, logic can be more sinister than we would like to think. Like fire, it is a good servant but a very bad master. Logic is a useful tool that becomes deadly if it runs wild.

Shakespeare often introduces us to tragic characters who are wrapped up in wild but apparently logical fantasies which drive them to brutal destruction. It’s cold logic that makes Macbeth think that ‘to survive, we’ve got to put Duncan out of the way’. It’s cold logic that marches Othello into Desdemona’s bedroom to strangle her, waving the handkerchief as proof of her infidelity. These men don’t tumble into the wild madness of Dionysus. They tumble into the far scarier madness of Apollo. A super-flux of logic is just as dangerous as chaos.

All this proves a very good example of the fact that our job is normally the exact opposite of psychoanalysis. For Alex can’t step into Macbeth’s shoes if at the same time he sits on the outside diagnosing him. He should never, ever, let himself feel superior to Macbeth. We must always try to find complete horizontality with the character and the play.

Imagine a long tunnel running straight through a mountainside that is blocking out the sun. If you want to see the light gleaming at the other end, you will have to stand in exactly the right spot. If your feet are placed a little too high you will not see it, or if your feet are a little too low, you won’t be able to see the light either. It doesn’t matter how hard you squint and peer and concentrate into the tunnel if you haven’t first paid proper attention to where your feet are placed.

This is the best way to approach our work. It’s all too easy to be superior to a character by playing the psychiatrist. We can also find ourselves standing too low by feeling intimidated by the play, as, for example, when we tackle a great classic. One of the great challenges of rehearsal is to make sure that we are constantly shifting the position of our feet in order to get as horizontal a view as possible. Of course, this isn’t easy.

It’s a constant process of readjustment. It means we must shift all the time. It is all too comfortable to judge a character. Judging people is lazy and addictive. It’s also very dangerous.

Get horizontal with the character.