Beneath the Surface

I’ve been all demanding and challenging in the latter part of this week – to be fair Gold and Black were the ones that really took the brunt of it…but this blog is to say I’m not sorry.  Although I still think you’re all lovely and I know that your commitment is second to none… there seemed to be a certain amount of coasting going on…a kind of innate belief that just by turning up when you were meant to and learning your lines your productions would all sort of slot into place.  You’d stopped being thinking actors…you’d stopped really stretching yourself, you’d stopped having vision, not all of you and not entirely but enough of you and to a big enough degree that it was time to draw your attention to it…so I did.
I get such a kick out of watching the light bulbs go on in actors heads when they realise that the tougher you make it on yourself the better acting is…not tougher in a oh-no-I’m-so-bad-angsty-what-am-I-going-to-do sort of a way but in a, “How do I make this better interpretation of the text?   Why does a character say and act in the way they do?” sort of a way.  More importantly there’s a magic for a director when you get a sense that in that moment, in that rehearsal the actor has a clear sense of why they should refuse to settle for a surface performance where every line is played but with no thought about how these lines connect up and in turn how they connect to the character, the relationships and the world of the play.  When they know there is something better, something cohesive, something truer to aim for. My nagging and challenging made that happen on Thursday and Saturday.
So team…come on…rise to the challenge…you have less than four weeks to the Christmas performances, less than a week till the Connections auditions…as they say in The West Wing in times when the pressure is on and demands are being made…BRING IT YEW TREE!!! …well obvs they don’t put in the Yew Tree bit but only because they don’t know you…