Building a Character

Despite the silly snow that disappeared as quickly as it arrived we had a 20 strong Gold company on Saturday morning workshopping both the genre of Melodrama and the practitioner Stanislavski. 

The results were fascinating.  A lot is taken for granted in relation to these two aspects of theatrical history, there are too many generalisations and assumptions made.  However in our workshop on Saturday morning there were lots of questions asked and exploration embarked upon instead, always guaranteed to make me a happy director. 

It’s always good when different elements of the youth theatre compliment each other and so I was more than pleased when these questions and explorations of the morning were prevalent in our National Connections rehearsal of that afternoon.  Our connections play “Tomorrow I’ll Be Happy,” by Jonathan Harvey is a tough play, it’s tough to direct and tough for actors and it’ll be tough for the audience to watch.  However it is an important story that needs to be told and that makes it worth the effort.

What the questions and explorations highlighted to me was the depth of curiosity, of imagination, of integrity and of effort that need to be invested in bringing a work like “Tomorrow I’ll Be Happy,” to life.  It was exactly this kind of investment that Stanislavski was talking about to his actors over a hundred years ago and it’s thanks to him and the way he has inspired others that we have a fighting chance of coming somewhere close. 

Imagine for a moment how much work it would take to get someone to understand you, all the things you know about yourself…every little idiosyncrasy, trigger, neurosis, desire, fear, hope, experience, insecurity, addiction…the myriad of things that make up you at this moment in time.  Now imagine how much work it would take to be able to get someone to be able to be you…to react like you do, to think like you think, to behave like you behave, to do what you would do in the way that you do it.  Now consider that there are some things about ourselves that we do not really understand…put that in the mix and the complexity of the challenges of the last two sentences goes through the roof.  Essentially that’s what an actor needs to do, to understand a character more than the average person understands themselves and then be them…consider that for a moment and be suitably humbled…

Doesn’t matter how good we think we are, how much we pride ourselves in being able to instinctively “get” a character or situation, unless an actor is prepared to really graft, unless they are prepared to rid themselves of all of their assumptions, unless they can strip away themselves and construct from the very foundations the character they are playing, unless they are truly humble in the face of the task they don’t stand a chance… That’s what Stanislavski in his writing and in his legacy tries to tell us and that’s what results in an unforgettable performance that will make the audience engage with the tough play and never forget the story it told…