I graduated from Mountview’s inaugural musical theatre course in 1991. I’d switched from the acting course simply because I thought it was better value for money; more training in more disciplines seemed to make sense to me. Sam Kogan had been the highlight of the acting course but he’d left after just a term.
I got an agent from our graduate showcase. I don’t remember using The Science of Acting at all in that performance. In spite of having been enthralled by it, the extra classes and the numerous mind-blowing insights, I’d already ditched it and had willingly gone along with the crowd and the general way of doing things; impress, impress, impress! We all acted, sang, and danced and it was all about impressing. Impress enough and you are commercially viable which is of course what the agents want.
You might think that’s too simplistic an assessment but you only have to look at reviews and those tag lines on play and movie posters to see that impressing appears to be considered the most important metric by which to judge actors and acting industry product…
Cate Blanchett is incandescent, Daniel Day-Lewis is extraordinary, Viola Davis is commanding, Andrew Scott is magnetic, Saoirse Ronan is luminous, Tom Hiddleston is spellbinding, Jessica Chastain is fierce, Idris Elba is mesmerising.
Yes it’s marketing hyperbole and meaningless, not least I’m sure to the actors it describes but it’s squarely focussed on the actor and the star or the commodity that they’ve become and that for the money folk, (the non-creatives as they are sometimes called) they need to be.
Of course impressing (the audience) as I’m describing it here, is the actor’s purpose. It’s nothing to do with what the character is thinking, so right from the very start of my career, though I didn’t know it, I was subscribing to a notion prevalent in the industry amongst those money types anyway, that acting or what you do to achieve it, doesn’t really matter. It’s sometimes called holding the room, or x-factor or star quality or some other mysteriously inexplicable ability and I bought into all of it completely. I thought if I could just be impressive enough, I’d get away with not having to do the real work of understanding my craft.
The other issue with impressing is that it’s what The Science of Acting calls an ‘egotistical purpose’. This means it requires another person’s thinking to achieve it, you have to know that the other person is impressed. So unless you can reach inside someone’s head to see if they are or not, you never know if you’ve achieved it. This means there’s a lot of doubt and uncertainty when it comes to impressing. You are relying on other people being impressed and though they might say they are, they may just be saying it because everybody else does or because they want to please you – you can never really know. Thus as a purpose, for an actor seeking job fulfilment and peace of mind – impressing is really not helpful but ironically what the industry uses as currency. I spent years doing my best to be impressive, seeming self-assured but secretly trying to second-guess what casting directors, directors, fellow actors and audience members really thought. It was exhausting and unfulfilling.
So now I’d graduated and got an agent I needed to get work and success; I needed to ‘make it’. I didn’t really know what ‘making it’ meant for me at that particular time but looking back I think, in-line with what I’d unknowingly subscribed to, it meant losing myself in the trappings of an industry that would turn me into a star – the most impressive of all impressiveness when it comes to acting. Once achieved I could completely forget the Science of Acting stuff and never have to take the responsibility of having the required dedication to study it fully. I clearly remember thinking, ‘I’ll try things my way first and see what happens’. In my particular case the allure of being famous was at that time, still strong, as it promised to cover up all the negative subconscious thoughts I had about myself and hide them, not just from other people but most importantly, myself. I didn’t give two hoots about professional fulfilment, I didn’t even know what that meant, and I had no idea how important it would become for me.