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.

I hardly know any of you and when not on a stage you could be up to some real dodgy stuff in other areas of your lives so I’ll stop short of mindlessly praising you all up to the high-heavens… besides ‘amazing, awesome, talented cast’ gets bandied about so often that it loses all meaning. Suffice to say my time on Footloose was mostly a pleasure and inspiring. I say ‘mostly’ because of the lack of rehearsal time – I’ll come back to that – and inspiring because it re-ignited my interest in music and singing, the latter of which I hadn’t done professionally for 12 years. 

I once did a musical where I mimed an instrument on stage, danced (a bit) and sang (a bit) all at the same time too and that was hard enough, even with 6 weeks rehearsal. In younger days I did a job swinging 6 roles that required roller-skating, huge guitar solos, and acrobatics but the demands put on me kind of pale in comparison when considering what you all have to do on Footloose after a relatively short rehearsal period and the ever-present threat of Covid. However the technical ability to get a job done that requires a more varied skill-set than a Swiss army knife should not be the ultimate bench-mark by which we are judged or judge ourselves as actors. It’s useful to have myriad abilities for sure and often gives an edge, but it is not the whole story.

With so little rehearsal time of course the technical stuff has to be perfected first – you can see and hear it so it has to be right. What gets inevitably left to the wayside apart from learning the lines (another technical requirement), is the acting part – yet for all us actors isn’t it is the most important, most enjoyable bit? 

Why does it get left?

Well for one, unlike dancing, singing and playing an instrument acting exists largely in the mental realm and let’s face it half the audience can think your acting is good and half can think it sucks. One critic might love you, another not. It will always be subjective. Ultimately though it never matters what the audience, critics, friends or your family think – they all have their agendas. However it does matter what we, the actors think of the job we are doing. We take those thoughts home with us after the show at the end of the night and they either give us peace of mind… or not. 

An actor’s job is to create a character. Simple as that… and most, if not all of us got into this profession because that is what we love to do. However that joy of thinking and behaving like someone other than we are is these days so often compromised. The preparation time to achieve a solid understanding of a character, their relationships and purposes is scant. The collaborative director-actor work, production dramaturgy and contemplation time can be precious little to non-existent. Together with learning the music, the singing and the choreography all the background research becomes part of an actor’s homework but again because it is the least immediately important it gets understandably put to the bottom of the list. It’s no one’s fault. Producers want to save money in difficult times and directors and actors want to get the most noticeable (not necessarily the most important) things right in the little time they have.

It’s not ideal but many times we arrive on a first night having to take short cuts when it comes to the understanding of a character. I certainly had to on Footloose. However we can spend the rest of the run filling in the gaps – that is the great thing about live theatre and fairly lengthy contracts, you can keep finding out, keep adding the details. By the way I’m not making any judgment call on anybody’s acting here. I barely had enough time to think about my own let alone anybody else’s. I am presuming though that some of you, like I had to, will be playing catch-up with the character/research work and rather than not revisit it I’m saying you absolutely should, as much as you can and get into the habit of doing it in order to develop your acting skill and make this job as worthwhile as possible. 

I wish you well for the rest of the run and encourage you, if you are not already doing it, to fill in the gaps. It’s worth it for you personally but also for the audience who’ll be transported that bit more if you are thinking more of the thoughts of the character in pictures and impressions within the context of the story. Oh and don’t be duped into the old ‘well it’s only Footloose or such and such – a this and that musical, it’s not worth putting the work in.’ There are enough people who denigrate musicals and musical theatre actors (or better put – actors that do musical theatre) without us denigrating ourselves. Different in style certainly but Footloose is as legitimate a piece of theatre as Three Sisters and the same goes for all the characters. Don’t let anyone, whoever they are, make you believe otherwise. You are an actor, a dancer, a singer a musician you can do it all, every genre any role. In the US you’re a triple, a quadruple threat… just don’t neglect the acting bit because other people think it’s just a musical and it doesn’t matter. Put down the phones for a while, get off social media, the video games whatever for a spell, and do some research. Read a book about the American 80’s watch some relevant films, create the house your character lives in, the kindergarten and high-school you went to and go to. The town of Bomont with its church, its council hall, diners, gas stations, seven-elevens, police stations and residential neighbourhoods. Equip your character with as much knowledge of their lives as you have of your own. And the best bit, while you are doing it you’ll be using the greatest gift we all have, that we all loved using so completely as kids, that ultimately drove us into this profession – your imagination.  

I recommended this book to Darren ‘Open Secrets’ by Richard Lischer. It details the life of a Pastor in Rural America in the 80’s and is a fascinating read. The town, if you can all it that is probably a bit smaller than Bomont but you get the idea of the kind of people that live in these places and the small-town mentality. Another potentially good place for American life research is Studs Terkel – he’s written lots of stuff about everyday working people.

I apologise if at the end of this you think I’m a w&*%#r or a patronising moron etc. Truth is I’m oldish and I’ve made mistakes. In our beleaguered society there are too many older people like me who don’t share the knowledge gained on the back of mistakes even when they have the opportunity. I had that opportunity and (maybe a few years late) went for it – no regrets.

Finally I’ll leave you with this snippet from ‘Art’ by sculptor Auguste Rodin… it gave rise to a quote from my former acting tutor which when I’m struggling to get motivated or put in the work that nobody ever appreciates, remains one of my favourites…

‘Art is made of kisses and caresses’. 

All the best,

Philip 

One late afternoon, when I was with Rodin in his atelier, darkness set in while we talked.

“Have you ever looked at an antique statue by lamplight?” my host suddenly demanded.

“No, never,” I answered, with some surprise.

“I astonish you. You seem to consider the idea of studying sculpture excepting by daylight as an odd whim. Of course you can get the effect as a whole better by daylight. But, wait a moment. I want to show you a kind of experiment which will doubtless prove instructive.”

He lighted a lamp as he spoke, took it in his hand, and led me towards a marble statue which stood upon a pedestal in a corner of the atelier. It was a delightful little antique copy of the Venus di Medici. Rodin kept it there to stimulate his own inspiration while he worked.

“Come nearer,” he said.

Holding the lamp at the side of the statue and as close as possible, he threw the full light upon the body.

“What do you notice?” he asked.

At the first glance I was extraordinarily struck by what was suddenly revealed to me. The light so directed, indeed, disclosed numbers of slight projections and depressions upon the surface of the marble which I should never have suspected. I said so to Rodin.

“Good!” he cried approvingly; then, “Watch closely.”

At the same time he slowly turned the moving stand which supported the Venus. As he turned, I still noticed in the general form of the body a multitude of almost imperceptible roughnesses. What had at first seemed simple was really of astonishing complexity. Rodin threw up his head smiling.

“Is it not marvellous?” he cried. “Confess that you did not expect to discover so much detail. Just look at these numberless undulations of the hollow which unites the body to the thigh. Notice all the voluptuous curvings of the hip. And now, here, the adorable dimples along the loins.”

He spoke in a low voice, with the ardor of a devotee, bending above the marble as if he loved it.

“It is truly flesh!” he said.

And beaming, he added: “You would think it moulded by kisses and caresses!” Then, suddenly, laying his hand on the statue, “You almost expect, when you touch this body, to find it warm.”

I’m writing to you after I noticed my voice had been overdubbed in your film in which I played the character ******

Coming soon….

Well no, I’m definitely not.

As the extra classes continued above the pub so did regular classes and drama school life which included end of term assessments. 

For my acting assessment I paired up with my flat mate to do a scene from a play whose title I can’t remember. The scene was a couple of guys fishing. We’d decided to go all-in applying what little we thought we understood of The Science of Acting, to the job in hand. You couldn’t fault us for our enthusiasm but it turned out to be a fantastic example of doing mostly what The Science of Acting isn’t. 

We read the play and gleaned some relevant facts from the text that we were extremely keen to replicate in support of our scene and characterisations. Our characters needed bait for their fishing trip and just like they did, we kept that bait in our actual fridge; live earth worms, in milk. There they squirmed in a Tupperware box, for about a week…apart from when we decided to rehearse. Then, dressed in our winter coats we’d whisk them into my mates room and using a broom and a brolly for fishing rods, cotton thread for line and bent safety pins for hooks we’d do the scene. This involved skewering a couple of unlucky worms onto our safety pin hooks and casting them out onto the carpet. We thought we were doing a brilliant job, going the extra mile for our art and no amount of cleaning up worm-guts, mud and milk, could deter us. 

What we were doing of course would be considered by many as ‘method acting’. Whether it’s fishing in your lounge, staying awake all night or remembering the pain of your own personal grief, they are all doing the same thing – substituting the characters experiences / thoughts, with your own…which is about as near a definition of method acting as I can get – it’s difficult to find one online amid all the confusion about it. 

I’ll elaborate…

Stanislavski

Stanislavski had his first Studio of the M.A.T. (Moscow Arts Theatre) in 1912 and in it he developed his ‘system’. Amongst other topics like attention, relaxation, objectives, etc, he crucially introduced the concept of emotion memory (subsequently referred to by acting teaching luminaries as affective memory, emotional recall and sense memory which is kind of different, but also kind of the same). 

At some point though and by the time of the Second Studio of the M.A.T. in 1916, Stanislavski had ‘abandoned’ and ‘rejected’ emotion memory in favour of a concept he referred to as physical action. He suggested emotion memory should only be used as a last resort presumably because he also said that using it had caused hysteria in some of his students. 

However, two of Stanislavski’s students from the first Studio, Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya chose to ignore that when they emigrated to the US and taught what they had learned of Stansialvski’s system, including emotion memory, at the American Laboratory Theatre which they established in 1923. Three of their students were Lee Strasburg, Stella Adler and Harold Clurman who went on to form the Group Theatre which also had Sanford Meisner and Elia Kazan amongst its members.

It then seems that Lee Strasburg developed ‘The Method’ as in ‘Method acting’, based on what he was taught at The American Laboratory Theatre and he particularly embraced the concept of emotion memory (he called it affective memory) which Stanislavski had long since changed his views on. 

Accordingly, Strasburg is known as the father of ‘Method acting’ and as such you’d think he’d be able to tell you what it is. I looked and found this cryptic reference on the Lee Strasburg Theatre and Film Institute website: 

‘So what is Method Acting? As Lee Strasberg said, Method Acting is what all actors have always done whenever they acted well. But The Method–it’s how you get there.’  

Sounds impressive, suitably full of intellectual mystique but it simply doesn’t answer the question at all and no one is any the wiser. 

Part of the continuing confusion about method acting seems to be that both Adler and Meisner are also considered method acting teachers… 

…but they weren’t. 

Strasburg, Adler and Meisner

In fact both of them parted ways with Strasburg over his interpretation of Stanislavski’s teachings particularly the use of affective memory, so why would they teach ’The Method’ something that Strasburg himself alone devised? They both developed their own techniques which are sometimes referred to, online anyway, as their versions of Method acting while simultaneously being described as different from Method acting.

There is also more confusion over which actors are Method actors.

Marlon Brando

Marlon Brando is considered a titan amongst Method actors but he never trained with Strasburg. He was taught by Stella Adler and therefore he cannot be described as a ‘Method actor’… on Brando’s page on the Stella Adler Studio of Acting website, the word ‘Method’ never appears. He attended the Actor’s Studio in 1948 before Strasburg became its director in 1951 and according to him, he only went for Elia Kazan’s classes and to check out the girls. 

Daniel Day-Lewis…

… another method actor right? 

Wrong. 

He was trained at Bristol Old Vic drama school in the UK not by Strasberg or presumably anyone else using ‘The Method.’ Ironically one of the things Day-Lewis is associated with is staying in character all the time which is a common misconception of what method acting entails. This practise was, in fact, rejected by Lee Strasberg. 

The confusion continues with the Actor’s Studio where Meisner seems to have considered himself a main teacher, presumably teaching his own technique. He was very perturbed that Strasberg claimed singular credit for having trained the many stars that passed through the Actor’s Studio, who were accordingly labelled, ‘Method actors’.  

I could go on and on and dig and dig but all the confusion claims and counter-claims detract from what is the central issue with method acting, no matter how well it has been marketed… 

It doesn’t work. 

Yes sure, if your character has a scene in a sauna in the play and you personally never had one then if you can, do so, to experience it physiologically. See how the senses respond to it, see how it works, how it is built, what it smells like. But if you can’t then simply read about it, research it and imagine it. After all, if you have to kill someone in the next scene you can’t go out and really do that to see what it is like and rather obviously that’s the first issue with Method acting. 

The second is that when you are substituting in your own thoughts for the character’s, your thoughts are a result of experiences you had in your own life. They come with the associated pictures and impressions that constitute complexes formed in your own life and not the character’s. So if I’m playing a boxer in 1930’s New York whose father has disowned him and I substitute in my own thoughts about my own mother’s recent passing in present day England to trigger suitable emotions, there are going to be all kinds of thoughts present in my head from my own life that have nothing to do with my character’s life. 

Third is that re-living your own emotional trauma over and over seems like a bad idea when considering your own mental health. Maybe it was this process that led to the hysteria Stanislavski witnessed and why the use of emotion memory became something he warned against. 

So that’s my take on Method acting. How does The Science of Acting compare? 

Sam Kogan

The difference is night and day. Both techniques have their roots in Stanislavski’s teachings yes, but one is steadfastly based on the blind acceptance of an abandoned, faulty, unworkable concept, while the other asks new questions and finds new answers inspired by the same constant, methodical purpose which inspired Stanislavski himself; to find out what good acting is and to comprehensively understand how to achieve it so actors can be taught how to create characters that live on stage as we do in life.

So back to us and our worms and the impending assessment. Though we were showing willing, most actors do, we were pretty wide of the mark in acting terms. We made the same mistake those well-intentioned folk did at the start of this post and lumped this Science of Acting stuff under the umbrella of Method acting – ‘it’s all the same shit anyway, isn’t it?’ 

We did the assessment and were deemed good enough to keep our places at Mountview, our willingness carried us through. Meanwhile, in spite of Sam’s classes and the frequent, illuminating, mind-blowing moments in them, I allowed myself only the vaguest notion that perhaps The Science of Acting wasn’t anything like the ‘same shit’.

It would be some time however, years in fact, until I would finally grasp just how completely unparalleled and life-changing a body of knowledge it was that I had been exposed to. So profound an experience was it to become that I always find it difficult to put it into words. I think a fellow actor, Richard Brake who also studied with Sam, said it best when he described The Science of Acting as ‘the atom bomb of acting techniques’.

Richard Brake

I completely get what he means. In an industry that cloaks itself in mysterious ambiguity, The Science of Acting offers such a powerful clarity of understanding that it makes every stock-in-trade turn of phrase and hackneyed, archaic attitude, pale into insignificance.

So there you have it. The Science of Acting. It’s definitely not Method.

It was lucky for me then and about 10 other like-minded students, that Sam, who taught us all only once a week on the school timetable, started extra evening classes above The Duke of Edinburgh pub around the corner from Mountview’s main building.

Here we were provided privileged insights that thankfully, firmly planted the seed of the Science of Acting in my hopelessly rudderless and immature consciousness which was certainly no place for it to thrive. Not then… it would be different later.

But even then I knew the Science of Acting was a seed that required a fertile soil and conscientious tending. With daily watering and extra nutrients, it would grow into a strong and beautiful tree – a tree of knowledge. Compare that to the conventional acting classes I was getting at my drama school. No seeds were being planted there, no nurturing was required, instead with relatively little time and effort being invested on my part it seemed I already had my fully grown, very impressive trees… Ok, they were fake trees, but who cares when you can climb them all the way to the top!

So there I was a new student at a drama school. Over two years I’d auditioned about a dozen times for a handful of accredited schools and I’d finally got in. I’d officially left home to be here leaving a personal life that was in turmoil, behind. Now miles away in London I could kid myself that I didn’t have a care in the world; I drank, I smoked, I partied,  stuff you can easily get away with at any drama school and still sail through with flying colours. It was a world away from the strict self-discipline that I would require in the future, at Sam’s own school, and hence why I remember little of the specifics from that time.

But back to what I do remember of those extra-ordinary classes above the Duke of Edinburgh, a dog-eared boozer in the back streets of Wood Green. I say extraordinary because they were so unlike any other acting classes I was doing or had done.

Here’s an example… 

Sam wanted us to start studying a short play with him. It was The Jewish Wife from Fear and Misery in the Third Reich by Bertolt Brecht. Traditionally the first thing a group of actors do with their director is a read through of the play and it was no different in this case. 

Except it was very, very different. 

There weren’t enough parts to go round so we did a few lines each. BUT… we all had to read the lines slowly, without any inflection at all. Our attention had to be solely on understanding the fundamental meaning (what Sam would later refer to as the ‘semantic core’) of each word we were reading. There was to be no ‘performance’ at all which meant no personal interpretation of the characters and the things they were saying. For those of you with little knowledge of acting I cannot tell you how completely unusual this was. 

The first read through of any play with a bunch of actors (and it’s probably worse with student actors), is usually a quite ridiculous affair where insecurities must be shored up and teachers, directors and producers reassured by impressive performances that garner laughs and praise. But what really condemns the whole exploit is that often, the way the lines are delivered by an actor in that first second or third read through and the thinking that comes with them is the same in the first and last performances after 3 or 4 weeks rehearsal and a month run! 

In other words it is often the case that an actor makes the decision on how to say the lines before, or on, the first day of rehearsal, when he or she has a scant understanding of the story and the character. That decision sticks even when there’s been no discussion with the director or the rest of the cast and no development of understanding as to why and how the character thinks the way they do at any given time in the play. Those things aren’t in the actors head. 

So what is?

Well, impressing those that need to be impressed. Then everyone can be safe in the knowledge that if day one of rehearsals is anything to go by, everything is going to go very well. But this impressing is now part of the actor’s complex when he/she says the lines, whether in the read through or a performance. There’s no room to start building character’s complexes or even a need for them because rather conveniently – impressive actors are generally considered good actors. (They certainly shouldn’t be).

But back to the pub on our Day 1 of rehearsal and in comparison what we were doing was almost revolutionary.

We were just finding out.

No impressing allowed. No preconceptions about the characters and no imposition of our own thinking on to them. When you think about it – it kind of is a ‘oh yeah – of course’ kind of moment. It’s so simply, logically correct that every rehearsal should start like this. Then the story, the characters and their relationships can be properly understood by degrees, throughout the length of the rehearsal process. It does make the conventional read-through seem pretty ill-conceived. 

I have to add in here that I’m not having a go at actors. I’m not some embittered acting failure. I’ve been that impressive actor, I’ve been the ‘desperate to get it right at the read through’ actor but crucially I’ve learnt from it. Not because I’m special but just because I was given the knowledge to do so. 

No actor wants to be bad, we all want to do the best job we can but overwhelmingly, at drama schools and classes that profess to teach us… 

We aren’t given the knowledge to do so. 

Instead we become trapped in an incredibly dumbed down, self-congratulatory, smoke and mirrors industry where really finding out about how to act, how the characters think, and how to think a character’s thoughts rather than our own, hasn’t been furthered since the teachings of Stanislavski well over a hundred years ago!

Well, not until The Science of Acting came along.

Straight away that didn’t sit well with me. 20-year-old me, who thought he knew everything. I’d been to the National Youth Theatre and I’d got my place at an accredited drama school. I balked at the application of the word Science to the artistic pursuit of acting. It seemed a dangerously analytical word when aimed at the mystical profession I’d chosen and the inscrutable, god-given acting talent that had been bestowed upon me. In fact so threatened was I that in my very first Science of Acting lesson, when Sam challenged my sulky teenager slouch by politely asking me to sit up straight, I muttered loudly enough for everyone in the class to hear…

…‘this is bullshit’.

Come the next lesson and I was equally challenging. ‘How can science have anything to do with art?’ I thought. As a protest and thinly veiled, puerile challenge to this charlatan, for an exercise he’d asked us all to prepare, an ‘objectless action’ which is a re-creation of an everyday mundane task without the objects, I chose going for a dump. I was a teacher’s dream back in those days, a complete twat but I can’t remember anything other than Sam patiently asking me to choose something different.

I’d tried to rattle this Science of Acting guy and it hadn’t worked. He hadn’t got angry or dismissed me from the class. Why not? What’s the deal with this idiot? I thought I’d change tack and do some of this stupid Science of Acting work, see if the fraud notices. Hence, I remember the next exercise vividly because I did do a lot of work on it.

It was simply called ‘Animal’ where you chose an animal, worked on it at home and then acted it for the rest of the class. I chose a fly and by this stage, I thought I knew enough of what Sam wanted to have a good go at it. I still wasn’t having any of the ‘Science’ bit but I’ve always had a pretty strong purpose to please and now everyone was convinced by my rebellious antics, it was safe to revert to type.

So for this exercise I knew I needed to rehearse 7 times, that I had to think about size, define my fly-body, think about my fly-life until now, and my purpose for the future, to see through my flies eyes, and have something happen that would result in a small movement of my fly. I imagined that I was in a house on a white, papered wall in the warm sun, some shade falls on me so I move a couple of steps with my six legs, back into the sun. I worked pretty well on this exercise though looking back I created a fraction of the pictures and impressions that I would do now, (in other words, I used comparatively little of my imagination) but as I took my place on the floor of the classroom to act my fly, I was pretty confident I’d done some work and my exercise should hold up well.

So I’m acting my socks off (you know, doing my best to please and trying not to think about my audience of classmates while of course thinking about them and what they think – a lot) imagining the world through my multiple-lensed eyes… my diminutive size, the massive distance to the ceiling and the floor, the texture of the paper.. my hooks stuck into it, my wings, the warm sun on my exoskeleton, the cold of the shade and my six legs moving as I step back into the sun. So Sam sits there arms folded his head slightly tilted, looking on, and he asks a couple of my classmates what they think… A girl who I think likes me says unconvincingly ‘yeah I can see he’s a fly’ and my mate declines to be critical at all by stating, “I’m not sure”. Then Sam says quite simply, directly to me…

“This fly has never flown.”

This fly has never flown.

All the work I’d done. Through the hours I’d worked on my fly, I’d tried to cover everything… eating, walking, climbing, the environment I lived in, all imagined through my fly eyes but he was devastatingly right. Even though I’d defined my wings and where they were attached to my body, I’d not thought about and imagined flying at all. I say devastatingly because it was like my mind had been opened and looked into. Even more astonishingly a part of my mind that I myself previously was unaware of. How could he do that? How did he know? In comparison to other acting tutors I’d had this was very, very different and from that moment whatever Sam wanted to teach, I wanted to learn.

Like my fly to the wallpaper, I was hooked.

A fellow cast member, playing her role, tied to a chair and struggling (with ten times more vigour now we were in front of an audience), fell backward off the raised stage. Fortunately, she was completely uninjured which made it a comic moment rather than a painful one. She was laughing as were most of the audience and the rest of the cast…

…except me.

My only concern was to continue with the story. Watched by my giggling cast-mates, I managed practically single-handedly to get my colleague and the chair back on the stage. I never once broke character. I didn’t laugh myself or get annoyed, I just very clearly wanted to get on with the play.

I didn’t know it at the time but this would prove to be an important moment for me. It cemented what I first and foremost wanted to achieve even then as a young child through the experience of acting. I wanted, above all else, to be lost in the world of my imagination for the duration of the story. I think for me that was and still is, absolute freedom and fortunately this ideal, though it became increasingly neglected, was to stick with me as I grew-up and headed towards a career in acting.

Unfortunately, the older I got the more my imagination became compromised by the perceived pressures of society and adult life. Fitting-in and being cool, worrying about what others thought of me became of great importance. Acting became less about the freedom of being lost inside a fertile imagination and more about being impressive, the centre of attention. This change of my purpose to act, was imperceptible to me at the time because it was a gradual process of going with the flow, belonging and failing, leaving the beautiful and simple ideals of childhood behind.

It took until my early 30’s and a 4 year Acting and Directing course at The School of the Science of Acting, to rediscover the joy and freedom I’d experienced and sought after as a child.

Before the memories of Birmingham fade, the dismal events of the cancelled show and in stark contrast, the latter triumphs of the cast particularly the swings, understudies and standbys, I wanted to make the effort to present a different perspective of that Saturday show cancellation. I’ve been busy as we all have at this special time of year and I almost gave up on doing this but that would be to shirk a responsibility I feel I have and to forgo peace of mind.

In a career spanning 30 years the cancelled show in Birmingham was a low point for me. I don’t blame anyone for it but I do think it was a mistake.

As I grew up in this industry I was taught that the audience should be treated with a huge degree of regard, after all, without them we are nothing. A show cancellation is something I’ve rarely, if ever encountered but of course I know they happen due to catastrophic technical failure, life and death safety issues, accidents and other grave situations. Theatre is a live medium anything can happen.

I don’t think the situation on the day of our cancellation was sufficiently grave to warrant the action taken. There was indeed a problem, a problem that needed to be addressed and although the response from the Producers, the Theatre, Stage Management etc may never live up to individual expectations, I think there was enough evidence that a fair and consistent effort was being made to resolve matters and to offer work-arounds for the performers. I don’t dance in this show but I have in past productions so I understand and I completely agree that preservation of fitness and minimisation of the chance of injury are paramount. It’s not something I take lightly for myself or others.

Throughout our careers there will always be opportunities (sometimes absolute necessity) to be at odds with Producers and other departments, always. I’ve experienced it a few times myself and though anger is an understandable state of mind in many of these situations, prolonged anger is destructive both for those harbouring it and those it is aimed at. Anger kills any kind of considered, reasoned discussion and it usually leads to further discontent. It seems to have become a prevalent emotion in much of the Western World over the last few months that has somehow spilled-over into everyday life from the unrealistic realm of social media where vitriol is freely flung about but very rarely is any kind of open-minded, responsible and caring debate entered into.

Have your say, stand up for you rights, get your point across but make every effort to do it with understanding and good grace. I studied boxing for a role once. I learned that there is an art to fighting. A good combatant is relaxed in the fray. They study their opponent and seek to understand them so as to know the best and most economic way to prevail. They pick their method and moment accordingly. Conversely a bad one lashes out in anger, without control. They may chance to vanquish their adversary but there’s a strong possibility of collateral damage.

The cancellation of the show was neither the method nor the moment and the audience ended up being the collateral damage. We went on strike but with no notice and 1100 people paid the price with much of their expenditure unrecoverable; travel, hotels, babysitters, and perhaps more importantly the time invested in organising who knows how many special occasions… As privileged professionals we sometimes forget but for the public, seldom is going to the theatre not a special occasion.

OK, people are tremendously resilient, they bounce back and life goes on but still, I believe the cancellation was unecessary and unfair on them.

Finally, with the audience having been kept waiting in their seats for half an hour, the cast were offered a vote on whether to proceed with the show or not and while I do not think this was the ideal solution at all, the reason it was quashed – something about not wanting to have to hate those who don’t vote the same – though certainly given in haste, should nevertheless be questioned.

There will always be people who think very differently, who vote differently. Do we have to hate them? It won’t enrich life. It won’t bring anyone round to change their way of thinking. It achieves the opposite. But… understanding another person’s view, why they think the way they do, approaching issues we have with them in a calm and controlled manner, may on the other hand have a very positive result whether they are won over in the end or not. There’s never any need to throw all the toys out of the proverbial pram – life is wonderful and there are a lot of toys for us all to share.

This turned out much longer than expected. You have indulged me to the end so I hope that this might perhaps inspire reflection, consideration and the chance of a different outcome should you ever find yourself in a similar situation to the one we found ourselves in that Saturday night.

I very much enjoy being part of this show which is a beautiful whole of its parts. There are some excellent performances and exemplary professionalism in all departments. Mistakes happen, it’s life. To learn from them is, I believe, the best reason to make them.

Yours,

Philip