Why the text has to be your master as an actor.

I was on the treadmill today learning a script (yep I find, and research backs me up, that doing monotonous activity such as walking or cooking helps you learn scripts quicker) and I really wanted to complain about how much learning I had to do in such a short space of time. I was ignoring the indisputable fact that my fellow treadmillers and gym muscle buddies were casting me strange looks as I muttered lines such as ‘She slept with many boys who gave her ecstasy?’ and ‘Why do you think your husband slept with prostitutes!!”

However I have caught myself from complaining as I love acting, the process of both films and plays, the rush. It is just that initial hurdle of getting all the lines down is always a mental effort, even though I am incredibly quick at it. This play Unrelated is fantastically written by Dan Horrigan and is a four hander, I am bizarely the only actor in it to not have studied at Drama Centre. I like the fact that my previous teachers who studied at Drama Centre always seemed very instunctual and free and my fellow actors all are fantastically free and open. But of course all actors have different processes and I am finding I am differing here as I like to do any back work after I have the lines learnt.
I did an amazing workshop this year with Niki Flacks at The Actors Centre which has made me throw all my acting technique and tools out of my playmat and has re-equipped me with just two rules
– Know your lines very well
– -Trust yourself

All the other stuff, such as look as what people say about you, what you say about yourself and others is all vital stuff but again once you are in rehearsals you can’t help but hear it. I find that without my lines learnt rehearsal time is not fully utilised, I need to be off script. Plus Niki would argue (and I have found this to be true in the last few films and plays I have worked in since studying with her) that all that backstory/discussion is largely unnecessary as the facts, character work and thoughts are all in the script so learn the text thoroughly and the answers are there. You need to be free to let your instincts work not allow your intellectual voice to take over and make comments, judge you, review your acting whilst you work and yell at you for not being good enough or feeling the ‘right’ emotions at the ‘right’ time. Sure an accent, period, way of being may need to be referenced but the truth of a well written script or play cannot help but always jump through an actor who does not paraphrase the text and lets their instincts and emotions guide them.

Hence I am spending my weekend on the treadmill, the elliptic and on the couch so I can turn up Monday with a much better grasp of the lines. We go up a week Tuesday so I think the basics, the lines of which there are many for all of us, need to come first for me anyway!!