Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love (23 page)

Researchers are moving forward in exploring how we empathize with all kinds of emotions. One study imaged the brains of people who first themselves inhaled nasty odours and then watched a film of an actor wrinkling up his face in a disgusted look. Both when feeling disgusted and when watching someone being disgusted, their insula fired up.
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Even more interestingly, one study investigated ‘tactile’ empathy, that is, how we react to the sight of others being touched. Do we feel the touch ourselves? Indeed, the results indicated that the same area in the cortex would fire in people when they were lightly touched on their leg and when they watched video clips of others being touched in the same spot.
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Most recently, another study revealed that the mirror-neuron system was involved in individuals who watched others yawn.
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Mirroring the stage

The power of the mirror neurons has resonated widely within the theatre world especially, because it provides a fresh theory to probe the mysterious and tacit understanding between actors and audience.

The relationship between actors and audience is indeed theatre’s raison d’être. When we view a performance, our whole bodies participate in the action before our eyes. We cringe in front of a horrifying act of violence or a display of disgusting material. Our guts contract during moments of suspense or fearful anticipation of danger. We get goose bumps at the sight of a moving act of heroism or a saddening scene of loss and separation. We almost feel the touch of a caress or a kiss being given on stage. Our skin and nerves relax when a conflict is resolved and harmony seems to prevail on stage. During a play, our mirror neurons are constantly at work.

The relationship between actors and an audience is osmotic. Both parties at either side of the footlights gain something. Actors spread emotions across the room. In turn, the audience provides a significant emotional feedback to the actors.

The eminent theatre director Peter Brook recounts a story that beautifully demonstrates the influence that different audiences can have on the quality and tenor of a performance.
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His 1962 production of
King Lear
with the Royal Shakespeare Company was touring throughout Europe. Show after show, the quality of the production continued to get better, reaching a peak between Budapest and Moscow. Brook was endlessly charmed by how audiences with a scant knowledge of English could have such a profound and positive impact on the actors. At that time, the separation between the Western and Eastern sides of Europe was stark. Brook attributed the great response from audiences to an appreciation of the play itself, but also to a genuine desire for an interaction with foreigners.

These elements mingled together and manifested through silence and attentiveness that influenced the cast ‘as though a brilliant light were turned on their work’.

The tour continued to the United States and the actors were charged with excitement and confidence that they would be able to offer an English-speaking audience all they had just learnt from the tour in Europe. When Brook attended a performance in Philadelphia, he was taken aback. The acting had lost most of the quality it had gained during the previous stops of the tour. The connection with the audience had drastically altered. Although the American audience could understand English perfectly, they did not engage with the play nearly as vividly as the Europeans. People yawned. Their motivation was different. For them, the production was yet another permutation of
King Lear
which they probably attended out of habit. As an audience, they needed something else. The actors did not ignore the requests of the new audience and responded by introducing a new rhythm. They highlighted every bit of moving or dramatic action by playing it in a louder and more pronounced manner. Ironically, all those complex passages that the Europeans had dwelt on and that an English-speaking audience could have easily absorbed were paced swiftly.

The audience is alive. While on one hand it can distract the actors (with noise, or with laughter at unexpected moments), on the other its silence and concentration or its synchronous response to a given moment in a scene may enhance and enthuse the acting.

The quality of such osmotic dialogue also depends on the type of theatre in which the play is acted. In most of today’s theatres, in which the actors are blinded by the footlights, they can’t exactly see what the audience are doing, nor look them clearly in the face. Most plays take place in dark theatres to create an atmosphere and to solicit the audience’s imagination. Ben reminds me that this wasn’t always the case and that plays have been staged in the dark for only about the last two hundred years.
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In Elizabethan theatre, for instance, the connection between actors and audience was quite different in that the actors were much closer to the audience and actors and audience were equally lit. In the modern re-creation of the Globe Theatre actors can see the faces of audience members. They can play watching one person right in the eyes. This way, they can notice their reactions to the play, their amusement, sadness or joy.

Whether such direct exposure to the audience’s reactions helps the actor may depend on the actor’s skills and experience. Peter Brook called the audience a ‘partner that must be forgotten and still constantly kept in mind’.

Yet what gives a performance emotional power, and how do actors work to create it?

What’s the trick?

In 1895, the playwright George Bernard Shaw witnessed something remarkable at a theatre performance. He was in London watching a play entitled
Magda
(originally
Heimat
, homeland), after the name of the protagonist, who on that evening was played by the gifted Italian actress Eleonora Duse.

Magda is a bold young woman who defies her father and escapes the bourgeois reality of her native town to venture on a career as an opera singer. While she is away from home, she enters a relationship with a fellow opera student who soon after leaves her alone with a child to raise (Duse actually experienced something similar in her own life). Having become a leading opera singer and a single mother, Magda decides to return to her native town and, overcome by a bout of homesickness, makes an approach to her father who agrees to take her back. A bewildering surprise awaits her at her childhood home. Soon after her return, she discovers that one of her family’s intimate friends is the father of her child! In the third act of the play, Magda is on stage when her ex-lover is announced as a visitor. At first, she seems to cope well with seeing him again. They sit down and address each other cordially. But then, as Shaw noted in his review of the play: Duse (as Magda) visibly ‘began to blush; . . . the blush was slowly spreading and deepening until, after a few vain efforts to avert her face or to obstruct his view of it without seeming to do so, she gave up and hid the blush in her hands’.
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Eleonora Duse was so intensely into character that she blushed on demand, as the theatrical moment required. Her performance made a huge impression on Shaw who was amazed by her ability to express embarrassment and discomfort so powerfully: ‘I could detect no trick in it: it seemed to me a perfectly genuine effect of the dramatic imagination [ . . . ] and I must confess to an intense professional curiosity as to whether it always comes spontaneously.’
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Undoubtedly, Eleonora Duse was a fountain of talent. She was a theatrical sensation, both in her home country Italy and abroad. She had a unique gift for dramatic interpretation and, apparently, the rare theatrical authenticity that left G. B. Shaw so astonished came entirely naturally to her.

The question is: can the craft of acting out the details of an emotion with total authenticity be learnt, or even taught? Around the time of Duse’s memorable performance in London, as she continued to command theatre stages in Europe and the United States, an ambitious and talented young Russian actor and director made plans to open an acting school. His real name was Constantin Alexeyev, but he was better known by the stage name of Constantin Stanislavsky. In 1897, at the age of thirty-two, he founded the historic Moscow Art Theatre, an establishment that was to become the cradle of a revolutionary method of acting.

Stanislavsky opened his theatre at a time of exciting and shifting views in science. The end of the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of psychology as a science – William James’s theories, for instance, that I described in chapter 3. It’s not clear what science publications Stanislavsky actually read himself, but his thoughts on acting shifted and evolved through the years, and were influenced by the science of his time. Eventually, he summarized his ideas in two remarkable books that are still the best place to go to grasp his enormous contribution to theatre, and are a pleasure to read.

An actor’s emotions stimulate the audience. Stanislavsky described this as the ‘irresistibility, contagiousness, and power of direct communion by means of invisible radiations of the human will and feelings . . . ’. He compares those radiations to what is used to hypnotize people or tame wild animals. Similarly, he said, actors ‘fill whole auditoriums with the invisible radiations of their emotions’.
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In his book
An Actor Prepares
Stanislavsky explains his acting technique through the story of a theatre director and acting teacher called Torstov and his pupils. The text is structured as a series of episodes, each constituting an acting class at his school in Moscow.
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One day when Torstov arrived at the theatre, he found the entire class intent on searching for a purse. He let them carry on with their hunt and watched them until they found it. Then he challenged them to repeat the search, so the students replaced the purse where it had been and started again. But the second time round the action was not convincing. It had none of the attentiveness and diligence Torstov had witnessed when the students were genuinely looking for something. The students protested, saying that their second search could have not been as effective because they knew exactly where the purse was, but Torstov insisted that since they were actors they should have been able to be just as convincing.

‘We should [first] prepare, rehearse, live the scene . . . ’ they objected.

‘Live it?’ Torstov said. ‘But you just did live it!’
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During the early phase of his long theatre career, Stanislavsky had insisted on one crucial tenet: that he and his pupils fully embody a role. In Russian, this imperative was laconically summarized as
(
perezhivanie
), or ‘experience through’. Every actor must
become
the character he or she has been assigned. To achieve this transformation, an actor had to live through a part ‘inwardly’ and feel the emotions and sensations of the characters to be portrayed.

A central technique in the Moscow Theatre School was ‘emotional memory’. Stanislavsky knew very well that while tiny details of events that occur in our lives can escape us, the emotions attached to them usually won’t. Fear, dismay, hope, happiness, guilt can all be recalled, one by one.
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The Russian director invited his pupils to bring back to the surface memories of personal experiences and use them to portray the emotion of a character, just like a painter who, he said, can ‘paint portraits of people they have seen but who are no longer alive’.
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For instance, if they needed to express grief, they would do so by recalling the intense feelings of separation they had when they lost a close friend.

Stanislavsky didn’t expect the recalled emotions to be identical to those experienced in the past. Though he demanded that actors be as sincere as possible he knew that the emotion recalled on stage was only a repetition. Emotions are fleeting and they flash by ‘like a meteor’.
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To colour their performances, his students were urged to draw from all kinds of sources beyond their own memories, such as books or travel, art, museums and conversations with other people. Even science. ‘A suggestion, a thought, a familiar object’ that bore personal relevance would help them revive the feeling.
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But not just anything. Actors were invited to employ their imagination to select the most artistically powerful memories, those that were more ‘enticing’ and shared the highest affinity with the character. So, with the use of their imagination, and by drawing on their personal experience, actors needed to fully place themselves in the circumstances of the character they played. That their memories were distant in the past was not a disadvantage. Time, said Stanislavsky, was ‘a great artist’. It could turn ‘memories into poetry’.
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