Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love (24 page)

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At a later point in his career, Stanislavsky felt something was missing in his practice as an actor and theatre instructor. He felt that his passionate teachings on how to incarnate a role on the basis of emotional memory and imagination demanded an additional framework. Evoking emotions from the meanders of an actor’s past alone proved not to be a reliable strategy. He understood that when the actors spent too long carving out a character from the inside, they exhausted themselves and equally neglected sharpening the physical component of the performance.
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Stanislavsky needed a new source of inspiration. To find it, he resorted to science. Influenced by nineteenth- and twentieth-century reflexologists, he turned to conditioning theories to empower his methodology of acting. Stanislavsky sought a way to consciously trigger an actor’s emotional expression through targeted physical cues. It was common knowledge that nervous pathways underlay complex behaviour and emotions, and that behaviour can be conditioned in response to a changing environment – let us not forget that Pavlov’s ideas I described in chapter 3 were prominent in Russia at that time.

In a way, Stanislavsky became a scientist on stage. He realized that by selecting and carefully preparing key units of physical action pertinent to the logic of the character and the circumstances of the play, the actor could learn, by reflex, how to express the full-blown psychological experience of the emotion. In other words, physical action was the bait for emotion and the bridge between the actor and the role. He would ask his actors to proceed by accomplishing a sequence of small truths.

‘When a whole action is too large to handle, break it up,’ he said. ‘If one detail is not sufficient to convince you of the truth of what you are doing, add others to it, until you have achieved the greater sphere of action which does convince you.’
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So, an action would be dismembered into its smallest physical parts and each part executed as truthfully as possible. A particular posture or movement would trigger a particular target emotion. Thus by working on minor actions such as clenching the fists and tensing the muscles of the neck, the actors would trigger anger, or they would produce feelings of despair by shuffling or sagging the shoulders. The body became the primary vehicle for the delivery of emotion.

Stanislavsky demanded something else of his actor pupils. Though they knew that the action on stage was fiction and not as true as in real life, they had to nurture a strong belief in their actions and their motives in order for those actions to be deemed persuasive by an audience. ‘Truth,’ he said, ‘cannot be separated from belief, nor belief from truth.’
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Everything that happens on the stage must be convincing to the actor himself. If it is not convincing for the actor, it will not be emotionally charged for the audience. For Stanislavsky, overplaying the ‘truth for its own sake . . . is the worst of lies’.
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To achieve his aim, he basically asked: what would an actor do
if
they were in the character’s situation? An actor knows well he is not Hamlet, but what would he do if he were Hamlet? The ‘if’ worked to place the actors in the circumstances of the character, via their own imagination.

An actor’s skills must be honed through practice. All units of action had to be rehearsed and practised for them to be reliably stored in an actor’s baggage of experience – as any conditioning technique would require. Through repetition, the body learns to reproduce the emotion. As opposed to the internal search for the psychology of the character, the bodily experience constituted something more concrete, or easier to let recur, with the power to generate the real, full-blown experience, perhaps even capable of triggering a release of adrenalin to produce an on-stage blush like Eleonora Duse’s. This was Stanislavsky’s way to reach ‘unconscious creativeness through conscious technique’.
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The paradox of acting

Daniel Day-Lewis is renowned for taking his preparatory period for a role to some extremes. One of the remarkable components of his personal way of getting ready for a role is to refuse to break character during the production of his movies. He totally immerses himself in the life of the character he has chosen to portray. Apparently, he trained with a boxing champion for
The Boxer
, took butchering lessons for
Gangs of New York
. When he played a man with cerebral palsy in
My Left Foot
, he may have spent the entire filming time in a wheelchair and he successfully taught himself how to change a record with his toes. For
In the Name of the Father
he spent time in prison. When he played Abraham Lincoln, an absolutely stunning, touching and convincing performance, he is said to have spoken in the accent and voice he created for the role even in between takes.

Such intense preparation is not a mere whimsical, eccentric way to get into the part. In an interview in which he discussed his method, Day-Lewis said that for his close adhesion to the character he needs ‘to create a particular environment . . . the right kind of silence or light or noise. Whatever is necessary – and it is always different . . . ’
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If you interpret that in Stanislavsky’s terms, it is the construction of the right external physical conditions, that help support the overall experience of the role.

Duse’s performance, and that of other acting geniuses such as Daniel Day-Lewis, is heralded as the epitome of
true
,
believable
and
authentic
acting.

Concepts of truth, credibility or authenticity are dangerous traps in theatre and acting in general. We expect a performance to be as convincing as something real, yet we know it is not. Actors know that, too. Any actress interpreting Medea is not going to actually murder her two children, nor is the palace of Corinth going to catch fire and burn down. Yet we are shaken by Medea’s hatred and need for revenge. We fear her, and we also share her feeling of having been betrayed. An actor may be fully captured by Hamlet’s vengeful rage, simulate the escalation of violence towards his uncle Claudius, but he will not ultimately nurture the actual desire to kill his colleague playing his uncle. Yet we feel the tension of Hamlet’s hatred, we witness the run-up of his revenge. How can something be real and false at the same time?

As early as the eighteenth century the French philosopher and dramatist Denis Diderot recognized this paradox. In
The Paradox of Acting
he writes that an actor’s performance of an emotion is not always the same thing as the feeling of the emotion perceived by the audience.
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In order to be real, the actor must be artificial. In other words, in order to express an emotion and grip an audience with it, the actor must feel none. For Diderot, an actor must behave like an ‘unmoved and disinterested’ observer. He distinguishes between two main types of actors. One relies on what he called
sensibility
; the other on
intelligence
. Diderot’s idea of sensibility is to play from the heart. But that kind of playing, he insists, brings no coherence. The playing will alternately be ‘strong and feeble, fiery and cold, dull and sublime’.
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By contrast, the actor who plays ‘from thought’ and from careful study of human nature, will be one and the same at each performance and will always be at his best. The intelligent actor will have ‘considered, combined, learnt and arranged’ the whole play in his head. His ‘passion’ will have a definite course, with bursts and reactions, a ‘beginning, a middle, and an end’. The ‘accents’ and the ‘movements’ during his performance will be the same.
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‘What, then, is a great actor?’ Diderot asks. ‘A man who, having learnt the words set down for him by the author, fools you thoroughly, whether in tragedy or comedy.’
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Over a century before Stanislavsky, Diderot had outlined the challenges that the Russian would encounter along his own path, and had recognized the fact that an impassioned, internal search for the character would be prone to imperfections and that a more controlled, ‘scientific’ approach to acting would prove more reliable.
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In theatre, when we think actors are conveying emotions naturally they are actually conveying those emotions in the most unnatural way. When we believe they are showing us moments of great truth and utmost authenticity, they are outstandingly pretending. They are creating moments of great deceiving fiction.

On stage, truth and falsehood occur simultaneously, each a disguise of the other.

Stanislavsky said: ‘A sense of truth contains within itself a sense of what is untrue as well.’
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Whether truth or falsehood predominates in the scene depends on the actor’s skills. We may be moved to tears by Romeo’s pain and anger at Mercutio’s death, but while the actor is clearly able to show the biological components of those emotions – he turns pale, he shouts – he doesn’t always
feel
the emotions he conveys his character to be feeling.

Diderot uses a fine example that illustrates the core of the subtle distinction between reality and fiction. What is the difference between tears provoked by a real-life event and those evoked by a ‘touching narrative’? – a question that even Hamlet asked after hearing the player delivering Hecuba’s speech.

In response to a fine piece of acting, ‘your thoughts are involved, your heart is touched, and your tears flow’. In response to a real-life tragedy, ‘the thing, the feeling and the effect, are all one; your heart is reached at once, you utter a cry, your head swims, and the tears flow’. In the case of a real-life event, tears brim in your eyes suddenly, in the case of an acted one they come ‘by degrees’.
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The magic of authentic acting is perhaps to reduce the distance between these two apparently opposed ways of feeling. As long as the desired effect is achieved, it does not matter what method is used. There may be both intense, inward characterization and a high degree of detailed groundwork at the same time.
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Daniel Day-Lewis says: ‘I recognize all the practical work that needs to be done, the dirty work, which I love: the work in the soil, the rooting around in the hope that you might find a gem. But I need to believe that there is a cohesive mystery that ties all these things together, and I try not to separate them.’
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Something about it will always remain mysterious.

Reality or fiction?

On a daily basis, from childhood, we are constantly exposed to fictional worlds. We encounter fiction when we are told fairy-tales, when we read a book, when we play computer games or watch TV advertisements. And when we go to the theatre. The brain takes no break. It is extremely busy processing and integrating all this information, but it seems to have developed a way to distinguish what is real and what is unreal or fictional.

Dr Anna Abraham from the Justus Liebig University of Giessen in Germany was for a long time curious to map the neural networks that accomplish this task. She wanted to find out whether the brain operates by different mechanisms when it is exposed to a situation that is real as opposed to one that is entirely fictional. So she designed an interesting fMRI-based experiment that explored the brain’s reactions to situations that involved either real or fictional characters.
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Participants were shown one-sentence written scenarios in which a real person named Peter was involved in situations that included George Bush or Cinderella. In one set of situations, Peter simply received information about both characters. For instance: Peter heard about Bush or Cinderella on the radio or read about them in the newspaper. The other set of situations involved direct interactions with the characters: Peter either spoke or sat down for a meal with them. What participants had to do was simple. They had to decide whether the scenarios portrayed were possible or not – that is, if they could indeed happen in the physical reality of the world we live in.

Obviously, it would be perfectly possible for Peter to hear about either of the two on the radio, but whereas Peter might actually meet George Bush in person, it would not be plausible for him to have lunch with Cinderella – at least not for real.

How does the brain operate when assessing these two different types of scenarios? The results were intriguing. Common to both types of situation was some level of mental activity in parts of the brain, such as the hippocampus, that are at work when we in general recall facts or events. Such activity was detectable regardless of the nature of the scenario – that is, whether the scenario was informative (when Peter only heard about the characters) or interactive (when he actually met the characters). However, there were a few striking finer distinctions in activity relative to the two scenarios and these depended on the type of character involved.

When exposed to scenarios featuring George Bush – a famous real person – the brain involved the anterior medial prefrontal cortex (amPFC) and the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). As I explained in chapter 1, the PFC is a wondrous region in the brain with multiple functions – such as keeping an eye on the limbic system, aiding our short-term memory and our attention. The amPFC and the PCC are medial parts of the brain that are involved in autobiographical memory retrieval, as well as self-referential thinking.

When fictional characters were featured, the brain responded somewhat differently. Parts of the lateral frontal lobe, such as the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), were more active. The IFG is thought to provide mirroring capacities, but is also involved in high-level language processing. The fact that George Bush was linked to personal memory retrieval but Cinderella was not led the researchers to think that a crucial difference when assessing real or fictional scenarios might lie not so much in the degree of
realness
of the character involved, but in their
relevance
to our reality. To test this hypothesis, they peered into the brain of nineteen new volunteers who, as in the previous study, were asked to assess the possibility that a real protagonist could either imagine, hear or dream about or actually interact with a set of characters.
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However, this time the characters involved in the scenarios were ranked in three categories with differing degrees of personal relevance for the participants: their friends or family (high personal relevance), famous people (medium relevance) and fictional characters (low personal relevance). As predicted, the activation in the PFC and PCC was indeed proportionally modulated by the degree of relevance of the characters described. It was highest in the case of friends and family members and lowest in the case of fictional characters.