John Gielgud has once said, "Style is knowing what kind of play you are in ". Young actors don't always instinctively know what kind of play they are in, or how to recognize the clues of style. One reason for this is the limiting way in which being "natural" or "honest" has been used as a touchstone of acting: an actor should do nothing that cannot be perceived as consistent with his own emotions and personal sense of identity. Thus, in this century actor training was dominated quite recently by "naturalistic" technique, a concentration upon inner process and the generation of personal emotion. This served the dominating perception that realism in drama demanded a one-tone-one relationship between the actor and his role - becoming the character in a real-world sense rather than "playing" the character within the framework of the theatrical event. While theatre continued to speak of a "play", "playing" and "players", the relationship between the acting process and the concept of play tended to be lost beneath the emphasis upon the "reality" of theatre.
The necessity for truth, honesty and responsibility (Stanislavski's sense of the art in oneself, not oneself in the art) must work hand in hand with the recognition that a complete actor has to be able to play many parts within the full range of the dramatic repertory - from Aeschylus to Beckett or from Aristophanes to Tabori - and that his character is a dramatis persona , a mask of the action, rather than a "real" person. This is not to ignore the place of emotion: emotion is both stimulated and communicated by action. At one time it was believed that if an actor felt an emotion intensely enough, it would automatically be communicated to the audience. This turned out not to be the case: emotion is intangible and must be manifested through a recognizable action.
"Play" presumes action, and "mask" requires the adaptation of action to the inherent stylistic demands of different plays, so that the player will adopt the right mask for the right event and not give every performance generally in the style of Ibsen, or vaguely like Chekhov. Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière, Schiller, Beckett, Brecht - each has his own identity, his particular demands - in a word, style. The clues of the style are in the text. To recognize them the actor must know something of the world in which and for which a text was written: its theatrical space, society, and politics; its architecture and clothing; its social and theatrical conventions - all the flavour and physical quality of a period that informs the sensibility of a playwright.
Basic acting techniques is common to all styles of theatre: impulse leads to action, and action leads to event. Every act of creation starts from an impulse. It may be an idea, it may be an image; it may derive from pure imagination, or, it will be the actor's response to a play text. An impulse is a movement towards action: if an actor wants to communicate his impulse he must do something - play an action. Playing allows the body to respond to an impulse, to clothe the impulse in physical form - which is much stronger and more tangible than either an intellectual idea or feeling.
The actor's focus, then, is at all times upon doing - making physical choices that express the intention of the impulse. The interrelationship of all the choices of all the actors creates the event. On stage the event, or score of actions, is a constant - the result of choices made in rehearsal. However, the way in which the score is "played" will vary somewhat at each performance: there is always a margin in performance that allows the actor to respond to the immediate rhythms of the event as they reach him from fellow actors and the audience. It is this aspect of "playing" that keeps the vitality in a performance.
But where does the style come in? Style is what distinguishes one event from another. The impulse for action is found in a text. The text also contains the given circumstances of the event - the rules of the theatrical game. (To pursue the game analogy for a moment, it is the rules that tell us how, with the same deck of cards, to play bridge rather than gin rummy, or how, with similar implements, to play tennis, rather than raquetball). So the text not only provides the impulse to action but, through the given circumstances, determines the shape of the actor's physical choices and the form and sensibility of the event.
What are the given circumstances that catalyze the impulse and shape the style? Most actors are familiar with the idea of given circumstances such as place, climate, dialects, and physical type, age, and occupation of a character. These clues may distinguish qualities of character and situation, but they do not necessarily determine the style of a performance. The basic question is: why do a character in a comedy by Noel Coward and a comic character in Molière require different approaches from the actor? Or, what makes the quality of a play by Tennessee Williams different from that of a play by Eugene Ionesco, and why are neither like a play by Bertolt Brecht or a restoration playwright?
As I mentioned before, the clues are in the text. And broader clues derive from: theatrical conventions of the time in which the play was written - spaces, equipment, the physical manner of the actor; language, rhythm and forms; Dramatic conventions such as the use of verse, the employment of neoclassical or epic structure, and the mask approach to character; social, political, moral and other perspectives of the age in which the playwright was working, and his response to them.
It is only by understanding these built-in clues that an actor can hope to approach a true awareness of the stylistic demands of a text. All of this I am calling the sensibility of a time - the theatrical, social and personal values a playwright inevitably writes into a play. An understanding of the sensibility makes possible an assumption of the physical style.
To some degree style reflects the fact that theatre holds "a mirror up to nature ". Joseph Chaikin has noted that "Theatre styles are interrelated with living and thought styles - everything we see carries a recommendation to be seen within given system of perception " . It is this system of perception - the reflection of a particular social reality at a particular time - that an actor must appreciate in order to avoid imposing his own contemporary sensibility upon a text and limiting or warping it.
Style might be said to be the realism of a particular time as communicated through the theatrical conventions of that time. The imitation of the mannerisms of twentieth-century humans, the outward manifestation of their inner psychological process acted out within the peep-show theatrical spaces of the time, created a style that proved valid for certain plays. There was however, a vast corpus of drama that did not respond to this approach. And for good reason: the "naturalistic" approach tried to impose a quite different reality upon these plays - one based upon a psychological interpretation of character and contemporary concept of behavior quite foreign to the given circumstances of the text. Charles Marowitz, an early proponent of the naturalistic acting technique, known as "the method", and one who came to realize its limitations, wrote, "There is some commonly experienced continuum in a work of art which we are prepared to accept as its truth. A truth nurtured in a very special way by the material and its conceptions which, if they are consistent, pursuades us to accept, even if only temporarily, someone else's coherent view of life " .
An actor must come to terms with the inherent truth of each text, and not impose his own sense of truth upon it. While inner process is necessary, the simple manifestation of personal feeling by an actor will not communicate the totality of a play. It is physical actions - signals and signs - that communicate, and these must take on a particular shape, create a particular style, in accordance with the given circumstances of a text.
Theatre is the creation of an illusion of reality. As Lee Simonson has observed, "The reality of a performance has no inherent connection with the degree of fidelity with which it reproduces the facts of actual life " . For an actor there is a distinction between simply expressing the self, and using the self to express the truth of the event as found in the given circumstances. Emphasis upon "honesty" has sometimes be taken to mean that all an actor has to do is project his feelings through the role, turning every character into a carbon copy of himself. Dion Boucicault once wrote, "If actors' and actress' minds be employed upon themselves and not on the character they aspire to perform, they never really get out of themselves.Many think they are studying their character when they are studying only themselves " . An actor must consider all the given circumstances in order to create the mask that the truth of the event requires. He must be aware that a character may be constructed as much out of the rhythms and images of its speech and its structural function in the play as out of imagined biological or biographical data; that a playwright may deal in broad humors as much as in detailed psyches; and that the "artificiality" of manner written into some plays must be recognized as representing the physical reality of its time, and must be reproduced if the quality of the play is to be truly served. If an actor creates a valid mask and plays it truthfully within the demands of the script, then he is being honest.
We should take a moment to clarify our use of the term mask . Apart from its etymology and its historical meaning, mask may be used to describe the structural function a character performs in a play - which points to the fact that theatre is not "reality", but an illusion of reality. As Richard Schechner has pointed out, "Great errors are made because performers and directors think of characters as people rather than dramatis personae: masks of dramatic action. A role conform to the logic of theatre, not the logic of any other life system. To think of a role as a person is like picknicking on a landscape painting " . Thus, a mask consists of everything a character is required to do in order to discharge a valid function within a play.It is a set of physical choices that includes eveything from hair style, vocal quality, costume, and physical rhythms to kind of shoes and manner of walk. These choises will differ with the different demands of each text. Robert Benedetti has put it well: "Mask is a set of postures, gestures, sounds and actions performed by the actor . (.) different kinds of acting, having different purposes, require different relationships of actor and character " .
Mask is physical rather than emotional. Stanislavski, whose name is sometimes exclusively associated with inner process and the discovery of emotion, was, in fact, highly conscious of the primacy of physical actions and mask choises. "The typical gesture ", he said, "helps to bring a player closer to the character he is portraying, while tha intrusion of personal movements (i.e., those not demanded by the mask) separates him from it and pushes him in the direction of his personal emotions " . There is no fundamental contradiction between the demands of mask and playing and the need for inner process. Gestalt psychology teaches the close relationship between physical and emotional response, and Grotowski, together with many practitioners of modern theatre, feels that the articulation of the physical part of the role actually leads to the inner support .
The discovery and playing of the correct mask is, then, the actor's fundamental task in approaching the style of a theatrical event. Whether the character is perceived of as "realistic" or is removed from a contemporary perspective by time or social environment, the task of coming to terms with it does not differ. In the theatre the one character is just as "real" as the other: both are a function of, and serve, the play's demands. The actor discovers the needs of the character mask, as determined by the circumstances of the event, in the text. The character's feelings are the actor's feelings, and the character's gestures are his gestures, in the sense that the actor is the material out of which these feelings and gestures are created. Thus, although an actor uses himself and plays from himself in creating a character, he does not simply project his own personality; he plays his character mask, but with absolute personal conviction. Just as no two actors are quite the same, so will no two masks ever be quite the same, although responding to the same demands.
Again, style is not an attempt to serve empty historical re-creation or to ape dated conventions. I am aware that life is constantly moving and that re-interpretation is an inevitable function of that passage of time. We can never come precisely to terms with the sensibility of another period, but we can equally never hope to understand theatre of a period other than our own if we don't make some attempt to discover the inherent truth of the text.
I am not saying a particular kind of play must and can be done only in this way. I am saying this is a reasonable idea of how it was intended to be done. It is worth understanding: and it is at least a starting point for actors in approaching a text that doesn't fall into their contemporary time span or immediate social background. It helps them to discover what kind of a play they are in. I am aware that interpretation is a director's prerogative. But, to take the extreme example, even if an actor is involved in a modern dress production of an antique play in a small theatrical space, he will be better able to make appropriate and intelligent choices if he understands the inherent conventions of the play and has some idea of how the action is structured by the manner in which it was originally intended to be performed.
A Play is a highly structured context or game, with absolute rules that heighten and intensify its action. The actor must know the rules (the given circumstances) of the game ( the text or theatrical event) in order to understand and play the action. The actor must adapt his process of playing to the different circumstances. In sports, similar skills are called for - timing, coordination, flexibility, balance, speed - but the rules are quite different. In the same way an actor brings his skills and technique to a play, but the rules for comedy of manners are different from the rules of Shakespeare or Brecht: they are different games. We have to understand the rules before we can play the game well, and the rules are in the text, the given circumstances that are the clues to the way in which the actor plays the style.
I began by suggesting the acting process moves from impulse to action, and from action to event. This parallels our method for discovering style: moving from sensibility to mask, and then to play. In giving the actor a feeling for the sensibility underlying style and, through exerrcises, for how the sensibility may become a physical reality, I have concentrated more on essence and physical flair than on small detail. In other words, the actor should be allowed to make informed choises within the stylistic framework.
Two thousand five hundred years ago, Epictetus said to the actor: "Remember you are an actor in a drama of such kind as the other pleases to make it . (.) For your business is to act well the character assigned to you: to choose it , is another's " ; and it holds true today.
Ozdemir Nutku
Theatre Theoretician
Proffessor of theatre
Director
