Performance as Metamorphosis

I want to set the context for my discussion of theatre and consciousness by re-examining the central fact about the theatrical performance: namely, the fact that it is an impersonation.  The earliest discussions we have of theatre theory in the West begin by acknowledging this fact.  For example, in the Republic Plato describes mimesis as something that occurs when the poet/rhapsode "delivers a speech as if he were someone else." [1]  And Aristotle, in his Poetics, speaks of mimesis as a performance in which the actor ceases to "speak in his own person" and takes on "another personality." [2]  

 

            But just what is it that we mean when we say that the actor is engaged in an impersonation?  If we listen to Plato, the situation is one where the actor is pretending to be someone else.  On the other hand, if we listen to Aristotle, it is a case of "another personality" appearing in the guise of the actor.  Depending on what we believe the actor is doing when he or she impersonates a character onstage we will get two very different notions of what sort of consciousness is taking place during the theatrical performance.  Accordingly, I want to begin by examining these two meanings that impersonation can have.

 

            First, there is the popular view which makes no distinction in kind between the impersonation that children and adults perform in everyday settings and the impersonation that takes place in the theatre.  According to this view, the performer -- both in and out of the theatre -- is creating the illusion that he or she is someone else.  In the theatre, however, this illusion is created with a sophistication that effectively brings about a suspension of disbelief.  Perhaps the most compelling, and for our purposes the most fruitful, discussion of this view is to be found in Diderot's The Actor's Paradox. [3] 

 

            According to Diderot, the actor is someone who has carefully observed the different ways in which our body produces "the outward symptoms of the soul."[4]  Her situation, he tells us, is like that of the sculptor who, having thought through the modèle intérieur he wishes to represent, directs his consciousness at the block of marble on whose surface the chisel is to perform its function of depicting the emotions that will communicate this figure to the audience.  For her part, the actor directs her consciousness toward her body seeking to produce the outward signs of the emotions called for by the modèle idéal created by the playwright.  The greatest actor is the one "who best knows and best renders, after the best conceived ideal type, these outward signs."[5]   

 

            In many ways, Diderot's idea of the actor's performance was modeled on his observations of the performance of his painter and sculptor friends.[6] He noticed that the emotions to be expressed on canvas or in marble had already been worked out beforehand and that during the execution of the painting or the sculpture the artist's consciousness is directed exclusively at representing these emotions.  To the degree that the artist, at the time of execution, underwent the emotion expressed in the painting or in the sculpture, to that very same degree the work of art was flawed.  This was to become the central argument, which Diderot would repeat again and again, in his discussion of the actor's performance.  The actor creates the illusion of Hamlet's anguish much the same way as the illusion of Mary's anguish is created in the Pietà.  If the actor is to succeed onstage, she must not be undergoing the emotions expressed by the character.

 

            What Diderot is in effect saying is that there are no acts of consciousness occurring onstage corresponding to the state of affairs we call anguish.  The anguish which is expressed there is only a depicted anguish.  It is not a genuine emotion presently being undergone by anyone.  It does not exist as a state of consciousness but is instead the object being produced by the act of consciousness.  The act of consciousness which exists onstage and is producing the emotion witnessed by the audience is the conscious state we call pretending.  In other words, the consciousness that is crossing the threshold of the body onstage and is coming into the world is the conscious state of pretending which produces the simulated anguish that the audience sees. 

 

            With regard to this anguish, the actor's body is not functioning as a threshold, but is rather being employed as a referential site on whose surface the act of consciousness is shaping the appearance of anguish.  Diderot is clear.  The actor is someone "who, having learnt the words set down for him by the author, fools you thoroughly" into believing that these emotions are in fact being undergone by someone onstage.[7] 

 

            In Diderot's description, then, the actor is engaged in an impersonation in the sense that she is pretending to be someone else, pretending to emotions which she is in fact not undergoing. Her performance is continuous with what children and adults do when they impersonate someone.  Like them, she is using her body to refer the spectator to someone else.  Except that in the case of the actor it is done with preparation, care and consummate skill.              I have no wish to deny that an actor's performance can be, and often is, a case of successful pretense, and that for many -- no doubt a majority of theatre-goers -- this is the common sense of the matter.  What I want to challenge, however, is the notion that what is distinctive about the theatrical performance is the level of competence with which the pretense is performed.  Let us remember that there is another view regarding the nature of the impersonation which takes place in theatre.  This view conceives of theatre as a distinctive art, an art which traces its origins back to the Dionysian rituals which took place on the hillside in Greece.  The performances contained in these rituals were directed at making the god present.  Their purpose, in essence, was to achieve a metamorphosis: a bringing someone else to presence in the body of the performer. 

           

With the displacement of these rituals from the hillside to the city, the Greek theatre was born and supplied a new context for these ancient performances.  The actor in the theatre continued to find himself involved in an extraordinary activity.  That is to say, his function continued to be, in the words of Aristotle, to take on "another personality."  The idea that the actor was pretending to be someone else had not yet entered into the West's understanding of theatre.  The audience came to the theatre expecting to bear witness to a metamorphosis: they came to the theatron, the "place for seeing," expecting to see someone else -- just as the initiates on the hillside expected to see Dionysos.  The activity which in its ordinary everyday setting "personates" the actor (that is to say, brings to presence the person of the actor) in the special setting of the theatre was expected to "personate," or bring to presence the person of, someone else: the character in the play.  This is the distinctive meaning that impersonation has in the theatre.

            It is an idea that lies at the heart of Stanislavski's obsessive search for a "method": a method which would enable the actor to partake of such a metamorphosis during the performance.  Stanislavski exploited the difference between ritual and trance and the actor's performance.  In the case of the former, the "actor" remained unaware of the "other personality," whereas, in the case of theatre, the actor would be aware of this someone else.  Hence the possibility of a process he called a "science" whose outcome was belief.  

           

It is important to remember that Stanislavski did not call into question the legitimacy of the acting method embodying the principles that are found in Diderot's treatise.  The actor trained in such a method "also lives his part."  But he does so "as a preparation for perfecting an external form.  Once that is determined to his satisfaction [during rehearsal] he reproduces that form through the aid of mechanically trained muscles."[8]             The metamorphosis which comes under the guise of inspiration is not something which the actor can control.  If, as is often the case, it fails to come, the actor who has prepared in accordance with Diderot's directives can be relied on to give a good performance.

           

The fault with such a method of acting, in the eyes Stanislavski, lay in the fact that it fails to recognize that the actor's calling requires him to remain open to inspiration.  "In our art you must live the part every moment that you are playing it, and every time."[9]  Consider what happens when an external occurrence "injects a bit of real life into the theatre."  Diderot's actor "steps out of his part, disposes of the accidental intrusion, and then goes back to the convention of the theatre and takes up his interrupted action."  Stanislavski's actor, on the other hand, "includes such accidental moments of reality ... fitting them into the pattern of his part."[10] The fact that the theatrical performance is a live performance lies at the core of what he is doing.

           

There is an interesting letter written by David Garrick to Helfreich Peter Stutz which re-enforces the distinction between Stanislavski's and Diderot's methods.  What makes the letter especially pertinent is the fact that Garrick is commenting on the acting of Claire-Joseph Clairon who, along with himself, was one of the two actors Diderot singled out as exemplars of the acting method he put forward in The Actor's Paradox.  Garrick concedes that Clairon is a good actor.  She is at all times in total control of her stage presence, achieving exactly the effects she sets out to achieve.  In a word, her performance realizes what has already been achieved in rehearsal: namely, the ideal model.  Her performance, however, accomplishes nothing more.  And this is the fault that Garrick finds with it.  It leaves no room for "the greatest strokes of Genius ... [which occur] unknown to the Actor himself 'till Circumstances and the warmth of the Scene has sprung the Mine as it were, as much to his own Surprise, as that of the Audience."[11]  Knowing how to create the illusion of an emotion is all well and good and invariably gives pleasure to the audience.  But, in the final analysis, to achieve a truly great performance, to accomplish what theatre and theatre alone can accomplish, the actor must remain open in his performance to the actual realization of the emotion.  In other words, the live performance onstage must strive to enact the "live" performance which take place in life.

                       

In his An Actor Prepares, Stanislavski/Tortsov speaks of the spontaneity which happens onstage when the emotions break through the scaffolding of pretense.  "The very best thing that can happen," he tells us, "is to have the actor completely carried away by the play.  Then regardless of his own will he lives the part, not noticing how he feels, not thinking about what he does, and it all moves of its own accord, subconsciously and intuitively."[12] When this happens, the theatrical performance ceases to be an impersonation wherein the actor pretends to emotions which he does not undergo.  The performance has become an enactment of life and, as in the case of life, what comes to pass moves of its own accord.  Feelings are no longer the object of the actor's consciousness: something which he produces or depicts onstage the way a painter produces or depicts feelings on a canvas.  They are now genuine, spontaneous: that is to say, they are feelings that are being undergone as states of consciousness.  As such, they belong to the live performance that constitutes the life of a person: the person onstage being, of course, the character.

           

William James, in his Principles of Psychology, points out that every experience or state of consciousness enters the world as the present of a stream of consciousness which is presencing a self.[13]  This stream is the life of consciousness and comes to pass of its own accord.  So when Stanislavski refers to the actor as being "completely carried away," what he is saying is that the actor has somehow managed to establish a present which is the present of a stream of consciousness.  And that the feelings in question have shifted from being objects of consciousness to being states of consciousness.  In their capacity as states of consciousness, these feelings weave themselves into the fabric which constitutes the reality of a person, a someone with whom the actor is identifying herself: the character in the play. 

           

What has happened is the "mine," that Garrick speaks of, has detonated and the actor, being "transported beyond himself," has become someone else.  Actors speak of this phenomenon as "living in the scene."  It is the moment which their preparation has prepared them for: when, in the words of Stanislavski, "the creative artist feels his own life in the life of his part, and the life of his part identical with his personal life ... A miraculous metamorphosis."[14]  

           

But what can we say about the consciousness which is taking place during this metamorphosis?  The feelings, as we have seen, have shifted from being objects of consciousness to being states of consciousness.  As states of consciousness, they are directed toward the scene much like the states of consciousness that arise in life are directed toward the world.[15] The body in life functions as a matrix of states of consciousness which  establish it (the body) as a threshold across which someone -- the one who undergoes these states of consciousness -- comes to presence.  The energy by which nature constitutes a living, shaping force has become a conscious force in the human body and its shaping function is a "personating" activity.[16] The art of the actor consists in reconstructing this state of affairs on the theatrical stage.  The body in the life of the scene continues to function as matrix and threshold.  Like the world, the scene elicits spontaneous corporeal behavior that gives rise to states of consciousness which establish the presence of someone --the character -- onstage. 

           

These states of consciousness, however, and the stream to which they belong, and the person who comes to presence as undergoing them, as they occur in the theatre are enactments.  They are not the originary state of affairs we have in life in the world.  The character who appears onstage and the feelings that appear as being undergone by him exist insofar as there is an appropriation of a body whose feelings are originarily someone else's: namely, the actor's.  In one sense, it must still be the actor's body since it continues to function as the matrix of acts of consciousness.  In another sense, it can no longer be the actor's body since it functions as a threshold across which someone else is coming to presence.

           

How is this possible?  What is the actor doing when he effaces himself?  We could say that the energy which in the life of nature reveals itself in the persona of the actor has been channeled by means of artifice into revealing itself in the persona of the character.  Eugenio Barba, in his work on theatre anthropology, describes the actor's work on her body as one that seeks to compose a "pattern of actions which form the banks ... through which energy flows, transforming the natural bios into scenic bios and bringing it to view."[17] The daily body has in effect been transformed into an extra-daily, or scenic, body: that is to say, a body in which the actor's person has been temporarily "put out of play."

           

But in what sense can we say the actor is out of play?  He has certainly not been rendered unconscious.  If this were the case, the states of consciousness that presence the character would have no means of entering the world.  In being "completely carried away" and "transported beyond himself," the actor has not fallen into a state of senselessness.  In other words, he has not lost that self-awareness which establishes his body as a matrix of acts that engage the world in conscious terms.  Beneath our every conscious activity and functioning as their ontological support, so to speak, there is our awareness of the body's "situatedness."  Again, it is William James who calls our attention to this primitive self which he describes as the perennial awareness our body has of itself.[18]   This awareness continues onstage, where the body engages the scene in conscious terms and as it does so functions as a threshold across which a self is presenced in the world -- this time in the world of the play.

           

In a very important sense, the actor is not in the world of the play.  Her body is.  But it is someone else who is coming to presence across that body.  Although the body continues to be hers during the theatrical performance, this is not because it is bringing the person with whom she identifies herself to presence.  It continues to be hers by virtue of the fact that it is the same body which "nature uses" to bring her to presence.  But during the theatrical performance, the actor is "imitating" nature.  She is using this body, her body, to bring a character to presence. 

                       

As matrix and threshold, the body (which nature uses) has a pre-personal existence: that is to say, James' primitive self is a pre-personal subject that is at work "underneath," so to speak, the personal subject.  Philosophers, especially those who have been influenced by phenomenology, speak of an "impersonal one," that is to say, of a body-subject whose "prehistory" is taken up in all our personal dealings with the world.[19] It is for the purpose of reaching this stratum of his body that the actor works on his body.  Charles Marowitz has described the actor as "someone who remembers."  Remembers not only his lines, or the emotions that humans experience, or even the "primordial impulses that inhabited his body before he was `civilized' and `educated'."  At the end of it all, the actor is someone who "remembers the world before it became his world and himself before he became his self."[20] It is when the actor has retrieved this self "before it becomes his self" that he is in a position to "build a character" which enables him to "feel his own life in the life of his part" during the performance.

           

All of the actor's exercises and preparations, then, are directed at reaching the body at that point where it functions as matrix and threshold.  The objective is to "re-code" the body, as it were, so that when it behaves in the context of the scene it will presence the character in the play and not the actor.  The actor's training, according to Barba, teaches her how to separate herself from what her body shows.  The effacement that lies at the heart of the theatre metamorphosis is achieved when a new form is instituted which functions as the soul "of a living but re-invented body ... [giving rise to] a behaviour which has been separated from the behaviour of every day, a naturalness which is the fruit of artificiality."[21]

           

I am using the word "soul" in the way that Aristotle uses in his De Anima where he identifies it with form (which is the word Barba uses) and describes it as the "first grade of actuality" -- that is to say, the actuality which establishes the horizon within which the body is "prepared" to act.[22] According to Aristotle, the fact that the body is besouled accounts for why its movements are "behaviour."  And when this behaviour is a conscious behaviour directed at an horizon of meanings, the body becomes the site of a personality.  The soul, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, is something the body shows.  And, in the theatre performance, the body shows "another personality."

           

During the performance, the actor's primitive self-awareness remains intact, as the recoded body functions in its capacity as matrix and threshold.  The states of consciousness that enter the world during the performance will have the actor's self-awareness as their ontological support.  But the threshold they cross is one that, thanks to the actor's artistry, presences someone else.  The actor undergoes the emotions which take place onstage; but he does so as their support.  It is the character who, in the final analysis, undergoes these emotions in the mode of being constituted, or brought into the world, by them. 

           

The double consciousness which actors say takes place during the performance is a split which takes place within the actor's consciousness and is not a case of there being two states of consciousness.  The actor is exploiting a split which is already delineated in his ordinary life where there is, on the one hand, his awareness of his body, and, on the other hand, his awareness of the one who is being presenced by this body and with whom he identifies himself.  It is the latter awareness which is the locus of the "surprise" Garrick speaks of.  The actor finds himself identifying with someone he is not originarily.  Unlike the child who tells his mother that no matter who he pretends to be he always end up being himself, the actor finds himself becoming someone else.  Be this as it may, however, it is in the awareness he has of his body that he continues to find the assurance, pace Diderot, that come what may he will be adequate to the task of supporting the life which the performance is bringing forth.

           

What is more, it is a surprise in which we, the audience who are bearing witness to what has happened, share.  We have from the beginning of our existence been "with" others.  The phenomenon called intersubjectivity speaks to the primitive situation that exists between us before we learn how to observe one another.  We find ourselves partaking, as it were, each of the other.  This, I believe, is the deeper meaning of Aristotle's notion that we are born with the instinct to imitate.  How else are we to explain the fact that we naturally recognize persons despite the fact that this would appear to be entirely gratuitous if we were to stay exclusively with the data we receive when we observe someone's body?  To be "with" others, to recognize someone (the one who is coming to presence across a body) is connatural to us: that is to say, we are born that way.  We can, and do, learn to be with other in other ways.  But it is this primitive way that theatre exploits.  The actor is not alone in recognizing this someone else who is coming to presence across her body.  We the audience also recognize her.[23]

           

This is what stands behind the seemingly innocent notion of "suspension of disbelief."  Stanislavski's insistence that the actor believe in the character was rooted in the fact that only in this way would it be possible to engage the audience's belief.[24] It is misleading to think of this as a chronological sequence: a going from actor to audience.  It can also go the other way: from audience to actor.  Actor's speak of "feeding" on the audience.  The fact of the matter is: the two happen together or not at all.  The actor's artistry consists in taping into the intersubjective bond between himself and the audience and the suspension of disbelief, whatever that may ultimately be, is something that happens both onstage and in the audience.[25]

           

What the actor does, then, when she impersonates someone is to create someone else out of herself.  She brings this someone else forth from her own body.  It is not a case of pretending to be someone else.  It is a matter of becoming this someone else.  In a word, the impersonation which takes place in the theatre is a metamorphosis.

 

__________________________________________________________________

 

            1. Plato, Republic, iii, 393c.  For an important alternative approach, the reader is referred to Daniel Meyer-Dinkfräfe's Consciousness and the Actor: A Reassessment of Western and Indian Approaches to the Actor's Emotional Involvement from the Perspective of Vedic Psychology (Frankfurt am Main, 1996) which explores the question of consciousness and the theatre in the light of Vedic psychology's model of consciousness.  A discussion of this work is beyond the purview of this present paper which remains exclusively within the Western tradition.

 

            2. Aristotle, Poetics, iii, 1448a 21-22.

 

            3. It is not my intention to revisit Diderot's classic work in order to give (still another?) interpretation.  Suffice it to say  that Diderot's discussion -- the very terms in which he has set  forth the actor's problem -- places him squarely at the center of  the first meaning of impersonation.  From this perspective, the  "duplicity" which Diderot discerns at the heart of great acting  illustrates Plato's worst fears concerning mimesis. 

 

            4. Dennis Diderot, The Paradox of Acting, trans. by W.H. Pollock (1883) in The Paradox of Acting and Masks or Faces, intro. by Lee Strasberg (New York, 1957) p. 53.

 

            5. Ibid. See, James Creech, Diderot: Thresholds of Representation (Columbus, Ohio, 1986), chapter five.

 

            6. For a discussion of the influence his contact with painters and sculptors (beginning in 1759) had on Diderot's theory of acting, see Joseph R.Roach, The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark, Delaware, 1985), chapter four; and Sarah Kofman, Mélancolie de l'art (Paris, 1985), pp. 37-70.

 

            7. The Paradox of Acting, p. 37.

 

            8. Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (New York, 1944) p. 18.

 

            9. Ibid.

 

            10. Ibid., p. 270.  Stanislavski remarks that "such occurrences often act as a kind of tuning fork, they strike a living note and oblige us to turn from falseness and artificiality back to truth.  Just one such moment can give direction to all the rest of the role." (Ibid.)

 

            11. David Garrick, "Letter to Helfrich Peter Sturz, 3 Jan. 1769" in The Letters of David Garrick, eds. David M. Little and George M. Kahrl (Cambridge, 1963) no. 528.

 

            12. An Actor Prepares, p. 13.

 

            13. See William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol 1 (Dover Publications, 1950) pp.330-342.  See also his chapter on "The Stream of Consciousness."

 

            14. An Actor Prepares, p. 269.

 

            15. See Principles of Psychology, pp. 271-290.

 

            16. A person, or self, is the one in reference to whom things  exhibit meanings.  Human actions are directed toward things in  terms of the meanings they display.  The body is a "human body" when it behaves-in-the-world as a threshold across which someone is presenced in the world.  As such, it functions, in the language of  phenomenology, as an "incarnate intentionality."

 

            17. Eugenio Barba, The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology, trans. by Richard Fowler (London: 1995) pp. 54-55.

 

            18. See Principles of Psychology, pp. 292-329.  See also the notion of a body-subject in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. by Alden L. Fisher (Boston, 1963) pp. 189-224;

246-249.

 

            19. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty's discussion of perception which he describes as embedded in the body-subject -- that primitive self at the center of an incarnate intentionality -- in his Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (New York: 1962) p. 240: "Perception is always in the mode of the impersonal `One'.  It is not a personal act enabling me to give a fresh significance to my life.  The person who, in sensory exploration, gives a past to the present and directs it toward a future, is not myself as an

autonomous subject, but myself in so far as I have a body and am

able to `look'.  Rather than a genuine history, perception ratifies and renews in us a prehistory."

 

            20. Charles Marowitz, The Act of Being: Toward a Theory of Acting (New York, 1978) pp.26-27.

 

            21. The Paper Canoe, p. 104.

 

            22. See Aristotle, De Anima, Book II, chapter 1.  Barba's work suggests a familiarity with Aristotle.  For a discussion of

the notions of soul and form, and their relation to metamorphosis,

see my "Person as the Mask of Being," Philosophy Today 37

(Summer,1993), 201-210.

 

            23. For a discussion of the way in which the actor-audience bond is affected by the metamorphosis, see Dunbar H. Ogden's excellent article "The Mimetic Impulse or the Doppelgänger Effect," in Theatre and Television, ed. Robert L. Erenstein (Amsterdam, 1988), 21-49.

 

            24. The talk about belief, in the context of theatre, serves to point us to that "place" where we are still "with" one another, where the distance effectuated by observation (and knowledge) has not yet arisen.

 

            25. What I am suggesting is that to suspend one's disbelief is to move oneself outside of the observational mode and to "return" to a more primitive mode.  In other words, the advice often given to actors that they "reach down inside themselves," etc. is something that the audience in its own way must do.

WORKING WITH THE PLAYWRIGHT by Charles Marowitz

When directing a play by a living author, who is usually granted the right to attend rehearsals, the director will find himself in an awkward position. The power-base is suddenly split. Surely, the director is the Captain of the ship and his word is law. And yet, here is the author, without whom there would be no ‘ship’ at all - so to which authority should the actor be beholden?

If the playwright is someone like David Mamet, Neil Simon or Tom Stoppard, the author’s influence is often paramount and there are frequent consultations between director and playwright, the contents of which do not seep out to the company except as directives previously agreed between both parties. However, if you are working with a new playwright, you might consider an alternative arrangement which may be more effective.

The first thing to realize is that many fledgling playwrights do not understand the process by which a play gravitates to the stage; that a variety of people with creative talents i.e. actors, designers, dramaturgs, etc., are reshaping the original material in the act of interpreting it. Sometimes, this may alter the playwright’s original vision and sensible playwrights realize this is often to the good. But there are some playwrights who find it difficult, if not impossible, to relinquish the picture of the play they have in their minds, who insist on tangibly reproducing those images that first arose in their imagination. I am not inferring that a mise-en-scene should transform the nature or spirit of the original work, only that the act of interpretation opens doors to other people’s conceptions of what a playwright has created and, unless the writer recognizes he is moving from one genre into another, and one which has its own special requirements, he will come unstuck.

The playwright should be in attendance during the two or three reading-rehearsals in which the actors are seated around the table with script is in hand. He should be pumped for as much information as he can possibly give and everyone concerned with the production should have a chance to bombard him with questions. Once he has been pumped dry and the actors get on their feet, he should be prohibited from attending rehearsals. This may sound draconian but it is a practical prohibition. Once actors have begun struggling with their lines and formulating their moves, they become badly inhibited if the playwright is present. They are not sure whether or not he realizes that those early, tentative, necessarily imperfect efforts are part of the process of looking for and finding the route into the play, and they are painfully conscious of the fact that everything is in disarray; the inevitable disarray that precedes the decisive choices that will shortly be made.

Once the play is ready for its first runthroughs, the playwright should be invited back to see the work in its embryonic state. At that juncture, he will have an idea of which way the material is moving and if he has strong objections, that is the time to voice them. To the director, of course; not the actors. That is the same point at which the director will get an objective impression of what has already been created. The playwright’s absence during the major part of rehearsals has given him an invaluable objectivity which he could not possibly have had otherwise. His reactions at that stage will be extremely pertinent and it behooves the director to give them very serious consideration. Often that is the moment where the playwright himself is inspired to alter and revise, delete or re-angle. It is also the point where the director has an opportunity to ventilate the problems he has encountered with the script. It is the second plateau of the rehearsal period where the production is not quite off the drawing-board, but almost.

Once the impressions of both director and playwright have been honestly evaluated, it is possible to visualize what the shape of the final product will be. The freshness of perspective for both parties provides a great opportunity to seriously assess the fruits of their joint labor. Once this has been accomplished, the remaining runthroughs and previews should try to assimilate the new information.

During that last stanza of the production, the playwright’s criticism should be relayed exclusively to the director – never directly to the actors. Nothing subverts the authority of a director more than suddenly discovering that actors are responding to the playwright’s notes – rather than his own. This is not a matter of bruising egos. It is simply that the playwright has neither the language nor the technical expertise to remedy the problems that have emerged and, just as the director would not have the audacity to revise the playwright’s lines, so the playwright should not interfere with the communication which has been assiduously built up between the director and his company. A playwright may be able to tell an actor succinctly what is wrong with his performance, but usually, he hasn’t the vocabulary or theatrical background to know how to correct it. In short, the chain-of-command which initiated the production-process should not suddenly be subverted as that tends to disconcert actors, upset directors and be fatally counterproductive to the playwright’s own remedial intentions.


When I was directing a triad of plays by Murray Schisgal in London (the first professional productions, in fact, of this writer’s work), the author would stalk up and down the aisle at the back of the theatre wringing his hands and mumbling his irritations with the actor’s work. So much so that the actors complained to me that they couldn’t possibly rehearse freely knowing that the playwright was being so disturbed by their work. I explained this to the author and, to safeguard the morale of the company, I banned him from daily rehearsals until the production was ready to open. This was very early in Mr. Schisgal’s career and no doubt, he thought it very high-handed of me to bar the playwright from his own play but my choice was a simple one. Either the playwright remained and the actors became progressively more distressed, or the playwright went and proper work could be resumed. I had no hesitation in making my decision,

Recently, there was a production of a play in California which I knew was seriously overwritten and badly in need of editing. I also knew the playwright in question was very anal-retentive about his material as I had had a previous experience with him during which I had to forsake a production because of his unwillingness to make changes or deletions. To avoid a reprise of that unhappy situation, I entered into a written agreement with him that a), he would accept whatever cuts the company and I would make in rehearsal and b) that after the first Readings he would leave the scene to return only when runthroughs were in progress. Reluctantly, the playwright accepted those terms. During rehearsals in which the actors and I proceeded to trim the fat from the script, I found myself having to protect the play from the excessive mayhem the actors were anxious to perpetrate. The result, I can report, was gratifying to both the author and the public. But that was a unique situation. Usually, one commences rehearsals with a script already pared down to essentials. In this case, it was a play with obvious excesses, clearly in need of editing which needed to be carefully assessed before cuts were made. It sometimes happens that there is a slender work-of-art entombed in a flabby exterior (like Cyril Connolly’s belief that “Imprisoned in every fat man, a thin one is wildly signaling to be let out.”) That was exactly the case here.

Working with a playwright who has chosen you to direct his play is sometimes like being invited to a sumptuous feast on the condition that you don’t spoil the table-setting by actually eating anything. Or it can be a marvelous tête-à-tête between two kindred spirits who clearly enjoy the same delicacies.

Montage theory

What is Montage

In the infancy of film and later television editing was not part of film making. It was staged like a piece of theatre where everything was one long take. The Lumières brothers for example worked with only one take to illustrate various stories. As the cinema evolved and more people began to create films new ideas emerged such as using different lenses. As films broke the idea of splicing film together to tell a story evolved until Sergei Eisenstein among many other editors began to explore Montage Theory.


Montage literally translated from French is assembly, the process by which an editor takes two pieces of film of tape and combines them to emphasise their meaning. It is a method by which through two unrelated shots we may create a third and different meaning. Visualise for example shot a which is a pumpkin and shot b which is a hammer going down. Mix both shots together and you get meaning C. Mixing the two shots together insinuates that the pumpkin will be destroyed by the hammer.

In the Soviet Union directly after the Octobre revolution Soviet editors such as Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein developed a very individual style of editing. Whilst films in America where only around three hundred or more shots a film we find that soviet films had over a thousand shots. The pacing was much faster and they were pushing the limits of comprehension of the audience at the time. In Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible we find really good examples of this with the fight between the Russians and the Teutonic nights. There are a very wide variety of shots and the action is really alive flashing from one shot to another in quick successions.

Sergei Eisenstein is an important individual within the world of editing because he developed "The Film Sense" with fast editing and juxtaposition. The school of thought at the time was that shots complemented each other. If you show a person walking then the next shot should help continue the action. Eisenstein developed the idea of juxtaposition. Juxtaposition is the process of showing one thing and another which are unrelated and through combining the two they create a new meaning. Imagine that you are creating a documentary about the night life of students in a pub. You have two shots, A which is a shaker being filled to create a cocktail and shot B is someone dancing. If both shots are juxtaposed then it leads us to believe that although the two shots were unrelated in time and space the student whom we see after the shaker has had his head filled with alcohol which is why he's behaving that way.

Editing

From montage theory we will now take a look at editing in general. Editing is one of the most important parts of modern television because without it modern television would cease to exist. Whenever we watch a film or program on television we notice that each program is different. Adverts for example are very short, around 30 seconds whilst programs last 25 minutes and films may last up to four hours and more.

Creating the story

The first stage for the producer and editor is to know what is the story they are trying to tell. The story is the skeleton of the edit and helps organise the edit into chapters and topics much as in writing. In writing this document for example I begin with the general concept of editing and Montage, I then need to create an outline for the story and as the framework is created I can then add elements as the process is happening. Over a period of time a story will begin to emerge in the form of a rough cut.

Rhythm and Pacing

Rhythm and pacing are very important within edits because if we are editing a news story then it must be very fast with shots not lasting more than around 3 seconds. In documentaries though there is luxury to play around with the pacing of an edit. If we look at "War Photographer" for example we are introduced inside James Nachtway's world. The way in which the film is edited deeply affects the way in which we perceive the person whom is being shown. It takes ten minutes for us to hear James Nacthway speaking for the first time. It is feature length so we are given the luxury of watching the way in which this interesting photographer works and lives. If we take the feature film and look at it's basic structure then we may be able to edit the project down to around 25 minutes to fit within television schedules. The pacing will be much faster and more information will be given. If it is edited properly then the viewer should have the same feeling seeing a half hour version as for a 1hr 36 minutes version.

When watching an action film such as Die Another Day we expect the cutting to be very fast, many shots to show various angles and to extend the action as far as possible to amaze the audience and in parts to contribute a little humour. In contrast if we were to watch Pride and Prejudice we would see far longer shots with a lower variety of shot sizes and elements.

With sequences such as the helicopter sequence from Apocalypse now with the music and the huey helicopters and the firing of weapons and feeling we have right from the beginning of the film we can't help but be amazed at the beauty of the helicopter sequence. In the same way Blackhawk Down is a beautifully edited film with the descent from the helicopters into Mogadishu, the succession of shots showing the situation and the people within this situation so that we really feel something for the soldiers.

Juxtaposition

One sequence which I remember well is from the series "Spaced" which aired on British television where a couple are having an argument and we see shots of the two people arguing and this is intercut with scenes from Streetfighter and each time the girl scores a victory her avatar on the game wins, everytime the guy wins his avatar is holding the upperhand. The sequence really contributes to the audience's enjoyment of the scene.

How should we define "good", and what qualities should a good show have?

If we are still talking about helping Directors produce "good" theatre then are we not discussing a hugely subjective issue. I have been to see shows which I considered absolute rubbish that received standing ovations and seen shows I loved... that played to 4 or 5 people a night and got panned by reviewers. Quite passionate attacks on shows and defence of same. I am reminded of Paris and of course Rock Apocalypse.

So what constitutes good theatre? Many people seem to believe that for amateur shows, particularly those with a lot of young people in them, effort from the cast and overcoming obstacles are enough to consider a show good theatre. I don't.

Theatre needs to entertain, I feel that very strongly but then we must consider what it has to say. If it only entertains and has no message are we doing the right thing by Thespis. Oh and by the way, it is important that the cast understands what the show has to say. If they don't the message will fail.

Additionally, some people in the business say that good theatre must have a 'message', whether it be political, social or of other important topics of the day.

Personally, I find shows are 'good', when the production has strong, believable characters, few mistakes, a clear and defined script, and the design aspects enhance the performance subtly. I prefer a performance which takes me down the road of the unexpected, rather than the retreading old ground (what I call 'domestic' plays: that is, if the play is something that can be seen anywhere and anytime in the world, and does not bring something new to the themes or storyline involved). This is from an audience point of view... so perhaps we need to split the question into two parts. What makes a good show from the audience's POV, and what makes it good from a cast/crew POV?