Improvisation in Rehearsal

John Abbott

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788502696
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

John Abbott, author of The Improvisation Book, explains how theatre directors at every level can use improvisation in the rehearsal room. Foreword by Mark Rylance.

Packed with useful exercises and improvisation scenarios, and examples from a wide variety of plays, Improvisation in Rehearsal reveals how improvisation enriches and enlivens the creation of characters, back-stories, relationships, shared histories and emotional lives. The book also demonstrates how improvisation can be used as a powerful tool in the foundation of a strong company, and when searching for the hidden depths and dynamics in a scene.

Building on his own experience as an actor, director and teacher, Abbott writes with clarity and an infectious enthusiasm which will motivate directors to try the techniques for themselves. As Mark Rylance says in his Foreword, this book 'will inspire and delight its readers'.

'Improvisation can be used as part of the creative process of rehearsing a play. It can be a fabulous tool for exploration and discovery. It can strengthen the actor's commitment to their character. And it can create an environment of confidence and spontaneity.'

'Essential reading... full of useful exercises and improvisation scenarios... Abbott knows what he's talking about and has a gift for expressing himself in straightforward, clutter-free language' - The Stage

1

Preparation

I’ve never been skydiving but it must be tremendous fun. Swooping down from the clouds. Gliding through the sky like a golden eagle. Banking to the left. Diving to the right. Floating on an updraught with nothing holding you in place. Out there in empty space with the countryside like a perfect model village below. Little houses and roads. Trains moving through the hills like the most brilliant Hornby ‘Double O’ display at Harrods. Freedom. Flight. Harry Potter playing Quidditch. Leonardo’s flying machine. The dream of mankind throughout the ages.

Mind you, skydiving wouldn’t be such fun if you didn’t know how to open your parachute. Can you imagine it? Or what if you fell out of a plane without wearing a parachute at all? That would detract somewhat from the fabulous flying experience. Or even if you had the parachute on, but you weren’t sure if it was properly fitted. You’d be searching those little model buildings for a hospital so you could crash-land nearby. You’d be hoping to find a haystack in those glorious fields in order to guide yourself in the right direction. Yes, you would swoop and turn, but they would be the tactics of survival rather than the freedom of flight.

OK. Suppose you had your parachute on, and you had it properly fitted and you were reasonably sure it would open on time – what if you didn’t know how to land? You might break your leg. Surely the landing anxiety would also detract from the magical skydiving experience. How could you glide like an eagle if you thought that pretty soon you wouldn’t even be able to waddle like a duck?

No. Preparation is the thing. In order to skydive with the glorious dream of mankind making endorphins flow through your brain, you have to be fully prepared before you jump. You have to learn how to operate the parachute, and that includes packing it in the correct manner; fixing the harness safely; pulling the right cords to open it; guiding it in the direction you want to go; and landing without damaging your body. You also have to learn how to move around in free fall so you can go the way you want to. That’s where the gliding, swooping and diving bit comes in. I’ve no idea how it’s done, but I’ve seen it on television. It looks marvellous.

Once you have learned all the necessary skills you will be able to leap happily from an aeroplane and fly like a bird. Brilliant!

Preparation rules OK.

ACTORS ARE THE SORT OF PEOPLE WHO LIKE TO EXPRESS themselves by action. They like to do things. Directors structure things and give them clarity. I suppose you could say that they like to illuminate things. And writers use words to communicate ideas about the human condition. They create things. In the evolution of a play, it could be argued that writers use their intellect to create a text, directors use their imagination to visualise a production, and actors bring everything to life by expressing human emotions and actions with truth.

These breakdowns of different skills are generalisations, of course. writers, directors and actors are all creative people; they all like to illuminate things and all of them are people of action. We all have a bit of everything in us. But look at it this way: most people would agree that men are taller than women. However, in a group of twenty people, the tallest female would usually be taller than the shortest man. So forgive me for this oversimplification. What I’m talking about are tendencies. Men tend to be taller than women. Some writers probably try acting out the lines as they write them, and directors will sometimes intellectualise the themes of a play as they explore how to put it in front of an audience. Actors, of course, often talk relentlessly about their character to anyone who will listen, but the ways that writers, directors and actors like to express themselves tend to be in the ways I’ve described above.

So, if actors are able to convey human behaviour by tapping into the emotional truth of a character and just ‘being’, then it stands to reason that directors should exploit this talent during rehearsals. They should ask actors to get up and try things out as much as they can. Actors can’t wait to get up on their feet. They know in their hearts that they will discover more by doing something than by talking about it too much. They trust their instincts. If they can just ‘be’ a character for a while, then they will discover how that character thinks and behaves – and they can do that through improvisation.

But before they start to improvise they have to be thoroughly prepared, and the place to start this preparation is the text of the play itself.

Looking for Clues

As all detectives know, you can’t put a case together without at least a handful of clues to get you going. Similarly, you can’t start improvising without knowing something about the play and the characters. So the first thing actors should do before anything else is to read the play. That’s obvious. And then, less obviously, they should read it again. And then read it again. There are loads of clues in the text of a play, and it’s surprising how much more an actor can discover on the second or third reading.

Unlike a novel, the text of a play contains very little in the way of descriptive material. There will possibly be a paragraph or two at the beginning to describe the set, or the way the writer imagines the stage will look, but after that, passages of descriptive text are few and far between. Some writers put in stage directions, like ‘He pours himself a drink’ or (famously, from The Winter’s Tale) ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’, but most of the time these are just bits of action that the writer feels are vital to the plot and they don’t really add much information. Playwrights also incorporate hints to persuade the actors to play the lines the way they want them to be played. Like ‘Angrily’, ‘With a wry smile’, ‘With mounting annoyance’, etc., but actually I’ve known many actors who will go through a script when they first get it and just cross these stage directions out. They feel that the playwright should write the dialogue, but the actor should discover how to play the scene for themselves.

So when an actor is trying to understand the action of a play, or starting to find out what their character is like, or attempting to fathom out how the characters feel about each other, most of the information can be found in the things the characters say and the way that they say them. In other words, the dialogue. That’s where the clues, sometimes called the ‘given circumstances’, are to be found.

When actors first read a play, they are so concerned about their own ‘part’ that they often miss the subtleties of the plot. Ideally, an actor should read a play for the first time without knowing which part he or she will be playing. In that way they can get an overall view of the material without being distracted by the finer details of their character. This is not always possible, but it is desirable.

As they read the play, the actors should start gathering clues and writing them down. Even before rehearsals begin. These clues should be facts not speculations. ‘I see this character with a wooden leg’ may be an interesting idea, but if there is no reference to it in the text, then it is pure speculation. Rather like a detective finding an empty cigarette packet at the scene of the crime and then saying, ‘I think the villain drove a Mercedes.’ It may be true, but it’s not very helpful in the early stages of an investigation unless it can be supported by facts.

‘I have of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth,’ says Hamlet to his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Of course he could be lying, but put it together with ‘How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world,’ which he says to himself, and ‘I do not set my life at a pin’s fee,’ which he says to his best friend Horatio, then we begin to realise that Hamlet could be depressed. Or at least he thinks he’s depressed. And that is something to start working on. An assumption fully supported by the text.

The villain may or may not have driven a Mercedes, but if a cigarette packet is found at the scene of the crime it’s reasonable to assume that he or she could be a smoker.

First Reading

In rehearsals, the first reading of a play with the whole cast is a nerve-wracking experience. Some directors don’t bother with a readthrough any more, but I think it’s important, if only to settle everyone down. Often this is the first time that the actors will have met each other and it gives them the opportunity to relax a bit. Some of them will be a bit nervous of displaying their sight-reading skills in public so I usually make it a pretty light-hearted affair.

During this first readthrough, it is quite useful to stop at the end of each scene, section or act to have a discussion about what has been revealed. Again, these discussions should avoid speculation. People should only talk about things that can be supported by the information in the text. This way, everyone can share their observations and build up a catalogue of information and ideas.

When the readthrough is finished – and with all the pauses for discussion this may take all day or even longer – everyone should then discuss what the play is trying to say and what effect the author intended it to have on the audience. When a group gets deep into the rehearsal period it’s very easy to lose sight of the basics and stop seeing the wood for the trees. After a first night I’ve often heard actors say things like ‘I’d forgotten it was a comedy’ or ‘I didn’t realise the play was so moving’, so it’s sensible in early stages to think about what a play is trying to achieve. Then everyone is working towards a shared objective.

Character Discussions

Having arrived at an understanding of the play as a whole, the next step is to discuss each of the characters. At this stage, the actors shouldn’t get too precious about their own character. There will be a lot of creative and imaginative people in the room, and each actor should keep their minds open to other people’s ideas. Other actors often come up with things that the actor playing a particular character may not have considered. Why not exploit this group creativity? Everyone benefits in the end.

If the rehearsal period is long enough, the whole cast can discuss each character, one at a time, but if not, the discussions can be in small groups comprised of actors whose characters are most likely to know things about each other: characters who are family members, or who are in the same scene together, characters who are best friends, characters who hate each other, etc.

These discussions should focus on collecting facts; however, there will be a certain amount of speculation. Some clues discovered in the text may suggest a fact rather than spelling it out. Yes, it’s safe to say that Hamlet is depressed, but parts of the text could also suggest that he is jealous of Claudius’s relationship with Gertrude (Hamlet’s mother), or that he is still in love with his old girlfriend Ophelia, or that he is apprehensive about the sword fight with Laertes which happens in the last scene of the play. All these ideas are ripe for discussion, and everything should be written down for consideration at a later date.

Relationship Discussions

The cast should read the play together again, but this time everyone should think about the relationships between the characters in each scene. What do they think and feel about each other? How do their thoughts and feelings change throughout the course of the play? Again, it is a good idea to have a discussion with the whole cast after each scene, section or act while the ideas are still fresh in everyone’s mind. And don’t forget, even people who aren’t actually in the scene may have interesting things to say because they will probably have a more objective view.

Having done that, people can then get into appropriate discussion groups to talk about relationships. The prime consideration in setting up these groups is to put characters together who would have met each other before the action of the play: characters that have a relationship, however tenuous. A servant who only has one line will have a relationship with the person they serve, so both actors need to find out what that is. A play about a family will need to have all the actors in the family getting together to discuss the interweaving and intricate relationships between each of them, in order to understand how some characters play people off against each other and others dominate, placate or counsel. But the most important consideration when setting up these groups is to put people together who are playing characters that bring some sort conflict to the play. If, for instance, you were rehearsing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee, where the central characters are a middle-aged married couple who fight and argue and dig up the past for three solid acts, then the discussion between the actors playing George and Martha would be the main thrust of the relationship discussions and they could go on for a long time. That’s fine, but at this stage the actors should still stick to the facts that are written in the play and not speculate. The other two characters, Nick and Honey, are a younger couple who have an equally complex and stressful marriage. They too will need in-depth discussions about the development of their relationship.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is mainly about the relationship between George and Martha, but other plays will have a mixture of simple and complex relationships between many of the characters. Each of these relationships needs to be discussed by the actors playing the parts. If you are rehearsing Hamlet, for instance, then the actor playing Hamlet will need to get together with the actress playing his mother Gertrude, to discuss the relationship between these two characters; Polonius will have to have a discussion with his boss, the new king, Claudius; and Laertes will need to discuss his relationship with his sister Ophelia and with their father Polonius. But then Hamlet will also need to talk with Ophelia too because she is his ex-girlfriend, as will Polonius, her father. Gertrude will need to discuss things with her new husband Claudius but then she will also need to talk with Ophelia because at one time she was going to be Ophelia’s mother-in-law. Rosencrantz should have a proper discussion with his mate Guildenstern, and they will both need to talk to Hamlet about how well they knew each other as students. The two gravediggers will obviously have to talk, and so too will Bernardo and Francisco who guard the battlements. It’s a very complex play with a lot of interweaving subplots and this may sound like time-consuming, laborious work, but with careful planning some of these discussions can happen at the same time.

I usually set the actors up in pairs or small groups to have these discussions, and then I move from group to group so I can listen to what they are saying. In this way, the actors can discover things for themselves, while at the same time I can add my observations to the mix.

Although there can be three or four discussion groups happening at once, there will be times when some of the actors are not going to be involved in any of them. Hamlet has relationships with virtually all of the other characters in the play and will be going from group to group, but the gravediggers only know each other so after they have talked about their relationship they won’t have anything else to do. When this happens I usually get those actors to join with other groups so they can bring an objective view to the discussion. After all, everyone is working on the same play and all opinions are useful.

The relationships between different characters is such an important aspect of any play that these discussions will probably continue on and off throughout the rehearsal process, but at this stage these group discussions will give the actors something to work with. In Chapter 6: Relationships, I describe a series of improvisations that will develop these character relationships even further, but the actors can’t do that work until they have established a shared understanding of the basics.

The Social and Physical Environment of the Play

The final fact-finding discussion should be about the world that the characters inhabit. As before, these discussions should revol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Contents
• Foreword by Mark Rylance
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• 1 Preparation
• 2 Research
• 3 Background Improvisations
• 4 Preparing a Character
• 5 Developing a Character
• 6 Relationships
• 7 Centre of Attention
• 8 Sense Memory
• 9 Creating a History
• 10 Preparing to Rehearse
• 11 Developing a Scene
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Copyright Information