The Actor and the Character

Explorations in the Psychology of Transformative Acting

Vladimir Mirodan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317527947
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Transformative acting remains the aspiration of many an emerging actor, and constitutes the achievement of some of the most acclaimed performances of our age: Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln, Meryl Streep as Mrs Thatcher, Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter – the list is extensive, and we all have our favourites. But what are the physical and psychological processes which enable actors to create characters so different from themselves? To understand this unique phenomenon, Vladimir Mirodan provides both a historical overview of the evolution of notions of 'character' in Western theatre and a stunning contemporary analysis of the theoretical implications of transformative acting. The Actor and the Character:

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• Surveys the main debates surrounding the concept of dramatic character and – contrary to recent trends – explains why transformative actors conceive their characters as 'independent' of their own personalities.

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• Describes some important techniques used by actors to construct their characters by physical means: work on objects, neutral and character masks, Laban movement analysis, Viewpoints, etc.

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• Examines the psychology behind transformative acting from the perspectives of both psychoanalysis and scientific psychology and, based on recent developments in psychology, asks whether transformation is not just acting folklore but may actually entail temporary changes to the brain structures of the actors.

The Actor and the Character speaks not only to academics and students studying actor training and acting theory, but contributes to current lively academic debates around character. This is a compelling and original exploration of the limits of acting theory and practice, psychology, and creative work, in which Mirodan boldly re-examines some of the fundamental assumptions of actor training and some basic tenets of theatre practice to ask: What happens when one of us 'becomes somebody else'?

1

INTRODUCTION

For over a century people have turned to psychology to understand acting. First, generations of actors, directors and teachers became fascinated by psychoanalysis. More recently, extensive work by such writers as Bruce McConachie, Rhonda Blair, Rick Kemp and John Lutterbie (to name but a few) has drawn interesting lessons regarding acting and spectating from cognitive science.

However, in both traditions, relatively little has been written about the complex psychological interplay that takes place between the actor and the fictional character. In addition, in recent books about acting by well-known directors and writers such as David Mamet or Declan Donnellan, the very concept of character is largely being dismissed, at times in peremptory terms. This attitude parallels that of many literary critics who have, since the modernist upheaval of the 1930s, been at war with the notion of character. ‘The Idea of Character’, Part I of this book, therefore surveys historical understandings of character and type and charts the ways in which – having flourished in the acting mainstream for most of the twentieth century – these have wilted over the past thirty years under the blast of more fashionable currents: new emphases on immediacy, authenticity, and individual difference. It seemed to me that in relation to character the ‘new’ had become a new orthodoxy and was thus ripe for re-examination.

Lofty directorial or lit. crit. rejections notwithstanding, in acting practice ‘character’ or ‘transformative’ acting stubbornly refuses to go away. Transformative acting remains the aspiration of many a student actor and constitutes the achievement of some of the most acclaimed performances of our age: Mark Rylance in Jerusalem, Meryl Streep as Mrs Thatcher, Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter – the list is extensive, and we will all have our favourites. It has even become a cliché for Oscars to be won by beautiful women or glamorous men playing monsters or characters defined by a disability.¹ However, switch on the television tonight or go to your local theatre or to the Odeon around the corner and the acting is unlikely to be transformative. For perfectly good reasons of personal inclination, commercial imperative or professional practice, much of the acting on display is rooted in an extension or refinement of the actor’s personality. In the right context, this is fine; it only becomes problematic when it is assumed that this approach to acting is the only one of value. Thus, for example, Lee Strasberg: “The simplest examples of Stanislavski’s ideas are actors such as Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and Spencer Tracy. They try not to act but to be themselves . . .”² And, six decades later, Jason Solomons, the film critic of the BBC, speaking after Christopher Lee’s death: “He was always Christopher Lee, whether they put a beard on him, or a hat or anything else . . . This is the secret of film acting, to be yourself”.³ Taking another look at transformative acting therefore felt timely, if somewhat against the current. Here is one instance (among many) why I think this argument also reaches further than mere acting preferences:

Over the past few years a number of drama series based on Fargo, the classic Coen Brothers movie, have been made for television. The first of these series turned on two pivotal performances: the American actor Billy Bob Thornton played Lorne Malvo, a strange drifter-cum-contract-killer, whose path crosses that of Lester Nygaard, a small-town insurance clerk ‘going bad’. The latter was played by Martin Freeman. Thornton’s performance fell within the ambit of the ‘transformative’: from the sculpted hair framing his face, to the distinctive walk, to the fixed stare, he was both ‘other’ and ‘other-worldly’. Martin Freeman, on the other hand, was . . . Martin Freeman: he attempted, with patchy results, a mid-Western accent, but his gestures, facial expressions and overall physicality not only remained stubbornly British but were recognisably within the same range as those he had used in The Hobbit as well as for Dr Watson in Sherlock Holmes. The point I would make is not that one style of performance was more successful commercially or professionally than the other, but that they were different in the way in which they affected the meanings of the story. From the point of view of the spectator, Thornton’s transformation into an incarnation of transcendental Evil (an interpretation explicitly supported by the dialogue) lifted the story away from the personal and into the realms of the epic, from the local to the mythical, from domestic drama to tragedy. It is in this sense that this book argues that transformative acting is of particular value. At the end of Part I, Chapter 5 tests this proposition against a number of contemporary attempts at doing away with character through either dramaturgy or acting style; in the concluding chapter, I use the framework of Deception Theory to argue for the intrinsic value of such acting.

Transformation is often a matter of degree: there are ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ forms. The one that interests me, however, always goes over the ‘tipping point’ of perceptible physical changes. In consequence, this book foregrounds throughout body-based approaches to acting. Transformative acting entails a ‘conversation’ during which actors deliberately guide spectators towards a particular understanding of their characters, by means of their bodies. The language in which this conversation takes place is based, I argue in Chapter 3, on a ‘language of movement’ familiar to actor and spectator alike and rooted in commonly held assumptions about social and psychological categories of people or ‘types’. For example, we may know that it is quite wrong to assume that all short, fat men are jolly and all tall men aloof and that this is habitus. But try to picture a tall, gaunt and loose-limbed Father Christmas, played by John Cleese; or Robin Hood as short and fat. Not easy . . . It seems that as soon as we dwell on the way in which we communicate through physical behaviours we revert to an atavistic certainty: that the corporeal demeanour of a person is an indication of who they are. This subliminal understanding enables actors to delineate characters by altering their bodies and in turn have their transformed shapes understood by audiences.

However, although it offers extended sections on physical and mental approaches to transformation (in Chapters 6 and 9 respectively), this book is not primarily about acting methodologies and their teaching – a vast literature on these already exists. Nor is it about the way in which acting is being received by the spectator – much excellent work, especially from a cognitive perspective, has been done in this area. This book is written from the perspective of the actor in rehearsal, in an attempt to open a few windows (and re-open some, stuck shut by layers of over-painting) onto a cross-disciplinary field of enquiry that asks what might be happening when it looks as if one of us ‘becomes someone else’. I therefore start from the premise that characters can and should be considered as ‘other’ than the actor. As Michael Chekhov once wrote: “It is a crime to chain and imprison an actor within the limits of his so-called ‘personality’, thus making him an enslaved labourer rather than an artist”. And, incidentally, what follows focuses exclusively on ‘acting’, concerned with the interpretation of extant texts; ‘performance’, in its numerous guises, is outside the scope of this discussion. As are complex and challenging issues to do with notions of ‘self’, considered within the framework of the philosophy of mind: while undoubtedly relevant, these are beyond a book principally concerned with exploring aspects of the psychology of acting.

From the perspective of the actor, transformation is first and foremost an act of imagination. I consider imagination in this context to be a psychophysical process, involving the body-mind of the actor in an uninterrupted flow of mutual reinforcement, a spiral of physical changes leading to psychological insights, which in turn cause further physical alterations. I am not therefore concerned with questions such as whether the use of emotional memory, say, precedes the adoption of a certain body shape or – in the opposite direction – whether choosing to wear a particular hat or stilettoes rather than flat shoes triggers the emotional responses which lead to the character. I find such debates about chickens and eggs, which have defined much of the discourse on acting in the twentieth century, somewhat sterile. I am much more interested in finding appropriate frames of reference within which to place the act of transformation. These might throw some light on the elusive phenomenon of creative, focused imagination, which leads in turn to psychophysical change. And approaching transformation through the body seems to me particularly useful as a point of departure. For one thing, characterisation by physical means is readily observable. For another, turning the routine motions and gestures of daily life into expressive movement entails the activation of complex psychophysical processes – in turn, their analysis can yield useful clues regarding the mental processes involved in transformation.

As I mentioned above, much valuable research has been carried out over the past two decades on the links between acting and cognitive science, and much of what follows aligns itself with this work. I cannot help feeling, however, that attempts at developing a “science of the imagination” – interesting and innovative as these are – do not quite manage to capture the lived experience of actors contemplating and giving physical shape to personalities ‘other’ than their own. Part II therefore places psychophysical approaches to the creation of dramatic characters in dialogue with psychological models, which attempt to explain daily-life personality from the two (admittedly very different) perspectives of scientific psychology and psychoanalysis. The link between physical expression and personality is core to both:

From the beginning, psychoanalysis promoted the ability of the analyst to deduce personality traits from an analysand’s physical demeanour. Alfred Adler was fond of quoting Luther’s dictum, “do not watch a person’s mouth, but his fists”, and wrote: “If we want to understand a person . . . we have to close our ears. We have only to look. In this way we can see as in a pantomime”.

Prompted by such observations, later generations of psychoanalysts sought to develop systematic methodologies associating certain postures with specific inner states. However, much of what psychoanalysis had to say about this topic was a reconfiguration in psychological terms of ancient tropes linking inner states and physical expression. As I outline in Chapter 3, Classical discourse on human nature and comportment had promoted the ideal of the harmonious, restrained body, expressive of a harmonious, controlled mind. Distortions of mind and body were consigned to madness or satire. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, was greatly interested in what the deformations of the body had to say about the distortions of the psyche and their effect on shaping personality. In this view, fundamental imbalances in the psyche could also explain theatre characters: the excess of some “peculiar qualities”, dominating all others, could be considered to define not only Morality Play Vices or Jonsonian humours, but characters in Chekhov, Ibsen or Miller too. This aspect of Freudian thought came to hold considerable sway over acting practices; in its Jungian adaptation, it eventually led to an elaborate system of character analysis and classification which has also had theatre applications – I examine these important influences in Chapter 8. At the same time, I note the dearth of contemporary writing on literary character from a psychoanalytic perspective. As the critic Elizabeth Fowler observes:

It is typical of the impoverished state of thought about characterisation that even psychoanalytic theory has exiled characters. There are no characters in the writings of Jacques Lacan; figures like ‘Dora’ disappeared together with the genre of the case study as the discourse developed in the years after Sigmund Freud. Literary scholars interested in psychological approaches to text have followed suit, sometimes even excluding character as a potential location for the psychoanalytic process.

(2003, p. 4)

This exclusion can in large measure be laid at the door of the scepticism contemporary writing evinces towards psychoanalytic perspectives in general. From a scientific perspective, the conceptual framework underpinning the assertions made by psychoanalysts remains that of the ancient rhetoricians and physiognomists and is just as speculative. In our case, psychoanalytical claims to ‘reading’ a person’s traits and emotional states from their physicality (posture, gait, and gesture in particular) are wide open to the criticism that the evidence on which they were based was essentially subjective and varied from analyst to analyst. For its part, scientific psychology also seeks to ascertain, this time by experimental methods, whether personality traits can be inferred from physicality (Chapter 7). And inferences rooted in science are considered to be, as the scholar Bruce McConachie asserts, “on a firmer footing” than the “now largely discredited theory of psychoanalysis”.

Trenchant differentiations such as these, while widespread, tend to ignore a growing body of research seeking to unify the intuitive outlook of psychoanalysis with the quantitative methods of scientific psychology. Such bridge-building ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Terminology
• 1 Introduction
• PART I The Idea of Character
• PART II Transformations in Body and Mind
• PART III The Melding of Actor and Character
• Index