Giles Block: ‘I see a voice’ – the clues in Shakespeare’s words

17 May

Giles BlockIn his role as ‘Master of the Words’ at Shakespeare’s Globe, it is Giles Block’s job to help both actors and audiences fully understand and enjoy Shakespeare’s words. As his new book Speaking the Speech is published, Giles reflects on how he came to work with the language, and how ‘trusting the detail’ can enable greater insight.

Today, before I sat down to write this, I was working at the Globe Theatre with actors from the cast of our upcoming production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So lines from that play are very much in my mind. At one point Bottom, cast as Pyramus in the play within the play, hearing his love Thisbe talking on the other side of the wall, says:

                                      I see a voice; now will I to the chink,
                                      To spy and I can hear my Thisbe’s face.

These lines, on the face of it, are ridiculous: has Bottom just got his words muddled up?

How can you see a voice?

But then, thinking about Bottom’s ‘I see a voice’ I said to myself, that’s exactly what we should all be able to do when we are looking at Shakespeare’s texts on the page.

In Speaking the Speech, one of my aims is to show how by learning to follow the way Shakespeare’s texts are composed – whether the lines are written in verse, or prose; whether the verse is rhymed or unrhymed; whether the phrases of which his verse speeches are composed, are contained within the run of his lines, or tumble over from one line into the next – it is possible to begin to ‘hear’ the voices of the characters, coming off the page towards you, as you scan Shakespeare’s lines with your eyes.  That is, if you know what clues to be looking out for.

I believe that it is by observing the ‘form’ that Shakespeare’s writings are cast in, that you will discover creative freedom.

I’ve been at the Globe since 1999. My role there is to try and make the text sound clear, and expressive, and be delivered as spontaneously as possible.  My ultimate aim is that audiences should come out at the end of the performances and say – ‘It was so clear, I understood every moment… but you’ve modernised it, haven’t you?’ – and I shall be able to reply, ‘No, that’s just as Shakespeare wrote it.’

I never thought that I would ever write a book. From my school days onwards I knew, vaguely, that Shakespeare was important to me. It was fun to be appearing in his plays, both while I was at school and at university; and the fun continued once I became a professional actor. Ten years later, it became an even more engaging experience, once I had become a director, and began directing some of his plays as well. Much, much later, when I heard that Sam Wanamaker was planning to build a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London, I thought, ‘how much I‘d like to be a part of that’…

Mark Rylance

‘Giles deepened my love for Shakespeare and for the way we all speak. I trust you will have a similar experience reading his book.’
- Mark Rylance, from his Foreword

Each year I work at the Globe with probably about an hundred actors – including, for my first seven years there, Mark Rylance, who kindly wrote the Foreword to this book. But I also work with probably a couple of hundred students each year, and I know there are so many more actors and students I’d like to reach out to. I realise now that this book, which I never thought I’d write, may well enable me to do that.

Who is this book for?

While clearly I’d like young and aspiring actors to be drawn to it, it’s written with actors of all ages in mind: all those who are still curious and young in spirit (as actors as a group tend to be). But as Shakespeare touches so many more than those who are simply part of the theatrical community, it’s also for those interested in reading more about Shakespeare, the development of his writing, and his working methods.

Everything I say in the book is about ‘getting back to Shakespeare’ – trusting him, seeing exactly what he writes, and how he writes it. The greatness of his plays lies in the detail, and in the detail lies the richness and the contradictions of the array of characters he has created for us to play, and to be entertained by.

Bottom’s ‘I see a voice’ isn’t simply an anomalous one-off. It reminds me of other lines Shakespeare wrote including these closing lines from his 23rd sonnet:

                                      O learn to read what silent love hath writ:
                                      To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.

Speaking the Speech

Speaking the Speech, £14.99

‘Seeing’ voices, or ‘hearing’ with your eyes, may be an important step in speaking the speech with conviction.

Nick Hern Books is thrilled to publish Speaking the Speech: An Actor’s Guide to Shakespeare. To order your copy at a special 25% discount, click here – no voucher code required.


Conor McPherson: A flash, an image, a feeling – the mysterious art of playwriting

23 Apr

McPhersonAs his modern classic The Weir receives its first major UK revival at London’s Donmar Warehouse, playwright Conor McPherson reflects on the creative process, and how hard it all seems to explain.

The best plays come in a flash. An image, a feeling, and that’s it. You know these ideas because they are the undeniable ones that won’t let go. They pull you in and compel you to start scribbling notes. If you are a playwright and you have one of these on the go, you know you have a responsibility. To what? Something that doesn’t exist? But the good ideas feel like they do exist. They’re just beyond view, and you’re trying to capture them with glimpses that may or may not be accurate.

So many things can go wrong along the way between the vision and its presentation on stage – missed beats in the writing (or too many beats), the wrong cast, wrong director, wrong theatre or just the wrong time. Any and all of these may consign your hard work to the ‘Who Cares?’ file. And you know you are playing Russian roulette – it all comes down to those couple of hours on opening night. But you keep the faith and you pull the trigger. What else can you do?

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The Weir is now on at the Donmar Warehouse, London

You start scribbling. Worry, issues of control, and even, ironically, a sense of longing to be free of the process, all propel you to write your first draft. Subsequent drafts can never quite fix all the problems, yet neither can they prompt the same exhilaration. Many playwrights I’ve talked with agree that the best moments are often those tentative notes when the ghosts first present themselves in your mind. They are so insubstantial, yet bear their complete mysterious history within. This is when playwriting is at its most private and, paradoxically, when the play is at its most beautiful. The more real you make it, the less magic it retains. You are aware of this but what can you do? You keep going. Always writing at the very edge of your limitations. And your limitations are not necessarily a bad thing. Your limitations are in fact what give you your unique voice. But it’s hard to view your limitations in a warm light when you’ve just read over your work and it makes you embarrassed.

The truth is nobody really knows how to write a good play. You just do your best to avoid writing a bad one. The rest falls to fate. Joe Penhall once said to me, ‘Who knows if the magic is there and – even if it is – will the bastards see it?’, which I think sums up the car crash of hope, despair and paranoia that accompanies artistic creation.

And the enemy of art is not the pram in the hallway, it is self-consciousness. When you are young you know nothing, least of all yourself. You write plays quickly, perhaps in a matter of days. As you grow older – and if you’ve managed to survive some decades of playwriting – you may gain a little wisdom. But you lose your recklessness. Why? Because, like the ageing stuntman, you know exactly what’s at stake each time you do it. Further, you are no longer new. Everyone knows what you can do and they have certain expectations. So you go the long way round, trying to surprise everyone. But going the long way round kills spontaneity.

And what’s wrong with that? Well, Neil Young’s late producer, David Briggs, said that the best way to record music is the simplest way. You get the mic as close to the sound as you possibly can and just record it as it is. ‘The more you think, the more you stink’ was his mantra. Neil Young’s albums are full of first takes – often the very first time the band have ever played the song – because that’s where the magic is. Neil Young calls it, ‘the spook’. In other words, you’ve got to be careful not to perfect what you are doing to the extent it has no soul left. Perfect is not best. Okay, so he’s talking about rock ’n’ roll, but there’s something in that for playwriting too.

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McPherson Plays: Three, £14.99

So if there’s anything I can see that’s worth passing on, it’s this: it’s as important to forget what you’ve learned as it is to learn.

This piece is an extract from the Foreword to Conor McPherson Plays: Three, a new collection covering a decade of playwriting, which is available now. It includes acclaimed plays such as The Seafarer as well as two previously unpublished works: The Birds and The Dance of Death. To order your copy at a special 25% discount – no voucher code required – just click here.

The Weir is playing at the Donmar Warehouse, London until 8 June (a tie-in edition is available here). It will be followed by a new Conor McPherson play, The Night Alive, which will also be published by Nick Hern Books.

Janice Okoh: Three Birds in rehearsal – the evolution of a Bruntwood Prize winner

25 Feb

Janice Okoh photoJanice Okoh’s Three Birds – her startling and darkly comic play that won the 2011 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting - premieres at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester later this month. In this piece, the playwright talks about how the script has continued to evolve throughout pre-production, and the importance of the relationship between collaborators.

When I sent Three Birds in to the competition, I was on my third draft. Although I was happy with it, I felt that it was still far from whole. What’s attractive about the Bruntwood Prize is the fact that it offers a year developing the winning plays, so it was really exciting when I actually won one of the prizes.

I met Suzanne Bell, my dramaturg, and Sarah Frankcom, the director, several times over the year and each time we discussed how we should go about improving the play. We decided that I needed to write an additional scene in order to develop one of my characters, work out a suitable time frame for the play and bring some of the drama that happened offstage on. Suzanne and Sarah also encouraged me to experiment and ‘go bonkers’ with the play so a lot of my drafting involved taking things out in one draft only to find that I would put them back into a later draft or conversely binning stuff that took the play in a completely different direction.

Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester (photo)

Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

I really enjoyed the process. Sarah and Suzanne were able to climb right inside my head and voice the thoughts that I would be thinking. It really felt like they got the play. However, it was still really hard work trying to make sure everything fitted together in order to create something I was happy with and, ultimately, proud of. But it’s been wonderful having a dramaturg and director working hard at making the process work for me. They organised a reading when I wanted one, moved deadlines to accommodate my other writing commitments, and, most importantly, reassured me when I voiced my fears at the thought of Three Birds going into production before it was ready. But the thing is, and I guess a lot of writers would concur, I don’t think my play will ever be ready and, as I prepare to send Three Birds to the publishers Nick Hern Books, I’m tweaking and adjusting, always trying to make it just that bit better. But there has to be a cut-off point which is probably when the actors need to start learning their lines!

Listen to a conversation between playwright Janice Okoh and Three Birds director Sarah Frankcom, discussing the writer-director relationship:

Three Birds (jacket)

Three Birds, £9.99

Nick Hern Books are proud to publish Janice Okoh’s new play Three Birds. To order your copy, click here.

Three Birds premieres at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester from 27 February, before transferring to the Bush Theatre, London in March. For more information, and to book tickets, click here.

The 2013 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting is now open. To help you get inspired for your own entry, we’re offering free UK P&P on all NHB-published, Bruntwood Prize-winning plays – including Three Birds - bought through our website, on top of our standard 25% anniversary discount. Just enter the code BRUNT13 at checkout. The offer is valid until 3 June. For more information, including details of the plays included, click here.

[This piece has been reproduced from the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting blog, published on their website. Many thanks to all at the Prize for their kind permission.]

Paul Harvard: Do You See the Singers Act? – Acting Through Song in Les Misérables

25 Jan

Paul Harvard photoWith Les Misérables enjoying award nominations and critical acclaim in addition to its box office success, most critics are praising the emotion on display in the film. In this piece, Paul Harvard, musical director, composer and author of new book Acting Through Song, asks why that isn’t always the case.

The barricade has been erected, the battle-lines drawn. It seems the recent film adaptation of Les Misérables – after its popular victory at the box-office in its opening weeks – has left a whiff of gunpowder in the air. As filmgoers have braved the cold weather to keep the popcorn flowing, an intriguing fight has taken shape, not involving the students of revolutionary France, but between the critics of the UK’s national press.

Reviewers have not always been kind to Les Misérables. Famously, they nearly disembowelled the show when the stage version first opened at London’s Barbican Centre in 1985. It was only because producer Cameron Mackintosh screwed his courage to the sticking-place, and trusted the voice of popular opinion, that the production transferred to the West End, allowing it to survive and grow into the global juggernaught it is today.

In contrast to its theatrical premiere, Tom Hooper’s admirable film version has largely received the praise it deserves. Some commentators have picked on the close proximity of the camera, or the odd performance, but a majority of the reviews have fallen between the grudgingly positive and the downright ecstatic. However, one forthright piece – by the Evening Standard’s David Sexton – stood out for adopting a harshly different tone.

Mr Sexton is plainly not a fan of the film. But in his article he not only takes issue with Les Misérables, but with the entire musical-theatre genre. He declares himself to be one of those people who ‘can’t bear musicals at all’, a genre he describes as ‘embarrassing and stupid’. The crux of his argument is that we don’t have sung conversations in real life, so to do so on the stage, or on film, is silly. He argues that, because he values music and drama so highly, to combine the two in a musical devalues both as a means of expression.

It is unsurprising that Cameron Mackintosh decided to refute Sexton’s opinions last week in his sharp, sarcastic and witty manner. What is perhaps more intriguing is that Lyn Gardner of The Guardian also felt compelled to write an article rebutting Sexton whilst defending the musical as an art form. So who is right? Is the musical simply an awkward hybrid that should never be viewed as high art? Or does it have more merit than it is sometimes awarded?

In my book Acting Through Song I argue strongly for the latter. I contend that rather than undermining the genre, the unique combination of music and drama in musical theatre is the reason why it can be so compelling. Music is a powerful form of expression. The most universal of mediums, it transcends cultural and social barriers, reaching out to everyone. It has the ability to move the audience very directly, bypassing their intellectual responses and appealing to the emotions. And this is what makes musical theatre so special: by placing music at the heart of the storytelling, it provides the opportunity to combine the power of drama and music to create a potent means of expression.

Hathaway as Fantine (photo)

‘truthful, raw and committed’ – Anne Hathaway as Fantine

But if this is the case, why do people like Sexton frequently dismiss musical theatre? I believe it is because for the material truly to come to life, for the combination of music and drama to seem organic rather than contrived, then the standard of acting must be exceptional.

Take ‘I Dreamed a Dream’. For students of music and drama, it may seem at first glance that the component parts of this song are unremarkable: a serviceable, if uninspiring lyric, set to a catchy tune with a generic pop-ballad accompaniment. You might not expect this material to resonate greatly. Yet in the film the sequence is cinematic dynamite; in the screening I attended it wrung the packed house emotionally dry. So what was the magic component that made this song so arresting? It was the performance of Anne Hathaway as Fantine. Because her delivery was so truthful, raw and committed, the music became heartbreaking and the lyrics poignant.

Compare this with Russell Crowe’s work as Javert. His performance has come in for much criticism in the past few weeks, mostly concerning the quality of his singing. But whilst he doesn’t have an outstanding voice, I don’t consider his singing to be the main problem. His vocal delivery is competent; the real issue is his inability to act successfully through song.

Crowe is a very fine actor whom I rate highly. Yet when he sings that ability seems to ebb away. Watching his performance in Les Misérables it is like he has a miniature critic sat on his shoulder, whispering to him whilst he is singing: ‘What are you doing? You sound awful! You look really stupid!’ And consequently he appears stupefied during his songs. Despite having arguably better material to sing than Hathaway, his performance has none of her impact.

Russell Crowe as Javert (picture)

‘he appears stupefied during his songs’ – Russell Crowe as Javert

I believe that many students of musical theatre, and indeed some professionals, suffer from these attacks of self-consciousness when they sing. Their heads become so full of their own self-criticisms that they no longer trust their instincts and follow their impulses – which is the worst mistake any actor can make. This problem manifests itself in different ways. Some inexperienced actors become leaden and unable to make any spontaneous choices; those with more experience often fall back on a set of ‘performance tricks’ that suggest a pretence of good acting but is really just a fake and contrived substitute for the real thing. Some commercial theatre is riddled with this kind of performance.

To free themselves from their self-consciousness, and learn to act truthfully and spontaneously, the musical-theatre performer needs to learn to focus outside of themselves whilst they are singing, so they can respond organically to the other actors, or their imaginary circumstances. In short: they must learn to master the skills of the classical actor.

But why isn’t this automatically the case? Why are these skills not always in evidence? I believe that acting does not always receive a high enough priority in the education of our musical-theatre performers. No matter how much weight is given to it in prospectuses of drama schools, it sometimes ends up being the poor cousin in the reality of the training. I think this is an error. Acting must be explored in all its nuance and detail – as it is the thread that weaves the art form together. Only when a singer acts through their songs does the work truly come alive. The most respected colleges do strive to make acting central to their work, but I believe that there still needs to be a shift in the focus of our musical-theatre colleges – so that acting is always placed right in the foreground.

Acting Through Song (jacket)

Acting Through Song, £12.99

That is why I believe Hathaway’s performance is so important. As odd as it may sound, when I think of her Fantine, sobbing in the docks of Paris, I can’t stop smiling, because the power of emotion she conveys in that potentially forgettable song demonstrates to the next generation of musical-theatre actors the standards of acting that they can, and should aspire to.

NHB are delighted to publish Paul Harvard’s new book Acting Through Song. To order your copy at a special 25% anniversary discount – no voucher code required – just click here.

Fin Kennedy: Calling all Theatre-Makers! An extraordinary challenge from Culture Minister Ed Vaizey

14 Dec

Fin Kennedy photoAs an award-winning playwright, university tutor and writer-in-residence at an East London school, Fin Kennedy has a keen interest in the future of British theatre and the new writing that will lie at the heart of it. In this piece, he explains how a remarkable conversation with Culture Minister Ed Vaizey has spurred him into action to protect that future.

Earlier this week, I attended the Performers’ Alliance Parliamentary reception, co-hosted by Equity, the Musician’s Union and The Writers’ Guild. It’s an annual event in the Terrace Pavilion in Parliament, and a chance for actors, musicians and writers to meet MPs and discuss any issues of concern. The Culture Minister and Shadow Culture Minister both come along and make speeches (Ed Vaizey and Dan Jarvis respectively) as do representatives from each union. MPs with an interest in culture also attend, like Ben Bradshaw, former Labour Culture Secretary and now member of the Culture Select Committee.

I was there to lobby about proposed changes to the English Baccalaureate, which regular readers will know I’ve been banging on about for ages. But as it turned out, something else came up as a more immediate challenge to those of us involved in new play development.

As the speeches ended and the mingling began, my Guild colleague – theatre, TV, radio and computer games writer Andy Walsh – bravely took on bullish Culture Minister Ed Vaizey. Andy decided to use the opportunity to take Vaizey to task over recent Arts Council cuts to theatre companies, and how those were impacting the development of new plays.

Vaizey’s response was extraordinary. After hiding behind the principle that the Arts Council was an arm’s-length body, and the government is not responsible for its decisions (which wasn’t what we were suggesting) he went on to assert in no uncertain terms that the cuts the Arts Council had imposed were in any case having no effect whatsoever on the British theatre industry. On the contrary, he said, new theatre writing was thriving – he cited in particular Soho Theatre‘s expansion into a third auditorium, and the Bush Theatre.

Andy and I were dumbfounded. I tried to explain to Vaizey that in tough times theatres contract around their main stages and protect their core work. What gets cut is the complex web of development which backs up the main stage work, such as writer attachment schemes and schools work. I cited Hampstead Theatre‘s recent decision to cut their entire education department, including their phenomenally successful Heat and Light youth theatre. In the short-term, of course such work isn’t essential to what takes place on the main stage. But in the medium and long-term, it absolutely is. Where else will the new talent come from?

The fact is that 25 theatre companies or venues have suffered 100% cuts to their Arts Council grants, along with 5 writer development organisations. Further big cuts have fallen on some of our finest playwriting powerhouses, including the Almeida (39%), Soho Theatre (17.6%) and Out of Joint (27.9%). Smaller new writing companies who are busy nurturing the next generation, often in inner city or regional areas, have also been targeted – these include Red Ladder (39.6%), Theatre Centre (22.3%) and Talawa (21.9%). Even those who got off relatively lightly, like the Bush, Tamasha, BAC, ATC, Clean Break, Cardboard Citizens, Hampstead, the Tricycle, the Orange Tree, Bristol Old Vic and Salisbury Playhouse still suffered an 11% cut.

But Vaizey stuck to his guns: none of this was having any effect at all. And then he set us an extraordinary challenge. If we could provide evidence of our claims that Arts Council cuts were affecting new play development in the UK, he promised to read whatever we sent him. Moreover, if there was evidence that new play development was being adversely affected, he would bring it up on our behalf with the Arts Council.

At first, I couldn’t decide whether Vaizey was being disingenuous or merely ignorant of how our sector worked. On reflection, I think it was probably the latter. The long tail of development which lies behind any new play is of course invisible to the public, Vaizey included. It’s pretty specialist knowledge to understand how plays travel the long road from inspiration to opening night. That tail might be one, two, even three years long – sometimes far longer. Jez Butterworth is on record as saying Jerusalem was seven years in the making.

This is a fragile ecology which only those working within it truly understand. What you see performing on the nation’s stages on any given night is like gazing up at the stars – it is a vision from the past. Those productions were first seeded years ago, long before the current round of cuts. Indeed, you could even say that much of what’s playing right now is the final fruit from a pre-financial crash era of new play development. It would be an understandable mistake for a layperson to take a look around at Soho, the Bush, even the West End and say: new plays are thriving, what’s the problem?

The answer is that the problem will be in two, three or seven years hence.

So I think we have to take Vaizey at his word here and, in good faith, to pick up the gauntlet he has thrown down. It is an opportunity not only to explain to him, but to the wider taxpaying public, precisely how new play development works, and how the cuts taking place now are hacking away at the roots of our future output.

So I’ve decided to take up Vaizey’s challenge – but I’m going to need your help.

In the next month, I will be writing to theatre companies around the country to ask how the cuts which were made in April are affecting new play development. This might take many forms, for example:

  • Producing fewer new plays overall
  • Programming plays by household name writers rather than those less well-known
  • Having fewer writers on attachment or in-residence
  • Offering fewer full commissions
  • Cutting back on literary department staff
  • Cutting back on education or youth work
  • Reassigning dramaturgical functions to associate directors rather than literary staff
  • Programming musicals, comedy or revivals in slots where new plays would once have played
  • Going dark for a few weeks
  • Putting plays on for shorter runs
  • Winding up writers’ groups or other developmental schemes
  • Limiting actor workshop time on new plays in development
  • Having to give notes to writers primarily driven by cost – such as smaller cast size
  • Offering fewer playwriting workshops to beginners, or to the general public

I would emphasise that this categorically isn’t about ‘naming and shaming’, or suggesting anyone isn’t doing their job well. Rather, it is about celebrating our fantastic expertise, while lamenting its inevitable curtailment. Evidence can be submitted anonymously, if desired (though I would suggest it is more powerful to someone like Vaizey if theatres are prepared to go public). I would hope that, en masse, we can demonstrate a wider trend here which goes beyond individual theatres – that we’re all in the same boat, struggling to continue what we do best under reduced circumstances, but that something, somewhere has to give. This is about explaining where, how and why those tough decisions have to be taken – and the likely knock on effect. When we look around us in three years’ time, will it still be possible to say “new writing is thriving, what’s the problem?”

As luck would have it, this week the Guardian’s Lyn Gardner published a timely piece entitled Do theatres have to close down before government acts on the arts? In it, she references an earlier piece by the Independent’s David Lister, pointing out that theatres need to get better at evidencing their claims of the damage they are suffering.

Well, now’s our chance.

I got in touch with Lyn about Vaizey’s challenge and she got straight back to me. She has agreed to publish on the Guardian Theatre blog an article, or even a series of articles, looking at the results of my research.

To be honest, I’m a bit anxious. It’s a lot of work and I’m going to have to do it in my own time, unpaid, squeezing it in around other work. But I’m serious about doing it. And I would be immensely grateful for your help.

Do you run a theatre company or literary department? Would you be prepared – anonymously or otherwise – to contribute specific examples of how the cuts are materially affecting your new play development?

Or are you a writer or director? Have you had a commission rescinded, a tour postponed, an education package cancelled? Or, do you have good relations with an artistic director or literary manager who you could ask, on my behalf, about contributing to this research?

Perhaps you work outside London, or predominantly in youth or community settings. Is provision for the development of new talent where you are drying up?

In all cases, I would love to hear from you. Email me privately on finkennedy@yahoo.co.uk

This is it, theatre-makers. A challenge to each and every one of us. It’s time to put up or shut up.

[Fin Kennedy's plays are published by Nick Hern Books. This piece has been reproduced from the author's own blog, which can be found here; many thanks to Fin for his kind permission.]

Thomasina Unsworth: ‘peeling off the labels’ – why I wrote Becoming an Actor

5 Dec

Photo of Thomasina Unsworth Thomasina Unsworth teaches at Rose Bruford College, one of the UK’s leading drama schools. In this blog piece, she explains her frustrations at the labelling of students, and how that inspired her to write her enlightening new book.

My youngest daughter came home from school the other day in a miserable state. During swimming lessons her class had been divided into three groups: Jellyfish, Dolphins and Sharks. The Jellyfish, a shivering clutch of four sub-standard swimmers, were left in the shallow end to learn the basics, while the other children bobbed and ducked in the deeper water, superior species. Afterwards all the talk was of Jellyfish, Dolphins and Sharks. My daughter, hair still dripping from the pool, dripped too with shame.

Why do we have to label our children? What good does it do to attach titles to things? The jellyfish tank is my absolute favourite exhibit in the London Aquarium. The water glows pink and blue and one can be mesmerised by the slow clenching and unclenching of frondy tentacles. However, to a child who is battling for self-esteem and a place in the group, being labelled as a jellyfish may not seem so appealing.

Labels stick. Labels define. I spend my days teaching people who come wearing their labels to classes. ‘I’m slow’; ‘I don’t feel things intensely’; ‘I’m an extrovert’; ‘I’m a clown’; ‘I’m a bit mad’; ‘I’m a good girl’; ‘I’m a troublemaker’. The list is endless, but in that roll call of behavioural attributes my students lay out their perceived inadequacies and in doing so they shore up their limitations. How can they be open to an exercise when they know that they ‘over-think things’? How can they relate to that character when they know that they ‘would never behave that way themselves’? Get rid of the label and you liberate the student.

I am fed up of an education system that increasingly marginalises the arts. The arts feed imagination. They allow one to go beyond oneself, and do not concern themselves with the reductive policy of nailing things down in order to be neatly labelled. I am fed up of league tables and target ladders and numbers that tell someone how they are doing rather than words. I am fed up that in actor training we are now expected to grade our students, to attach a number to a name so that that person leaves thinking that they are worth 52% as an actor. What good does this do? It is a nonsense, a damaging nonsense.

An actor is not just a jellyfish.

I see the damage more and more in those I teach. They are fearful of getting things wrong. They care more for a number than a comment. They arrive ossified by their past experiences of school. Over the years I have noticed that the actors I train are, by and large, becoming increasingly result-orientated. Doing it ‘right’ is valued more highly than the simple experience of engaging in the ideas and exploring the possibilities. They have become attached to their labels, they are confused by open-ended questions, they want to know exactly what they should do to be good next time, as if actor training can be reduced to a set of equations: N+1=great acting.

Training to be an actor can be a bewildering time, even without this set of obstacles. When I went to college I felt unprepared, and I wished that I had been better informed. I arrived with lots of preconceptions about what the experience would be and was confused initially by how different the reality of the training was in comparison to my fantasy version of it. Had I been better informed I think I might have got a lot more out of my training. With this in mind, I set out to write a book that would help any aspiring actors to negotiate the obstacles – both those that face you at drama school, and those you will encounter in your first year as a professional actor.

The resulting book, Becoming an Actor, is intended as a handbook to accompany your training. It also contains a lot of exercises that will be useful not only for acting students, but also for teachers. I wanted to offer both actors and teachers a simple set of exercises together with the thinking behind them, uncomplicated by jargon or constrained by dogma. Training to become an actor is a valuable, important process, worth engaging with for its own sake. I hope the book will encourage actors to value their life experiences, and to hold on to what interests and fuels them, throughout those potentially dark days of unemployment.

The exercises in Becoming An Actor are varied. I do not believe that there is only one way of doing things, and hopefully actors and teachers will be able to be selective as they go through them. There is a great deal of emphasis put on working to release the actor from self-consciousness. Practitioners such as Meisner, Bella Merlin and of course Stanislavsky crop up regularly. However, Becoming An Actor also looks at ways of exploring extensions of, and departures from naturalism. The second half of the book concerns itself with auditioning and professional preparation and life beyond drama school. I hope that all this will provide the reader with a straightforward guide that asks them to engage in ideas before looking for results. I hope that it is both practical and thought provoking.

Becoming an Actor, £10.99

Becoming an Actor, £10.99

Above all, I hope that this book goes some way towards freeing those actors from the labels that have been attached to them, so that they can be as fluid and flexible in their responses as the movement of those frondy tentacles attached to the body of that jellyfish.

NHB are thrilled to publish Thomasina Unsworth’s Becoming an Actor. To order your copy with 20% off click here – no voucher code required.

For more information on Rose Bruford College, click here.

Steve Waters: Stepping back from the end-game – the story of Ignorance/Jahiliyyah

20 Nov

Steve Waters author photo

As the Middle East seemingly teeters once more on the precipice of war and the excitement of the Arab Spring gives way to a new, uncertain reality, playwright Steve Waters explains the process behind Ignorance/Jahiliyyah, his timely new drama for Hampstead Theatre which delves into the life and legacy of the influential author, thinker and Muslim Brotherhood member Sayyid Qutb.

Contemporary political reality can fill you with despair.  Israeli rockets slaughtering children in Gaza, the ongoing bloody impasse in Syria, the intractable agonies of the Eurozone, our own ignorant little coalition/junta dismantling the things that make life in this country tolerable – such a list, however glib, seems to give the lie to the idea that any form of politicised art can offer any insight or relief from the world’s dreadful in-tray.  Into such a world comes my new play Ignorance/Jahiliyyah, which just opened at Hampstead Theatre Downstairs.

The play concerns the experiences of Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) in America during the late 1940s and the ways in which his subsequent writings have shaped the tenor of relations between the West and radical Islamist politics.  Such a summary hints that you are not in for an easy night at the theatre, or the ‘laugh hit of two continents’, as Waiting for Godot was once described.  Some might also argue in a reality of political violence, in the form of war, torture and economic meltdown, a play of ideas, of debate, of words, is a somewhat depleted form of engagement.

Nasir/Qutb (Jude Akuwudike) in rehearsal
Courtesy of Hampstead Theatre

Yet what drew me to this haunting tale of a stranger in a strange land was that it might offer a way to step back from the current end-game of political reality, the sickening predictability of regimes in bloody retrenchment.  Hamas, who are on the receiving end of so much Israeli ferocity, and of course who have dealt out mayhem of their own, have a long heritage, a history that can be traced to the very Muslim Brotherhood that Qutb was so influential towards in the 1960s; indeed even Bashar al Assad’s paranoid violence in Syria bears the ancestral traces of his father’s ferocious repression of the Brotherhood in Hama back in the early 1980s.  Violence may be the outcome, but ideas and words fuel and inform that violence.  When I started my play the Brotherhood were an outlawed and repressed force in Egyptian politics; now, in the form of the Freedom and Justice Party, they make up the dominant bloc.  A play that started out as an attempt to excavate the ideological roots of Terror has become about the pre-history of one of the key mobilising ideas of our time.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression.  At its worst, political theatre is often little more than an index of the passions that inform it; my job is to find and illuminate people, characters, to find a story that is not a mechanism for smuggling in messages but a moving entity in its own right.  In fact I bring little polemical intent to this play; rather I wanted to bear witness to the tragic encounter between the culture of Islam and the West (wherever that is).  Most of all I wanted to examine the pertinence of the challenge of radical Islam.  What were my credentials?  Other than some patchy travel in Israel/Palestine and Egypt, very little.  But I felt there was something in this I could imagine; and something I couldn’t let go of.

Photo of Sayyid Qutb

Sayyid Qutb in prison, 1965

My first encounter with the historical figure of Qutb was in Paul Berman’s incendiary yet eloquent tract ‘Terror and Liberalism’, wherein the New York Times journalist, attempting to locate an intellectual heritage for al-Qaeda, turned to Qutb, painting him as a prophet of a fascist Islamic utopia.  For all the hyperbole of Berman’s account (a doomed attempt to justify the War on Terror from the left), he insightfully identified Qutb as a kind of Islamic Existentialist who offers an acute analysis of the alienation of modern life, which, in Berman’s words, ‘pulls us this way and that’.

So I looked closer at the now almost mythical details of Qutb’s time in the America of 1948-49;  time spent travelling, staying in New York and Washington, auditing courses in obscure universities such as that in Greeley, Colorado, where in part my play is set. When I looked closer, the truth of Berman’s observation became apparent.  Qutb’s visceral reaction against American life – the centrality of technology, the violence, the hollowness of its values, most of all the sexualisation – was a potent mixture of the sort of cultural critique that also came from European émigrés in the US of the time, be they Brecht, Adorno or even Evelyn Waugh, coupled with the insights of a post-colonial outsider.  Yet Qutb’s observations are also marked by a strange paranoia that seems hard to take at face value. Was he really visited by women in the night sent to recruit him?  Did New Yorkers really laugh and shout for joy in the street at the assassination of Hassan al Banna, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood?  What was myth and what was truth?  This was an America bedevilled by McCarthyism and Jim Crow racism, and Qutb, in his suit and with his scholarly demeanour, was surely on the receiving end of that. But who was the woman he mentions at Greeley who brags of the ‘biological nature of sex’? What did he make of the Kinsey Reports into Human Sexuality? And what led him to publish an obscure allegory called ‘The World is an Undutiful Boy’ in the college journal?  Such questions seem impossible to answer beyond fiction.

This may all seem a long way from Gaza and the Arab Spring. Qutb’s animus against the West was not widely shared in the Muslim Brotherhood of the day; after all America was then deemed out of the colonial debacle.  And in no way do I attempt to suggest that what happened during that lost year was more fundamental in shaping Qutb’s ideas, as expressed in Milestones and other incendiary works, than what followed: ten years on and off in Nasser’s gaols, torture, and ultimately execution.  Yet those American experiences surely promoted Qutb’s notion that the way forward for the Islamic world was to extirpate any traces of western corruption, expressed in his blanket critique of the contemporary state of ‘jahiliyyah’, or ignorance of true Godly values, that he claimed prevailed everywhere in the world and which he suggested necessitated ‘jihad’ – a duty to struggle, possibly violently.  That dangerously accommodating word certainly went on to inform some of the frenzied violence in Algeria in the 1990s and then across the world thereafter.  But what do the man and his ideas mean now in a world poised between deep change and the fall-out of the disastrous response to 9/11?

Layla Ahmad (Laila Alj) in rehearsal
Courtesy of Hampstead Theatre

Hence the final element of the play – the encounter between Philip Mitchell, an English academic writing on Qutb, and his student Layla Ahmad, who accounts herself the guardian of the memory of a man who died decades before her birth. I wanted to examine the fall-out of Qutb’s ideas as they manifest themselves in the grassroots Islamisation of Egyptian society, a process that the January uprisings seemed only to have accelerated.  Visiting Cairo in 2010, the sense of a world on the brink of massive change, slipping into a non-violent but nevertheless pervasive form of Islamicised institutions, was unmistakeable and for me discomforting.  But what was it that was so unsettling – what was under threat?  What sort of appeal might these changes have for a moral, intelligent, passionate young woman?

It’s a commonplace now that the West’s repressions have conjured Islamism into life, and Egypt’s ex-Brotherhood leader President Morsi walks a delicate line between mobilising such forces (and the even more extreme forms they might take in Salafi groups) while at the same time keeping Egypt in dialogue with the West. Yet every time Israel humiliates Gaza, every time the West makes the wrong call in the fight for democracy in the region, that attempt to achieve dialogue becomes more endangered. I think in a modest way my play tries to weigh the risks and appeal of political Islam and audit why liberalism seems so tainted to those to whom we fondly imagine it appeals.

Cover for Ignorance/Jahiliyyah

Ignorance/Jahiliyyah (£9.99)

Nick Hern Books are proud to publish Steve Waters’ new play Ignorance/Jahiliyyah. To order your copy with 20% off – no voucher code required – click here.

Ignorance/Jahiliyyah is currently premiering at Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, in association with the Peter Wolff Trust. For more information, and to book tickets, click here.

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