Mike Alfreds founded Shared Experience theatre company in 1975, and has since directed plays for the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company and also extensively abroad. He is hugely respected within the profession, and his books Different Every Night and Then What Happens? are essential reading for actors and directors. His new book, What Actors Do: Advice to the Players in Seven Paradoxes and a Manifesto, explores the wellspring of the actor’s craft, and traces a pathway to creative freedom through the thickets of competing methodologies and confusing paradoxes that can face actors in their training and career. Here, he reveals what led him to write the book, and why he believes acting is one of the highest expressions of human activity.

After I’d written my previous two books, I sensed there might be a third waiting to be written, but I hadn’t the slightest idea what that could be. It took ten years before it hatched in the confines of the Covid pandemic. The restrictions on our activity and social contact during that period seemed to allow space and time for new thoughts about acting and the true nature of theatre to come, quite unbidden, into my consciousness at a much deeper level of understanding.

What Actors Do is the result of this period of incubation. Some of it I had already known at an instinctive, non-verbal level, but much of it surprised, thrilled and at times even disturbed me. ‘Yes, of course!’ I heard myself saying, ‘Why didn’t I realise this before!’ It had taken me all these years to get here. Sometimes, you can’t see the wood for the trees. It was a gift that totally justified all the ideas I had instinctively been developing about theatre since, at the age of 12, I started going to see shows.

I’ve had a constant belief in the primacy of the actor – virtually since I started directing seventy years ago – and that has informed my other books, which explore in detail my processes in directing plays and creating adaptations. They are crammed with techniques empowering actors to take their rightful place as the main creative force in theatre. My belief has never wavered, and the new book adheres to it. But this time, I had the profound realisation that acting can represent one of the highest expressions of human activity: empathy. Acting is a reaching out into life, and a desire to understand and be at one with other people, not only those living now but also in the accessible past and in every culture, past and present. We are all made from the same stuff, irrespective of who we are and where we come from. Physicality is the first point of entry into acting. After all, we are our bodies. Our bodies are us. Our bodies contain all of us – not just our physical life, but our thoughts and our feelings. Emotions and Ideas are not disembodied essences floating about in the ether.

In the theatre, a group of people – actors and audiences – come together to believe in people who do not actually exist, living lives that never actually happened. The audience experiences the actors in the here and now as themselves, and simultaneously as characters in the there and then. What an extraordinary phenomenon! It reveals the potential creativity, empathy and imagination in all human beings.

In my new book, What Actors Do, I’m inviting actors to look at themselves and at the nature of their chosen vocation in greater depth than I sense many of them have ever done before. When you enter the profession, you are very often overwhelmed and over-excited by what you’ve heard and imagine theatre to be, and by the sheer effort of getting into the profession. The book encourages you to look at your vocation more calmly and with much greater profundity, and to come to terms with the huge demand it makes on a totally committed creative artist: your body, mind and feeling, all fully involved.

The book offers seven different ways of looking at acting, focussed in a series of paradoxes that cut right to the heart of what actors are, and what they do. To realise your full potential as an actor, you need to come to terms with the contradictions implicit in each of these paradoxes. The book also contains a ‘Manifesto for Actors’, exhorting you to take greater control of your career, which can easily feel totally out of your hands.

Actors, for the duration of a performance, are the audience’s representatives, undergoing an infinite range of experiences in our names and on our behalf. Implicitly they are saying: do you recognise this? Have you ever felt that? Does this confirm what you’ve experienced? Is this something that’s ever occurred to you…? Look, we are all in this together! Above and beyond the usual pleasures and relevance of theatre, it’s about us collectively and individually sharing part of this journey through life. When we leave a performance, we have all – audience members, actors, even the characters they’ve been playing, all of us together – grown that much older, living through some fresh experience together. At this level of theatre, audiences are transformed from passive consumers into active participants. We all create our own shows.

Theatre rarely gets the full credit for its potential humanity. I hesitate to use the term, perhaps for fear of sounding pretentious, but I believe that theatre’s humanity ennobles the vocation of acting.

This is what I explore in What Actors Do. I hope the book will strike a chord with actors and directors, and bring fresh stimulation to their work. For anyone who simply loves theatre, I hope it will shine a light on the endlessly fascinating subject of what happens when actors and audiences come together to make a performance.

---

What Actors Do: Advice to the Players in Seven Paradoxes and a Manifesto by Mike Alfreds is out now. Save 20% when you order your copy directly from our website here.

Related blog post: Mike Alfreds: ‘The play is not the thing’ – actors and storytelling in theatre.