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There's No Such Thing As CoincidenceDateline: 22nd February, 2004How many times do you hear a detective in a mystery novel or a TV crime show say that? Load of rubbish! Of course there's such a thing as coincidence and I experienced a perfect example this week. As you will see from my review, I went to see a final year production at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama last week. On the same day I was in the National Theatre Bookshop (fatal - I can never get out without spending lots of money) and bought, among other things, a copy of David Mamet's True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor. I am sorry, Mr Mamet: I admire your plays enormously but as an authority on the training of the acting profession, you make a good nuclear physicist. Basically the book takes up some 127 pages to tell us that the job of the actor is simply to speak the lines given by the author in as simple a way as possible. (S)he (he constantly uses "she": how politically correct is that?) should not waste time exploring character, text, background or anything else. Just learn the lines, speak them clearly and you've done your job. At one point - and I really can't be bothered to wade through the book again to find the exact words - he more or less says that plays are better read than performed, because that way the author's intentions come across most clearly. Now I can see where Mamet is coming from here: he is scathing - with considerable justification - about Stanislavsky and "The Method", but to condemn, on that basis, actors to being automata mouthing the words and slavishly following the stage directions of the author is, to understate the case considerably, somewhat extreme. And, of course, he looks at theatre from the point of view of the writer: it is his work - he doesn't want it mucked around with by directors (whom he also condemns) and actors. But theatre is a collaborative art: it is a fusion of the skills, talents, experience, intuition, understanding and - yes, I will use the word! - soul of each member of the team, not just writer, but actors, director, designer, lighting designer, sound designer and many more. And at the end of the same day as I bought this book, I saw Monday After the Miracle, performed by five third year students of the Guildhall. It was gripping and deeply moving and, if it had not been for the students' natural talents and the skills they have learned, it would not have been so. The student who played Helen Keller, Laura Elphinstone, had prepared for the part by meeting, observing and learning from people who are blind and deaf and that experience so informed her playing that we, the audience, were convinced that she was both unseeing and unable to hear. I'm afraid that Mamet's injunction to "say the words as simply as possible" (page 81) would have led to a much poorer and much less believable performance, which would have been totally untrue to the author's intention. Articles Indices:
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