The British Theatre Guide: Acting Training

School & Youth Theatre

Acting

This was originally part of a series of guides on various aspects of school theatre, which could be downloaded from the School Show Page. They were intended to encapsulate my experience of school theatre built up over about thirty years. This ia reproduced here as a web pags for the first time.

It is long!

It occurs to me that we've got this far and we've not really made much mention of acting. Most peculiar! We've discussed choosing the play, even writing it; we've talked about how to direct it, how to interpret it and how to rehearse it, but we haven't mentioned the one thing that makes a production stand or fall, the way the actors perform it!

In a way that isn't surprising, because when I am asked about plays I have directed the questions are always about these other subjects, never about the acting. It is somehow assumed that the performers know how to act.

What prompts this is an incident which happened just a day or two ago. Having not - mirabile dictu! - lost a couple of free periods to sit for an absent member of staff, I was working at my desk in the drama room when one of the house staff walked in with a complete first year class. Would I mind, she asked, if she brought them in to rehearse for an assembly? I should point out that the drama room, being large, is used for house assemblies, and she wanted them to rehearse in the area they would be using. What could I say but to carry on? I considered uprooting myself and going off to the staff room but I knew that if I did I would waste precious time by collecting everything together, and anyway if I went to the staff room I'd just get involved in conversation and wouldn't get anything done, so I decided to stay put. I've learned to filter noise out and get on with my work because the Dance Club meets in the room under my supervision: it's run by the kids themselves and I am just the token teacher - there for insurance purposes only! - so I leave them to get on with it and do some work.

So I sat and tried to do just that. I couldn't, however. Not because of noise (there wasn't any) but because they were, to say the least, under-achieving! I have the class for Drama and I knew they could do much, much better, and I can't tell you how frustrating I found it to sit there, watching them work well below their best. As I've said before, kids will always try to live up to the teacher's expectations of them, so if you set them a low standard, then that's what they'll reach. My colleague's sole concerns seemed to be whether or not they could be heard at the back of the room and that they pronounced words correctly. When they achieved that, she was satisfied - amd so were they. Had I been taking them, however, they wouldn't have been.

I'm not suggesting - far from it! - that I am a better teacher than she is. It's just that in this area she has dual standards: she knows what good acting is but she does not apply that knowledge when the actors are kids. Her attitude seems to be that it is a matter for congratulation, not that they act well, but that they do it at all! Unfortunately this seems to be the attitude of many teachers, even those who produce school plays, which is why, even on nights when both I and the kids are aware that the performance is well below par, many teachers will heap uncritical praise upon them.

Now, don't get me wrong: I wouldn't want any member of staff to damn kids' performances in a school show - that's my job as director! - but it does worry me when they put their critical faculties into abeyance just because it is a school show. The same thing happens when we see kids in TV plays: so often a merely competent performance is hailed as a masterpiece by the uncritical viewer. By treating them in this way we do our kids a disservice: we are undervaluing them; we are being patronising.

Obviously kids lack the experience of life that adult actors have, and that limits their performances to an extent, but if they are playing parts which are within their experience there is no reason why they should not turn in first class performances. At the age of eighteen I played Mark Antony in a school production of Julius Caesar. It was just within my range: I could follow his motivation and understand his feelings. Looking back - and making allowances for rose-tinted spectacles! - I think I produced a workmanlike performance. There was, of course, nothing startling - no new insights, no great depth - but I don't think I failed Shakespeare. Had I been asked to play Lear, however, I would have produced a caricature, because the part would have been far beyond my understanding. A good girl of sixteen can produce an excellent performance as Antigone (the Anouilh version; I'm not so sure about the Sophocles) but ask her to play Cordelia and she'll be lost; she'll make a good Viola but produce a cartoon version of Olivia. In the right part kids with acting talent and intelligence will put in performances which will rival anything that a competent adult can produce.

We should, however, add a rider to that last sentence: always providing that the direction is right. And by that I mean that the expectation of the director should be high: (s)he should expect the highest possible standard.

Occasionally I have heard a teacher (even a director) telling a kid to "put some expression into it". What a singularly unhelpful instruction! It's the surest way to get a performance which screams aloud "I am reading this with expression in my voice"! Unfortunately this "expression" usually has nothing to do with the meaning of what is being read: it's just a variation in tone for the sake of variation.

Always start with the meaning.

That's the best advice I can offer to would-be directors of school plays. And by "meaning" I'm not just referring to the lexical meaning. Everything that is spoken, or is written to be spoken, has a sub-text of emotion. We almost never speak unemotionally, unless we do so deliberately, which is itself a clue to what we are feeling. Even the most vacuous gossip has this emotional sub-text. Gossip is a prop to the self-esteem, a way of convincing ourselves that we know something important, that we are privy to the secrets of people's lives. It can be, for some, a way of making human contact, perhaps their only way. It makes us feel important, or more secure, or even that we have power over another.

So start with that word which is central to the actor's skill: why? Why does the character say this? It's just as important for the actor to know why, if he's playing, for instance, Simon Gayforth in Shadow Play (Tonight at 8.30), he says "Lotuses smell of pineapple", as it is for Hamlet to know why he says "To be or not to be". If the sub-text is wrong, then no matter how well-delivered the lines, they will not make proper sense. A good actor, of course, will understand instinctively what we might call the ordinary common-or-garden sub-text, but for the average kid - and let's face it, for most of the time we are working with the average kid - words on a page do not translate easily into words in the mouth. They can decode them, of course, but they have difficulty seeing past that decoding. For many simple decoding is sufficient.

Let me take a fragment of dialogue (imperfectly remembered, I must confess) from that assembly piece I referred to a few moments ago. One line, spoken by a slave of the man who was later to become St. Alban, to the Christian priest whom Alban was sheltering, ran something like this: "How can you bring my master into such danger when he has been so kind to you?"

Now my colleague said not a word to the child who spoke this line. He could be heard and the line made sense, so she was satisfied. Had I been directing, the conversation would have gone something like this:

"Stop a monent. Why do you think he said that?"

"Well, because he was angry."

"Why was he angry?"

"Because the priest had put his master in danger."

"Why should he be so angry about that?"

"Because he was frightened."

"For himself?"

"For his master."

"So he was angry and frightened?"

"Yes."

"Do you think you sounded angry and frightened?"

"No."

"Would you like to have another go at it?"

"How can you bring my master into such danger when he has been so kind to you?"

"Was that better?"

"A bit."

"Shall we try to make it even better? I'm Mrs (the Head of House) and I've accused you of pinching something. You haven't but I won't listen to you. I'm going to take you to the Head and get you suspended. Right?"

"Yes."

"Right. You've got really mad about this because I'm just not listening to you. So you shout at me that it's not fair. OK?"

"Yes."

"Come on then. Have a real go at me. Right Fred, I don't believe you. We're going to see the Head, and you'd better tell him the truth or you're in real trouble. If I have my way, you'll be out of this school so fast your feet won't touch the ground!"

"Sir! It's not fair!"

"Why are you shouting at me like that?"

"'Cos I'm mad at you."

"Why are you mad?"

"Because you're going to get me thrown out of school."

"Why are you mad about that?"

"'Cos it's not fair."

"Is that all?"

"No. I'll get into trouble at home."

"So you're not just mad at me? you're frightened as well?"

"Yes."

"Isn't that how the slave feels?"

"Yes."

"Then shouldn't he sound like you just did?"

And so on.

It takes time, and it's quite possible that the kid will never get it exactly right, but that line will sound five hundred percent more convincing when you've finished. And the strange thing is, you'll probably not have to mention volume at all, because once he really feels the line the right volume will come of its own accord. And you won't have to do it for every line: once the kids get into the way of thinking like this they'll start doing it for themselves, and that's the point when they start acting rather than just "reading with expression"!

It's the same with moves. They too have to arise from the emotion. Unfortunately it's a rare kid who will realise that. If we are not careful, what will happen is that that kid will say the line with conviction and feeling, but his stance and movement - his body language - will belie what he says. You'll need to do something similar to get him to make the movement natural. Back to the dialogue!

"You know why I thought you'd pinched that money? Because Joe Bloggs over there told me you had. He said he'd seen you do it. Don't you think you ought to go over there and tell him off about that?"

And with luck you'll get exactly the right movement. It merely remains to translate that into the movement on the stage, and you've got a natural and believable scene rather than something artificial and wooden.

It is, of course, best if the ideas about the sub-text come from the kid rather than you, so you'll have to use leading questions, forcing him to think along the lines you want. But you're a teacher, and so you're doing that every day! Once the kid gets into the way of thinking like this, then you can leave your questions much more open-ended, offering him the chance to come up with alternatives. We may work on the "director-as-God" principle but that doesn't mean we're omniscient! And once you've got your actors thinking, you've got to respect their thoughts and ideas, and sometimes they can have a deeper or better insight than you.

That's very easy to forget. As teachers we are used to being the expert, the one that knows it all, imparting knowledge to the ignorant. In fact, our popular image is just that, which is why we often seen as bossy and overbearing! And it's very difficult for most teachers to admit either to ignorance or to being wrong: it requires more self-confidence than most of us have.

(Isn't that interesting? - our reputation for arrogance comes from our basic insecurity. But then, no one who knows teachers and teaching should be surprised at that!)

But in this case we are not dealing with knowledge, but with something in which we don't have a built-in advantage: experience of life, or emotional states, even of suffering. It is my experience that there are kids who have experienced far more of these than so many of us who, from a more or less caring middle-class background, have gone from school to college to school. It has to be said that many kids have far more meaningful insights in this area than most of us.

If motivation is so important, if it is so vital to get the kids thinking why all the time, is there any place for specifically technical acting training? The answer, I believe, is a resounding "yes".

Confidence on the part of your actors is the key to a successful production. Anything which boosts that confidence is therefore of great value, and there is no doubt that some training in basic stagecraft and acting technique makes them feel much more at home and at ease on the stage. But you've got to time it right. I think it's a mistake (made all too commonly, I'm afraid) to begin with this kind of training. For it to be effective the kids have to see the relevance of technical training. Expose them to it before they experience actual performance and it will have no meaning for them: it's only when they have been on-stage and faced the problems that they realise its value.

Of course, once you have a tradition of school plays up and running, kids who are new to you will accept this training because they will have seen its results in terms of the performances which they have watched; they will see the "stars" giving their time and attention to it and will therefore recognise that it must have relevance and value. As every teacher knows, they're much more likely to take the word (or the example) of another kid than of a teacher.

So, what should this technical training consist of?

There are, I think, four areas of prime importance in school theatre: breaking down inhibitions, establishing mutual trust, building concentration, and actual acting technique, especially voice. I think also that they should be tackled in that order, although I would suggest that the first two are interdependent.

The next question, of course, is "what exactly do we do?"

For the first three we rely on games of various kinds. I don't propose to embark upon a coverage of even a proportion of the drama games you can call on - there are many books available which will give you far more than you could ever use - but I will give a few examples which I find work well.

My prime aim is always to mould the diverse collection of kids who will turn up for a Drama Club into a company, a group who feel comfortable with each other. To feel that way, they have to trust each other - and you! - and be uninhibited with each other. The two go together: you can let yourself go and take the most incredible risks in terms of revealing yourself or doing things that might seem silly or even stupid, if you trust those you are with. My first aim at the beginning of every year is to attempt to achieve this comfortable feeling with all the kids who join.

A word of warning here: there are some kids who won't be able to handle this and they'll drop out. Don't pursue them and try to dragoon them into staying! We have to recognise that performing in public is not everyone's cup of tea and some kids cannot achieve that strange mixture of mutual dependence and self-confidence which playing in a show requires. Let them go! No matter how let down you may feel, or how much you may imagine you have in some way failed these kids, let them go. Your function as a play director is not the same as your function as a classroom teacher, nor is the function of the play that of a lesson. If you try to combine the two you will fall between two stools: you will not succeed with kids who are temperamentally unsuited to performance and you will do serious damage to the quality of the finished product: thus you will let both sets of kids, the suited and the unsuited, down.

Try to establish a sense of working together from the word go. The first thing I do at the beginning of a new year, at the first meeting, is to get the kids to "find a space" and then say, "On the word 'go', shake hands with everybody in the room, then return to your place. Go." The chances are that the first time you do this it will become obvious that they don't count you as a person! Don't let them get away with it: tell them they haven't done it, but leave them to work out why. Sooner or later the penny will drop and they'll come and shake hands with you. By this little piece of symbolism you establish that you are part of the group, as is any other member of staff who may be present.

And whilst we are on the subject of other members of staff, I am firmly of the opinion that there must be a distance between staff and kids, so I would never, for instance, allow any child to call me by my first name in school (what happens out of school, of course, depends upon the relationship with individual kids: if we were both members of the same non-school Drama Club and appearing on-stage together, then the situation would be totally different). On the other hand the formality of the classroom needs to be relaxed and one way you can signal some relaxation without inviting undue familiarity (there is nothing wrong with a degree of familiarity providing the teacher/pupil distinction is not breached) is by members of staff addressing each other by their first names rather than Mr. X or Miss Y, which is what most teachers would do in the classroom situation. My experience is that the kids pick up the signals quite correctly and if anyone tries to take advantage, the others will pull them up.

Another useful exercise (which is also a bit silly and usually reduces everyone to fits of laughter) is to get them all to walk around the room with their eyes closed and, when they bump into anyone else, they are stuck to the person and must walk around together. This goes on until everyone is stuck together (and they probably all fall down!). Now this is a game in which staff must remain outsiders: not only must they keep a close eye on the safety aspect (you'll be running around like a mad thing making sure that they don't walk into walls or furniture), but you also have to be careful that you don't put yourself in a compromising position ("Mr. X put his hand on my bum"!).

As far as trust exercises are concerned, these "blind" games are very effective. Start off by dividing the kids into pairs: one is blind and keeps his eyes shut all the time, and the other is the guide and must lead his partner round the room in complete safety by guiding with hand on elbow. Swap over and do it a second time. Then have them guide by voice alone. Taken seriously - and anyone who doesn't take it seriously must be given the push! - this game engenders both trust in, and a sense of responsibility to, others, two qualities which actors must have.

Another good way of establishing mutual dependance is the "shrinking island" game. All gather in a tight group in the middle of the room and a rope or something similar (I use lighting cable, because it's there in the room) is loosely laid on the floor around them. Then they are told that, when they step off the "island", it will shrink. When they are given the command to get back on, they must make sure as many people as possible are "saved" and if anyone drowns it will be accounted a failure on the part of the others: it is the duty of everyone to make sure everyone else is safe. You simply keep reducing the size of the "island" and the game stops whenever there are more "drowned" than "saved".

Games of this nature really do work well: they are also great fun to do and there will be many shrieks of laughter and dissolvings into giggles, but they will learn to depend upon each other and inhibitions will go.

My favourite concentration exercise is one in which everyone has to sing! They sit in a circle (it's best on the floor - more relaxed and informal) in groups of about half a dozen, and everyone sings Baa Baa Black Sheep. This in itself is often the cause of great hilarity (especially since I usually sing it first, just to get them going!), but that's only the beginning. The second time around each group has to sing it individually, each person singing only one syllable: any mistake (one person singing "master", for instance) and they start again from the beginning. Once they've mastered that (and keep them at it until they do), try them on Humpty Dumpty - that's a killer!

These games are useful, important and fun, but they must not take up all your time. You must spend some time on acting technique: the kids will expect, and want, it. Concentrate first on voice, and then on movement. It's better this way round, for voice flexibility and volume are generally the weakest aspects of most kids' technique. There are, again, many exercises which can be used here, but remember that everything to do with the voice begins with breathing, and if the kids aren't breathing properly - and the vast majority don't - they will never achieve the flexibility and projection which they need. So exercises and games to get them breathing with the diaphragm are the first priority, closely followed by control of the breath. As all these exercises can involve the production of a lot of silly noises, most kids will enjoy doing them. They'll need to, because it's no good doing them once and then forgetting them: you have to keep coming back to these basic exercises time after time after time. My policy, once I have started my Drama Club on this kind of regime, is to devote fifteen minutes of each meeting to voice exercises.

Again there is not the time to go into detail about the various exercises you can use; in any case you can get a great deal of enjoyment out of devising your own. One or two suggestions will not, however, come amiss.

Practising correct breathing is just that: practising. Make them do it time after time: by asking them to keep one hand on their stomachs when they breath you can detect that they are doing it properly - if there's no back and forth movement, they aren't. And as for breath control, try getting them to expel all the air in their lungs in one burst, then in two equal bursts, then in three, and so on. Or ask them to expel the air gradually - as slowly as they can - and count at a predetermined rate. The idea is to see how far they can count without having to take another breath. Make it into a competition, not only between them but against themselves. Each week tell them that you expect them to be able to count at least an additional ten.

Some understanding of the mechanics of voice production is helpful. I find that taking a break in the middle of a set of exercises and having them sit down where they are for a brief (and I mean very brief) talk on one aspect of the subject is the best way of getting this across. Make particular play of the wrongness of using constriction of the throat to increase volume: get them to compare the strangulated shouts which constricting the throat brings about with the much fuller and rounder tone obtained by using the diaphragm. Working with a Music teacher who has some knowledge of singing training can be very helpful.

The next aspect of voice to work on is diction, and for this there's nothing better than the good old tongue-twisters, especially I'm not the pheasant plucker...! A real beaut, however, is Sister Suzie:

Sister Suzie's sewing shirts for soldiers
Such skill at sewing shirts my shy young sister Suzie shows
Some soldiers send epistles
Saying they'd sooner sleep on thistles
Than the short serge shirts for soldiers shy young sister Suzie sews.

A good exercise, which only really works if you have in excess of twenty kids, is to ask them to divide into pairs and stand them at opposite ends of a room. Those at one end have to pass on some information to those at the other end - all at once! - but without shouting. The noise can be horrendous, but you'll find they will automatically start forming their words properly to aid communication. If this proves to be too easy (and after the first time it will be) exacerbate the problem by lining them up alternately as listener/speaker/listener/speaker and so on. There are plenty of possibilities for making the exercise as difficult as you like! In fact the real test is not when they shout to each other, but when they have to whisper!

Encouraging flexibility of tone can be done by getting them to hold intelligible conversations with each other using only one word. There is usually some "buzz" word which you can utilise, but if there are none around at the time use the name of a pop-singer or something else which has meaning for them - "spot" is one of my favourites. Many years ago I used to use "spam" but nowadays many kids don't even know what it is - gone are the days of those awful spam fritters for school dinner, and I doubt whether anyone (except the manufacturers) mourn their passing! And alas, even the Monty Python sketch is not as well-known as it once was!

Then there are movement exercises. The aim of these is to help the kids control their movement: we all know how many are awkward and gangling. The majority of these exercises consists of slowing down normal movements to a ridiculous extent. The one I use most of all is picking up a coin lying on the floor in front of you. Ask them to do it a few times normally, and then they should take a full minute. Emphasise that they should be moving all the time - no jerkiness or stopping-starting but smooth, continuous movement. Keep extending the time: one minute, then two, then two and a half, then three, and so on, as long as you feel that you can get away with it! When I was (very) much younger, I once managed fifteen minutes, and afterwards I felt as though I'd run a marathon.

Training in one of the martial arts can be very useful, particularly Tai Chi Chuan, but make the movements a slow as possible. Remember, you are not teaching self-defence but bodily control. Also useful are ballet barre exercises - and they'll probably find them the most demanding of all. Doing this has the additional benefit of instilling in them some respect for dancers' strength and endurance! - Have you tried doing a full plié‚ in first position?

For movement exercises proper clothing is essential. Working in their normal school clothes is to be avoided, especially by girls who wear tight skirts! Track or shell suits, jogging bottoms, tee-shirts, all are suitable, and I find that the best footwear for movement exercises is bare feet. Those who suffer from athletes foot, verukas or any infectious foot condition should wear the lightest footwear they can find - it often seems to me that many "fashion" trainers, as distinct from those intended for sports, are as heavy as climbing boots! Girls will find slipperettes or jazz shoes very useful.

One last thing: make these sessions fun. The exercises themselves may not be, but keep it light, joke about what you're doing, or they'll get fed up and that's no good to either of you.

But there's no getting away from the fact that acting starts with the text, and it is on the text (and its associated sub-text) that the bulk of your attention must be focused. Perhaps we should look at a few text-based exercises.

Incidentally, there is no better source of text-understanding exercises than the work of Cicely Berry, Voice Director of the RSC: her books Voice and the Actor and, in particular, The Actor and the Text are, I think, essential reading for any would-be actor or director. The following exercises come from Miss Berry's books (or, at least, are based on her ideas). Incidentally, the book by Patsy Rodenburg, who is the National Theatre's voice coach, The Need for Words, is also a good source of ideas, as well as being a good read in itself.

Like Cicely Berry and Patsy Rodenburg, I use Shakespearean texts for many of these exercises - just to show the kids that he is actually quite easy to understand - and I normally like to start off with one of Helena's speeches from A Midsummer Night's Dream, the one which begins

O spite! O hell! I see you all are bent
To set against me for your merriment.

I simply give each person a copy of these two lines, written as normal speech, not verse, and ask them to read it aloud. We try to say them in all sorts of different ways: laughing, weeping, howling in anguish, whispering, and - to finish with a flourish! - we go outside and I tell them to run up and down shrieking the lines as loudly and as angrily as they can.

I once did this when, unknown to me, a governors' meeting was going on in one of the rooms adjacent to the yard. It appears there was consternation with everyone thinking that the school was about to be wrecked by a bunch of vandals when one of the teacher-governors looked out of the window and said, "Oh, it's just the Performing Arts Department". Heads were nodded in sympathetic understanding (not of what we were doing but of what the Head had to put up with!) and the meeting continued when the other teacher-governor volunteered to ask me to stop. The kids thought it was hilarious - and so did I!

Actually one nice exercise that I like to do here - it arose from a rather drunken evening after a performance of Dream at the St David's Arts Festival - is to get the cast to sing the lines in a style of their own choosing (shades of Whose Line Is It Anyway?). I normally demonstrate by singing it like an aria from grand opera (which is what I and the actress who played Helena did at the Festival - for half an hour or until we were chucked out of the room by the rest, whichever was the sooner!).

It sounds silly on the surface, but there is reason behind it: it simply won't work if the style does not suit the words! They'll realise that soon enough and will have to hunt around for an appropriate style. Rap sounds pretty damned good!

The next stage is to look at the whole speech:

O spite! O hell! I see you all are bent
To set against me for your merriment:
If you were civil and knew courtesy,
You would not do me thus much injury.
Can you not hate me, as I know you do,
But you must join in souls to mock me too?
If you were men, as men you are in show,
You would not use a gentle lady so;
To vow, and swear, and superpraise my parts,
When I am sure you hate me with your hearts.
You both are rivals, and love Hermia,
And now both rivals, to mock Helena:
A trim exploit, a manly enterprise,
To conjure tears up in a poor maid's eyes
With your derision! none of noble sort
Would so offend a virgin, and extort
A poor soul's patience, all to make you sport

Each kid is to find a space and set himself two chairs about six/eight feet apart. They stand by one chair and read the speech aloud until they come to the first pausing punctuation mark (comma, semi-colon, colon or full-stop), at which point they stop, walk to the other chair, and then read the lines to the next punctuation mark, and so on to the end of the speech. The amazing thing is that you will find the vast majority - even first years - will understand the whole thing without any explanation.

We then play around with the emotions, with one directing the speech at another who has to try to interrupt and defend himself. The speaker is to ignore the protestations of the other, overriding them if they become too insistent. In no time at all a real scene begins to emerge - and you, as teacher in charge, will not have given them any guidance about tone or moves!

I could fill chapters with these exercises, but I'm sure you get the idea. Read the books; try out their ideas; devise your own. Change the texts: use modern plays, poems, anything. The important thing is that you should be driving the kids to look at the text in depth and play around with its emotional and intellectual possibilities.

Move on from this to improvisation of similar or related scenes; use hot-seating and thought-tracking techniques on these improvised scenes; use forum theatre ideas to get the other kids to change the direction of the scenes. In short, put the text through the wringer: use every possible approach to squeeze every last drop of meaning from it.

Once your company members are used to looking at the text and the sub-text in depth, then they can really start to think about character.

Let's get one thing straight right form the start: most role play exercises of the sort used in drama lessons, or PSE, or even business simulations, are a waste of time. They have nothing to do with character, merely with role. Get kids to play a teacher and they'll come up with a caricature; what's more, it will be a caricature that differs little from one kid to the next. Ask them to act out a classroom scene and the "kids" will behave badly and the "teacher" will shout and thump, or even wave a cane about. What they produce will have far more to do with the Bash Street Kids than what they experience every day of their school lives!

What we have to do is to remind them (and keep reminding them!) that, in their real lives, they all have the same role as school kids, but that each of them is different from the others. Remind them, too, that each teacher is different, and that they approach each one in a different way. I usually pick the most feared and the softest teachers and ask, "Would you behave with Mr X the way you would with Mr Y?" The answer is invariably a heartfelt "No!" Then I will ask, "Would you talk to me in the same way as you talk to them?" Again the same answer. The next question, of course, is the ubiquitous "Why?", and the answer is always, "Because you're different from each other."

Once they are able to separate the role from the character, then we can begin. Until that distinction is clear in their minds, real characterisation is impossible.

Taking on a role is so much easier than developing a character that I like to do a number of improvisation exercises to hammer the point home. I'll set up ordinary events (arriving home an hour later than told to, for instance, or being falsely accused of some wrongdoing in school) and get them to act it out. But I won't just let it run: I'll begin the dreaded "why?" game to force them to think of motivation. I'll make the same people do the scene a couple of times but I'll change their characters each time. If, in the falsely accused scene, the pupil acts aggressively, I'll tell him he's timid and shy: sometimes I'll even work backwards and tell them their reactions ("You're going to burst into tears") and then ask why they reacted as they did.

Try some games. I like to use "Masters and Servants". They divide into pairs, one of whom is to be the master and the other the servant. The servant must do anything the master tells him (unless it's dangerous or immoral!) until the game ends. The masters will (usually) go mad, putting their servants in all kinds of degrading situations - having them crouch on the floor to be a foot stool is usually the least of it! After a while stop the game and question both about their reactions, then ask the question, "If it's like this, why are people willing to take jobs as servants?" Don't, however, let them answer: restart the game, but this time telling the masters that they've had servants all their lives and the servants actually quite enjoy working for them.

What we are actually doing here is examining the place that our status has in our lives (there is a fascinating treatment of this topic in Keith Johnstone's book Impro). The unconscious assumption of our status vis- -vis others is a good starting point for our study of character, for it is our relations with others that determine not only how they see us, but also how we see ourselves. With the lessons of the masters and servants game under our belts we can start to look at character work much more profitably. Until I realised the importance of status (thanks, I have to admit, to Keith Johnstone), I was never happy with the character work I directed: now with the attitude that character, relationships with others, and status are inextricably intertwined, I find that we can probe much more deeply.

As a real test (only to be used in the advanced stages of character work, which not every kid will be able to achieve), have them choose someone they know well (a parent or other relative, for instance) and tell them to study their behaviour and reactions in depth during the coming week. At the next meeting they are to be that person throughout. Watching the interaction is fascinating!

This is something like the way Mike Leigh created Abigail's Party (Alison Steadman's account of that development quoted in Peter Barkworth's The Complete About Acting should be compulsory reading for all drama teachers, especially those who aspire to direct shows!), but it is easier because the kids have a model to build upon.

One thing that they will almost certainly have noticed in their study is the small actions or mannerisms which characterise us all - they are often the stock-in-trade of the impressionist. Point them out: get the kids to become aware of such small actions. They are much more important than you would think. I recently went to see a nativity-type play at one of our feeder primary schools and this was brought home very clearly to me.

You see, I didn't believe in Mary! Yes, I know she was only a ten-year old, but we do make allowances. I was convinced by the Angel Gabriel. I suppose that what I really should say is that I was able to accept that that this ten-year old boy was representing the Angel Gabriel. However I couldn't feel that about the girl playing Mary. There was little difference between the two in terms of acting ability and so it took me quite a while to see what was causing the problem. When the light finally dawned, it was actually very simple: she never looked at the baby! Here was a mother with her first child, in this case the son of God, and she never looked at it once!

Now I am not blaming the child - I am not blaming anyone, for this is a situation in which acting technique is of little or no importance for the kids or the audience - but I merely use it as an instance of the importance of the little things. Inappropriate though my response may have been in the circumstances, it is instructive, and tells us something of the eye for small detail which both actor and director have to have to create a realistic character.

I could go on and fill a book! But I won't: all I will say is that there is a vast literature to guide you, but my own feeling is that the best exercises are those which you devise (or adapt) yourself, to suit your own company. Just don't lose sight of the fact that you are developing acting skills: you are not a psychotherapist, you're not trying to interfere in any way with the characters of the kids you are dealing with. Your job is to enable them to see how people differ from each other, how they can perceive these differences in the texts you work on, and how they can bring out these differences in their performance. The depth to which you take any exercise will depend upon the kids themselves, the time available and your own judgement as to the success or otherwise of what you are doing. But be clear of one thing: unless you do force (deliberately chosen word!) your kids to think about these matters, you will never get anything other than a superficial performance out of the majority. Playing a r“le is easy: playing a character requires hard work. Without an understanding of character they will never act, they'll just act out!

And no, this is not airy-fairy theorising! It's what I do in my acting training for the kids I work with. It's part of professional training, and it's what the best amateur actors do too. In acting as in everything else connected with the school play, you have to aim for the very best, because nothing else is good enough.

I'd like to finish this chapter by mentioning a few of the most common faults amongst young actors (and the not-so-young, to be honest!). Watch out for them and nip them in the bud early: most will show themselves at the first reading.

First is the dreaded pronoun stress! You know, when unnatural emphasis is placed on every pronoun - and by unnatural stress I mean any stress at all. Read the following sentences aloud:

I fancy going to the pictures tonight.

Oh yes, I remember Fred.

Have you got change of a quid?

Was she at home when you rang?

In normal, everyday speech we throw the pronouns away: they bear no stress whatsoever and their vowel sounds are very indeterminate. The inexperienced young actor, however, will give them their full vocal value, making the sentence seem stilted and artificial. Get them out of this habit straightaway.

And keep your ears open for its recurrence. I was devastated not long ago when I went to a performance of a panto by a local amateur operatic society of which a number of our present and ex-pupils are members. One of the ex-pupils had a small speaking role. She'd been a very competent actor at school and is very bright, but there she was, speaking her lines as if she were a not-very-confident reader reading from an autocue for the first time! I could have got up onto that stage and wrung her neck!

A second, just as common, fault is related to this: giving every word equal stress. With the less confident this can be a bugger to get rid of! The reason is that they are so concerned about getting every word in (and right!) that they don't think about meaning. You need to mimic them - a little exaggeration is permissible here, I believe - so that they hear how unnatural they sound. You should then speak the line naturally and ask them to try to isolate what the difference is. Don't just get them to imitate you speaking the line correctly: they need to know what they are doing wrong and what they should be doing. And pounce on every occurrence: only constant reminders will eliminate it. But make a joke of it and get them laughing at themselves. I've just come from a rehearsal in which I spent nearly fifteen minutes working on one line with a rather inexperienced girl who, at one point, was helpless with laughter, but who finally got it right. And she won't forget in future!

Many kids are afraid of contact. And by that I don't just mean physical contact (although that is true), but eye-contact too. In fact, it's not just kids. As an actor in an amateur company many years ago, I worked with one very experienced man who just would not meet the eyes of anyone else on stage. He was hell to work with! Before I appeared with him I had seen him on stage many times, and wondered why his performances never completely convinced. I knew there was something wrong but could never put my finger on it. It was only after playing opposite him that I realised.

A good exercise to cure this: make them work in twos with a member of the opposite sex, preferably one they don't know very well. Stand facing each other with toes touching; place right hand on the partner's shoulder. Now they must gaze into each other's eyes without flinching or letting their glance slide away for a full minute. They can, however, blink: this is not a staring exercise. Do it as often as is necessary, changing partners a few times.

Finally, for those intimate scenes (not necessarily of a romantic or sexual nature) where they shy away from close physical contact: have them play the scene sat on the floor, leaning their backs against each other. Then do it again with backs and heads leaning against each other. Then make them exaggerate the feelings of the scene whilst remaining in the same position. If that doesn't work, grab the little ****s by the scruff of the neck and push them together!

It really is these seemingly little things that make the difference between a forced, stilted performance and one which is realistic and convincing. Remember the old saw: look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves? It's as true in acting as in finance! It's these little things which will make for an effective, real performance.