The Great Acting Blog: “Acting Weird”

The Great Acting Blog: “Acting Weird”

The actor should always allow the context within which the scene takes place to do it’s work.

Below is an extract from the script for our new short film, Will It Stop Raining In Summer. Beryl is married to Maurice, but having a secret affair with Roger. In the scene below, Roger and Beryl have met up for a drink but Maurice has co-incidentally turned-up at the same cafe, and so the three of them sit together, and chat. The surface action in the extract below is pretty innocuous, but it is the context which gives the scene it’s strangeness and complexity.

Maurice is driving the conversation and Roger is going along with whatever Maurice does in order to keep the peace, and maintain  a sense of normality. The point is, the actor playing Roger need never indicate further that what is taking place in the scene is weird or complex – because the context already infers this. The more powerful acting choice, is to play Roger stoically, showing as little as possible, being disciplined – this allows the audience to project their own imagination onto the scene, and their own strangeness and complexity on to it, which leads to an infinitely richer experience than explaining what is happening in the scene through indication or characterization (eg – Roger flicking a moody, “I-can’t-believe-this”-look over to Beryl*, which basically amounts to trying to control what the audience think). Much better to infer than to show.

* This is also true for the cinematography – to use it in such a way as to point to the meaning of the scene, say cutting to close-ups – I intend to shoot the scene as one master shot.

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