The Great Acting Blog: “Actors Are Not Children”

The Great Acting Blog: “Actors Are Not Children”

That actors are children, is a myth put about by certain theatre directors, the object of which, is to help those directors maintain a position of power – it functions as a Trojan Horse: the comment is a designed to seem like some cutesy truth, implying that this childishness is the very source of actors’ creativity,  and so  actors should be protected and afforded special allowances on account of this apparent arrested development. Actors, in turn, go along with the ruse and behave like children because they think that that is what is expected of them – thus directorial dominance is achieved through the creation of a parent-child structure. Children are not expected to take responsibility,  and so if actors are supposed to be children, then they too are not expected to take responsibility, and respond accordingly. The most damaging outcome of this state of affairs, is that actors lose their independence of thought, they stop thinking for themselves, and, by extension, stop drawing their own conclusions. When an actor no longer takes responsibility for himself, he loses his initiative, and merely sits around awaiting instructions – if he’s been a good boy, then he will receive a moment of adoration from the director, a moment of favouritism. And then the whole process starts up again.

The notion that the actor is a child, is a gross and damaging misunderstanding of the actor’s process – the idea that one must regress in order to perform, is, frankly, absurd. Nobody says such things about opera singers or  painters. And fundamentally, this view of actors denies that there is such a thing as acting technique, and therefore denies that acting can ever be art, because without technique there cannot be art. Yes the director is the actor’s boss (for the duration of the production), yes the actor is there to serve the director’s vision (if the director has one), but the actor must be able to function independently of the director, he must work hard and be prepared to meet his own high standards, and do so not in order to please the director, but to please himself . This notion that the actor is a child should be dismissed, it’s worthless and incorrect. Whatever the director may bring, should be treated as an added bonus, but the performance level should be reached without the director’s help.

Actors need to take responsibility for their work.

I only recently started posting The Great Acting Blog on this site. For the full archive of posts from the last 2 1/2 years, click here