A smorgasboard for actors
Adam Macauley,
Don’t Tell Me, Show Me: Directors Talk about Acting.
NSW: Currency Press, 2003
ISBN 0 86819 669 X
211 pp
Au$29.95
(Review copy supplied by Currency Press)

In Don’t Tell Me, Show Me, Adam Macauley asks twelve Australian film, television, theatre, and opera directors the same question: When you work with actors you consider good, what is it they have or do that makes them as good as they are? The initial answers then become a springboard for extended and provocative discourse, apparently only lightly guided by the interviewer, on a host of related concerns – skills, attitudes, and training; the differences between acting for the stage and acting for the screen, between English and American actors, between acting Chekhov and acting Shakespeare.
Macauley, himself an actor, director, scriptwriter and teacher of acting, has transcribed and edited the responses into eleven chapters (two directors, interviewed together, make up one chapter), and the results reflect the characteristics of freewheeling interviews – spontaneity, candor, looseness, repetition, vehemence, and the occasional grammatical lapse.

Why assemble the interviews in the first place? Macauley’s premise is that “an actor can find it very difficult to avoid the despair, resentment and bitterness lurking behind every perceived rejection” (v) in a vocation of few definitions and endemic uncertainty. The odds against the actor are quantified by Simon Phillips of the Melbourne Theatre Company: ten training institutions turn out some 150 graduates each year. Only ten per cent of them will find steady employment – not for lack of talent, but because roles are scarce. After three years of drama school, one might actually never work in the profession (187).

Macauley’s purpose, then, is to produce “a smorgasboard of ideas and a variety of tone” that encourage a “more open dialogue about our expectations of one another ..in the collaborative process of making and sharing stories.” (vi-vii) A modest enough objective, yet one whose appeal is bound to be further limited to a slim and selective readership by the book’s structure and content.

For narrative pull and behind-the-scenes intimacy, the revelations cannot compare with other sources of acting lore like Laurence Olivier (On Acting, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1986), John Houseman (Entertainers and the Entertained, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), Hume Cronyn (A Terrible Liar, New York: Morrow, 1991) and James Earl Jones (Voices and Silences, New York, Limelight Editions, 2001). Macauley develops no sustained argument that needs to be followed from beginning to end. Since each director addresses the same core question anew, the reader can start and stop at any chapter, and not feel compelled to resume immediately, or where he left off. Once he does resume, he is in for another take on the same general issues.

Neither is the book a how-to-manual or exposition of method that a director has found useful. While the directors stress the importance of technique, they aren’t overly informative on the subject. The book’s most entertaining anecdote – Bruce Beresford’s account of Sharon Stone’s ability to cry out of either eye on cue – is totally unhelpful on how the aspiring actor might acquire this remarkable skill:

I said, ‘Look, it’d be great if just as the camera comes around, you cry.’ And she said, ‘Oh, okay. Both eyes, or just one eye?’ I thought she was joking, but I said, ‘Can you do just one eye?’ She said ‘Yes. Which one would be better for the light, the left or right?’ I said, ‘Well, the left eye.’ She said, ‘Where will the camera be when you want the tear to roll?’ so I marked a point for her and she said, ‘Okay.’ And she did it every time, just the way she’d said. In fact, she did it four or five times…. Now, how do you train to do that? … She said, ‘Well, gee, I don’t know, you just have to do it.’ (109-110)

Nor do the directors offer authoritative unanimity on how one should train for an acting career, or even show up for auditions. Barrie Kosky of The Schauspielhaus Theatre (Vienna) warns that it is dangerous to train actors in any one particular method (3). Bruce Beresford, whose directing credits include Breaker Morant (Australia, 1980)and Driving Miss Daisy(USA, 1989), never attended acting school himself, though he concedes “they must be doing something right.” (124) But John Bell, founder of The Bell Shakespeare Company, regards formal training as a rite of passage: “You don’t want to be teaching actors as you are directing, it just doesn’t seem fair” (158).

Television drama director Michael Jenkins insists actors shouldn’t show up “with all their bloody lines down” (78) as memorizing before audition means working out how one intends to play the part, which in turn obstructs the ability to listen to fellow actors on stage. Gale Edwards, founding artistic director of The Energy Connection, likewise tells actors not to learn lines of a classic play beforehand, because it’s vital to spend days in collective discussion and discovery of shared verse lines, commas and full stops (132). But Kate Woods, award-winning director of ABC TV Drama, can’t abide actors who need to read their scripts; “I can’t see their eyes [and] they’re not confident about what they’re doing.” (173)

Directors do agree on a few points, nonetheless, and surely these are worth an actor’s reflection. They expect experimentation, and the boldness that goes with trying out varied interpretations a director can choose from, even if the actor risks being humiliated in rehearsal. A second area of convergence is literacy. An actor will find more that is useful in Dickens, Dostoevsky and Thomas Hardy, says Kosky, than in a Stanislavsky manual (15). Ros Horin, founder of Playworks, demands that an actor recognize her references to a Pirandello moment or a Picasso painting (99). A third area of agreement is on the actor’s need to listen and respond to other actors, as opposed to reciting and showing off. This is why Horin and Bell don’t audition actors solo, but in pairs, so they gauge empathy along with skill (97, 145).

The most basic of all requirements is technique, acquired through drill, practice, and repetition, and manifested in a multitude of ways: athletic suppleness (Kosky, 11), mastery of accents (Beresford, 118), voice tune and emotion (Phillips, 180), the “little physical, impulsive, momentary” ways of speaking and moving that make the character come alive (Woods, 172), on-stage awareness that “if they take one more step they are going to fall into the orchestra pit” (Di Drew, 29), specific skills like piano-playing or swordfighting called for by the role (“There is no way I would allow an actor to pick up a sword and work from their fucking feelings!” Aubrey Mellor, 57).

An aspiring actor may read through each and every one of these selections and still conclude that the way ahead appears as arduous and as daunting as when he started. Nonetheless, the directors collectively deliver what Macauley promises in his foreword: a smorgasboard of ideas, a variety of tone, an access to insights that enrich the apprentice’s grasp of avenues and possibilities for beating the odds.

Jaime S. Ong
De La Salle University, Manila.
Created on: Tuesday, 4 May 2004 | Last Updated: 4-May-04