40 Questions of One Role
• How does it relate to the present, to the past, to the future, to you personally and to all humanity – young and old, black, white, or yellow?
We know these questions from our school days. I was taught to understand the principle of an idea thus – “in taking a play to pieces you have to find the most burning issues of today in everything.” That is arguable. “Today’s issue”, so to speak, may only be burning today and lack powerful energetic potential, so it cannot count on lasting long and consequently has no claim to be classed as a work of Art.
But before we start to argue about that, we must define what an idea is. Often actors and directors call their own concept the idea of the role or the play. Others try to find the “idea of the author” by honest means. But you have to look not for the idea of the author and his play or your own idea but for the Idea itself. What does this mean?
The fact is that Ideas or groups of IDEAS exist outside the drama and outside us. They belong to no one nation, time or event – they are eternal. The time, the situation and the development of philosophical and aesthetic thoughts, of all culture and civilisation, are appointed by time so that the Idea appears before the new Aischylos, Shakespeare or Chekhov. The paradox lies in the fact that we are looking for a new Idea all the time, whereas actually it is looking for us, seeking out that worthy someone.
Its energy – and an Idea has incredibly powerful energy – strikes the playwright and thanks to the Idea he starts to create his own work. He embodies the Idea in his play – a specific story, theme, conflict, personnages or text and so on. The first thing the director does having read the play is to fall in love with the Idea. It is the Idea he expresses in his production by analysing the play, the mise-en-scènes, the sequence of events, the style and music etc – in other words by all means available to him, though first and foremost through the actor. The actor feeds on the Idea and embodies it in his acting, in an emotion or a movement. Through the actor the Idea reaches the audience. So, in accordance with this pictorial chain which Plato beautifully portrayed in his dialogue Ion, the actor has to turn primarily to the Idea that formed the basic impulse for the creation of the chain. Imbibing energy from the initial source, so to speak.
Corruption of the initial impulse will occur in any chain reaction. The longer the chain the higher the coefficient of corruption. The “purer” and “clearer” the transmitter the more the final result resembles the original. That is why each of those in the chain must constantly check their thoughts and reference points against the main Idea from which everything began so as not to corrupt it. Can a role or a play be constructed from several principal ideas? Yes, of course. A role or a production constructed on myriad ideas is much more difficult to embody, but, from my point of view, such a model has much greater energy and is of greater beauty.
As an Idea, the sea can be expressed in a single drop of water, a forest in a single leaf, so the Idea of a role can be expressed in everything – both generally and in minor details, in a long dialogue and in the shortest retort, in a pause and in the text, in movement and in motionlessness. It is an entire world built on and subject to one thing – the Idea. The Idea is the main impulse and guideline for analysing a play or a role. The Idea is the main source of energy for the imagination, reflections and the rehearsals of the actor and the director both when working on the entire performance and in the process of its creation and embodiment. In order to keep a production or a role truly alive for a lengthy period it is necessary to think, first and foremost, about their vitality in terms of the main Idea.
You have to see the difference between ideas of the present and Ideas for all time. They are different energies, different distances, different lives of the role and the play. An idea for today may be bright and burning now but tomorrow lose currency and fade away. It is important to find an Idea that will never die, which will live, independent of time, social structures and people’s dispositions. Don’t rush and call the first thought that comes to you in the role an idea. That’s akin to calling your first experience of love true love itself. You will soon be convinced of how fast the first “concept” of the role evaporates, how empty everything that you have analysed and conceived seems. That is normal. When working on a play your understanding of the Idea will grow, it will somehow change, it will become more defined, it will grow like a living being. Only practical work will help you give the Idea an exact name. But simply naming and understanding an Idea are insufficient for an actor. You have to feel its fire, let it burn you, your partners, embody it on stage and convey it to the audience.
An Idea can strike an actor not just when he is creating the role. He might discover an Idea for himself that fills his life and his entire artistic being with meaning. The power of its energy does not fade with the end of the work, rather it grows and other plays and other roles will be needed to embody it. If an actor grasps the Idea of the role as well as its main source of energy then he will discover a beautiful and endless well of creativity.
We will return to the Idea several times, which is proof, if such were required, of its importance, both as the main line of analysis and as the main source of energy for investigation of the text.
Question 2
What is the Energy of the role?
In an analysis, first and foremost you have to look for a source of energy – energy of the role, the scene and the performance, and not merely understand the meaning of the words. Below you will see that almost every question or rule is directly linked to the problem of seeking energy for the role. Because this is the basis for the life of your role. Finding the logic, defining the emotions, creating the chain of actions, identifying the meaning of what is said and what is done is much, but it is not enough. Find the source of the energy! Above all the analysis is needed for this. Naturally investigating the role is important for the clarity of its intrigues, the composition of themes and images, for understanding the structure of the text and style etc., but more than anything it is necessary to find its energy. Without energy there can be no life, and so analysis should act as a strong and powerful generator of energy for the role. This can be attained first and foremost by changing your way of thinking. When analysing, try to avoid purely logical or linear approaches, from a justification of events, the “organic nature” of emotions, pre-programmed behaviour. All this is important but it is not enough. Go one step further to discover all the resources of energy: Make your analysis of the role varied, expansive, paradoxical, awaken contradictory emotions and thoughts, bringing them to an irreconcilable contradiction, and then the energy will appear.
You have to assimilate the fact that energy develops when there is a battery. There have to be “plusses and minuses”, “hot and cold”, “poetry and prose”, “the exalted and the base”, “the tragic and the merry”, “the vulgar and the refined”, “the emotional and the intellectual” and so on. By analysing a role on several levels you have to make a sudden transition from one to the other. This will result in the greatest possible energy. You can analyse one and the same scene according to differing theatre schools and directions. This will also bring you energy. You see? It’s all very simple.
If you look at a role from various standpoints, altering the line of observation, and ensure that the “battery principle” is observed, then the energy will increase, endlessly shifting from one form of its existence to another. This is the main rule by which all the energy resources of the role are to be discovered.
Question 3
What is the tension of the role based on?
What I am now going to talk about is normally called “conflict” in theatre. I call it “tension”. In my opinion, thanks to the concept of “tension” there are greater possibilities to understand how to create the role and the scene. It is best to stipulate this from the very start so that it is understood what I mean when I use this or that word. Basically I am talking about one and the same thing.
First and foremost about School! The thing is that without School you will never discover anything new. You have to know the rules to be able to break them and change them. School tells us that conflict forms the foundation of foundations of dramatic art. Accordingly an analysis of a theatrical plot is a study of how conflicts arise and how they are resolved. Sounds clear and precise. But that’s not all – to know the profession is to know how to create conflict through action on stage. Conflict is a fact of opposing interests, views and convictions. An actor finds the conflict when he discovers this fact. The conflict comes to life in the struggle and the struggle comes to life in the action. Each conflict cannot remain unchanged, it has to be resolved. It grows all the time, the struggle develops and it leads to an event after which the conflict is resolved. A play, a performance, a role all exist, live and develop first and foremost due to conflict – that is how my teachers taught me. Look for conflict everywhere and all the time, they said. In everything… They taught me well. From them I learned to define the conflict, develop it and unfold it to the very limits, to bring it to an explosion so that it could no longer exist. In other words, to bring it to a dramatic culmination. These are the main rules of School.
But with the passing years, somewhat expanding my knowledge of theatre, I came to understand that “conflict” is by no means a characteristic of every theatre. There are other cultures besides. For example, the traditions of Eastern theatre are not characteristic of conflict as we understand it in European theatre. So today, when the borders of theatre are becoming increasingly blurred, I wouldn’t recommend that an actor be dogmatic in understanding the nature of conflict and the laws of its construction. A conflict can remain static for all time. It might not be resolved and it might not disappear. A scene can be constructed without any conflict at all. But in this case you have to understand and organise life on stage in a completely different way to what we are accustomed to. That is why in such cases we have to look for “tension”. It is a similar phenomenon. But all the same it is already a different world, another philosophy, a different theatre. The concept of “tension” increases our possibilities of seeing and creating a scene with invisible links, on unnoticed nuances, as if on a molecular scale. It could be said that the scene is not constructed but comes about according to the law of dynamic harmony to be found in nature. It is as if everything is evenly distributed and exists in harmony, while nonetheless there is tension. And thanks to this tension life takes on boundless meaning and volume of action. Within us there develop unclear, dequilescent feelings towards it and as a direct result of this the many possible ways of reading it. Learning to read the tension of a scene means being able to read the tension between a river and a field, between snow and a railway track.
I first came across this issue in the Soviet Union when I started out on my career as a director. The fact is that from the time of Stalin it had been said that as there were no antagonistic classes and no conflicts in socialist society, then they should not exist in contemporary drama. In performances about the lives of Soviet people it was proposed that conflict take the form of a struggle between the “good” and the even “better”. Harmony of happiness instead of conflict! A proposition – if we refer to Aristotle – impossible in dramatic art, yet nonetheless performances were staged, and some very good ones too. Only with the passing of time did I come to understand that this and the following generation of Soviet directors were forced to learn to create polar tension for a scene and a role in total harmony with all its components. And I believed that communist dictatorship had made a great discovery for contemporary theatre according to which conflict in theatre is not a struggle, but rather harmonious tension.
The concept of conflict is more specific and defined in dramatic theatre than tension. You can “touch” it, as they say. But also within this concept, seemingly already known and familiar to actors, there is a great deal more that has to be grasped and used in an analysis of a role.
Thus a conflict in classical drama can be defined as a conflict of two personnages, two groups of people or two philosophies. But in viewing it as a confrontation of religions, civilisations, generations, states or mere people, in any case you have to see the conflict of the Ideas in it before all else. The higher and stronger the actor sees the conflict the better his acting and his energy will be. Otherwise you can get bogged down and submerged in petty conflicts.
It could be said that a conflict does not exist just within the drama, it always exists outside the framework of the play and the performance too.
Discovery of all the possible conflicts is possible by one means only – by analysing the role in various spheres – ideological, philosophical, psychological, aesthetic, physiological, artistic, national, sexual, political conflicts, conflicts of age, emotions, words and a thousand other things. In other words, if you take a role apart from different positions then the conflict becomes larger and more capacious.
The best thing is to make the analysis of the conflict of your role thus so it is impossible to express it in one formulaic phrase. This discovery, which I came to over time, completely contradicts what I was taught. The definition of the conflict should be so complicated and confused that the actor’s psychological and physical abilities do not know what to do, how to act it out, how to embody it on stage. And, on the other hand, everything should be absolutely clear and precise to the actor’s artistic “Self”. This is the foundation for the dialectics of the link between theory and practice, between analysis and embodiment.
When I propose carrying out such a multi-layered analysis of the nature of conflict actors normally get nervous and revolt. They want to know everything exactly. And the sooner the better. They believe it is very important to visualise the main direction of the plot and the struggle clearly. They believe it necessary to reveal and name the conflict precisely. They believe that this is a deposit in confident acting. But it is a mistake. Because clarity and definition destroy the improvised nature of a living search and lowers creative energy, it turns the acting into a series of simple, logically justified actions. It will be proper, but nothing more.
There are thousands of different kinds of conflict and places where they occur. It would be impossible to list them all but they can all be important for the actor. So you have to look at as many possibilities and variations as possible. They will form by themselves into a sphere of conflict, where they will weave between each other like worms in a fisherman’s can.
Conflicts can be divided into separate categories. And in accordance with each category analyse the role and the scene. For example an open conflict is one that lies on the surface. It is open to both the personnage and the audience. This kind of conflict has least energy and gives little to an actor. Taking this as a foundation you generally have to work with variations of it, looking for unexpected moves and techniques. However you act out an open conflict it is never the main motive force of the scene or the role as it has no inner secrets or energy. But this kind of conflict can serve as good camouflage for another conflict that is hidden and has not come to light. If a conflict is expressed in the text or actions of your personnage then you have to look for one on a deeper level, which doesn’t express itself directly. A hidden conflict is when the personnage knows about it but does not express it in words or actions for a long period. It comes to light at a particular point in the play and the role. Sometimes it never comes to light. This kind of conflict is richer and more intense, it has the energy of a secret, of the “underground”, it gives the actor greater freedom for improvisation.
The conflict can be internal – experienced by the personnage himself – and external – between the personnage and the surrounding world. Actors often take a greater interest in the first, believing that if a personnage has no internal contradictions then it will be of little interest to interpret the role. This idea came to them and remained with them from an enthusiasm for psychological theatre. But I can assure you that external conflict is often more of a game, and however strange it may seem, more emotional than internal conflict. It is often much harder to portray. Three quarters of the world’s plays are structured on external conflict.
Personally I would like to add that an actor’s undying love for “feelings” should not deprive the personnage of the right to live without internal conflict and in external harmony. After all, a man can be in harmony with himself and with the world. Everything can be well at work, at home, with his health, financially, with friends and in love. Here you have to seek out other techniques to portray such a personnage.
Conflicts may be categorised into conflicts of time – the past, the present and the future. For example, it can be said with certainty that it is a conflict of the past if it developed long ago and only its resonances can be heard in the play, like the echo of passing thunder.
A conflict of the present is when it arises now, at this minute. In this case your attention should be focussed on the process of how the conflict develops, how it flares up and how it ends.
In the role and in the scene you can see and analyse the origin of a new conflict – a conflict of the future, the results of which will only take on form and lead to certain consequences only in the future. This kind of conflict always gives the role a certain tension towards the finale when, although everything seems finished, it is still clear that it is not over with and there is still a great deal that will happen. For example, at the end of Chekhov’s play The Three Sisters we hear that it is just the beginning.
Some conflicts could be called potential. They are still unknown to the personnages themselves, neither are they set by them, but the actor finds them, defines them and can use them as the basis for creating the role. It can happen that it is they who to a great extent define its character and the direction it takes. Such conflicts are generally never resolved within the framework of the play, but their definition gives the entire role or a part of it yet another source of energy.
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