Actors' Voices

The People Behind the Performances

Patrick O'Kane

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN:
  9781849433365
• Print ISBN:
  9781840029567
• Edition: 1

In conversation with Patrick O'Kane, eleven experienced actors who have made a living, a life, in theatre, television and film, share their process, comment on their experiences and consider their role as theatre artists within the broader spectrum of Art and Culture. Contributors, who have worked across a range of forms from mainstream theatre to experimental performance practice, include: Claire Price, Ruairi Conaghan, Mojisola Adebayo, Tim Crouch, Olwen Fouéré, Gerrard McArthur, Gabriel Gawin, Selina Cadell, Simon Russell Beale, Paterson Joseph and Jim Norton.

A book that actors can mine for tips on craftsmanship and the business. A book that reveals to directors which approaches enable actors and which block them. A book that calls the UK industry to attention: actors should be embraced as primary creators along with the writer, director and designer of any production.

GERRARD MCARTHUR

Gerrard is an associate, as director and actor, of the Wrestling School, the company with an international reputation for being dedicated to producing the work of a living author, Howard Barker. His directing work for that company includes Barker’s The Dying of Today (Arcola) and Hurts Given and Received (Riverside). Other direction includes a site-specific production of Heiner Muller’s Quartet (Queen’s, Adelaide), and with Stewart Laing, Copi’s The Difficulty of SExpressing Oneself (Glasgow Tramway and King’s X Depot). As a Wrestling School actor he played the protagonist Priest in Howard Barker’s 8 hour epic, The Ecstatic Bible (Adelaide Festival), Vanya in (Uncle) Vanya (Hebbel Theatre, Berlin), Toonelhuis in Barker’s most formally experimental work Found in the Ground (Riverside), and Blok in Blok/Eko (Exeter Northcott/Vanbrugh, London). As an actor he had a 10 year association with the Glasgow Citizens. He also played Prospero for Romanian director Silviu Purcurete in Europe and Japan and has worked with film-makers Derek Jarman and John Maybury.

What was your first experience of the theatre?

We never went to the theatre, but I knew I was an actor, I felt it in me. I could see other people doing it, on the telly and I knew that I could do that. I felt what they were doing, imaginatively, in me, so I knew I was associated with those people.

So when did you first go to the theatre?

I honestly can’t remember. It must have been when I was in something. My comprehensive school put on plays; one year the teacher asked people to put up their hands if they were interested in being in his next production. So I put up my hand. That is really how it started: I was in a school production.

And the reason you put up your hand was because you had seen the TV and you thought you could do that?

I put up my hand because I felt that I could do it. But it is more than that: I felt that that is what I was. I would have been about 13.

And what did you think it was?

I knew what it felt like – a feeling or sensation, not connected to the idea of being an actor, or what an actor was or anything grounded; it was just a sensation, a feeling, but I knew in my head that it wasn’t merely an imaginative fantasy, that I was emotionally, chemically and even technically able to do it. It was a very strong deep visceral idea of myself, or a sensation of recognition of the possibilities in me, in response to the idea of putting my psyche into other characters. That is how I started – and that was in Berlin’s comedy musical, Call Me Madam! It was an all boys’ school, and I played Sally Adams! I really enjoyed it, and I just knew what to do. I knew where I should be in relation to other people, I knew how the scene was going to work somehow, where we were going to be – basic things, stage procedure – I didn’t need to be told. I don’t know how I knew that, but I did, and I enjoyed it. I was also the quietest boy in the school. I was incredibly shy, I had a couple of very close friends, but I was very bookish, very quiet really, embarrassed at talking to any adults.

So was performing a release from that?

Yes, absolutely, they go hand in hand don’t they? You know there is a huge thing going on in you and that is obviously a key point.

Did you start going to the theatre after that?

The school took us to see The Misanthrope, at the Old Vic, with Diana Rigg and Alec McCowan, in what was quite a famous production. I have a vivid memory of the set and colossal amounts of talking; very high levels of speech-making, people talking for a very long time when they have a thought. For someone like me who didn’t say anything, to have these people building a whole plethora of ideas and drawing them to a precise concluding statement, was amazing. More than that, however, was the physical thrill of being in a theatre; the sense of ceremony, the physical fabric of it, the instinctive excitement of bodies in space on stage and the visceral excitement of the spoken word – physically thrilling for me and still is, to this day. A person in space, making movement, making a sound, is a really beautiful thing. It’s beyond words, actually, why that has such a powerful, primal, effect. I still have that, and walking onto an empty stage in a theatre, it holds some instilled beauty and powerful energy for me.

So you went to university and you studied Classics. Did you not want to be a professional actor, at that point?

No, I didn’t and that was probably the right move. I should have stuck to it. And so I went to University, I didn’t do any plays, I didn’t go anywhere near the theatre department. I didn’t complete the course at University. I left and came back to London. I thought, ‘what shall I do?’ I thought I should do the thing I enjoyed doing. A friend called John Maybury, who now makes cinema films, was making super 8 art movies, in the way that Derek Jarman made his before that. I acted in those early films of John’s and I enjoyed it and so I thought I will apply to RADA. I never had a realistic conversation with myself; I thought I will apply, it is the only place I have heard of and if they want me, great, if they don’t, then I will do something else. I applied and I got in and so I went there. If they had said no to me I might not have continued.

What were your expectations of the training at RADA? What was its point of focus?

I had no expectations about the training at all. I was very glad to be there very quickly, it was full of interesting minded eccentrics on the staff and everything seemed to be focused, but lateral, which perhaps is how I think. Nothing was over-explained. You were allowed to experience things rather than being told what you were going to experience and why you were doing so. There is a real intelligence about people, who just let you discover it, and see you discovering it and lead that line with you; that is very high quality teaching and they had the confidence to do that. I was there at a spectacularly interesting time; there were a lot of good people there training and it was the last period of Hugh Cruttwell, who was extraordinarily gifted at running a drama school.

In what way?

He chose and cast people extremely well. Everybody was able to get a sense of themselves through the way he cast them and he could spot things. He would put them in places where that had a possibility of finding its expression. When you are performing that function for a group of 24 people and they are all getting that from you, then that is a pretty big accomplishment. I know we all felt that. We had a reunion a couple of months ago; we had 24 in our year and 21 people turned up.

Were you all still actors?

Not all, a couple had become casting directors, but most people were acting, which is extraordinary.

What was the impact of your training on your career?

I am in two minds about that, because it was both esoteric and practical at the same time, which is a fantastic combination, as was the Citizens, very esoteric and practical. In a way I was unprepared for the dull, ordinary, everydayness of the business of being an actor, meeting people, getting jobs, servicing those requirements; in a way, RADA had been too special.

Is there anything about your training that you would do differently, that you think was lacking, or needed more attention?

I would have liked to have been drenched more in areas of process and the history of process and to have been introduced more to Continental models of acting, in a systematised fashion.

In your experience what would improve the theatre training process?

Well, there needs to be a more somatic training.

What do you mean by somatic?

Just to do with the body, to do with sound-making, and treating writing as a musical notation; writing is a notation of a psyche on the page and it invites you to make sound and that sound has an implication for what is happening in your body, and so the somatic. You need to find a way in which the physical training is integrated into voice classes, so they are one and the same thing and you are not doing things separately. As students come into rehearsal-type structures, as they begin to put plays together, you have to take the somatic, the sound-making, the body sensitisation and the intellectual understanding through in a cumulative way. One of the most difficult things for a drama school is that they have all this different expertise, but they are all separately thrown at the young actor, so the learning gets segregated. So an Alexander teacher for example will come and say, ‘good performance, but I think you have a neck thing here, which is just holding the expression of that voice’; then you get vocal teachers telling them different stuff in a different vocabulary. None of these things are incorrect technically, but if you are sending them, like mechanics, with a toolbox walking around their own psyche, walking around bits of their body, thinking, ‘I have just got to hold my neck this way’, or ‘I just have to release my larynx this way, and I have to rethink that kind of structure in my head this way’ – the nuts and bolts of fixing it – like a mechanic in a garage working on bits of a car, you will be endlessly working on bits of that car, without a picture of the whole car. It is about having a sense of focused wholeness, bringing all of these things into the actor, under the bonnet, so the whole thing has a connected tissue. I have worked with a whole variety of different people at all different ages and they say that they haven’t properly had that experience.

What impact has your training had on your career?

I don’t know. In a way, I think my training was up at the Citizens.

What was your first job?

I played Romeo at The Watermill, Newbury, with Kathryn Hunter as Juliet. I was amazed that, on the first Friday, somebody gave me an envelope with money in it. I don’t know what my expectation of it was, it was immediately after RADA – it followed straight through. I was completely exhausted and what I should have done was rest. I do find institutions, no matter how good, are very institution-like inevitably; the wrong kind of energy had been going on in me for a while before I got let out of RADA. I needed a rest. It is easy to make so many mistakes with Romeo, it is really a very difficult part and looking back, I did find it difficult.

What did you find difficult?

Partly because Romeo is reactive, which, in a way, ought to be a gift. It is an easy mistake to play Romeo like Hamlet, but Hamlet is a thinker and Romeo is not. I wasn’t reactive enough. Furthermore, it is quite hard playing Romeo when you had this idea of what Romeo is, symbolically, and I never thought for a second that I was Romeo or that I could be, I didn’t have the requisite ego to think, ‘oh yeah, of course I can be Romeo’.

Tell me about those people or events which have helped to form your artistic sensibilities. You left RADA, you had done Romeo and Juliet, is that when you went to the Citizens in Glasgow?

Funnily enough it wasn’t. I left RADA in 1983, played in Romeo and Juliet almost immediately and then didn’t work on stage for six years, when I did Büchner’s Leonce and Lena, in 1989. It’s an amazing piece; it almost invents about three different strands of theatre, which are absolutely central to the history and development of European theatre. It uses the structure of a fairy story to hide a satire that is both expressionistic and stunningly naturalistic. Doing that play was a plunge-pool experience.

Did that whet your appetite for theatre work again?

Yes, it really did. It’s a communicative piece, but it’s also tremendously mysterious. One thing I remember about Leonce and Lena, was that the local paper sent their football correspondent to review it. And he had a really good time. He said, ‘I don’t know what this was about, at all, but I thought it was bloody great’. It goes to the core of what I feel. Theatre shouldn’t feel the need to explain itself. That man came, he frankly hadn’t followed it, but he saw what it did, he felt what it did and he said so. It was honest and wise to say so; I wish some of our professional critics could be so wise. They think that they have to understand something for it to have merit; I simply don’t know where that idea comes from. It is a completely false basis for reviewing, or looking at anything. If we fully understand the art piece, then it probably has limited value. It was then that the Citizens asked me to work there, in the early part of 1990 and that was the beginning of a ten-year attachment, which was extraordinarily influential, working for Philip Prowse, Robert David MacDonald and Giles Havergal.

You said previously that was where you received your training as an actor, could you explain that?

Well, the training was one of sensitisation to the experience of being in a thought structure, a picture structure and a directing structure – all the one thing – that the Citizens provided, because their design of everything was fundamentally responsive to the thought structures of the play and their own artistic response to it. That is basic for all design, but up there the level of accomplishment, as is well recognised, was quite considerable. I think Michael Coveney once described the style at the Citizens and the style of Philip Prowse as one of ‘lush austerity’. They were very elastic and flexible, there was not just one look, but every look was informed by a visceral, direct and modern response to the thought structures of the plays. They did amazing translations of scenes exploding one into another. The first thing I ever saw there was Schiller’s Mary Stuart: the first two thirds of the play were in near-pitch black, with just faces picked out, emphasizing the enclosed, the secretive, the politicking and subterfuge. At the moment of the big meeting between the two Queens, suddenly the faces disappeared and you heard this dull thumping sound: the stage had been surrounded by a black curtain, that fell away, thump by thump, revealing a complete white box behind. Everything which had been entirely black was now entirely white and leaves floated down to indicate you were in the open area in the forest and then the two Queens came on. Blazingly simple, extraordinarily effective; when your eyes have been used to an hour of utter blackness, to get this absolute blaze of white, exaggerated by light: you had to blink, literally blink, which, of course, was the feeling that Mary herself was feeling, having been incarcerated for so long. So everything is tactile, everything is essential to the passage of the plays and the experiences the characters are going through and they make you feel that in the audience too. That is just one very simple example of something that was characteristically and consistently rich and complex, at The Citz.

How was that applied to the actors in that framework?

Being directed by Philip was like finding yourself in exactly the right emotional position at any given point on the stage, and you either know that is what is happening and accept that, or you muddy it and you will find you are failing. The people they liked were actors who had a sense, a realisation, that they were being given an opportunity to be in the right space, at the right time, at the right rhythm – the emotional rhythm of the play. Prowse was a tremendously incisive, emotional and visceral director. It always felt that you were never in the wrong place emotionally, and that is a pretty difficult trick to pull off.

One of the charges laid at the Citizens, is that everything looked very pretty but the acting was poor.

The people who were at the Citizens constitute a long list of extremely famous people: so either they were just shockingly bad then and have come good, in some mysterious way, or the myth of The Citz not living up to the image in terms of the acting, is simply rubbish.

So what is the legacy of the Citizens on your personal development as an actor?

Well, everything. If I ever achieve a compression and authority about being the person I am portraying, about having a sense of emotional space and being aware of the rhythms of that space in relation to the language I am speaking, and the conflicts that are being enacted with the other bodies in space, all of that is entirely implied by every piece of direction that Philip gave. It’s a compression of focus and a sense of the structure of things.

What was going on in the rehearsal room in The Citz masked a very great degree of sophistication. If you really fully gave yourself over to the sense of the emotional and picture space he was creating, then you would be all right.

Were there any other significant events or people at The Citz?

Yes, they then opened two new studios during the redesign of the building. At the same time, the ENO were really pushing forward the design of opera and shaping up the way opera was done and causing a lot of controversy (and also pleasure), so it was very active, at the edge there, artistically. Being an opera director and designer himself, Philip invited radical opera designers who wanted to direct in the theatre for the first time and gave them the new studios. So you had these really amazing designers directing plays for the first time and designing extraordinary things in the two new theatre spaces. I was very lucky to be in the first directions of some fantastic designer-directors, such as Stewart Laing, Antony McDonald, David Fielding and Nigel Lowry. Because it was a compressed example of it in those studios, that experience reminded me just how much design is an expression of a fabric of thought. When you are in a design you are in thinking, in a space where you have to plug into its thinking in order to execute that space to its best advantage: that sense is the single greatest thing that I got from my experience at The Citz.

When did you start working with Howard Barker?

I started working with Howard...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Introduction
• CLAIRE PRICE
• RUAIRI CONAGHAN
• MOJISOLA ADEBAYO
• TIM CROUCH
• OLWEN FOUÉRÉ
• GERRARD MCARTHUR
• GABRIEL GAWIN
• SELINA CADELL
• SIMON RUSSELL BEALE
• PATERSON JOSEPH
• JIM NORTON