Style for Actors

A Handbook for Moving Beyond Realism

Robert Barton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429589171
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teatro

Style for Actors is an award-winning handbook and the definitive guide to roles in historical drama. Anyone who has ever struggled with capes, fans, swords, doublets and crinolines should make this third edition their constant companion.

The past is a foreign country, and this outstanding book is concerned with exploring it from the actor's point of view. Specific guides to each major period give readers a clear map to discover a range from Greek, Elizabethan, Restoration and Georgian theatre to more contemporary stylings, including Futurism, Surrealism and Postmodernism. New material in this edition covers Commedia dell'arte and non-Western forms of theatre, theatrical fusion and developments in musicals and Shakespeare. The book's references, images, resource lists and examples have all been updated to support today's diverse performers.

Robert Barton takes great care to present the actor with the roles and genres that will most commonly confront them. Containing a huge resource of nearly 150 exercises, suggestions for scene study and applications not only for theatrical performance but also for stylistic challenges in the reader's own offstage life, this book is an invaluable resource for students and practitioners of acting and drama.

Part I

Finding style

Style for Actors will offer you many ways to develop into a TRANSFORMATIVE ACTOR. While some performers have success as what we might call a PERSONALITY ACTOR, our goal here is to go beyond that. If you aim to transform yourself to embody characters from any time, any culture, and any place. Even if you do not entirely achieve these goals, you will unquestionably stretch and expand your artistry and your wisdom. But before we stretch your style, we need to identify precisely what it is.

Many of us are confused by the whole idea of “style,” since the term is used in so many forms and activities. We also sometimes fail to recognize a style because we are so accustomed to it. Or we do not explore a style because we have decided it is too remote from our experience. This part is about recognizing and owning instances where we stylize our behaviour to suit a circumstance. Many actors are overly timid about moving outside contemporary realism, but fantasize doing so. We will try here to offer reassurance that style exists all around us and that all of us have style knowledge on which we can draw and build.

The first two chapters are about style in your daily life: sensing it, analyzing it, and using it to understand your own experiences. We all know far more than we think we do and already travel outside of realistic behavior more often than we may have noticed.

The first chapter is about recognizing what you already do and know, as well fully comprehending conventions or rules of make believe. The second presents ten categories for examining and entering a world – in the theatre or outside it. These categories are carried forward through the remainder of the book, providing structure for all inquiries. The answers to the same basic questions, as they vary from times, cultures, and genres, can illuminate not only the answers, but the questions themselves.

The third chapter analyzes the differences between a limited contemporary actor and one who comfortably performs the classics, to determine what characteristics all good style actors share. It deals with significant style issues that influence all periods and genres.

• 1Recognizing style: The eyes of the beholder
• 2Analyzing style: Survival questions
• 3Mastering style: The classical actor

Figure 1.1 Katharine Hepburn

Figure 1.2 Audrey Hepburn

Among all actors from the past and present, these two Hepburns still reign as consummate style masters. Aside from being hugely admired as actors, they had much coveted personal style in the way they presented themselves. This was long before stylists were hired to save stars from red carpet faux pas. Unlike others who succumbed to fashion fads, there are no photos of either of them that seem dated, eccentric, or unfortunate. They always chose clean lines and classic looks that do not date. Not only would both have been comfortably cast in any period play, but their personal style choices were so classic that they continue to survive the test of time.

1 Recognizing style

The eyes of the beholder

Style is something we all want and fear. We want to have “real style,” but to be more than just “stylish.” We want to be a master of style, never a slave to it. We want style, without mistaking style for substance.

Since our feelings are ambivalent towards it in our own lives, most of us are tentative in our early efforts at style in the theatre. To understand style acting, we must recognize it in our offstage lives where the word is used synonymously with: form – manner – method – way – fashion – vogue – mode – chic – craze – fad – rage – practice – habit – air – distinction – typical presentation – characteristic behavior – elegance – wording – means of expressing – and execution.

Style is the way something is done, rather than the core act itself. In writing classes, separate grades may be given for style and content. A beautifully written essay may say nothing, or an awkwardly expressed one may have profound insights. Style is also perceived in terms of expectations. Contemporary realistic theatre, where each actor is cast close to age and type, is standard. It is our dominant style. Any time a show moves away from this, it is called “stylized” or is described as done in “the ‘fill-in-the-blank’ style.” You stylize an event by boldly removing it from everyday, expected behavior. The more stylized a production, the more conventions or rules of make-believe the audience must accept, in order to appreciate it.

“Style work” may refer to any journey you take outside of mastered, known territory into new ground. This often involves changing yourself enough to believably enter another world, formerly unfamiliar to you or to most audiences. The same happens outside the theatre, where people who are thought of as having real style are those who move with relative ease between worlds.

Defining style

Style is a way of understanding the world and then entering it based on what you see

If you see the world as a vicious concrete jungle, you might wear leather and studs and often use the “f” word. If you see the world as an enchanted romantic garden, you might wear flowing chiffon and improvise poetry. If you change your mind in the middle of the day (stuck in chiffon, spouting the “f” word), you have trouble reconciling feelings with presentation. Style is the external manifestation of some inner drive. It is a set of choices in action, a relationship between what you feel and what you present in the world. The world may be a club, a country, a period, or a play. It may be all of the above.

A film scholar noted difficulties in mounting serious plays about infidelity in France, because the French tend to view the subject humorously or ironically. A belief shared by enough people is perceived as the dominant style. If you see a character in a French film being told about a neighbor’s affair, what do you expect that character to do? Shrug? Smile? Wink? Briefly philosophize? Probably. Rage? Weep? Register shock? Get a gun? Probably not.

Too often in the theatre, outward manifestation of inward belief is picked up without the belief itself. When you attend a bad production of a period style play, you may see a series of poses, without a sense of anything going on behind them, as if a director had said, “You should all shrug a lot and then smile because that’s what French people do” and had neglected to explore the various motives in the culture that might encourage the act. Without belief, the whole venture looks hollow. There are likely to be shrugs in all the wrong places.

Style is what is shared by characters in a play (or people in a group), while characterization is what makes them distinct from each other

All characters in a play share qualities, a collective characterization that ties them together. In some musicals, they all wear sequins and tap shoes (even to the office), and when someone says “I’ve got an idea!!!,” they all lean way in to him and shout “What??!!” simultaneously. Yet, the sweet hoofer from Kansas in the chorus is clearly different from the temperamental, vamping star, even in this “stylized” world. They share style, but as distinct entities within it.

The balance between interesting, idiosyncratic, even quirky character work and co...