Teaching Actors

Knowledge Transfer in Actor Training

Ross W. Prior

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781841506982
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Teaching Actors draws on history, literature, and original research conducted across leading drama schools in England and Australia, to offer those involved in actor training a critical framework within which to think about their work. Prior, who brings to this volume more than twenty years of experience as both a teacher and performer in the field, devotes particular attention to the different ways in which teachers and students acquire and share knowledge through practical craft-based experience. The first book-length treatment of how actor trainers work—and understand their work—Teaching Actors will be an invaluable educational resource in an increasingly important area of theatre training and research.

Chapter 1

Historical Background

HAMLET:
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced
it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth
it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-
crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too
much with your hand, thus; but use all gently: for
in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) the
whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and I beget
a temperance, that may give it smoothness. O! it
offends me to the soul, to hear a robustious periwig-
pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears
of the groundlings; who, for the most
part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-
shows, and noise.
– William Shakespeare
(Hamlet, Act III, sc. ii, lines 1–13)

In recent times we have seen a proliferation of university degrees and courses in acting, drama, performance and various specialisms within theatre. Curiously this rise in interest has been at a time when there is a significant decline in available jobs within the industry. The increasing popularity of drama and theatre as secondary school disciplines indicates that this trend may continue for some time unless the growing rise in tuition fees slows it down. Undoubtedly the abundance of television talent shows has had something to do with the increased desire to seek fame. Whilst initially it may seem curious, I believe the answer also comes from an understanding and belief in theprocess of drama. As many educationalists know, the drama process offers new and engaging ways of learning. The broad applicability of drama as a way of understanding oneself, other people and the world, would seem to have something to do with this increasing trend. I believe we are seeing a global reaction to twentieth-century assumptions that suggested all could be measured and implicit trust given to scientific objectivity. Aesthetic education puts humans back in touch with their ability to feel as well as think.

Of course the ability to help peoplefeel in addition tothink has always been an actor’s job. But how has the job of acting been learnt? How has acting been taught and by whom? The history of actor training is an interesting journey that has been documented by other writers (e.g. Nicoll 1976; Harrop 1992). It is nonetheless worth reminding ourselves briefly of the origins of actor training and the eventual development into formalised drama school training with the birth of what is typically called the drama school.

Genesis of Actor Training

Actor training is firmly rooted in historical practices themed by a tradition of apprenticeship andlearning by doing. Acting, particularly in the western world, has been seen by some throughout the years as a rather dubious undertaking and at times as a challenge to the fabric of society itself. ‘Plato regarded actors as hypocrites, players of illusion and falsifiers of truth’ (Harrop 1992: 109). This began what appears to be a fascinating paradox, where actors were responsible for revealing truths; yet they were themselves pretending.

Although institutionalised actor training is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon (Harrop 1992), its roots are as old as acting itself – dating from the beginning of the fifth century bc. It is likely that the Choruses of Greek drama were trained, particularly in the area of voice control. In the canon of literature Thespis is credited with the distinction of having introduced the first actor as distinct from the choral leader in the sixth century bc. Ever since Pisistratus established the first dramatic festival (Nicoll 1976) the competitive nature of these events provided the necessary impetus for actors to develop their craft.

Medieval drama in France, Italy and England offered no such competition as was formerly evidenced in ancient Greece. One sixteenth-century record offers this fascinating critique of the actors who performed in mystery plays:

[Actors are] an ignorant set of men, mechanics and artisans, who know not an A from a B, untrained and unskilled in playing such pieces before the public. Their voices are poor, their language unfitting, their pronunciation wretched. No sense do they have of the meaning of what they say.

(Cited in Nicoll 1976: 112)

Whilst many participants in these dramas took their work seriously, they were largely amateurs. Professional entertainers such as minstrels andjongleurs(an early version of mime artists) were increasingly used to support the plays (Nicoll 1976), which no doubt offered audiences an element of observable cleverness and skill.

By the sixteenth century, professional and amateur players proliferated in English and European towns; however the court plays were becoming increasingly more professional. Queen Elizabeth I and her court came to depend more upon the skilled services of professional players than upon amateur actors. ‘Companies of boys [the Children of Paul’s, the Children of the Chapel and the Queen’s Revels, and the Children of Windsor] became, in Elizabeth’s reign, virtually professionals’ (Nicoll 1976: 199). However, these boys were disparagingly described by Rosencrantz in Shakespeare’s Hamlet as ‘an aery of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for’t’ (Act II, sc. ii). A growing interest in the stage by adult males formed numerous professional companies of players. The construction of the Theatre by James Burbage in 1576 saw the beginning of many purpose-built theatres in London.

In the East, drama was also developing its own traditions and conventions of actor training.¹ The Japanese Kabuki, developed at the beginning of the seventeenth century and was derived from the Chinese culture. It employs precise, familiar, conventionalised movements and gestures. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Kanami Kiyotsugu and his son Seami Motokiyo developed Nō drama that also retained the precision of prescriptive rule-based traditional actor training (Nicoll 1978). Similarly, Kathakali from southern India is another example of early eastern actor training. Kathakali is described by Phillip Zarrilli as ‘a rigorous and arduous process of transmission of embodied performance knowledge achieved through constant, daily repletion of basic exercises’ (2000: 66).

It is quite possible to draw an analogy between Kathakali’s notion of the actor becoming one with the character and how some western actors trained in Stanislavskian methodology might describe acting (Zarrilli 2000: 65). Indeed, eastern theatre and its techniques began to influence western theatre training from the first part of the twentieth century (Hodge 2000) with a continual and growing interest in more systematic approaches to actor training.

Birth of the British Drama School

Drama schools, as we understand them today, did not exist in England at the turn of the twentieth century. Cohen (1998) claims that the American Academy of Dramatic Arts established in 1884 is the oldest acting school in the English-speaking world. Rideout (1995), however, claims that the earliest record of a drama school in England was located in Dean Street, Soho, on the site of London’s old Royalty Theatre. Rideout’s research suggests a Miss Fanny Kelly established the school there in 1834. By 1837 she had built a small theatre there called the Duke’s Theatre and the Royal Dramatic School was attached to it (Rideout 1995). Situated much further north in Glasgow is the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, formerly the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD), which is reputed to be the first performance institution of its type established in the United Kingdom in 1847 (RSAMD Prospectus 2001–2002). The building originally opened as a music academy only, under the name the Royal Scottish Academy of Music, and in 1950 the College of Drama was founded. In 1968 the academy adopted the name of Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD), which reflected its new commitment to drama as well as music (RSAMD website n.d.). The growing breadth of disciplines was the catalyst for its most recent name change to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland on 1 September 2011, and now claims ‘the curriculum will create the space for disciplinary excellence, choice and transdisciplinary co-creation and will underpin our position as a new-model of conservatoire for the 21st century’ (RCS website n.d.).

Drama schools in the United Kingdom began as a direct response to the demise of the ‘old stock system’, which was replaced by the ‘long run’ (Cairns 1996: 71). The drama school was seen by some as the answer to providing ‘quality’ training for actors. Music academies such as the London Academy of Music (now LAMDA – London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art) offered voice production and elocution. It was founded in 1861 making LAMDA ‘the oldest’ continuing academy in London (LAMDA Prospectus 2001: 1). The London Academy of Music had been giving some acting tuition since 1904, but it was not until 1938 that Wilfred Foulis introduced a one-year full-time acting course and the academy subsequently changed its name to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA).

The Guildhall School of Music (founded in 1880) evolved some nineteen years later than LAMDA. By 1935, and in keeping with the developing trend, the Guildhall School of Music also added ‘drama’ to its title (Martin 1991). There were, however, several training companies already established in the 1880s, such as Frank Benson’s Shakespeare Company that was founded in 1883, Sarah Thorne’s at the Theatre Royal, Margate, in 1885 and Ben Greet’s Academy of Acting in Bedford Street, the Strand, in 1896 (Martin 1991).

In the 1890s Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree encouraged the establishment of a drama academy, and in 1904 he started a drama school in his own theatre (His Majesty’s Theatre) in the Haymarket, London (RADA website n.d.). Its popularity soon grew and in 1905 it was moved to a house in Gower Street where it still resides. It eventually became the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), which is ‘probably still the most famous theatre school in the world’ (Rideout 1995: 4). RADA claims its distinctiveness to be found in ‘the extraordinary level of personalisation throughout all the training – the skills of highly experienced specialists are harnessed in providing a training tailored to the needs of each individual student’(RADA website n.d.).

Soon afterwards Elsie Fogerty founded the Central School of Speech and Drama in 1906. Central School offered an entirely new form of training, one that (as the name suggests) did not ‘confine itself to a single educational model’ (CSSD 2001: 7) but rather took a ‘central position’ in the type of training it provided. In 1956 the Central School moved from the Royal Albert Hall, where Elsie Fogerty had originally joined Sir Frank Benson in rooms there, which, according to Martin (1991), led to the founding of the country’s first speech clinic at Saint Thomas’s Hospital. The new home of the Central School was the Embassy Theatre, Swiss Cottage, in the London Borough of Camden. In recent years the Central School of Speech and Drama has proliferated its courses offering many areas of study.

Rose Bruford, who began her career as a student at the Central School for Speech and Drama, established the Rose Bruford College in 1950 (Rose Bruford College Prospectus 2001–2). She taught at the Central School and at the Royal Academy of Music, and in 1948 published her book Speech and Drama for teachers. In 1950, with £600 she set up her own drama school, and the Kent Education Committee offered her the use of Lamorbey House (Rose Bruford College Prospectus 2001–2). In that same year the College was recognised by the Department of Education and Science. Rose Bruford developed a unique single course that combined actor and teacher training. She was principal from 1950 until retirement in 1967 (Rose Bruford College Prospectus 2001–2). The University of Manchester now validates Rose Bruford’s undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Rose Bruford College was the first drama school to offer an acting degree in the United Kingdom in 1976 (Rose Bruford College Prospectus 2001–2). The college claims to be ‘the most popular institution of its kind in the United Kingdom’ (Rose Bruford College website n.d.).

Whilst there are a number of other notable drama schools in Britain, the ones mentioned do give a flavour of the historical developments that are both unique and shared. The most common factor that the majority of drama schools share is that they grew out of the Victorian academies of music and opera and out of private tuition for elocution and deportment (Rideout 1995). Their existence came about through the need to provide singers with more accomplished acting and performance skills. Actor training was now set on a course that would see the demise of on-the-job company training as apprentices in favour of actor training as a form of institutionalised vocational schooling.

It should also be noted that the loss of the British repertory system further increased the need for training, which was once done more or less on the job. The current shape of the three-year acting degree reflects what was once a two-year certificate plus a third year to permit greater performance experience – the kind that repertory once offered the debutant professional actor.

The Australian Scene

Naturally, Australian drama schools do not have quite the same long history as their Northern Hemisphere counterparts; however Australian actor training does have close historical links with the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Prior to the establishment of major Australian drama schools, many of those wishing to study acting had to do so in Britain or the United States. Parsons (1995) suggests that continuous professional theatre began in Sydney and Hobart in the 1830s. Many of the earliest professional actors came to Australia from England. These included William Creswick in 1877 and Charles Mathews in 1870, who both brought their performance skills to the Australian stage. In the absence of much organised actor training, ‘tradition was highly valued on the professional stage in Australia, and actors learnt their craft by imitating’ (Parsons 1995: 18).

Without the kinds of Australian drama schools that exist today, in 1907 the influential American-born actor, entrepreneur and theatre manager J. C. Williamson advised ‘every humble performer’ to ‘make his closet his college and tutor himself’ (Parsons 1995: 19). However, many older actors ran private classes of their own. Considered amongst the best known were Philip Lytton in Sydney and Melbourne (c.1900) (Parsons 1995: 333) and Mrs G. B. W. Lewis in Melbourne. In the early twentieth century Gregan McMahon in Sydney and Agnes Rahilly in Brisbane supplemented their work by forming training companies (1995: 19).

Dissatisfied by the state of Australian theatre, Allan Ashbolt, Peter Finch, Sydney John Kay, Colin Scrimgeour and John Wiltshire founded the Mercury Theatre in Sydney in 1946. Subsequently the Mercury Theatre School was formed, where Allan Ashbolt lectured students on theatre history and Peter Finch taught Stanislavsky-based acting. The Mercury Theatre closed its operation in 1953 (Parsons 1995: 363–64).

Hayes Gordon, an American actor who had studied acting with Lee Strasberg and Sanford Meisner in New York, contributed to the post-war development of Australian actor training. Gordon taught acting from the time he arrived in Australia in 1952. He was brought to Australia by J. C. Williamson to star in Kiss Me Kate. Importing lead actors and even complete casts to Australia from the US and Britain to perform in major productions was common practice at the time (Parsons 1995: 18). Gordon commenced his teaching in Australia by giving backstage classes for the cast of Kiss Me Kate. These classes eventually grew into the Ensemble Theatre, which he established in Sydney, in 1958. Hayes Gordon directed over 60 productions for the Ensemble Theatre and classes were held at the theatre at the weekends. At this time the classes were in acting theory, conducted solely by Gordon. Students were expected to find their own voice and movement teachers, as the facilities at the theatre did not support these types of classes.² Actors attending classes provided virtually all the casts in Ensemble Theatre productions. In 1973 Gordon formalised the classes and established the school, subsequently named the Ensemble Studios (Ensemble Studios website n.d.).

The National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) is Australia’s most famous drama school. It is an independent school established in 1958. NIDA is located in the Sydney suburb of Kensington, New South Wales. NIDA continues to maintain close links with its founding sponsors, The University of New South Wales and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It is an independent company incorporated under the corporations’ law rather than operating as part of a university. NIDA offers five full-time Bachelor degree courses. They are Acting (acting stream and music theatre stream), Design, Production, Costume, Properties, plus Directing (Graduate diploma and Masters degree only) and Playwriting (G...