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Journalism of Courage
When one meets a stranger at a party, social etiquette demands that one asks the usual lead-in question, "So, what do you do?" If he answers with a `normal’ profession, the conversation rarely goes beyond perfunctory chit chat. One never, for example, asks a ball-bearing manufacturer for an in-depth, step-by-step description of how he produces gyro-sprockets. Unless, perhaps, one happens to be a rival ball-bearing manufacturer.
How come a mathematician can recite page after page of algebraic formulae, but can’t remember his own wife’s birthday? We are the same. We have selective memories. We can effortlessly remember what interests us. During the lengthy rehearsal of a play, we slowly get under the skin of a character. We begin to understand where he comes from, what makes him tick, and how he fits into the scheme of things. His thoughts and words become ours. Slowly, the moves given to us, the handling of props and the behaviour of the other actors trigger off lines and thoughts in our hands. We fully understand the story, and suddenly lines stop being lines. They become gut responses.
Ask me to memorise a two-hour long play, and I can do it effortlessly. Ask me to memorise two paragraphs of a History textbook, and I will fail the exam.
What happens when you forget lines onstage? Do you have prompters?
Prompters became obsolete along with the caveman and the corset. Forgetting lines is not usual, but we are human — it does sometimes happen. However, the actor is aware of exactly what his character is feeling and thinking at any given point, and can therefore improvise without the audience ever being aware that his knees are knocking. If you are in a kindergarten play, you are permitted to burst into tears, drum your fists on the floor and wail, "I want my Mommie!"
Don’t you get bored rehearsing for acting in a long-running play?
Rehearsals are periods of excitement and discovery. The role teases and titilates you, revealing bits and pieces of itself to you as and when it pleases. Slowly, a character starts to come alive within you, a person with different thoughts and emotions, housed within your body. The scripts reveal new twists and turns you never saw before, seducing you into following it on a mysterious journey. Boring? No. Exciting, infuriating, frustrating, enthralling, mindboggling? Yes.
During the run of a play, you are priviliged to go through the character’s life-experience in full, night after night. You soar with his highs, despair with his downs and revel in a strange mind not your own. Each night, the audience is fresh and different, responding collectively in new and exciting ways. The actor’s task is to reach out figurative arms and carry them with him on a mystical journey. Boring? Impossible.
Do you carry the role home with you? Does it affect your personal life?
Only a highly unprofessional, indisciplined, self-indulgent actor takes the role home with him. Part of the actor’s technique is to be able to cut off after a performance, allow for a brief spill-over period, and then `return to himself’. God help the family of an actor who takes the role home with him, especially if he is playing a psychotic killer.
However, each role does affect the actor, as he has to thoroughly explore and understand the psyche of the character he is playing. So each role, vicariously, enriches his own life-experience, and hopefully, makes him a more understanding and tolerant human being.
Are you like the character you are playing?
We always use bits and pieces of ourselves in each part we create, but mainly, we are playing a character. Poor Joan Collins, after a highly successful stint as the bitchy and manipulative Allexis Colby in Dynasty
, tearfully told reporters that she was close to a breakdown after years of constant verbal abuse from irate viewers at shopping malls, and being degraded and spat at on the streets by members of the public, who were unable to separate her on-screen personna from her, the actress.
Isn’t it glamourous being on a film set?
Ha! Ha! Ha! Try standing in the sun, in 42 degree heat, clothes sticking to you, make-up and perspiration dripping down your forehead and nose, squinting at the glare of reflector boards or harsh lights, and then doing 19 takes. After a couple of hours, your head starts to swim, your eyes are bloodshot, your brain shuts down and you have no idea what you are saying. Then try and play a calm, cool, composed scene.
Yeah, yeah, so all this acting is great time-pass, but when are you going to get a real job?
Instructions to all actors who get asked this one: Words are not necessary. Just reach for the nearest heavy object and pound that person repeatedly over the head, several times, hard.
Sohrab Ardeshir is a stage actor.
