( 2 Votes )

Why do we act? There are so many answers. We begin our careers in happy ignorance, like those police recruits who join up because they think the uniform is rather sexy. Michael Caine began classes in High School because he was no good at sport and noticed that acting classes were inhabited by mostly good looking girls (and still are). At some early stage we feel the power of pure talent in ourselves.

Later we become submerged in the business of training then acting and in time this initial experience of pure child-like joy can be forgotten. Yet if we persevere, escaping our inevitable moments of negativity, cynicism and bitterness, it is because we re-learn how to love what we do, to the point where acting becomes serious play. Its no surprise that the Russians dont have a word to act. They say "egrat", to play.

Most of us undergo some period of training, often part-time, gleefully cast aside as soon as it's object is realized: the signing of a reputable agent, then our first acting jobs. Whereupon we enter a strange artistic no-mans land. From a space where our teachers do not act but purport to know what's wrong with ours, we step, trained and 'ready' into a working environment where we will rarely get told what is good in our work, and certainly never what is wrong: few directors have a clue how to remedy that. Instead the phone stops ringing, and we are none the wiser. We must learn how to be our own teachers, mentors and friends. No one else is there to help us in this.

What an extraordinarily unsupported career acting has become! My respect for actors is immense. Contrast almost any other profession with ours: there are regular conferences, guild-meetings, industry get-togethers, up-skilling seminars, all of them useful and practical. The acting equivalent is the acting class. However these classes almost entirely are aimed at novice actors and teach to a level that any respectable professional actor has already attained. Masterclasses, which pop up from time to time, are a more viable alternative. Yet the teachers of these courses often have scant experience of the industry or have chosen to opt out of it. The standard of participant is also too often compromised in the interests of filling the class and making money.

There is an assumption at work here that work AND unemployment alone are sufficient artistic and emotional food for the seasoned professional actors. It is, of course, nonsense.

Peter Brook, the British Theatre Director, wrote in his book 'The Empty Space' of the artistic aimlessness of the professional actor. We actors very rarely have anyone who we can call a mentor, a past master of our craft who can guide our artistic growth. Contrast the opera singer or ballet dancer who, throughout their creative lives, can usefully return to such a figure. Instead actors move from job to job, director to director, and, as they get older, work frequently with collaborators less experienced than themselves. So spoke Burt Reynolds of Boogie Nights director Paul Thomas Anderson: 'I have socks older than him.'

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