Torment of Creativity.

I have over the years developed an active and healthy cynicism for the actor of today for whom any difficulties or failures, however slight, during rehearsals are seen as an emergency, which is quickly followed by a crisis of confidence, and hot on it’s heels by the actor declaiming the director for one who knows not what he wants.

For him everything that isn't achieved quickly is viewed with aversion; anything that requires exploration resisted with the fervor of Henry V’s army on St. Crispin’s Day; the very hint of an utterance, albeit as a low-pitched whisper, of the doom-laden word… improvise… received with an instant need to relieve himself, call his agent, or violently vomit into his text.
He seems quite content to poddle along; learning given words and perambulations, with the sole objective of repeating them as accurately as possible at given moments in front of an audience despite the presence of other actors onstage, who appear to him bent on providing as much distraction as possible to thwart his considerable performance.

This is the actor who has little understanding of Theatre and less of what it means to be an actor. For him his performance exists only as a platform for him to exhibit his prodigious skill of learning words and movements… with both occurring only from the neck up. He also considers all his roles as words spoken by him the actor, rather than as him the character, therefore Hamlet, Estragon, Lear, and Krapp, all appear as exactly the same character, only the words and the scenery differ.

I recently worked with such an actor who, when confronted in rehearsal with a young ensemble actor trained to use the body as an instrument of communication, remarked… “I’m amazed at how much movement you get into this scene.”.
Of course he wasn’t referring to ‘movement’: in his lazy, self-absorbed way he was referring to the ‘action’ that the young actor’s character felt provoked to perform, inspired by the words spoken in the given situation.
Many an hour was wasted during rehearsal in his attempts to limit the ‘Action’ of his fellow actors to levels which reduced the dangers of his experiencing dizziness through excessive turning of his head. (I do not apologize for the hyperbole.) To him all must occur as painlessly, and effortlessly as possible, it seems.
“Acting is about ‘Action’ and ‘Experience’, not words and movement” is an epigram far beyond this actor’s ability to comprehend.

But is it not true that every instant of true happiness is associated with suffering” Having a ‘Passion’ for the theatre means something rather special when one puts it in context of the original meaning of the word… ‘suffering’.
Perhaps it's because most of our torments are so superficial that today we have so little real profound happiness. The concept of 'the torment of creativity' has become old fashioned and has even disappeared from our vocabulary.

According to Stanislavsky the Theatre is spiritual, a living entity. It is a group of people who are united not only by performance on stage but also by shared ideas, shared values, by shared joys and misfortunes. The Art must be an actor’s all-consuming passion; it is not an job, rather it is a way of life.

There is a coarseness of acting techniques we observe today. Actors have lost the art of experiencing things physically on stage. An actor who doesn't know how to perfect his psycho-physical form and doesn't train every day, like a musician with his scales or a dancer with his barre, will develop an impenetrable layer of the armour of mediocrity instead of a fragile skin of creativity.

A true actor understands the need to create the complex human experience that is adsorbing to watch and that could be never achieved in a quickly created commercial performance that this actor delights in.