In my experience if you use any kind of technique as an actor and tell people you do, they will, 9 times out of 10, knowingly confirm for you… ‘ah, you’re a Method actor.’
James Dean
Well no, I’m definitely not.
As the extra classes continued above the pub so did regular classes and drama school life which included end of term assessments.
For my acting assessment I paired up with my flat mate to do a scene from a play whose title I can’t remember. The scene was a couple of guys fishing. We’d decided to go all-in applying what little we thought we understood of The Science of Acting, to the job in hand. You couldn’t fault us for our enthusiasm but it turned out to be a fantastic example of doing mostly what The Science of Acting isn’t.
We read the play and gleaned some relevant facts from the text that we were extremely keen to replicate in support of our scene and characterisations. Our characters needed bait for their fishing trip and just like they did, we kept that bait in our actual fridge; live earth worms, in milk. There they squirmed in a Tupperware box, for about a week…apart from when we decided to rehearse. Then, dressed in our winter coats we’d whisk them into my mates room and using a broom and a brolly for fishing rods, cotton thread for line and bent safety pins for hooks we’d do the scene. This involved skewering a couple of unlucky worms onto our safety pin hooks and casting them out onto the carpet. We thought we were doing a brilliant job, going the extra mile for our art and no amount of cleaning up worm-guts, mud and milk, could deter us.
What we were doing of course would be considered by many as ‘method acting’. Whether it’s fishing in your lounge, staying awake all night or remembering the pain of your own personal grief, they are all doing the same thing – substituting the characters experiences / thoughts, with your own…which is about as near a definition of method acting as I can get – it’s difficult to find one online amid all the confusion about it.
I’ll elaborate…
Stanislavski
Stanislavski had his first Studio of the M.A.T. (Moscow Arts Theatre) in 1912 and in it he developed his ‘system’. Amongst other topics like attention, relaxation, objectives, etc, he crucially introduced the concept of emotion memory (subsequently referred to by acting teaching luminaries as affective memory, emotional recall and sense memory which is kind of different, but also kind of the same).
At some point though and by the time of the Second Studio of the M.A.T. in 1916, Stanislavski had ‘abandoned’ and ‘rejected’ emotion memory in favour of a concept he referred to as physical action. He suggested emotion memory should only be used as a last resort presumably because he also said that using it had caused hysteria in some of his students.
However, two of Stanislavski’s students from the first Studio, Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya chose to ignore that when they emigrated to the US and taught what they had learned of Stansialvski’s system, including emotion memory, at the American Laboratory Theatre which they established in 1923. Three of their students were Lee Strasburg, Stella Adler and Harold Clurman who went on to form the Group Theatre which also had Sanford Meisner and Elia Kazan amongst its members.
It then seems that Lee Strasburg developed ‘The Method’ as in ‘Method acting’, based on what he was taught at The American Laboratory Theatre and he particularly embraced the concept of emotion memory (he called it affective memory) which Stanislavski had long since changed his views on.
Accordingly, Strasburg is known as the father of ‘Method acting’ and as such you’d think he’d be able to tell you what it is. I looked and found this cryptic reference on the Lee Strasburg Theatre and Film Institute website:
‘So what is Method Acting? As Lee Strasberg said, Method Acting is what all actors have always done whenever they acted well. But The Method–it’s how you get there.’
Sounds impressive, suitably full of intellectual mystique but it simply doesn’t answer the question at all and no one is any the wiser.
Part of the continuing confusion about method acting seems to be that both Adler and Meisner are also considered method acting teachers…
…but they weren’t.
Strasburg, Adler and Meisner
In fact both of them parted ways with Strasburg over his interpretation of Stanislavski’s teachings particularly the use of affective memory, so why would they teach ’The Method’ something that Strasburg himself alone devised? They both developed their own techniques which are sometimes referred to, online anyway, as their versions of Method acting while simultaneously being described as different from Method acting.
There is also more confusion over which actors are Method actors.
Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando is considered a titan amongst Method actors but he never trained with Strasburg. He was taught by Stella Adler and therefore he cannot be described as a ‘Method actor’… on Brando’s page on the Stella Adler Studio of Acting website, the word ‘Method’ never appears. He attended the Actor’s Studio in 1948 before Strasburg became its director in 1951 and according to him, he only went for Elia Kazan’s classes and to check out the girls.
Daniel Day-Lewis…
… another method actor right?
Wrong.
He was trained at Bristol Old Vic drama school in the UK not by Strasberg or presumably anyone else using ‘The Method.’ Ironically one of the things Day-Lewis is associated with is staying in character all the time which is a common misconception of what method acting entails. This practise was, in fact, rejected by Lee Strasberg.
The confusion continues with the Actor’s Studio where Meisner seems to have considered himself a main teacher, presumably teaching his own technique. He was very perturbed that Strasberg claimed singular credit for having trained the many stars that passed through the Actor’s Studio, who were accordingly labelled, ‘Method actors’.
I could go on and on and dig and dig but all the confusion claims and counter-claims detract from what is the central issue with method acting, no matter how well it has been marketed…
It doesn’t work.
Yes sure, if your character has a scene in a sauna in the play and you personally never had one then if you can, do so, to experience it physiologically. See how the senses respond to it, see how it works, how it is built, what it smells like. But if you can’t then simply read about it, research it and imagine it. After all, if you have to kill someone in the next scene you can’t go out and really do that to see what it is like and rather obviously that’s the first issue with Method acting.
The second is that when you are substituting in your own thoughts for the character’s, your thoughts are a result of experiences you had in your own life. They come with the associated pictures and impressions that constitute complexes formed in your own life and not the character’s. So if I’m playing a boxer in 1930’s New York whose father has disowned him and I substitute in my own thoughts about my own mother’s recent passing in present day England to trigger suitable emotions, there are going to be all kinds of thoughts present in my head from my own life that have nothing to do with my character’s life.
Third is that re-living your own emotional trauma over and over seems like a bad idea when considering your own mental health. Maybe it was this process that led to the hysteria Stanislavski witnessed and why the use of emotion memory became something he warned against.
So that’s my take on Method acting. How does The Science of Acting compare?
Sam Kogan
The difference is night and day. Both techniques have their roots in Stanislavski’s teachings yes, but one is steadfastly based on the blind acceptance of an abandoned, faulty, unworkable concept, while the other asks new questions and finds new answers inspired by the same constant, methodical purpose which inspired Stanislavski himself; to find out what good acting is and to comprehensively understand how to achieve it so actors can be taught how to create characters that live on stage as we do in life.
So back to us and our worms and the impending assessment. Though we were showing willing, most actors do, we were pretty wide of the mark in acting terms. We made the same mistake those well-intentioned folk did at the start of this post and lumped this Science of Acting stuff under the umbrella of Method acting – ‘it’s all the same shit anyway, isn’t it?’
We did the assessment and were deemed good enough to keep our places at Mountview, our willingness carried us through. Meanwhile, in spite of Sam’s classes and the frequent, illuminating, mind-blowing moments in them, I allowed myself only the vaguest notion that perhaps The Science of Acting wasn’t anything like the ‘same shit’.
It would be some time however, years in fact, until I would finally grasp just how completely unparalleled and life-changing a body of knowledge it was that I had been exposed to. So profound an experience was it to become that I always find it difficult to put it into words. I think a fellow actor, Richard Brake who also studied with Sam, said it best when he described The Science of Acting as ‘the atom bomb of acting techniques’.
Richard Brake
I completely get what he means. In an industry that cloaks itself in mysterious ambiguity, The Science of Acting offers such a powerful clarity of understanding that it makes every stock-in-trade turn of phrase and hackneyed, archaic attitude, pale into insignificance.
So there you have it. The Science of Acting. It’s definitely not Method.