Directing theatre: helping your actors to develop character

What is meant by character in the theater?  Is it in the writing?  Is it in the acting?  Is it the actor’s job to create character, or is it the director’s role to dictate it? 

Amateur productions are often populated by performances in which vocal and physical energy are mistaken for character acting.  In this article I am going to propose that real visible character is rooted in tiny moments of spontaneity and subtleties of tone, and set out one way to get your actors to the place where they can show it.

While it is very definitely the director’s job to manage the dynamics of each scene, this does not mean the successful dynamics will be dependent on a particular expectation of character.  However, by focusing on dynamics, you will be plotting a dramatic route for each character that will help the actor to shape the character to the action; characters learn about themselves from the actions in which they are involved, as people do.

There may occasionally be the need for some large broad interventions on the part of the director, but on the whole the process of character making is the business of the actor, and if the director has enough time in rehearsal to pay attention to character building as a process separate from the scene dynamics, then they are probably not giving enough attention to the dynamics.

So the advice is that, as a director, your interventions on character building will be indirect, and will arise from your management of scene dynamics.  This means that the processes around character building belong to the actor; are there things that you can do as a director to help the actor? 

It is likely that an actor of limited experience or training will have a confused view of characterization.  In the amateur theatre they will see performances that are physically and vocally energetic, but have negligible distinct characterization.  They will hear people describing Hollywood stars as people who ‘play themselves’.  They will hear directors saying that good acting is invisible (which it is), an idea which suggests that any departures into visible characterization are likely to lead to bad or hammy acting.

In fact a characterization is a negotiated balance between the individual creating the role and the written entity.  It cannot be detached entirely from the personality of the actor, nor should it.  Two actors creating the same role should not be expected to arrive at the same result. 

There are a couple of familiar clichés that are useful: ‘actions speak louder than words’, and ‘a drunkard speaks a sober mans word’.

Both of these ideas imply that truth can be found in the involuntary response.  No matter what pronouncements a warrior may make to build up the impression of his own bravery, nothing will convey the truth about him more swiftly and absolutely than his reaction when he comes under attack.  Either way, we learn something about him; if he flees we assume he is a coward with limited self-knowledge, or worse, the tendency to misrepresent himself.  If he stands his ground and embarks on a violent slaying spree he satisfies our expectations of him, but his account of himself goes unchallenged.  Either way we have seen him in a state of involuntary response. 

As anthropologists tell us, our involuntary responses as human beings are similar and predictable.  If you have any doubt about this, look around you the next time you're watching a comedy in a theatre.  Everybody laughs, broadly, at the same things.  If we weren't broadly similar in our involuntary responses, then comedic theatre, or perhaps any mass medium would not be possible.  Involuntary responses may provide the bare bones of character, but they are certainly not the whole story.

They provide a starting point, however.  When you're directing your actors, it can be useful to spend some time with them identifying points in the text where they lose possession of the power in the situation, where they become reactive, perhaps as a result of some surprise, or something unexpected, or because another character asserts themselves at somebody's expense.  By exploring the text in this way you are directing your actors towards involuntary response, towards surprise and spontaneity, and you start create the possibility of apparently spontaneous acting.  Nothing is quite so truthful in a performance than the persuasive depiction of total surprise, and when we see what surprises a character we catch a glimpse of their innermost workings.  As a feature of a rehearsal, you begin to give the actors a real experience of the possibilities that are open to them.

As we all know, self knowledge contributes to character as we mature.  We learn about our own involuntary responses and we develop ways to protect ourselves, to shield our vulnerability.  We all know people who protect themselves with sarcasm or humour, or have developed compensatory mechanisms to fend off disappointment.  In essence these defensive strategies are all about one thing: coping with involuntary response, hiding the weakness that threatens to emerge when we are caught unawares.

These accommodations can be extremely subtle, and their subtlety is a proportional response to the subtlety of a threat to our vulnerability. 

Consider this scenario.  A man in his mid-forties is chatting with a pretty girl in her twenties.  As he does so a younger man walks by.  Nothing happens.  There are no words exchanged, nothing that suggests a threat.    But in the older man's mind, perhaps not even consciously, there is a detection of the appearance of foolishness, a threat, unspoken, unconsolidated, that for a second takes charge of his actions; it’s the moment of involuntary response. 

If the involuntary response is left unlegislated, as it were, what will happen?  He may blush, look down at the floor, break off his conversation.  It’s the response of a teenager.  With his years of maturity, he’s learned not to be fooled, and he reacts with a counteraction.  He takes his mobile phone from his pocket under the pretext of checking the text messages, or perhaps he moves away from the girl and looks down the street.  Either way he has carried out a strategic response to diffuse the moment that threatens his possession of the voluntary.  This is ironic, of course, because by doing so, he is still reacting, still providing an involuntary response, but it is at least one that is in his control.  Perhaps he stares haughtily at the young man, or gets himself into the girl’s field of vision, and discreetly evaluates the young man’s dress sense as he goes by.  These are all legislated actions that cover up or compensate for involuntary responses, and they all give us subtle signals about his character.  While the involuntary response provides the root of the character, it is the coping mechanism that shows the flower of the character.

Try this exercise.  On a plain sheet of paper draw a horizontal line, left to right and bisect it at its centre point.  On the left of the centre point write the word voluntary, on the right write the word involuntary.  This is, of course, a scale of control. 

At any point in a scene, all of its characters are somewhere on that line.  And no matter how far they may be to the left hand side, they can be propelled to the far side in a split second.  This is one of the features of drama, one of its comic features, and (as is often observed) one of its tragic features as well. 

As a director, the position your characters occupy on this line is very much your business.  Changes in the power state of the play are the fundamental currency of the drama, of its dynamics, and by directing the dynamics you will produce an interpretation of lean muscularity and drama.

As for the legislations, the layers of traits, the sarcasm, the nervousness, or anxiety, or shyness, or defensiveness that the actor develops to help bed their character down on the left side of the scale, provided they don’t interfere with the dynamics, they are entirely the actor’s business.

In conclusion, its worth noting that character building is a gloriously inexact science.  As a director it is your job to design rehearsals that facilitate growth of character.  As suggested above, you can get a considerable amount done by directing the dynamics, and by supporting the actor’s discovery of their character’s moments of most pronounced involuntary vulnerability.  While experienced actors may lift these moments of vulnerability into complex managed character reactions, actors of limited experience may think that’s where the process ends.  Having exposed the vulnerability, you should encourage your actors to investigate ways in which they can use the vulnerability as a touchstone in the development of the character, but tread lightly.  Telling an actor what they should do to show character will lead to a low quality experience for both the actor and the audience.  And be mindful that character building is not exact, it is not causal, even.  By working towards it, you may find that it leads to some very strange, unpredictable and seemingly unsuccessful moments in rehearsal, but as long as you are supportive and positive, the actor will, in nearly every case, go through a watershed moment when everything falls suddenly into place, not necessarily in a way the work seems to have been leading, but a result, nonetheless, of the process.