Instant Acting, an article by Phelim McDermott

In the making of THEATRE OF BLOOD we used a rehearsal technique called the "Whelan Recording Technique."

In 1995 I caught sight of a book about acting in a bookshop. The first thing that drew my attention was its title. I remember thinking it was a bad title for a book if it wanted to attract British theatre practitioners. It was called Instant Acting Working “hard” and putting yourself through a difficult rehearsal process seems to have currency in most British theatre. The idea of an acting technique which is “instant” feels alien. In other words it sounded far too much like cheating! I bought the book immediately. From the moment I began reading, I knew I had stumbled across a technique which was incredibly exciting and close to my heart. It was new but I realised it was what I had been looking for, as a director, in my work with text. For many years I had been struggling with the gulf between what happened in the improvised theatre that I did and my work on written plays. The text-based work never quite had the same quality of excitement or relationship to the audience that the impro shows seemed to have.

In the rehearsal room I’d always be dealing with actors who carried the ghost of a script in their hands, sometimes right up to the moment they were onstage and then on into performance. Most of the rehearsal time was spent not rehearsing but trying to deal with how to get the painful memory of line learning out of their bodies. Discussions about what the text "meant" did not seem to enable the actors but to hinder them and freeze the choices their bodies had. The input I gave to the scenes they were doing, either positive or negative, seemed to immediately to limit the work they were doing. The decisions they were making were mine not theirs and it bored me. I went to the theatre and saw actors playing choices made for them by directors, and it depressed me. Actors were being disempowered.

One of the ways that I had tried to deal with the line-learning issue was to use a Spolin exercise I had learnt from Keith Johnstone called "Dubbing". In my version this involved actors offstage reading the words for the onstage actors who just moved their lips so they got a chance to play the scenes themselves without having to worry about whether they knew their lines. It was exciting and useful but the lines never quite got into their skin.

In Instant Acting, Jeremy Whelan had taken this basic idea and run with it in a way which was simple but also a stroke of genius. The technique involves recording the text, very simply and clearly, without deciding how you play it emotionally. Then, as it is played back, the actors work the scene to the tape without speaking but exploring the emotions between them. It is what it says on the cover of the book: "Instant acting". You play the scene straight away, then once you've done it in the space you re-record and do it again. This process continues, exploring different games and ways of playing to the recordings as you go. The actors are never allowed to do the scene the same way. After they've done it about five different ways they then play it off-book. What is amazing is that they remember 70-80% of the text without ever having learnt their lines. They also haven't decided how to play the lines in isolation but discovered how, in the theatrical space, in interaction with each other.

As a director the challenge here is to resist the temptation to fix things, to set what they have done because you think it's the best way they will come up with of doing the scene. The temptation is great. Not only to feel you are getting somewhere but also to prove you are doing your job properly. However the essence of impro is to keep the performers and the audience in the unknown so that they stay engaged. Time and again I have seen performers play the scene in a way that seems definitive, only to be surprised when they come up with an even better way. I now know there is no definitive way and that if you trust them to play the scene the way that is best in the moment, they will find that each night. You also have to sit with them and ‘hold the pot’ when they get lost and feel helpless. As Joan Littlewood said "If we don't get lost, how will we ever discover something new?" In my experience, if you can resist this temptation, actors always come up with better ideas than you, and any honest director will admit that the ideas he or she has in rehearsals are actually only bringing into focus ideas that the actors are beginning to manifest.

To work with instant acting takes a certain kind of director. I have used this process on six major shows now and I never cease to be amazed at how it supports actors’ creativity and courage. As a practice it fundamentally encourages them to believe in their own impulses and intuition. It is invigoratingly joyful and, as with all true play, it takes performers into places of vulnerability and excitement their heads would never choose to lead them. It also puts them at their edges, there is no choice but to be vulnerable. Exactly what an audience longs to see onstage; theatre is usually about people in situations of vulnerability where the great forces of the universe are acting upon them. As I have used the technique more I have become more confident about its value and less controlling as a director.

As I write, we are in our fifth week of rehearsal for THEATRE OF BLOOD and are still playing with the script in different ways. It is our intention to keep playing as we go into previews, and beyond, in order to find new and exciting ways of performing it. Maybe it will become set or maybe it will continue to change but our intention is to make a play that has the vibrancy and immediacy of an improvised show whilst really doing justice to the script we have created. With luck, there will be new discoveries up until the last performance.

Our anti-hero, Edward Lionheart, is not just an enemy of the critics he is also a champion of unbridled, outrageous theatricality. Perhaps thanks to "Instant acting" we will be able to give you a flavour of that sort of theatre.

© Phelim McDermott, April 2005