It’s such a joy to see people doing the repetition exercise and discovering how a seemingly banal observation can bring out all sorts of reactions in the other person if that person is truly listening and taking it personally. Meisner spoke a lot about taking things personally. In real life, if someone says something that hurts us and we don’t have a very close relationship with them (and sometimes even or especially if we do) we brush it off or pretend it didn’t affect us. We don’t call it out and stand up for ourselves because we’re afraid of conflict and we’re afraid that it will cause us more pain if we really let the hurtful words in.

In acting, we have to learn to take things personally otherwise we won’t ever come alive. Learning to do this is a whole journey and it’s a huge part of what we learn when we first start to do the Meisner exercises. It’s fascinating to see people’s defence mechanisms when they begin, the little tricks they sew together into a full suit of armour: The nervous laughter, the ironic replies and the fake bravado. When you fully commit to the exercises, that armour will start to fall off, bit by bit, leaving you vulnerable and open to your fellow actors and to the power of your own imagination.

Of course, our egos wouldn’t survive the real world without some armour but many adult actors have picked up so much that they struggle to relate to another person unless they can do it through the foil of a character. Meisner exercises teach us to deal with ourselves first. We cannot learn to play characters freely, with access to the whole range of human emotions, if we don’t allow ourselves to experience them first. So many people have said to me “I could never be an actor because I’m no good at hiding my feelings” and yet that is precisely what we need in our actors. Acting is revealing not concealing.

Cultural context also plays a role here. Most adults I know, and I come from the UK, where people are known to have stiff upper lips and an abrasive and self-deprecating sense of humour, are taught that showing emotion in public is simply not done. (Of course, I am also 475 and younger generations are definitely more emotionally open.)

So what does taking things personally look like? It means that when someone says something to you in an exercise, you take it as you would if someone really close to you had said it. To give an example, in the course of the repetition exercise one student tells another she is “arrogant”. She is clearly upset by this – we can all see this immediately from her behaviour – but both students then brush it away and the moment is lost. If they acknowledge the fact that one of them has hurt the other, the connection between them will change into another moment and another and another. Imagine if a colleague at work whom you don’t know well calls you arrogant in the course of a meeting. You will probably become defensive or embarrassed and try to walk away as quickly as possible. That evening at home, you might rage about it to a close friend, turn it into a funny story ridiculing your colleague or burst into tears. Either way, you will have some sort of reaction that you only release when it is safe to do so. If however, a family member or very close friend calls you arrogant, you may very well find your reaction comes swiftly and fully. Taking it personally simply means taking it as you would if the person opposite you has great emotional significance to you. The beauty of this is that once you accept that magic “as if”, it will become true. Our fellow players are genuinely the most significant people to us in the moments we are connecting with them.

Other thoughts that have come up in my classes recently include how important it is to tell actors when they are getting it right. I remember one play in which I got incredibly hung up on not feeling ready to burst into tears at the moment I was meant to. The irony was that every time I got to this point in the play, I was feeling absolutely miserable – which was exactly what I was supposed to be feeling. But instead of just allowing that to be, I would go up into my head and tell myself that the reason I was miserable was that I was a terrible actor, instead of recognising that the emotions came from the imaginary circumstances and staying with them. Unfortunately, in that case the director wasn’t able to help me with this. Meisner student and American playwright David Mamet talks about exactly this in his wonderful book True and False. It is very instructive to recognise that when you feel frustrated or hurt or hyper during rehearsals or film shoots that those emotions are almost certainly coming from connection to the material you are working on. We are very suggestible as actors but we are also very self-critical, which stops us from just allowing ourselves to be.

Another observation from teaching my workshop in Berlin last week (of which more in another post) is that the energy of a person who is hiding their emotions can have a very negative effect on the rest of the group. Feeling sad or angry when you come in to class isn’t the issue. These emotions have a tangible effect on our behaviour and as long as we acknowledge them, they can also change. Hiding our emotions however takes a lot of energy so that there is no energy left to be open to others and change. At the start of all my classes and rehearsals, we always sit in a circle and have a moment to share how we feel in that moment. Sometimes we comment on each other’s contributions but mostly we just listen. It’s Very Therapy. I keep expecting someone to rebel but so far everyone has always leaned into it, although some people find it harder than others. Still, even those people get into it eventually. It’s a simple way to figure out what you’re feeling so you can get on with what you’re doing and not constantly be in your head trying to deal with it or stop it from getting out in a Don’t Mention The War sort of way.

I also did a spoof voiceover for Fossielvrij Kultur, a wonderful group that stages performance art or artivism to get art institutions to stop accepting sponsorship from fossil fuel companies like BP and Shell or the big banks that bankroll them (looking at you, HSBC, Barclays and ING). It was one of the most satisfying voice-over jobs I’ve done for a while as I was able to bring my voice work and activism together. (In the absence of a Meisner actor to call bullshit on “my activism” I will have to do it myself and point out that it has been far too long since I joined my XR crew on the streets. I intend to correct this at the first opportunity.)

Tonight I will be working on my devised project again with one of my acting groups before our show next week. We are absolutely 100 percent not ready and have no idea what will happen. And so it must be.

_{Here are some photos of the wonderful Joanna Lucas and Anna Anning stalking each other emotionally.}

I am a very lucky person. I am privileged to witness the moments when souls come out of hiding. The moment when a soul stops stuffing itself down into a small corner of a body, hoping it will be safe there, hoping it won’t be heard, hoping it won’t be seen. Because a seen soul is vulnerable. A heard soul can be hurt. A speaking soul can have its words held against it. But such a soul can also connect, inspire, touch, love, think and give strength to others.

In class after class, I have witnessed the moment when the lights come on in a person’s eyes, when their heart engages, when their mind fills with hope and love and connection. And the ability and need to do all this was present when they entered the room, this ability and need were why they entered the room – but they didn’t know for sure if it would be safe to let their souls out into the open. They hoped for this moment, they had an instinct that this would be the right place to release their souls, to let them go fluttering out into the big, wide world, but they weren’t sure. And then, suddenly, there it is! The moment when they let go, when all their defences go down and there they are, all of them, in the middle of the room.

Of course, I know there are many of these moments in a person’s life and I don’t mean to suggest that an acting class is the only place where you can experience connection. But obviously in my life right now, when I am teaching three times a week and taking a class at least once a week, this is the space I am in.

An idea that has taken hold in me is that humanity is going to die at its most enlightened moment. It has seemed to me for a few years now that people are communicating and connecting as never before and yet the powers that be – and will be for some time yet – have no interest in the changes of which we speak and attempt. Italian political theorist and politician Antonio Gramsci wrote around 1930 that “the crisis precisely consists in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Perhaps this belief of mine – that we will die at our most noble hour – is just such a morbid symptom. Essentially, the climate and biodiversity crisis will force a collision between our hard-won humanity and the cumulative sins of our shared past and I worry that humanity will not survive. This idea took hold of me in 2017, as I became seriously aware of the terrible danger to our planet and all the creatures on it. When you parent young children, you become more alive to the life and suffering of everything else. I was living in Berlin with my husband and two young children at the time. Brexit and Trump’s election not long after made it crystal clear to me that world leaders were not focussed on solving the danger our world is in. When I got back to Amsterdam, the Extinction Rebellion movement was just taking off in the UK and then in the Netherlands. I joined the first XR meeting in den Haag and was suddenly surrounded by people who felt the same as I did; people who were often extremely skilled at connecting and loving. Since then, I have met so many people, many of them young, who know the tragedies we face and yet maintain the courage to fight for a better world.

During a recent trip to London to visit family, I walked into a bookshop and was struck by the titles on display. So many writers now are engaged in making sense of the world in an effort to make it a better, fairer place. And when I talk to people from different walks of life, it seems to me that, since Covid struck, more of us than ever want to connect despite the increasing polarisation and alienation with which modern life, or more specifically our capitalist masters, tempt us. But still a voice inside of me whispers: the sins of our fathers will be visited on us.

Yet despite the bleakness of this vision, I draw strength from watching souls take flight. Over the next few weeks, I am devising a piece with a group of actors that explores our need to connect and to become our whole selves with one another. (And of course I’m trying to sneak in my morbid idea that human life will shuffle off its mortal coil at its most enlightened moment. I think they might not let me though …) Watching them come together with all their unique experiences and abilities and learning to speak as one is very powerful.

At the same time, I continue to give Meisner classes and watch the interactions between the students, learning to use my words to help them get to that truthful place. I met a Danish student at the University of Amsterdam the other day who asked me what it was I was teaching. When I explained it to her she said, “So you’re teaching people to apply their humanity.” I don’t know if I can live up to that explanation but I’d like to try.

On Tuesday, I gave my first Meisner class in Amsterdam. It was all the things I had wished it would be but didn’t dare to expect. The actors connected, committed and, each in their own time, “got” the power of Meisner. However many times I see these moments, they surprise and fill me with excitement and gratitude.

The class was a free trial class for actors who wanted to see what it was all about; some of them had experience of the technique and some, none at all. We sat in the kitchen of the little studio we’re working in and got to know each before discussing the technique and how it works.

I am learning that while “acting is doing” it is vital that you sit down and talk about how Meisner defined acting – “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances” – and what that actually means in practice so that students know what they are going for and how to recognise it when it happens. I have been in classes where you just start doing the repetition exercise with no real understanding of its aim and purpose and that is a recipe for boredom, over-acting and inauthenticity – all the things that Meisner technique seeks to overcome.

In other words, as a teacher, it’s my job to set students up for greatness. The aim of all Meisner exercises is simple: it is to really do, to really listen, to really observe and to really respond, but this can be explained in surprisingly obscure ways. And as Meisner said, if you don’t understand what your teacher is saying, they don’t either.  

It was a varied group of actors, at different stages of their careers and from different parts of the world, but all with one thing in common: they wanted to experience the parts of themselves they don’t usually allow out in the open. They wanted to catch themself unawares, to throw out their socialisations and give free rein to their full selves, even the ugly bits they stuff behind the sofa when friends come to visit. And they did. All of them had their moments, all of them had an “aha!” moment when they surprised not just their scene partners, but themselves.

Scott Trost, my teacher at the Meisner Institute in LA, tells us that our job as teachers is to give our students “a truthful moment, a North Star by which to guide themselves.” That’s what my first teacher, Steven Ditmyer, gave me in my classes with him and I hope to be able to pass this on. It takes time to learn to be open and available from the first moment, to let your defences down and really take the other person in, all the time, but when you’ve experienced it even once, you know you want to keep trying.

Meisner said that what you do doesn’t depend on you, it depends on the other guy. To demonstrate this, he would tell an actor to learn the line “Mr Meisner” and would get them to repeat it a couple of times. Then he would approach the actor and pinch them, hard, and they would squeal or shout out “Mr Meisner!”

Years before Meisner began teaching, Anton Chekhov, one of my all-time heroes, once told Stanislavsky “Your actors ‘play’ well, but it still feels like they know what’s going to happen ahead of time.” Now that’s a pinch to ouch to! Essentially, that translates as, they’re good at saying the lines but I don’t believe them. Not what any actor wants to hear. Meisner training aims, above all, to teach us how to be present, so that we have no more idea about what will happen next than anyone in the audience.

I have written before about the inner critic and how we must learn to set him or her aside while we’re practising and performing so that we are free to follow our impulses wherever they take us. But I am coming to understand that the inner critic can be a wonderful guide if you learn to do the opposite of what she says. For example, if you notice something about your scene partner and your inner critic immediately jumps in with “you can’t say that!”, then that’s exactly what you must say. The inner critic’s fear is almost always justified: the thing you’ve noticed is going to get a reaction. During the class, there was a student who had something in his teeth which I noticed as soon as he stood up to do the repetition exercise. It was his first experience of Meisner. He had just done one round with another actor and had fallen into the usual (and essential to experience) traps of doing too much and not letting the other person in. His new scene partner, an actress with experience of the technique, started straight off with “you’ve got something in your teeth”. His reaction was real and immediate – an instinctive embarrassed covering of his mouth as he awkwardly repeated the line. We all laughed. Not because he had something in his teeth but because we all related to his reaction. Shakespeare? No. Real, spontaneous response? Yes. So, whether you think of it as putting the inner critic out of your head or whether you decide to keep her in there and take her advice in the spirit of reverse psychology, it is to the benefit of you and all your fellow actors to acknowledge her existence.

A massive shout-out to my lovely, talented student and now-assistant Başak Özen who arrived in the Netherlands two weeks ago, stepped straight into my intermediate acting class and afterwards told me she could help me with my social media posts and taking photos. I am hopeless at this. For example, I asked her to take photos during the first Meisner class, which she is also taking part in. We asked everyone for permission, it was duly given and then I basically said to Başak, let’s just focus on the class. So now I have no pictures to show you, except of the empty space … But as Peter Brook wrote “emptiness [is] a starting point, not for its own sake, but to help to discover each time what [is] really essential to support the richness of the actor’s words and presence.”

In any case, I don’t regret it. I put all my attention on my students and my students were worth every moment of it. Next week, I will be giving another “first” class with another group of students. I will try to give them the same guidance as I gave the first group – and they will receive it in their own, unique and unpredictable ways.

Creativity is a cat that curls up at my feet when I’m in bed at night. She sleeps so sweetly, keeping me company in my dreams and assuring me that in the morning, my mojo will still be there. Then, suddenly, just as I’ve fallen into a delicious dream, she jumps all over me and wakes me up, miaowing and hissing and scratching at my face. Why didn’t you make it funnier?! That title was rubbish. NO ONE’S going to read your stupid stuff! What you really should do is this, come … And then off she goes, pulling me by the scruff of my neck into stinky alleyways, up rickety rooftops and down damp drain-pipes, in search I have no idea what, for hours and hours, until finally she drops me off back in bed, utterly exhausted but vaguely searching for a pencil and paper before I mercifully fall back to sleep. And in the morning, my face drawn in shadows and lines by a sleepless night and when I could really do with a cuddle, she’s gone.

Kitty in bed. Reproduced by kind permission of Elizabeth Rubin.

Welcome to my world!

Two-step authentication

Last night I started teaching acting classes to adults again. Often, my students are people who want to get some experience in presenting skills and to gain confidence speaking in English, but a lot of them also want to feel the spark of creativity and playfulness they lost somewhere in adulthood, as well as the joy of connecting to other people in a real, rather than virtual, room. (Some of them also secretly or not-so-secretly hope to become actors, to which I say amen! The more actors and artists the world has, the better it will be.)

Lots of things came up. My kids and I had all had ‘flu the week before and I was still feeling very low energy, which I told these fifteen strangers when we sat in our introduction circle. But very soon, I forgot all about my low energy because I was filled with the energy of all the hopeful people in the room. Before long, we were leaping around and being silly and I was definitely leaping and sillying just as much as everyone else. For a while, I used to deny that I was an extrovert, even to my family, who have obviously known me since childhood. But for the last ten years I really believed I wasn’t. I thought I was maybe an ambivert – a bit of both or possibly an ambivalent pervert – but since I started teaching, I realise I am definitely an extrovert, and possibly even an extraextrovert. One of the ways to tell if you’re an introvert or extravert is whether you feel drained or energised by being with other people. Of course, the trouble with this definition is that it doesn’t define the “other people”. Because there are definitely people who leave me feeling drained … But a roomful of strangers that I am there to connect with? That’s my happy place.

When people introduced themselves in the circle, I noticed that hardly anyone said what it was that they “do” as their day job. And that that was wonderful. They were all there to explore their other identities, so it made sense to come in as all their selves and not as the one, corporate or official version.

I have so often struggled with the answer to the question “what do you do?” and nearly always babble through whatever projects I am working on at the time, ending with some feeble joke about how I need to improve my narrative structure or pitch. I now realise that I had also been intimidated by the label of “actor” and was increasingly uncomfortable with using it. For one thing, a lot of people assume that actors want to be the centre of attention all the time. Of course, this is true of some, but a great many brilliant actors are introverts while many others are social and out-going but not desperate to be at the centre of everything all the time. When I was younger and used to tell people I was an actor, they’d often put on that big, hammy ‘actor’s’ voice and ask me stupid questions like “What have I seen you in?” (to which the only appropriate answer is, bog off.) I thought that actors were supposed to be comfortable with being on display and that you had to be a whole lot of other things, which I didn’t feel I was, to call yourself an actor. (I also discovered much later that I am dyspraxic, but that’s for another post.) I ended up pursuing acting in a way that wasn’t whole-hearted but apologetic and unfocussed. I felt that real actors can ONLY want to be actors – and nothing else. I now recognise that a core feature of actors is their endless curiosity. The kids who try on a thousand careers in their imagination are often going to be the ones who end up pursuing some kind of artistic endeavour when they grow older.

I love acting, obviously. But I also love a whole lot of other things, like writing and comedy and salt and vinegar crisps, and one of the things I especially love is to support other people in doing their thing. Maybe it’s because I know what it’s like not to get that support – and how transformational it can be when you do; when someone sees you and what you’re trying to do and helps you do it.

Some clever woman, whose name I don’t know, told Oprah that the way you can tell if you are on the right path is if you don’t feel like you are betraying yourself. And when I teach, I feel like I’m being true to the real me. I often tell my students about the root of the word authentic. It’s descended from the Greek authentikos “original, genuine,” which comes from authentes “one acting on one’s own authority,” from autos “self” and hentes “doer, being”. For me, authentic means “giving oneself permission to be” or perhaps “permission to be all your different beings”.

We are complicated and we do not always fit into the labels we are given or give ourselves. If I had to choose a label that sums up all the things I have ever wanted to do and now spend my time doing, I would say I am a communicator. But the reality is, no human being can fit into one word and nor should they try. One of the more positive developments of the 21^st century is that many people are now starting to recognise that.

Many of the students I have taught have blossomed just by giving themselves this permission to be all the things they are: the good, the bad and the ugly. In the clip below, Meisner alumnus, actor and teacher, Jim Jarrett talks about how freeing it is to be able to embrace our whole selves and quotes Sandy as saying, “the seed of every character you will play is already inside you.” This for me is the starting point. Know that you have multitudes inside you and that, as an actor, you must throw off the socially acceptable versions of you and allow the multitudes out to play.