The inner critic

If you read about Stanislavsky, you will soon come across Glikeriya Nikolaevna Fedotova, a great actress whom he studied under at the Maly Theatre and who advised him to “look your partner straight in the eyes, read his thoughts in his eyes, and reply to him in accordance with the expression of his eyes and face.” Sound familiar? Behind every great man …

Meisner said many things about what acting is – and what it isn’t – but the grounding ones for me, whether I’m teaching Meisner or any other form of acting, are “acting is really doing” and “acting is living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” The simplest form of “really doing” is to really listen to your scene partner(s) and really respond to what you’re getting. Everything flows from that. Once you are immersed in the reality of what your scene partner is giving you, you will start to live moment to moment. And that’s a wonderful feeling – it’s what we live for as actors. But a lot of us get lost again when we transition from the rehearsal space to the performance space, whether that’s in front of a camera or on stage. That connection to our fellow actors, to the text, to the space and to ourselves gets drowned out in the demands of the inner critic to get it right.

The inner critic is an essential character in everyone’s internal drama and we all need one. But let’s face it, sometimes she gets a little too loud and self-important and you need to tell her to sit down, put her feet up and have a nice cuppa while you go and get on with whatever it is you need to do. The inner critic is very good at her job, which is to keep constant tabs on you so you can learn from your mistakes. She’s the original error-messenger. Unfortunately, she also makes you tense up and become self-conscious and therefore unable to respond to whatever is going on outside you. Not good for people whose work requires them to be in the moment.

When you’re performing you need to be completely available to what’s happening in the moment. So, if the scenery topples down on you, you will respond to that or if your fellow actor in a scene is much more distressed than he was in rehearsal, you pick up on it and respond in whatever way you do. Because you are really listening, because you are really connected, because you are really picking up the chair that’s fallen over – and you are doing all of this under the imaginary circumstances of the text and the staging that have real meaning to you because you have put the real work in.

So, how do we put the inner critic on standby mode? I think the honest answer is, with years of practice. But there are a few things you can do straight away. First, you can give your inner critic a name and call it by that (mine’s Nosy Nag.) In other words, you can make your inner critic real and therefore separable to you. You can talk to it and tell it, politely but firmly, that it needs to let you make mistakes. And it needs to let you be silly and loud and rude and crude and angry and snotty and vulnerable and right and wrong and fucking fabulous in public because you can be all those things and more and you have to be all those things and more if you want to be an actor. And the thing that makes you behave in all these wonderful ways are not years of training or reading books but impulses. Those same things that years of socialisation have taught you to be wary of and often completely ignore because they’ll get you intro trouble. Well, as an actor you need to be in trouble, because in acting trouble is beautiful, trouble is life.

So, how do we learn to throw off the shackles of socialisation and say YES AND! to our impulses? How do we learn to consciously relax when we perform so that we can be open to the moment and our scene partners? First off, we need to recognise that the goal here is not to eliminate our feelings of nervousness. Being nervous is a sign that your mind knows what you are about to do and is preparing you by putting you into a state of heightened awareness. But we also need to be able to accept that awareness and make it work for us rather than being overwhelmed by it. If you allow it, the inner critic will hijack this moment and make it all about her. But once you learn to put her out of your mind, you can become present with all the things that are going on outside of you and your body will become energised.

One of the best ways to learn to open up or leave yourself alone is by taking an improvisation class. The first thing you learn in improv is how to put your focus on the other person. You can’t hide behind learned lines and moves because there aren’t any. You have to learn to work off whatever you’re getting from the other person and trust that that’s enough. (As Sandy said, “acting is reacting”.) And if you’re in it for the laughs, you will learn very fast that the quickest route to funny is to shoot straight from the gut. And boy does it take guts to stand there and have no idea what you’re going to say next! But once you’ve learned it, you’ll never want to stop. Suddenly, there’s no end to what you can come up because you don’t have to come up with anything – it’s just there when it needs to be.

When we work with text the Meisner way, we learn to memorise our lines without any intention so that each time we play the scene we’re working off whatever our scene partners give us in the moment. We are in fact improvising our responses even though our lines never change.

“What you do doesn’t depend on you; it depends on the other guy”

Sanford meisner

Impulses or instincts are often seen as an inferior relation to craft and knowledge. Of course, you need both but without our impulses all the craft or knowledge in the world won’t help us. Think about a young tennis player. Maybe the first time she ever plays, she’s immediately hitting some balls right on target, even though she’s never done it before. So she gets excited and learns some skills. And, weirdly, her game will probably get a little worse at first. Suddenly, she’s in her head, trying to use her new knowledge to get it right. But all the stuff that was getting her to hit the ball in the first place is going on at a much faster level than she can control. Her grey matter is calculating distance and speed and angle far faster than her conscious mind can and sending the messages straight to her body. There’s no time to give her conscious mind a call to update her about these technical details – there’s a ball coming at her! So when she interferes with that process, she slows it down and misses the ball. Of course, she can work on, and later, control some things. Like her consistency, serve and backhand. But the other stuff, she needs to leave alone. (And that will also improve as her brain gathers more experience.)* At a certain point, her craft and her impulses (read: her grey matter doing its amazing computational magic!) will work together to produce a Wimbledon-winning tennis player. But that takes time. For now, she needs to hone her backhand and leave her impulses alone.

As actors, we face the same dilemma. Often, actors who are starting out are very alive to their impulses because they don’t have much else. Then they learn new skills and may well experience that same feeling of getting worse before getting better. Our bodies need to integrate the conscious knowledge we are learning (our craft) with the impulses we already have. Instead of trying to replace our impulses with our new-learned skills, we must learn to let them be and allow our craft to give them a bigger, firmer platform on which to stand. We do the work (the line learning, the movement work, the voice work etc) and then we trust that in the moment we will have everything we need to do our best work. Meisner called this process of trusting our impulses “getting out of your own way” and would tell actors to “leave themselves alone”. In other words, you need to allow yourself to be open and vulnerable and that means telling the inner critic to get on that sofa while you do the work.

Meisner technique is first and foremost a way to learn to scrape away years of socialisation and the voice of the inner critic to leave you, open, vulnerable, shiny you, available to your own impulses and those of the people around you.

There’s a brilliant and very skilled improv poet and creativity coach here in Amsterdam, Margo van de Linde. I watched her once in a crowded café, conjuring a poem seemingly out of thin air (and yes, it rhymed). It wasn’t thin air though – it was packed with the expectation, excitement and energy of all of us watching and that’s what she was working off. Margo learned the hard way that to pay attention to the inner critic rather than following your impulses ultimately silences your impulses. Thankfully for us, she found a way to reverse that process, which you can read about here.

David Mamet in his short and brilliant book True and False has this mantra “invent nothing, deny nothing and stay out of education”. That’s Meisner, distilled. You don’t need to try to be funny or clever or tell us your credentials if you’re really paying attention to what’s going on. And there’s always something going on, even if it’s that your scene partner is dead behind the eyes.

For those of you interested in learning more about the concept of getting out of your own way, here’s an article and video from the Maggie Flanagan studio in New York.

*Please do not ask me any questions about how to actually play tennis. I suck.