First class

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.