ABSTRACT
The celebrated British director Max Stafford Clark (1941-), once described the rehearsal room as either a magical world like a second childhood or a prison camp. It’s true; the rehearsal process can be a journey of creative ecstasy or a voyage to the centre of your darkest soul, where you lose any faith that you could ever act at all. But what exactly is the purpose of rehearsal – when, in radio,
you barely get a read-through and, in television and film, you often get more information at your interview than you do on the set? I’d suggest there are three main purposes: (1) to collectively map
out the territory of the fictional world; (2) to tell the writer’s story as clearly as possible; and (3) to create characters who seem plausible within the dramatic style of the piece. Since Chapter 5 looks in detail at screen acting, we’ll mainly focus here on building a character for theatre, though of course there are cross-over points.
