ABSTRACT
There’s no question that acting processes in the last one hundred years have evolved faster than any other century. The title of this chapter has resonances with Frank Wedekind’s cabaret group The Eleven Executioners, who scythed through conventional art, hacking away the old and inflaming the new. In this chapter, I’ve selected just eleven of the most influential acting practitioners, who are not so much executioners as ‘executors’, highly responsible for the trends and legacies of acting as we currently practise it. There were many who could have featured here, not least
Artaud, Boal, Bogart, Brecht, Brook and Littlewood (all of whom have made a huge impact on theatre practice, especially in directing and playwriting), not to mention Vakhtangov (who is considered by many as a vital bridge between the Russian ‘system’ and the American ‘Method’). I’ve chosen to focus on practitioners who have directly addressed the actual mechanics of acting in their own writings. The lack of women is noticeable, but a future overview of twentieth into twenty-first-century influences may well change that. The geographical areas we visit are Russia, America and Europe,
with a swift trip to Japan. (The absence of Brits, I’d suggest, is down to the heritage of institutions such as RADA, LAMDA, Central, Drama Studio, etc., rather than the individuals who teach
in those institutions, perhaps with exceptions such as Christopher Fettes, Yat Malmgrem [1916-2002] and Doreen Cannon [1930-95].) I don’t include very much biography or context for each, as a
quick whiz on the Internet will give you that information. Instead, I’ve homed in on one particular book for each practitioner, providing some suggestions on how you might adopt the wisdom within. Some of these books are now considered primers, and we’ll see how some tools are instantly useable, while some ideas need to be treated with caution. I’m certainly not advocating that all you have to do is read
each executor’s book and suddenly you’ll be an expert in their training process. Far from it. Indeed, for many of them, it would anathema. The trouble is that once a person publishes their words, the information is out there. Anyone can pick it up and read it, and make of it what they will. So, while I completely endorse that you can’t possibly absorb a training through a book, I want to access for you certain principles or philosophies that you can apply to your own acting ethos. Based on what you discover here, you can then make informed decisions about what kind of training or classes you may want to explore more fully in the future. And I warmly encourage you to read all the books, as you’ll get a
real sense – through the way each executor expresses themselves – of their different cultures and styles, as well as their shared philosophies. In fact, there are myriad cross-over points, basically because – as I said in the Introduction – all roads lead to Rome, ‘Rome’ being the quality of listening and reacting to which we’ve referred all along. Let’s start with Stanislavsky, as he was incontrovertibly the first
modern practitioner to try and put into a system the issues that challenge us as actors.
