ABSTRACT
Most of us have seen some reality TV show where a mum is plucked from the school canteen and launched onto the West End stage. And sportsmen and pop stars are regularly morphed into film actors. Which leads us to question, ‘Can anybody act?’ If the only required skills were walking, talking and looking right, then the answer could easily be yes. ‘Then why bother training?’ you may well ask. The answer is that the skills of acting actually go way beyond walking, talking and simply looking right. The technical demands of incarnating a mighty stage role night
after night, or knowing exactly how to hit your mark and reveal your innermost feelings to the lens of a camera – along with the challenges of interpreting and understanding all manner of characters from widely differing genres, styles and media – require skills far more extensive than most people credit. And although the ‘dynamic listening’ described in the introduction to this book might seem easy, in practice it’s surprisingly tricky. Acting as an art has gradually been undervalued, and with it goes a misconception of what good actor-training entails.
