Monday, October 09, 2006
The Problem Of Playing 'Maxwell-esque' Theatre.
Today we tried to find the ‘style’ of acting that we can place onto Maxwell’s theatre. These are a few Maxwell quotes lifted from a New York Times article I thought could be useful in doing this……(I also noticed Heather mentioned the article before men so the link is three blogs below mine):
“When I ask somebody to read a piece of what I’ve written, typically the first reaction is to make it into something that is ‘real’.” Mr Maxwell said. “My feeling is, it’s already real because you’re doing it. It’s not another reality that you’re trying to create. You’re seeing what happens in the moment, which is, for me, the highest reality.”
“There’s not a specific quality that I’m going for.” Mr Maxwell said. “For me it’s a process of removing the person to be a performer as opposed to a person.”
“If there were a style, I don’t think it would have the life that it has under the surface.” He added. “Even though they’re standing still, these people are always working, they’re always looking for moments together.”
The last quote suggests there is no style! As bizarre as this sounds I think that that is the best way to describe Maxwell’s theatre. When we did the ‘phone thing’ from the reciting end, this may have been the closest to true ‘Maxwellism’ we have achieved. The reason for this is that we were not trying to create anything, just recite the lines in fashion so that the listener understood lines. Not robotically, not making the lines any more or less than they were.
Today I found it hard to fall in between the gap of a robot and a ‘person’. Maxwell wants us to remove the person to be a performer which means we must not be ourselves, yet not ‘be’ another character.
The nature of the lines compiled from the interviews made the three parts played slightly disjointed but all assertions were ‘real’ as they were real lines. This was a useful demonstration of how Maxwell believes things are already real, simply because the lines are real. No character needs to be superimposed over it. As a result, although specific characters were defined in our initial interviews, all signs of character were erased when they were mixed together.
In conclusion, I believe that to create a Maxwell-esque feel, we must create real situations and dialogue but ‘alientate’ the situation in which it is said. So that it is just pure dialogue, nothing added, nothing taken away. A rendition of the original text with no disrupting overtone, that we normally call ‘acting’.
Simon
