Working with Actors

Working With Actors provides the key to unlocking the honest, dynamic performance every actor has within them. It offers a well-articulated formulation of the Meisner Technique easy for directors and actors to use within a working context. Through setting out an accessible training programme for practitioners working across stage and screen, this book establishes a clear-cut route to building a three-dimensional character in an organic, non-intellectual fashion, based squarely on the character’s objectives. Few books in this field venture out of the training studio, while in this book – alongside offering an intense and concentrated Meisner training programme – the focus is more on the ‘pay-off’: the collaborative act of developing the role and how that plays out in rehearsal and performance. Beyond that, the books uniquely offers: > a new modality for script reading, analysis and rehearsal through which the character is born in relation to other characters;> a prioritisation of the key skills for coming alive in the moment — listening and putting one’s attention wholly on the other character/actor;> a historical perspective on how Meisner’s methods have evolved and why they provide the basis of truthful acting;> for directors, a format for analysis of the complete work based on Stanislavskian principles;> for actors, complementary methods, such as Uta Hagen’s ‘endowment’, to enhance the ‘reality of doing’