Actors Acting Actors

Actors Acting Actors MARTIN ESSLIN In his recent book' Laurence Olivier gives a fascinating description of how he approached the part of Archie Rice in John Osborne's The Entertainer. As one of the main problems of that part - which involves a full stand-up music-hall comedian's routine - he identifies the basic difficulty of making a bad performer's work enjoyable for the audience, the bad jokes doubly funny because they are such bad jokes: "That really is the big problem: to be tatty but entertaining at the same time.,,2 How, in fact, does a good actor act a bad actor? Iftelling bad jokes badly - just being indistinguishable from a bad actor - is not enough, what has to be added to make the telling of bad jokes by a bad performer good acting and enjoyable to the audience? Olivier, that supremely practical and down-to-earth craftsman supplies his own answer: "Here everything had to be slightly out ofkilter, and yet the actor inside me still had to hold on to the audience . .. To be able to do things badly, you first have to be able to do them very well ..."3 The key phrase here concerns the actor's need to keep his "hold" on the audience. The audience must be made to realise that the actor knows that the jokes he is telling are bad and that he is telling them badly, deliberately and on purpose. Ifthe spectators merely felt they were seeing a bad actor telling bad jokes they would lose interest and concentration and tum against him. So the actor has to show the audience that he is fully in command of the situation. He must, in fact, make the audience aware that he knows how to do all the things he does badly, very well. He achieves this through his timing, the obviousness ofthe excessive delay with which he brings the point of the joke, the sureness of touch by which he puts his foot wrong in the tap-dancing routine, the slight flicker of terror in his eyes when it goes wrong, designed to make it clear that he is doing it wrong with premeditation - which, of course, requires even greater skill than doing it just right. In this the actor Actors Acting Actors 73 follows the tradition of the tightrope walker who almost trips, of the juggler who almost drops his club but catches it at the last moment, deliberately,just to show how difficult his routine is. The ability to act bad actors well thus becomes a hallmark of special virtuosity. Shakespeare exploited this with supreme skill in the rude mechanicals ' scenes in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The part of Bottom the Weaver is the virtuoso part par excellence: not only does he have the extremely difficult scene of his realisation that he has been having a love affair with Titania in the shape of an ass, one of the most demanding and effective "recognition scenes" in dramatic literature, he then has to give the grotesquely "bad" performance of Pyramus in the mechanicals' play. The actor playing Bottom acting Pyramus, like the one who does Archie Rice, has to show the audience an extremely complex state of affairs: he not only has to display the bad actor's lack ofskill, the terror and inner insecurity of his stage fright, he has also to supply the sub-text of his deficient thought processes that underpin his bad performance, and which ultimately spring from the character's lack oftalent and ignorance ofdramatic conventions, as when he - a tradition that surely goes back to Shakespeare'sown times - having stabbed himself, is seen stealing a good look at the audience's reaction. The audience's amusement must here spring from their realisation that the actor knows what the bad actor would feel and think in that situation and that the actor playing Bottom is consciously satirising that deficient actor's primitive thought processes. This, by implication, also displays his own delight in his own superiority as an actor over such a bad actor as Bottom, and his virtuoso ability to transform himself into such a bad actor. This in tum nourishes the...