I trained as an actor in the mid-1960s, a time of the most extraordinary changes in the theatre: not only how we viewed theatre, but, more importantly, how we performed theatre. We students had been the inheritors of the working class revolution in the 1950s, spearheaded by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court. Now we found ourselves in the midst of another revolution, that had a direct impact upon how we were being trained: a physical theatre, in which words were important, certainly, but now also a physical language, in which our bodies, our voices, were being encouraged to find a new form of expression. Here was evidence of the theories of Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty experienced through Peter Brook‘s experiments at the RSC which would lead directly to his ground-breaking production of the Marat/Sade in 1964. Grotowski’s laboratories were thrown open and we could witness ‘poor theatre’ in practice for ourselves. Foreign companies in the World Theatre Seasons at the Aldwych Theatre, working in their own languages, opened up new experiences in movement and gesture and vocal techniques, as well as text. At the fledgling National Theatre at the Old Vic one could see classics of the English repertoire played to perfection, but one could also see Peter Brook‘s visceral, gut-wrenching production of Seneca‘s Oedipus.
From now on it would become usual for some training establishments to talk about ‘breaking down’ a student in order to ‘build him/her’ up again. We would be encouraged to ‘lose our inhibitions’, be ‘more daring’ in our work, ‘risk insanity’, ‘stop being middle class’, get ‘down and dirty’, the list is endless; and of course, we did all those things, because we were living through a most exciting time.
In subsequent years, when I began to teach, it became obvious how easy it was to ask such a commitment from a student, without putting into place the appropriate safeguards that would allow them to ‘dare’, without compromising their own sense of wellbeing. Of course, acting training is not therapy, but how much damage had been done by that ‘breaking down’ process, when some students had not been able to build themselves up again in time to face the working world, either because they lacked the tools within themselves, or because they were being trained by insensitive and uncaring practitioners. How often did we think of a student’s mental health, when once more we asked her/him to ‘lay themselves bare’ and ‘risk insanity’ in some exercise designed ‘to open up the text’, ‘free the body and mind’, to make their acting more ‘real’, more ‘truthful’, more ‘dynamic’?
As an actor too, it was not uncommon to find oneself at the mercy of a director’s whim, to be fodder to some monstrous ego or ‘vision’, in which one had no say, when one had to stay silent in order to safeguard that and the next job. It is now fashionable for a director to talk about ‘making the play’ or ‘making work’, so we, the actors, are merely the raw material that enables this ‘great work’.
Students in training still find themselves compromised by directors asking them to bare their souls and their bodies, when there is no safe environment to do either, assuming it is appropriate in the first place. And often those students are still powerless to say ‘no’.
That actors are beginning to speak about their need for support in their moments of anxiety, stress, stage fright and panic is all to the good. The taboo that prevents them from voicing their concerns when they feel their mental health is at risk, should be confined to the dustbin. That that support should come from their places of work and that they should be able to declare their anxieties without risk to their livelihood or health is now urgent.
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