THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ACTING ON STAGE AND ON CAMERA
This was a question asked here yesterday and I’d like you all to consider my answer. I think this is something that many people are confused about. And it is often something that directors give damaging advice about. They tell actors they need to be “bigger than life”. But acting is about being “lifelike”.
Often people try to be “bigger” on stage. I’ve even seen it on Broadway, but I mostly feel that those performers are not truly in character. If they are thinking about being bigger they can’t BE their character. The character isn’t thinking about that. The actor is. And it just creates an over the top portrayal that doesn’t appeal to me personally.
Fortunately, the bigger the stage, the farther away the the characters are usually placed from one another. You need to project more to people farther away from you. On a film or TV set you are mostly very close to one another. There is no need to project. On location you need to choose the appropriate energy to communicate within the space you are in.
When I’m onstage I try to stay in my character’s mind but I imagine that the other person can’t hear me if I can’t hear my own voice bouncing back in the theater. And just that little push vocally tends to heighten my performance physically a little, too. But I will not disturb my goal of becoming the character in the most believable way possible. And that is always staying in the character’s mind and being as real as possible.
As Shakespeare said, “For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”
In other words, the whole purpose of acting is to recreate ...mirror real life. We need to “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action”. Even in Shakespeare’s time of no microphones and noisy crowds, that is what he wanted from his actors. He hated seeing actors shouting and gesturing. I love this excerpt from Hamlet’s acting lesson:
“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: But if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; For in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.”
He wanted his actors to speak in a normal tone of voice. He didn’t want them to overdo their physical movements. He didn’t want them ‘acting up a storm’. And if you have ever been to The Globe Theater in London, you know it is a large space which housed many noisy audience members.
But he didn’t want them to “be to tame” either. There is a place that is not pushed and not underdone that is REAL. And that is what we must strive for, whether on stage or in front of a camera. Shakespeare said, “O’'erstep not the modesty of nature:”. Don’t do anything that isn’t natural.
Here is the full speech from Hamlet. I make most of my students learn and perform this monologue. It is so important for every actor to know:
Posted Jul 6, 2019, 2:31 PM UTC