Anna Chancellor takes charge
“Listening in acting is everything. Listening in life is everything.” So said Anna Chancellor during the course of a remarkable masterclass she gave at the Donmar Warehouse yesterday.
The audience of students had completed their performances of devised dramatic responses to the Donmar’s two current productions, Creditors (in which Anna plays Tekla, the sensual novelist) and Ivanov. Now she told them there were two approaches to acting: using your own emotions; or absorbing stuff from outside, as she once did on trips to the zoo.
So she picked four schoolkids at random from the crowd and sent them outside to follow, stalk even, innocent civilians for ten minutes, then return and recreate their walks and physical habits.
This was not only very entertaining but immediately instructive on how an actor might develop a physical performance.
We saw a young girl chatting vacuously on her mobile phone while walking very quickly; a rather sad Ratso Rizzo character hobbling along and muttering to either side of himself; “some old guy” going slowly but transformed into a figure of pathos when Anna told the student to “act his wrinkles”; and a tiny tot holding her mother’s hand, cooing softly, thumb in mouth.
Presenting a character in this way was not something the students — who came from Croydon, Leytonstone, Kingsbury, Isleworth and the London Nautical School in Waterloo (no, it’s not a training base for naval cadets) — had done in their improvised playlets.
They had taken the structural ideas of Strindberg and Chekhov (the country estate became, natch, an inner city council estate) and related them to some startling scenarios of peer pressure, domestic violence, drug-dealing, teenage pregnancies and street crime.
Anna’s intervention lent another dimension. And she upped the ante by insisting on the “nowness” of theatre, the “nowness” of living. Somehow, magically, she banished all inhibition and shyness from the room.
She made everyone move to another part of the auditorium and sit next to someone they didn’t know. Then each person had to tell his or her neighbour about a dispute. Then she’d drag one couple up on the stage to enact it, develop it and give it theatrical life.
It was electrifying, and I suppose showed us all what we were missing by not going to a good drama school. Anna and the Donmar education team were presented with bunches of flowers by executive producer James Bierman. Anna promptly gave her bouquet to one of the beautiful black blues-singing girls from West Thames College in Isleworth.
“I’m an actress,” said Anna. “I get flowers all the time.”