Choosing your acting resources

David Suchet quoting Stanislavsky: If you speak any lines or do anything mechanically without fully realizing who you are, where you come from, why, what you want , where you are going, and what you will do when you get there you will be acting without imagination.

Or, what is your motivation.

You must listen to the words and understand the feelings of other characters. Be specific. Understand where the emotion is coming from.  Make your response fresh.

I am watching this evening John Barton and the Royal Shakespeare Company in Playing Shakespeare, a set of four 1984 DVDs available through Netflix, which I have just put on my Wish List for Christmas.  It's wonderful just listening to the discussion and watching such incredible actors - Ben Kingsley, Ian McKellan, Judi Dench, Patrick Stewart, Suchet, and a host of others - in a workshop that I could never afford to attend in person. An actor is learning his craft constantly.  But you can spend hundreds – no, thousands – of dollars on local workshops and classes given by far lesser lights than Royal Shakespeare who take those same few lines above and stretch them into 6 weeks of pure muddle.

So why do we do that when there is such a rich trove of resources on DVD and in books?  I have begun to question that.