‘In the beginning was the word……’
Actors work with, through and because of the power of words, so it’s useful to understand how words fit together in English to convey our intentions and meaning. We can also join the grammar to a clear acting process.
We can start with NOUNS.
A noun is the name of a thing.
Concrete nouns name things which are perceived through the 5 senses: script; theatre; actor; tree; cat, light, dark…
Proper nouns always start with a capital letter, and are specific names and titles: Jane; Fred; Royal Academy of Dramatic Art; Lyceum Theatre.
Abstract nouns name things that cannot be recognised by our sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. They are often the most important things in life: beauty; grace; hope; ambition; love; war; peace; doubt; fear…
(We can see the effect of these abstracts but not the actual thing.)
It can be difficult to write about abstractions, so poets sometimes personalize them as: ‘Grim-visaged War has smoothed his wrinkled front.’ (Richard 111.1.i)
Then we have IMAGERY
Similes: ‘The sea was a like a mirror’; and metaphors: ‘ The sky, it seems would pour down stinking pitch, but that the sea, mounting to the welkin’s cheek, dashes the fire out.’ (The Tempest 1.ii)
Acronyms are collections of letters used as a noun: RADA; LAMDA; AA; RSC.
Collective nouns are groups of things: audience, choir, army, crowd, team…
When we start work on a speech or scene it’s useful to list the nouns, the things we are talking about. When we find a pronoun it is essential to understand what that ‘it,’ ‘she,’ and ‘they’ stand for. We use a pronoun as a ‘shortcut’ for the noun we are thinking of.
The character we play always knows precisely what object she is talking about when she use a pronoun, which means that the actors must also know that missing noun.
The Pointing Exercise is the best way to get specific, clear acting. (This exercise is in my book ‘Essential Acting’, 2nd edition, page 116. I will also be writing about it soon in future blogs.)
Pronouns stand in place of a noun: he ,she, they, it, them…
Possessive pronouns: mine, yours, his, theirs…
Adjectives qualify a noun: beautiful, helpful, nasty, blue, sunny…
‘The intelligent actor gave a brilliant performance after her hopeless audition.’ Adjectives can build in stages of importance: good, better, best; bad, worse, worst; fine, finer, finest…
There is a rule which we all follow unthinkingly about the order of adjectives:
From the top: Opinion > size > age > shape > colour > origin > material > purpose. So you have ‘A lovely, little, old, rectangular, green, French, whittling knife.’
The exception is ‘the big bad wolf.’ But you would not say ‘old silly fool’ or ‘my Greek fat big wedding’ or ‘leather walking brown boots.’
Actors need to be wary of attaching adjectives to a character or a speech: once we have labelled a person we are closing our eyes to alternatives, natural changes, development, new understandings, the effect of events, different attitudes in a person… in ourselves and in the character we are playing. Question your immediate judgements and allow the discoveries made in rehearsal to give depth, contrast and natural inconsistences of human behaviour to the role.
Verbs are doing words. Each verb has an infinitive root: to act; to write; to learn, to kiss…
Which speech of Hamlet’s has several infinitives, not only in the first line?
Verbs show action, and through tenses we tell When the action happens:
In the Present: To learn; I learn; I am learning.
In the Past: I learned; I was learning; I did learn; I have learned.
In the Future: I will learn; I will be learning; I will have learned.
Verbs use auxiliary verbs to modify their meaning. Some nasty unhelpful ones are: should; must; ought to; try to…
Watch out for how you use those, especially to yourself! They are damaging to our confidence, ability to learn and have fun, and they don’t work.
‘I am trying to learn’; ‘I’ll try to do it better’; ‘I must try harder.’ Come on, you know that this approach to life is a waste of time; it’s quicker and easier just to do the action directly.
When starting scene work, a list of ‘doing’ words is useful. Find the physical actions in the scene or speech and act them out (silently at first, till the lines are learned), to activate the scene and experience the sensations of the character in this specific situation.
Adverbs qualify a verb: most adverbs end in ‘ly,’ though there are exceptions: Quickly/fast; excellently/well; loudly; softly; badly; clumsily…
Adverbs can be a real trap, especially when you are searching for or preparing an audition speech. If you are honest you will probably admit that you look for a speech which will allow you to demonstrate one or two your favourite emotions!
This goes back to the generalised idea that acting is about forcing yourself to ‘feel’ some emotion that you are not really feeling, then hoping your audience will believe the lie and be willing to plunge with you into the swamp of soggy sensationalism you have unhappily pushed yourself into.
So….avoid this trap! Remember the ‘Two States of the Actor’: the Actors’ State, which feels like, ‘I am trying to get this right,’ versus the Creative State, which feels like, ‘I am solving this problem.’ The character in any speech or scene is in the active process of solving her/his present-moment problem, usually by communicating to another person or the audience.
Articles: ‘the’ is the definite article; ‘a’ is the indefinite.
‘I’m in the play’; ‘I’m in a play’.
Conjunctions are joining words: and, but, because, therefore, or…
Be careful not to stress these unless the sense of the line demands it.
Prepositions show Where things are and Where and When the action happens:
John Donne wrote, in To his Mistress going to bed, “Licence [sic] my roving hands and let them go / before, behind, between, above, below…”
Sentences are sequences of words to make a complete message. Sentences can be:
- Statements: Sir Laurence Olivier made a film of ‘Hamlet’.
- Questions: Did Mel Gibson also make a film of the play?
- Demands/requests: Please lend me your DVDs of those two films, so that I can compare them.
- Exclamations: That’s so kind of you! I’m really delighted!
A simple sentence has a subject (noun), a verb and an object (noun): ‘the cat sat on the mat’.
If you reverse the nouns you change the sense: ‘The mat sat on the cat’. Because, in English, sense is conveyed by the order or sequence of words.
Write a simple sentence with a Subject noun (not a pronoun) an active verb and an Object noun: ‘The actor played the part.’
Change the nouns to pronouns: ‘She played it.’
Retuning to your original nouns, add adjectives to each: ‘The talented actor played the leading part.’
Then add an adverb, to describe how the action happened: ‘The talented actor brilliantly played the leading part.’
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Complex sentences are longer: they contain extra information in Clauses and Phrases, usually indicated in a text by the use of commas and in speaking by changes of volume, pitch and rhythm.
The basic rule, which you can test by listening to yourself and others talking, is that subordinate Clauses are spoken more quickly, more quietly and with less change of pitch (inflection) than the main sentence.
A Clause is an inserted sentence, containing an active verb: ‘Jane bought the dress’ Is a simple sentence.
Add some more, but less important, information: ‘Jane, who really wanted to go to the party, bought the dress.’
You could give that extra information in a sentence of its own as: ‘Jane really wanted to go to the party,’ but it’s quicker to sandwich the two sentences together with the middle one being less important.
So, in punctuating a text for your Voice (rather than for your eye as in silent reading) it is useful to eliminate the commas and replace the essential changes (which will be marked by vocal changes of volume, pitch, and rhythm) with Brackets; (as I have done above!) that way you can’t miss those vocal variations and the sense of your words will be clear and interesting.
A Phrase is extra information, not using an active verb, and usually shorter than a Clause: ‘Tim missed the train,’ or, ‘In spite of all his efforts, Tim missed the train.’
Phrases and Clauses can be attached to different parts of the core sentence without changing the sense of the message.
A sentence is a thought.
A thought is a breath.
Therefore:
A sentence is a breath.
Therefore a sentence, of whatever length, should be carried on one breath. You will need to practice this and train your breathing; the best advice is to link sense and delivery by learning the new breath with the new idea, as you learn your lines: so the (abstract) inspiration of the words is the same as the (concrete, physical) inspiration of the lungs.
This is actually what happens in our lives, when we find the new breath to express the new idea in the new words.
Don’t use a comma on the page as a tea-break; they are there for the eye. Punctuate the lines for the voice, using brackets, finding where to breathe, which are the most important words to stress, trusting in the subtle messages conveyed by vocal pitch, volume and rhythm which the flexible trained voice can express.
Stanislavsky tells us to use Single Stress: that is, that we need to find ‘the word without which the sentence could not happen’; and stress that word…by taking the stress off the other words in the sentence.
(I found this advice in the book by Vasily Osipovich Torporkov ‘Stanislasky in Rehearsal’ , which is full of illuminating practical teaching. Single Stress is tough to do; why not have a go and see how it works for you? You will find it worth the effort!)
Apostrophes are used for Possessives, and people often get muddled by this rule:
- The boy’s books.= the books belonging to one boy.
- The boys’ books.= the books belonging to two or more boys.
In the old days, when books were literally manuscripts, hand written, the scribes would use the old grammatical rule of putting ‘his’ to denote possession, as: ‘the boy his book’. Later, writers would save space by putting the word ‘his’ in small letters just above the main line; this was soon shortened by leaving out the first 2 letters, putting an apostrophe up there and leaving the remaining ‘s.’
- Jane’s script; Andrew’s bag; the actor’s roles; the horse’s harness;
- The actors’ roles; the horses’ harness = more than one actor, horse etc.
But it is ‘the men’s coats’ and ‘the women’s hats’ because the words ‘men’ and ‘women’ are already plural, so don’t need the usual plural ‘s.’
Apostrophes to mark missing letters are common in Shakespeare: look out for these!
For instance the word ‘blessed’ is pronounced with the final ‘ed’ adding an extra syllable, while the word ‘bless’d’ is pronounced as one syllable.
It is helpful to mark the extra ‘ed’ syllable with an accent in your script, so that you don’t miss it out.
Sometimes you’ll see: i’ th’ heat/ i’th’middle/ how is’t my lord?/ Take heed o’ the fool…. And so on in Shakespeare. This just means that you say the words quickly and naturally as: ‘in the heat/ in the middle/ how is it my lord?/ take heed of the fool/,’ neglecting those little consonants as we do in normal speaking.
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I have written Grammar worksheets previously. But recently, when teaching nouns, verbs etc., I found the link between the structure of English and the active processes of acting and wanted to join them together, making them, I hope, doubly useful and relevant to actors.
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