Stanislavski Uncovered (Part One)

Another picture of me as Mary in 'The Birth of Jesus'.

Last Thursday I walked around Creakebottom village as I often do, taking in the grandeur of its bumpy hills and feeling it’s odour-soaked blasts of wind on my face. Due to the frequent manure spreading on the largely agricultural farms surrounding the village, it can sometimes feel like wading through an enormous fart, which never really tails off. If I happen to launch a gaseous deposit (a stinker) into my personal atmosphere, I can open a window to attack the offense, but what if you’re already outside?! What then? The Creakebottom tourist board have long grappled with this conundrum, considering various solutions from giant air-hoovers to fragrance-emitting lampposts. The one sensible solution of introducing a wind-farm was met with a revolution akin to the Arab spring, with at least a dozen villagers picketing the council offices for the best part of an hour. It was wishful thinking on the council’s behalf, they can’t even get a Tesco’s here, let alone a wind-farm.

Anyway, where was I? Yes, last Thursday, in Creakebottom, I passed a homeless man selling the Big Issue, a rare sight in our village.

This week I was thrilled with the juiciest of questions which landed on my inbox. I have grown impatient with my intro and I can’t wait to get straight into it.

Category: Theatre related

“Gus, I've often heard in amateur theatre circles about 'Stanislavski Technique' but no one seems to have a clue what it is or how to use it. Could you help?"

Gareth Spinks, Swindon

What a corker of a question, and correctly labelled too! Such is the magnitude of this topic I will cover it in two swoops, part one this week and part two will follow next week.

The Rise of Stanislavskism (part 1)

The great man himself

Konstantin Sergeievich Stanislavski was born in January 1863 according to Wikipedia, which you may feel makes him rather old. But his techniques and methods are still being used today, though his body is long decomposed. I recently saw a budding actor of the professional ilk who showed off a picture with Stan’s gravestone. I honestly haven’t the foggiest idea what that was in aid of. ‘Here’s a picture of me with a slab of stone with Stan’s name on, underwhich lies what remains of his decomposed body’. Bizarre, but as you’ll find out, Stan does tend to make actors go a bit cuckoo.

Stanislavski is the name on everyone’s lips, big or small, when it comes to actor training, giving actors the tools to go out every night and give an audience the most believable performance humanly possible by humans pretending to be other fictional humans in a completely fabricated environment. So successful were his thoughts and musings that now all over the world students and wannabe actors are mentioning his name, of their own accord or as they read aloud blogs just like this one, that mention his name.

If you’ve ever seen a film or a play and thought “well blow me sideways that was realistic weren’t it! I almost believed it was real!” you’ve probably been Stanified. You see Stan was all about things being real, seeming real to an audience even though they’re not. In this way he was a very effective liar, and we can all thank the Lord he wished to pursue lying onstage, else I fear he’d have stolen all of Russia and the choice pickings of Eastern Europe by pretending to be their King.

He’s Russian by the way, and stinking rich, as many rich Russians are, and thus without need to work or do anything worthwhile with his time, he began wasting away his glutton filled hours with highly innovative studies into creating world-class theatre.

Stan's Method in Practice

Identity obvious from text.

Stan developed a technique which he named Emotion Memory Recall, or EMR (if you translate the full title into an acronym). This psycho-tool alone has been sold to drama schools all over the world as the way forward in modern-technological acting. It works like this: let’s say you have been given a role as Grumpy the dwarf in ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, perhaps at an annual pantomime. Now you might think “Easy, I’ll just strap shoes onto my knees, and pull a grumpy face. Job’s a gooden” well that would most certainly put you into the Crap School of Acting, not to mention the Director putting you at the back of the stage (the place no actor wants to be). No, Stan would teach you that the way to authentically portray Grumpy, is to remember (or recall, you see where the title comes from) a time when you yourself were grumpy. Perhaps you’d stubbed your toe. Perhaps an earthworm had wiggled it’s way into your picnic and you’d only found out once it was too late. Perhaps your knees had fallen off. Think about that grumpiness you felt. Meditate on it. Let it overtake you again. Then walk around a bit being grumpy, accessing the grumpy moaner that lives inside of you. Next step, start to believe that you are Grumpy, go out and introduce yourself as Grumpy the dwarf to passers by, refuse to shake their hands and moan about the weather (best to avoid those with Dwarfism during this phase as you are very likely to offend). Now you are no longer ‘being Grumpy’ but in fact you ‘are Grumpy’ or at least you think you are, and if you think you are, so will the audience, so says Stan.

So far so good you may think, albeit a little schizophrenic.

Well now imagine you have been cast in the role of Hamlet, the suicidal Prince bent on murdering his Uncle who’s killed Hamlet’s dad and shacked up with his Mum. Now we face a bigger problem, in that we are portraying emotions we may not ourselves have felt. Time for level 2, let’s stay with Hamlet.

Now although I have stayed for many acting seasons in Woking, Surrey, I have never stayed long enough to suffer from the suicidal depression which most permanent residents battle with on a regular basis, owing to the catastrophic choice of architecture, particularly in the town centre across the course of the last 50 years. Woking is the place creativity comes to die. I speak of course of the pre-aspirational years, before Woking developed the dream of becoming a poor man’s Guildford, and lured Superdry to open a shop here – the Japanese may make great clothes but they are known for their gullible nature.

What to do? I’m in a toilet that won’t flush. I’ve gotta play Hamlet but am not personally suicidal, and I can’t afford the time to spend in Woking History Centre which might get me to that place of suffering. What to do? The answer is in degrees. I may not have experienced the desire to end my life, but I certainly have experienced the desire to hurt myself a bit. I remember a time when I had had had a particularly long stint in the Woking borough, and each day I would walk past the Maybury Road and have to cast my eyes on the brown, yes brown, high rise, with brown windows, like a giant poo-drenched tardis. I could feel the depression rising in me one day, and as I sat down at Esquires, (now extinct, but in its height the most disappointing Coffee shop in Woking yet the only who had invested in free WiFi) knowing my coffee was too hot, I braced myself and took a big healthy swig. As usual the coffee wasn’t as hot as it should have been owing to Esquires poor standards, and thus the self-harming impact wasn’t what it should have been, but nevertheless I had abused my own body out of despair. I had, in a sense, committed mouth suicide.

All I now need to do is recall this event, focus on the poo-tardis, recall the need to hurt my mouth and scale this up to something resembling full suicide. Then of course I must say the words of “to be or not to be” with all that at the forefront of my overworked imagination.

You can see how this technique is both highly effective and indeed slightly mental. Most actors that do it regularly go bonko – is it worth it? Daniel Day-Lewis, a happy-go-lucky extreme Method actor, was doing precisely what I have been describing, playing Hamlet and using EMR, when on the National Theatre stage he believed that he saw the Ghost of his dead Father, his, not Hamlet’s. His dad. Who was also dead, but not under precarious circumstances. None that I know of anyway. But he was fully dead, and yet doing his EMR, DDL was convinced that he saw him. It freaked him right out and he’s never acted on stage again. 

_______________________________

Tune in next week for Part 2!

Yours Creatively

G. Blathermouth

GUS' QUESTION GUIDELINES: 

Any question MUST fall into one of the following FOUR categories:

a) Theatre related
b) AMADSC related
c) Love-life related
d) Jesus related (it may be that I refer you to Rev. Wesley Biggins if my theology muscles prove too weak for the weight of your questions)

I will answer no questions on the politics of UKIP or the progress of my long-term battle with genital warts. For questions regarding the former, please read the Daily Mail. For questions regarding the latter, please watch this space for info on my companion Blog 'Gus' Nuts' for all things wart-related.

To submit your questions, simply post them in the comments section below, or on the 

Gus' Blathermouth's Facebook Page

Slingshot Theatre Facebook Page

Why Suffolk? My unbuttoned chest revealing my heart for the 'South-folk'.

Hello dear friends and lovers of Blather-Attack, the weekly window into life as me, Gus Blathermouth.

A label with spelling mistakes.

Many of us will have pondered the considerable benefits of labels. They allow you to easily recognise a favourite clothing brand e.g. the Edinburgh Wollen Mill, personally identify your own property, and glean instructions as to the best course of action for cleaning said garment. Yes it’s official, labels are in, and they aren’t going anywhere. However, imagine if you will, a garment with more than one label… suddenly their usefulness has diminished for there is inter-label confusion. If they could speak it would be a particularly bitter argument as both claim the right of objective truth. “It’s a 50° wash!” “How dare you! It’s a 60° with one line!” “One line!” “Yes one line you imbecile!” “Well of course YOU’D give it one line, you chicken!” “Well this jumper has shrunk from a large to a small over the past 6 months and we all know why that is Mr. I-don’t-need-any-lines-because-I’m-so-far-up-my-own-stitches!” “Watch it you or I’ll fray your edges!” and so on and so forth. Carnage, plain and simple, I think you’d agree.

However stay with this grim picture. Now imagine a jumper with many labels, too many to count. Hell! The labels war against one another with vociferous anger, it’s a fibre-bath. It’s also tragic, as the very thing that made the label so sought after, has been it’s downfall.

This friends is the reason I resist any opportunity to put a label on what I do and who I am. I admit I am tempted to call myself a “leading actor”, but then what would the director inside me say? If I don “Producer and Creative Entrepreneur” the writer inside me storms out in a huff and starts a dirty protest in the toilet. Even a tentative and generalised label of “Man of Theatre” provokes jealousy, ripost, abuse and phlegm-spitting from the “Man of Intellect” the “Man of Romance” and the “Man of Faith” within the vast cloisters of my soul.

No, labels aren’t for me. I shall humbly wear “Cultural Philanthropist” and leave it at that.

Time for this week’s question! It comes from another East Anglian, whom I sense I know somewhat but I can’t for the life of me think how.

Dear Gus, Thank you for your frankly moving account of your "call" to Suffolk. As someone who has lived in exile over the border in Cambridgeshire for most of my life, looking longingly into Suffolk but only venturing there for occasional shopping trips in Newmarket, I admire your courage, and envy you greatly. Would you be able to share with us why you chose Suffolk as your base of operations and, if I may say so, the fortunate recipient of your ministrations?
Many thanks, Mr M. Hawes, Soham, Cambs

I foresaw this was coming and I could also sense that sometime in the future it would happen. A backlash, pure and simple. The apostle Paul said “All who wish to follow Christ will endure persecution”, I am no different.

The Warsaw Insurrection (1794)

My instructions for asking questions are CLEARLY laid out at the bottom of this blog, PLEASE be careful to follow them. Mr. M. Hawes (full forename not offered) has submitted a perfectly good question with the perfectly fatal flaw of not labelling his question (As I said, I’m not anti-labels, in the right context they are useful and should be employed, especially when CLEARLY asked for by someone, i.e. Me and ignoring them is both offensive and bigoted by the perpetrator i.e. You Mr. M. Hawes (full forename not offered)).

However Mr. M. Hawes (full forename not offered) redeems himself with the rightful admiration he holds for me and I am therefore sweetened from my bitterness to pick his question among the many thousands I have received already. I trust you the readers will be dying to hear my response in your ever eager eagerness.

WHY SUFFOLK GUS?

“…be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em”

Twelfth Night

My arch rival yet kindred spirit William Shakespeare wrote this famous line from his transcendent play and it provides a good basis to understand why I, a tree of artistic fruit was planted in to so rich a field as mighty Suffolk. I might re-write it like this:

“be not afraid of Suffolk: some are born in Suffolk, some achieve residence in Suffolk, and some have Suffolk thrust upon ‘em”

For I, all four statements are true. Take a walk with me…

Fear of Suffolk

People are scared of Suffolk, it gives them the willies. Why? Is it because of the vast gaps in public transport? Is it the counter-cultural approach to technological development? Is it because of the stubborn village-mentality so prevalent in the region? I certainly felt a fear when I first eyed “Welcome to Suffolk” whizzing down those country lanes, my view utterly impinged by a tractor, the road oscillating beneath me, constructed in such a way that a minor miracle is required for two cars to pass each other. I felt fear when I nearly died (I don’t exaggerate) after jumping into a puddle which turned out to be a quagmire, only to be rescued by the mere strength of my arms. But each time the fear came and knocked on my door I told it to do one. Clear off fear, I won’t bow to you idol of worry. I won’t be shaken by your screeches and door-banging. I won’t let the smell of dung send me packing back to that London. No.

Born in Suffolk

West Suffolk Hospital (not to scale).

It’s true. The sweaty screaming and pushing that lead to my inevitable escape from that warm but restricting environment (the womb) occurred at West Suffolk Hospital (location evident from name). I am a Suffolkite. My blood type is Suffolk. My DNA is Suffolk. This was for me the strongest indication of my call to these lands, being that God in his wisdom chose for me Suffolk as a launch pad, a grow bag, and I hope one day a breeding ground.

Achieve residence in Suffolk

Some housing in this county is as cheap as chips (and Suffolk chips are cheaper than most chips in the rest of the country, Yorkshire notwithstanding, so those homes I refer to are very cheap indeed, being that the chip:pound ratio is lower, ipto-facto, the houses are extremely cheap, given that by the national average each chip in a Suffolk chip shop is 5.6p cheaper than in say Kent or Surrey. London of course has an extortionate amount of tax levies on chips, and due to the Londonite habit of re-branding ordinary consumable items in order to charge large amounts of money for them, the chip has skyrocketed in price to monolithic proportions. Of course housing in London is very expensive too, so to say “cheap as chips” in London still stands up, though with a much adulterated connotation.)

Other housing is this county costs the Earth (and despite a global recession in the last few years, that still represents a large amount of money).

Back in the early 90s I purchased a ‘creative ark’ near the village of Creakebottom as a place to go on artistic retreats from the theatre hell of that London. I then decided to redesign the ark after it was destroyed by storm. Due to cost and lack of planning this project was put on ice, but due to unforeseen circumstances the ice melted and the project hit the floor again. Nevertheless, I achieved my first re-residence in Suffolk out of need for breathing space and to reconnect with my birth-county.

Have Suffolk thrust upon them

Whilst I can point my fans towards many reasons for my relocation back to my motherland, I cannot ignore the timely death of my Aunt and the subsequent estate I received as sole heir. When she kicked the bucket I was living out of a Premier Inn in Woking, truly suffering for my art. The message was clear: people are dying in Suffolk, they need someone to help them live. And as soon as this became clear in my mind I did what any rational human would do, I bought a one way ticket to Ipswich rail station, got on an interlinking train to Stowmarket, caught a bus to Lavenham, walked a few miles up the road to Monks Eleigh, hitched a ride towards Brettenham and jumped off when I was near Creakebottom. Two days later I arrived and the reward of arriving at my destiny was worth the week’s travel.

Once in Suffolk, you can imagine that even on a practical level it is very hard to leave. But I had no reason to leave. Suffolk had thrust itself on me like a wanton woman, and I had accepted the romantic advance – though to be absolutely clear this is only a simile and I have never engaged in any such activity, I find it abhorrent and would rather take pity on the woman who felt she needed to sell her body to make bread, perhaps performing a monologue for free or adding her to the AMADSC mailing list, rejecting in its entirety her offer.

_________________________________________________________________________________

So there you have it, the full scoop on all things location. If you are international reader and would like more insight into life in Suffolk, please watch this video below.

Get your questions in for next week!

Keep artistic.

G. Blathermouth

GUS' QUESTION GUIDELINES: 

Any question MUST fall into one of the following FOUR categories:

a) Theatre related
b) AMADSC related
c) Love-life related
d) Jesus related (it may be that I refer you to Rev. Wesley Biggins if my theology muscles prove too weak for the weight of your questions)

I will answer no questions on the politics of UKIP or the progress of my long-term battle with genital warts. For questions regarding the former, please read the Daily Mail. For questions regarding the latter, please watch this space for info on my companion Blog 'Gus' Nuts' for all things wart-related.

To submit your questions, simply post them in the comments section below, or on the 

Gus' Blathermouth's Facebook Page

Slingshot Theatre Facebook Page

The Call of Blather: an miniature epic tale of spiritually-induced urban-to-rural migration

A picture of a typical stage door sign from the professional theatre.

Hello there followers and thanks for clicking in again to Blather-Attack, your chance to ask myself, the official Gus Blathermouth™ anything your heart desires (answers not an obligation).

For my first full Blog I was thrilled to receive this from a local fan of my work:

“I have heard many rumours about how you abandoned your professional acting career and came back to Suffolk to be an am-drammer. I would love to hear the full story – could you silence the rumour-room and give us the scoop? With fond regards, Shiela x x x”

Shiela McGinty, Laxfield, Suffolk

I must admit when I first received this I feared there wasn’t a question to answer, something I wouldn’t want to engage with. Blather-Attack isn’t about me discussing statements – I’m here to quench the public’s parched gobs with celebrity juice. However, underneath the sentiment is a rocket of a question to pick apart. So Shiela I accept your question, sadly the kisses will remain in the cyber-air as I don’t conjugate with strangers. So without further ado, how did I escape the clutches of the professional theatre and become the amateur theatre icon I am today?

THE BEGINNING OF THE NEW ERA

It was January. Winter. In the mid-to-late-to-mid-late-90s.  The trees stood like stick insects in theatrical freeze frames. The sky grew dark so quickly after it had grown light it was almost like my time in the Northern fjords of North Norway where the sky grew dark extremely quickly after it had grown light. Frost grew cold on the green blade-like grass, and middle-aged men scraped ice from their windscreens with seldom-used loyalty points cards. This was Suffolk in hibernation. But as in all Winters, whilst it looks as if nothing is happening in the world around, underneath the ground the tectonic plates are shifting so vociferously that life will truly never be the same again. This was what was going on inside me during the build up to the Millennium bug (or lack of).

Having grown weary of my successful career as a leading actor, including such roles as ‘Slim’ in Oklahoma! and ‘Provost’ in Julius Cesar, I began to realise my calling as an cultural philanthropist come modern day bard. I remember standing on stage in a whirlwind of applause and abuse after delivering my devastatingly funny monologue as the Friar in the concluding act of Romeo & Juliet. (I used to punctuate the line "But then a noise did scare me from the tomb" with a bottom-burp (should I have had one 'in the wings' so to speak) which was perhaps the pinnacle of that particularly comic speech). My awe-inspired cast members called me ‘Marmite’ due to my ability to split an audience’s taste buds into two different albeit utterly equal halves. One disgusted punter would spit on my shoe and another doting fan would polish it for me.

As I soaked in the deep lingering adoration and the acidic taste of tossed tomato juice as it made it’s familiar journey down my forehead, pausing around my eyebrow before taking the plunge down my cheek and off into the dark abyss of my sweaty costumed body, I felt a deep prodding in my conscience that this was the end of something. Of course the play was ending, and the National Tour was ending, but down in the earthy gutterills of my soul the ear of my loins heard the whisper of a new calling. A call. The call. The call that would blow like a trumpet-wielding Duracell bunny through the entirety of my life (up to the point of writing), calling me forward, like Pocahontas, downstream, or upstream, depending on where I was already and where I felt I needed to go.

The voice said “come on Gus, come on”. “Where?!” I said, internally with a mixture of excitement and angst, like a child responding to the invitation of a mischievous elder brother (or sister). “Wherever you want” said the voice. “But I… I…” I paused, unable to speak or say words. “I… don’t know where I want to go”. “Yes you DO!” spat the echoic ethereal unction, “You’re right I do” I conceded. And with that I walked off stage, into my dressing room, into the toilet, lingered for three minutes or eight (can’t remember which visit that one was) collected my things, nodded to my dressing room buddy, walked down the stairs, nodded to the old bint on stage door, shook my employer’s hand, signed a few autographs, went to the after-show drinks, tried to kiss a cast member, failed, hailed a taxi, got in, got out (paid first), opened bag, got out keys, inserted keys into lock, realised it was the wrong key, realised it was the wrong door, corrected errors, entered my house and passed out. And with that brief action I closed one door and opened another, which Narnia-like, lead me into a whole new world of wonder, danger and adventure.

Of course some will say that the passing was more made concrete by the lack of offers I received for further professional performance work or indeed work of any kind, but I would point not to external circumstances, but internal chimes and resonances of the heart for my hasty departure from the cannibalistic dog-eat-dog world of a jobbing actor and into the inspired, honest and majestic land of amateur theatre.

Snow.

Some called me rash, but they were wrong. My name is Gus and always will be. I had finally understood the shocking truth the artist’s way and the professional theatre’s constriction of said way, and I wasn’t about to go back for sloppy seconds. The artist is like a freshly laid sheet of snow. Exciting. Malleable. White and flat but with the potential of holding any shape one should care to mould it into. The artist looks at this snow (himself (or herself)) and sees infinite possibility, and is released like an unwanted fart to mould the landscape as he (or she) sees fit. 

The professional theatre is like an ungrateful glutton who having enjoyed the view of the natural snowy beauty walks out of his front door, too fat and lazy to wander upstairs to his toilet, and urinates all over the lawn, tainting the snow’s vibrant white with the tacky yellow of his unhydrated piss and destroying it’s form via it’s body-temperature heat. And every day is the same. Snow. Piss. Snow. Piss. Snow. Piss. Two pisses on a Thursday and a Saturday and piss-soaked snow sold in the interval. Sunday, as with Christianity, is a day of rest from snowing or pissing. The irony of this day off of course is that many theatre producers are Jewish and are actually pissing when they should be on Shabbat, which would prohibit such behaviour. This pushes my point to its furthest end.

Thus wishing to remove myself from the constriction of being a brick on someone else’s wall, I escaped the only way an artist can. By revolt. I felt 17 again, but with more bodily hair. I felt like a prisoner of war seeing light for the first time in years. The first Monday out of theatre-hell I sat on my porch and took a toast at exactly 4.46pm, which is the time I would usually catch the train from my theatre-hell temporary base in Woking, Surrey up into the gas-chamber of central London. My career had taken me global, but I was about to go home, and this time for good. Why? Well I’ve already told you, I heard the call…

But what would this call look like? What would it sound like? Who else would respond to it’s echoey bell? When would the bell end? These answers I would find through the perspiration of my second career, a career I am following to this day (unless you are reading this after my death, when for obvious reasons I will have ceased my endeavours, in body if not in spirit). 

_______________________________

So that's all for this week friends, I hope you've enjoyed getting hearing the much-debated account straight from the horse's mouth, and with that I'll shake my mane, trott my hooves, release an enormous poo as if it's totally normal, and gallop back to my stable for another week. Do get your questions in for next week. 

Sincerely yours,

Gus.

GUS' QUESTION GUIDELINES: 

Any question MUST fall into one of the following FOUR categories:

a) Theatre related
b) AMADSC related
c) Love-life related
d) Jesus related (it may be that I refer you to Rev. Wesley Biggins if my theology muscles prove too weak for the weight of your questions)

I will answer no questions on the politics of UKIP or the progress of my long-term battle with genital warts. For questions regarding the former, please read the Daily Mail. For questions regarding the latter, please watch this space for info on my companion Blog 'Gus' Nuts' for all things wart-related.

To submit your questions, simply post them in the comments section below, or on the 

Gus' Blathermouth's Facebook Page

Slingshot Theatre Facebook Page