Playwright Anya Reiss has provoked a flood of indignation over her remarks on Twitter in which she exhorted actors to stick to their jobs and just say their lines
As an actor, I can’t stop thinking about a line by the playwright Anya Reiss. Not a line from one of her plays, but a recent tweet in which she exhorts actors to just do their jobs and say their lines. This sounds like a sentiment that will be engraved on the concrete of the National Theatre once Jeremy Clarkson becomes the government’s tsar of arts.
It’s a bad idea to get on the wrong side of actors, who have a lot of down time and are generally trying to make the most of free cafe wifi. Not that she is the first. George Bernard Shaw’s stage directions were passive-aggressive litanies of precision – he did not trust actors’ brains. Alfred Hitchock manipulated stars like chess pieces and once professed to be envious of Walt Disney, saying: “If he doesn’t like an actor, he just tears him up.” In fairness to Reiss, many performers are prone to bouts of the Brando. Paraphrasing, mannered cadences, mumbling: I have done it all. On the other hand, I have been in rooms where an actor’s slip or amendment unlocked a meaning that the writer fell in love with, and back-wrote into the script. (Not any of the times I did it, but you know, I was there.)
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2TzCISe
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