Act Play Read

Response to Lepage

The kind of theatre, or theatricality, that Lepage discusses in his work is not particularly of my personal taste. “Words were so coloured with politics, at least in the seventies, that people turned to non-verbal theatre to try and get their message across”. Nevertheless, he manages to present some fascinating perspectives on the misused value of film, methods of integrative learning, and the true nature of the thrill and beauty of playing. I found his perspective on theatre to be entirely refreshing.
The interviewer, Richard Eyre, begins by introducing Lepage as someone who represents the characteristics of theatre that are unique. He states “the more I treasure and admire characteristics about the theatre that can’t be translated into any other medium”. To be more specific, he contrasts theatre against other media of acting performance. “I don’t like theatre when it’s a surrogate for TV or for debate or anything else. I like it when it’s the thing itself”. Lepage echoes this notion when he disparages what film has brought to theatre. “[T]heatre for a long time, at least in North America, has been dispossessed from its theatricality. It started to imitate film more and more and got stuck with cinematic realism.” However, Lepage manages to see a redeeming value in the genre of film in what theatre might learn from it. “I think that it’s more interesting to work in theatre and to borrow from film artistic ways of showing things or telling stories. For a long time theatre had been only using the naturalism from film”.
The realism and naturalism that Lepage ascribes to film, is highly reminiscent of the methods of acting put forth by Stanislavski. His pedantic loyalty to realism in acting may have revealed some usable techniques but was, for the most part, genre specific to only realism on stage. Ultimately, speaking on Stanislavski’s behalf, others developed a ‘system’ of acting whereby anyone could ‘learn’ to act, theoretically. As long as you were involved in the genre of realism, the ‘system’ may well have worked, but Lepage explores a much broader scope for theatre. He describes a system of learning in which his mentor “had a way of approaching theatre in a very creative way. He never distinguished what a director and an actor do. He worked mainly on improvisations”. I reiterate that I am not a huge fan of improvisation as a form of entertainment or theatre, but as a form of training actors and directors alike, I think Lepage describes perhaps the only viable ‘system’ to which I might subscribe.
The lost art of collaboration, he suggests has been marred by cultures that have taken theatre to its severe political extremes. Lepage points out that “if you think the British theatre is hierarchical, the German one is virtually feudal. The autocracy of the director is extreme”. From the lofty heights of Stanilavski’s ivory tower, or the blue-collar trenches of Brecht’s socioeconomic severity, it is a lost hindsight to remember theatre as ‘playing’. The pedantic nature of theoretical explorations have all but removed the joy from discovery, creation and play, leaving behind a legacy of actors who take their “profession” all too seriously. Perhaps the most important point in the entire course, outside of Cole’s highly practical applications for actors, is Lepage’s musing on this lost art. “I think there’s an important word that has lost its sense in theatre, and that’s the word ‘playing’. It’s become a profession, a very serious word, but the concept of playing has disappeared from the staging of shows”. Lepage is not suggesting that there is nothing to be taken seriously about theatre, but that the art of playing must be reintroduced as well. Lepage even manages to incorporate his perspective into a refreshing look at some of the most brilliant works in the canon. “Dealing with Shakespeare we’re dealing with an avalanche of resources, a box of toys to be taken out”. As David Cole might suggest, read. Read, read, read, but read the plays, not the theory. Leave all that nonsense to the academic professionals and get on with the art of playing.