Theatre

true and false

David Mamet

Faber, #9.99

AS A student, I once took an acting class that was supposed to be about naturalism. The teacher divided us into groups, and left us to learn chunks of Miss Julie. He, meanwhile, went off to write a play of his own. It was an extreme example of lazy teaching.

Naturally, we got up in arms, complaining we had learned

nothing of Stanislavsky, the Method, or inner-life, just a big slab of Strindberg.

The way David Mamet has it, that was all to the good. There is but one way to learn about acting, he says, and that's to get up and do it, not in the studio, not in the workshop, not in the library, but before an audience. The modern actor's obsession with internalising character, investigating and inventing subtextual background, believing himself into his part, is all so much hokum. You can't act subtext, he argues, and even if you could, the audience is interested only in action.

Subtitled ''Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor'', True and False is ostensibly aimed at the acting student. That's just a front. It's for anyone interested in theatre, be it writing, directing, watching, or criticising. Maybe you won't agree with everything Mamet says - he is, after all, the most unequivocal of writers - but you will only be stimulated by it.

I said unequivocal; let me give you unequivocal: ''The Stanislavsky 'Method', and the technique of the schools deriving from it, is nonsense''; ''Most teachers of acting are frauds''; ''Most plays are better read than performed''.

Mamet is brilliant at such dogmatic assertions, and so good is he at blowing away the cobwebs from tired old assumptions, getting right down to first principles of acting, gnawing away at the same theme in brief chapter after brief chapter, that it's easy not to notice that he says nothing about how to proceed once you've taken on board his advice.

There are times when his anti-intellectualism sounds like a blueprint for boring theatre. The opposite is his intention, and it'd be fascinating to know his thoughts on the interpretative capacity of theatre, the way no two productions of the same play are ever alike.

He talks not at all, for example, about the director's role. Perhaps that's for another book, and if it's as refreshing and provocative as this slim volume, it'll be worth waiting for.