PICKING EACH OTHER UP

The potential for the show is endless, limitless. This is its strength, it’s beauty, it’s wonder. But let’s never rest on our laurels. Don’t settle or get too comfortable in our successes. Louis reminded us of the continuing need to ensure our actions have a specificity that will in turn give them what Charlie and Louis referred to as a Muscularity.

This discipline channels the Actor’s creativity in such a way that it fires like a torpedo down a barrel instead of wildly exploding and fading into the night like a firework.

So if there is a moment, a line, a movement a gesture, a thought, a relationship that is secretly or unconsciously becoming safe in a sameness, or lost in a vagueness – then break it. Investigate the action. And pick each other up on them.

The well executed play is full of corpses. Ours is alive because its never finished. Let’s continue to limit ourselves only to the boundaries of what we don’t know and it’s infinite possibilities. Failures are exciting as they can reveal infinite possibility but we must acknowledge them. We must always “fail again”, of course, but let’s “fail better”.

Pick each other up. Standing apart from their egos and avoiding interpretation actors can and should continue to pick each other up on mistakes, particularly habits, tricks, laziness and most of all the time and energy consuming apologies. Let’s not be friends if it means not telling the truth, but foes that can reveal it.


ORSINO
I know thee well. How dost thou, my good fellow?

FESTE
Truly, sir, the better for my foes and the worse for my friends.

ORSINO
Just the contrary; the better for thy friends.

FESTE
No, sir, the worse.

ORSINO
How can that be?

FESTE
Marry, sir, they praise me and make an ass of me; now my
foes tell me plainly I am an ass: so that by my foes, sir, I
profit in the knowledge of myself, and by my friends I am abused:
so that, conclusions to be as kisses, if your four negatives make
your two affirmatives, why then, the worse for my friends and
the better for my foes.