Methuen Drama Working with Actors: Meisner Technique for Directors and Actors

Working with Actors provides the key to unlocking the honest, dynamic performance every actor has within them. It offers a well-articulated formulation of the Meisner Technique easy for directors and actors to use within a working context. Through setting out an accessible training programme for practitioners working across stage and screen, this book establishes a clear-cut route to building a three-dimensional character in an organic, non-intellectual fashion, based squarely on the character’s objectives. Few books in this field venture out of the training studio, while in this book - alongside offering an intense and concentrated Meisner training programme - the focus is more on the ‘pay-off’: the collaborative act of developing the role and how that plays out in rehearsal and performance. Beyond that, the books uniquely offers: > a new modality for script reading, analysis and rehearsal through which the character is born in relation to other characters; > a prioritisation of the key skills for coming alive in the moment – listening and putting one’s attention wholly on the other character/actor; > a historical perspective on how Meisner’s methods have evolved and why they provide the basis of truthful acting; > for directors, a format for analysis of the complete work based on Stanislavskian principles; > for actors, complementary methods, such as Uta Hagen’s ‘endowment’, to enhance the ‘reality of doing’