Acting

This article is by Wendy Lewis.

Acting is very enjoyable and hugely educational, and at home brothers and sisters, or the whole of the family, can have immense fun putting on a play.

The obvious disadvantage with doing a play on such a small scale is the lack of people to take on lesser parts, as well as the lack of audience if too much of the family is involved in the production! The obvious advantages are that everyone gets a main role and everyone has a chance to act, direct, make props, write or choose the play, change scenes, dress up, and everything else which is involved in putting on a production. The interesting thing is that there is really very little difference between a home production acted once for your parents, and something on a much larger scale, acted on a stage many times over, to audiences of  hundreds. All the techniques of acting, learning lines, and practising the parts is exactly the same, it is only really the audience which changes, and this doesn't make much of a difference to anything other than nerves!

Choosing a Play
Firstly a play needs to be chosen. If there are young children involved, choosing a simple story like a fairytale is probably a good idea. Otherwise, you can make up a simple story yourself. Either way, you will probably have to write the play yourself (see Writing English... coming soon).
If the rest of your cast is older people, then you can always attempt Shakespeare. I think all actors would agree that nothing is better than acting Shakespeare. Not only does it allow one to appreciate his plays on a whole another level, but no one can describe all the passions of a human soul like him, and these passions he manages to convey  in such perfect words that it is hard not to act well whilst saying them. Other advantages are that his sets are unambitious, his props are few and there is always the minimum of characters.

To act out a whole Shakespeare play would be extremely difficult for a small group of actors, but it is quite possible to find portions of the plays which take your fancy. For example, if you have just a couple of people who want to learn a lot of lines, they can do the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet.

The first piece that my brother and sister and I did was the fight scene in Romeo and Juliet, where Tybalt and Mercutio are killed. There is very little talking, just four characters, and plenty of action.

We have since done large portions of Hamlet and Julius Caesar. With just the three of us it is always a challenge, but we have found it to be quite possible and vastly enjoyable.

When we were younger we did traditional stories, usually with our mother. Rapunzel was one of them, and we acted it out a couple of times for various groups of family members.

Casting
Once you have chosen the play, you can work out who will be who. Hopefully this shouldn't be too difficult. In my experience, people always have an idea of who they want to be, and it is usually somebody different from who I want to be! Some people naturally dislike acting, and blush at the mere idea of it, so these people make good side parts; other people can't wait to get out there and perform, so they naturally take the lead roles. Some people prefer to be the villains, some girls prefer to be boys, some children want to be animals, some people don't want to learn many lines - somehow it all works out. I don't think one has to bother with the young people having to be young and the old having to be old etc.; if one was this accurate there wouldn't be much acting involved, and that would defeat the object!

Learning Lines
The next step is to learn the lines. For some people this is very difficult, for others it doesn't seem so hard, but I think it is possible for everyone. Don't be put off if your fellow actors learn their lines in a day, maybe it will take you a week, but once the lines are learnt it doesn't make a difference who was quicker at the start.

I find a good way of learning lines is to read what I am going to say many times over, and then cover up the lines and repeat them without looking. If you do this in the evening you will find that the lines are cemented in your brain over night, and the next morning you will be able to say them quite fluently. It will take several days, maybe even a week or longer, before you can say the lines without pausing, but it is when this happens that you can really start acting, and bringing the words to life.

Props and Costume
To make a play convincing a certain amount of props and costumes are necessary. This is one of the hardest aspects of producing a play, because it is impossible to have everything. If one really did get all the correct clothes, furniture, scenes, special effects and lighting it would easily cost thousands of pounds.

It is comforting to remember the many films which have had every conceivable prop, and yet the acting was so unconvincing it wasn't worth watching through to the end. This goes to show that props aren't everything; it is the acting which really counts.

But some props are necessary, and help one to act better. Many plays use swords, and a fake sword is not too difficult to get hold of; you can use a stick, a toy plastic dagger, or you can make one out of two pieces of wood. Costume can be harder. Ladies always used to wear long dresses, men often had beards, nobody wore jeans or t-shirts, and who has the appropriate clothes for a king in their house?
Old dressing-up clothes can come into good use, and a beard is easily made from sheep's wool, wire and matching thread. The traditional burnt cork isn't a bad idea, either, for a black moustache. A toga can be made from a sheet, and an old bridesmaid's dress can provide a long skirt for a female part. With improvisation, most of the fundamental props and items of clothing can be had. Some Acting Props can be found in the Craft Section of this site.

Performing the Play
When to perform the play is an important question. "When it is ready," is not a good answer -  if you don't have a deadline you never will be ready. If you know what date you are performing the play on, everyone can aim for that, and practices, dress rehearsals, etc. can be worked out accordingly. Christmas day is a good time to do a performance, but if it isn't near Christmas, you can make it Easter, Halloween, your parents' wedding anniversary, or somebody's birthday.

When performing a play some things are very important, and need to be remembered constantly:

• Never have your back facing the audience. This sounds obvious, but it happens all the time.
• Speak loudly. The audience are never going to hear someone who is murmuring to themselves, but it is easy for the actor to get carried away and forget about their audience.
• Speak clearly. This is another all- important aspect. There is no point in putting on a play if nobody can understand you, but if you speak at everyday speed they probably won't. Therefore, one has to pronounce each word distinctly, even if this sounds ridiculous to you at first. It is true that nobody naturally speaks like that, but nobody naturally speaks like play characters anyway, certainly not like Shakespeare, this is just the way that acting, or at least stage acting, is.

When you are ready to perform the play, you will probably be overtaken by an attack of nerves. There is little one can do to help this. Nerves are not the actor's friends; they can make one forget chunks of lines one has said a million times over, stammer whilst talking, falter whilst walking, quaver whilst singing, and wipe out the whole memory when you need it most, let alone making one feel sick at a time when one wants to feel strong.

But I do believe that they can help the performer as well. If you are confident the play will go well, it often doesn't, and I think the opposite is true too. Nerves help one to try harder and therefore a better performance seems more likely, although this could just be actor's superstition!
It is certainly true that the worse the nerves beforehand, the greater the jubilation afterwards. There is nothing quite like the heady feeling of having finished a performance. This is what makes people act, I think.
Beforehand you will probably wonder why you are doing something so utterly excruciating, afterwards you will be working out when to begin your next play!

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