Harold Pinter, Betrayal: Characterisation; Objectives

1. Apply the Stanislavskian ‘magic if’ to this extract. How does it help you to build either the character of Emma or Jerry?

Playing Emma, the ‘magic if’ helps to understand Emma’s possible motives throughout the extract of ‘Betrayal’ and therefore play her character more convincingly because of a better understanding of her background and what she might be wanting from jerry. It works hand in hand with the theory of the given circumstances – from the text, we glean several details from their past, like how they carried on an affair for seven years without anyone suspecting them of it, and how they have moved on since and found separate partners. Yet, through the different beats in the extract we see how a part of Emma might still want Jerry, and vice versa, and it is through this that I could better understand how to play Emma. At the points where she asks, if jerry ever thinks of her, it is evident that she is longing for him and imagining the possible scenario makes it possible for me to play Emma as such.

Because it is difficult for me to use stanislavski's emotion memory technique having never had an affair or been married with children, the magic if helps to imagine how things were like if i were emma, and to imagine how she might realistically react to things.

2. Read up on the works of Vsevolod Meyerhold and his theory of ‘biomechanics’, and Stanislavski’s main concepts. Which approach to acting do you find easier to adopt?

Personally, I feel that stanislavski’s main concepts are easier to adopt than the ‘biomechanic’s theory of Meyerhold. The ‘Magic If’ which Stanislavski advocates that an actor adopts helps very much more with characterization because it allows one to understand every aspect of a character’s life, and encourages the analyzing of the given circumstances to obtain background information on a role. With this background information, motivations of a character’s actions can be obtained and this will guide the actor in determining what emotions to express where and how throughout a scene or a play. Before I found out about stanislavski’s approach to acting, analyzing a script just meant throwing out emotions that looked vaguely like they would fit a certain line and hoping that everything would fit together nicely when the whole script was performed.

Which did not always work the way it should, because emotions have nuances, and a really good way to achieve these nuances was the evaluation of motivations which stanislavski’s techniques encompassed. For instance, anger is a easy way to label a line spoken by a character. But what would give a performance so much more depth was the analysis of the purpose of this anger, where it was coming from, the background of the character which led to this anger, and how this might eventually be resolved. I think it made me kind of a better actor after I learnt about how to think about acting like that. It also provides justification for a lot of ways I might choose to interpret a character and not make me feel as though I am pulling motions and emotions out of thin air. I also prefer the idea of becoming the character, instead of Meyerhold’s approach of acting like the character, because thinking and feeling as a character would is very effective in portraying a character.

That said, there is some value in Meyerhold’s technique, in that it helps in expressing the movement of the character better than Stanislaviski’s does, for me at least. It creates this whole new being for the actor to immerse himself into, and allows one to ‘learn’ movements that can be applied to various characters. Ultimately, although I feel that Stanislavski’s techniques work better for me, it is a matter of integrating the two into a combination that works for one’s acting, drawing on both their strengths to create an ideal balance.

-Clara