In 1997 the 50-year-old playwright David Hare decided to visit the 50-year-old state of Israel and write a play - Via Dolorosa - about the conflict. He then chose to become the actor of his own play and set about learning to act the monologue for an uninterrupted 95 minutes on stage. Acting Up is a diary of the ups and downs of that learning curve as well as an insight into what it is actors, directors, producers and stage staff actually do in rehearsals.Hare's hilarious diary of his experience on both sides of the Atlantic tells of his difficulties in coming to terms with his terrifying change of career, but also grapples with more seriousquestions about the nature of acting itself.

David Hare was born in Sussex, England in 1947. His first play, Slag, was produced in 1970. His other works include Plenty (1978), A Map of the World (1983), and Pravda (1985). A founder of the Portable Theatre and the Joint Stock, he became resident dramatist and literary manager of the Royal Court Theatre, London (1967–71), and at the Nottingham Playhouse (1973). Until recently, Hare served as director of the National Theatre, London. In 1982, Hare founded a film company, Greenpoint Films. He has written several screenplays including Plenty (1985), Weatherby (1985), Strapless (1989), and Damage (1992). Several of his best-known plays, The Secret Rapture, Racing Demon, Skylight, The Judas Kiss, Via Dolorosa and Amy's View have been presented on Broadway.

Foreword

xi

PART ONE An End to Tim and Jim

3

(110)

PART TWO My Wife is George Bush

113

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Chapter One

4 August 1998 First day of rehearsal in the room at the top of the Old Vic. I first worked here in 1971 when I adapted the Pirandello play The Rules of the Game for the National Theatre. I remember the excitement of listening to Paul Scofield say lines I'd had half a hand in writing. And I last worked here in 1973, when I directed Fulton Mackay in the touring version of Trevor Griffiths' play The Party . The room was charged with the ghost of the just-departed Laurence Olivier.

Stephen Daldry arrives an hour late, thinking we're starting at 12. There's a whole group of us -- publicity, stage management and so on -- who've been there since 11. Stephen tries to be boyish and charming about it but nobody's charmed. I'm already exhausted from talking to a whole lot of people I don't know. It's the worst possible start. I find that doing anything except the play itself is impossible. On Thursday I'm meant to attend the Royal Court Summer School, to talk about the play to student directors and writers. I don't want to do it.

At the end of the day I feel horrible. We got through only two pages because most of our time was spent trying to establish a working language. I'm self-conscious anyway and find acting unnatural. Stephen wants me to walk on very slowly, and I feel a nelly. I keep asking him to get up and do it in order to show me what it looks like from the outside. When he eventually does, after two hours of refusing, only then do I understand what the effect of what he wants is.

At a couple of points in the day I get very angry. A real white rage: a function of my own incompetence. Once it is quite simply because there are three people behind the table -- Rufus (the assistant director), Lesley (the stage manager) and Stephen. Rufus and Stephen are giving me contradictory notes at the same time. I can't cope. I get even angrier when Rufus starts telling me that each line must be reduced to an action. `What are you doing? Are you seducing? Are you tickling? Are you provoking?' This approach, to me, is irredeemable bullshit, because the style of my writing is do all three at once, and with the same line. I found the experience of being taught this so-called method of work as if it were enlightening just incredibly annoying and unhelpful -- and slightly insulting. I found adjectives unhelpful. Stephen wanted me to be `mischievous', he said. But the word seems inadequate to the text. `Mischievous' just won't do, as a word. I am confused by a mix of feelings brought on by direction about something I understand better than anyone in the room, i.e. writing, and something I do worse than anyone in the room, i.e. acting.

I realize the purpose of my acting is to make me a better director, to understand acting better.

There is no doubt that my entrance will be crucial. How I come on. What effect I have by coming on. And how I keep the audience wanting to know what comes next. I learn two useful things today. First, not to rush straight from the end of one line on to the next, but to allow the end of the first line to do its work before I proceed. Second, not to look away from a particular member of the audience before the end of the line, since this creates the impression I don't trust it, or am ashamed of it.

Stephen says at one point that my tendency is to undersell the writer's work, as if I were embarrassed by it. This is a first-class note.

The physical is important. I can't work with keys or wallet in my pockets. I need to feel I'm naked. The work tails out inconsequentially because we have to go and do something called `doughnuts'. This means meeting the staff of the Royal Court at the Duke of York's. There, I take Stephen aside and request that I never again get contradictory notes from two directors at the same time. If I were Judi Dench, I would be able to offer two readings to satisfy both directors. But I'm not and I can't. It freezes me up. Stephen says `My God, I'm sorry. You should have said at the time.'

In the evening, I go to Renoir's film La Grande illusion with Nicole, my wife. The last half hour is unbearably moving. I ask Nicole why. `Because it shows human beings behaving at their best.'

5 August I've been awake in the night, but I realize, tossing and turning, what the day's profit has been. I no longer think of the text as something to explain, but as something which expresses emotion. If this is right, then the pain of the first day has been worth it.

Luckily, Stephen is alone when I go in, so I can get my doubts off my chest. I tell him I don't want to go home feeling terrible again, because that isn't helpful to me. We mustn't leave work unresolved. I also said I wasn't going to talk to the International Summer School, because it was the thing that would most fuck me up at this point. My worst tendency is to explain the text, rather than to act it. To make me go back to explaining it to young people will take me in quite the wrong direction. Stephen accepts this and we cancel the session. Frankly, I also don't want to have to listen to everybody's views since, based on an ignorance of the overall text, they are only going to be prejudices anyway. Of which, with this subject, there are too many already.

The day's work is much better. We have some interesting problems. Most importantly, Stephen tells me I go too fast. I tell him there are two reasons. First, because subconsciously I think the play is too long and I am worried it will be boring. He says it most certainly will be boring if I go as fast as I do at the moment. And secondly, I think that all plays are too slow. Whenever I go to the theatre I sit there thinking `For fuck's sake get on with it.' When I directed Wally Shawn's play The Designated Mourner I had to ratchet Mike Nichols up day by day. The slower people speak the harder they are to understand. Dialogue is rhythm, and there is some scientific rhythm which I believe corresponds to the natural pace of activity in our brains. Mike, himself one of the world's most experienced directors, kept complaining. `Nobody can understand this at the speed you want it.' But I believe I was right. Why am I not right this time?

Audiences move at the speed of their brightest member -- not their thickest. Frank Capra proved this by a famous demonstration. If you make a film, sit alone and watch it. You will believe that the story is going at a comfortable speed. Watch it with five other people and the film will seem a bit slow. Watch it with fifty people and you will find it has suddenly become very slow indeed. Watch it with five hundred people and you will be screaming in agony at how snail-paced it is. The more people present, the quicker you have to be.

Speed is not our only disagreement. So is size. It's a mark of my trust in Stephen that I now dare mention this, but I am aware that some of Stephen's productions are a little bit heavy on the acting. For my taste, they're over-pitched. Stephen just laughs when I remark that I don't want to come over like Fiona Shaw in the Sophie Treadwell play Machinal , belting it out to the back wall. This is what he calls `playing baseball', i.e. trying to hit the ball out of the fucking park. Stephen, needless to say, rather likes this style. He remarks that I am more like Barbara Leigh-Hunt, who refused to shout in An Inspector Calls because she'd been taught at drama school that shouting on stage was wrong.

We settle a happy medium. I agree with Stephen that my pitch will be higher than Barbara Leigh-Hunt's but lower than Fiona Shaw's.

What is good is that today it is a performance. How many times have I said to actors `I don't want you to be playing the line. I want you to be expressing an overriding feeling, and then to watch your mouth move independently underneath your forehead. Disconnect the line from your brain'? And here I am, now doing it myself -- concentrating on the feeling above the line, rather than the line itself. It's incredibly liberating. Mouth's moving, brain's somewhere else.

Tonight Nicole and I watch La Règle du jeu on video, to complete our short Renoir season. A flop on its release, because of what it is saying. Like all artists Renoir's a bit of an opportunist: La Grande illusion is pro-aristocracy, La Règle du jeu is anti-. Whatever produces the best work.

6 August I'm not sure why I'm so depressed this morning, since we had what's called a good day yesterday -- speeding through from my arrival in Tel Aviv, all the way to Benni Begin without too much difficulty. Stephen wants to choreograph and inflect every single moment, tying me down into specificity. Say this, look there, pause, don't breathe here, etc. This suits me fine. The more fixed it is the better. I have no fears about this at all. At one point by telling me to stop and count to five in silence, Stephen liberated a passage which had been giving me trouble. This is the kind of direction I like.

In its form, the play is a travel diary of Israel and Palestine, which dramatizes my meetings with politicians as well as the less formal, everyday encounters I had. In its aim, however, it hopes to be somewhat more than that. It is the story of a Westerner trying to understand two societies where belief is at the centre of the way of life. It is about the wrenching effects on a person apparently without faith of meeting a whole lot of people who have only faith. Its shape has been extremely hard to arrive at, and has involved endless rewriting. It has to seem artless, natural. That, as we know, is the most difficult effect of all to achieve in writing, as in everything else.

A lot of time today is spent searching for a parallel artlessness in my style of delivery. Stephen invents a technique to make me seem to be speaking to only one individual in the audience, and to no other. It's a technique he's seen preachers use. I christen it my Jerry Springer technique. By focusing down on to one person in five hundred, we discover we can convey sincerity. We develop this technique for passages which need special credibility.

The most interesting problem was with the design. I'm to walk along a gangway to a stage built over an abyss. If I fall off the walkway I will die. This does not particularly bother me. For some reason I assume it's not going to happen. But what does bother me is the idea that the structure may not be completely solid. Simon Callow said he never felt comfortable in my production of Christopher Hampton's play Total Eclipse . His chair was on a revolve, so the ground didn't feel firm beneath his feet. After three days I have exactly the same feeling -- that when I put a foot on the ground, the ground must not respond to my foot. I know I won't be able to act if it does.

At the end of the day we discussed costume. I enjoyed this very much since, for once in my life, it's up to others to woo me. I don't have to do the wooing. Like all writers and directors, I've spent my life being the persuader. You're always the school prefect, coaxing and imploring -- `come on, chaps, please do what I ask you, it's going to be fine.' Now the boot, spectacularly, is on the other foot. Ian McNeil, the designer, comes to me and says he hopes that I'm going to like his ideas. He even looks a little nervous. This is terribly refreshing. Best fun of all is keeping out of crucial decisions. There is to be a vision of Jerusalem at the end of the play when a model hillside will rise up out of the stage. It was a pleasure to walk away and let Ian and Stephen decide exactly what form it should take.

Dinner with our French actor friends, Yves Lefèvre and Sabine Haudepain. Sabine was the little girl in Jules et Jim -- her first role, at the age of five. The extraordinary thing is that she says she can still remember every day of the filming. They all lived in the house where the film is set and Jeanne Moreau cooked for them. Now, she says, she is the only actor she knows who goes home after a show. The rest all eat out, have bread and butter and wine and steak and chips. She watches them get bigger as the run goes on.

9 August For the weekend I went to Malvern to see Phèdre . I spent most of my time trying to work out why Barbara Jefford, classically trained at the Old Vic in the 1950s, is presently so much better than anyone else. What is this thing some actors have -- absolute simplicity, absolute authority? Dinner afterwards was very disturbing. I was shocked first of all by the hostility some people showed to the idea of Nicole Kidman appearing in The Blue Room -- a Schnitzler adaptation I have just done for the Donmar, and which is rehearsing concurrently with Via Dolorosa . They resent the idea of Nicole swanning in from Hollywood and taking a job from our local actors. It is very rare to feel you are working on a project that everyone wants to fail. When conversation then turned to my own acting debut, the actors at dinner were not hostile, but everyone else was. The form the hostility takes is for everyone to tell me how `brave' I am being by doing it, how difficult one-man shows are, how impossible it is to remember your lines, how contentious the subject is, etc.

It reminds me of Wally Shawn's story in his film My Dinner With André . When he was going to act for the first time, as it happened as a cat, in The Master and the Margherita , everyone told him how impossible it was to act in a cat-suit, how you can't breathe in cat-suits, how you become disoriented, and so on. Wally thought, do these people want me to fail as a cat?

However, the most positive sign of change was when I made a short speech introducing the old Joan Crawford melodrama Mildred Pierce , which I had chosen for a screening at the Malvern cinema as part of the festival. Afterwards, Nicole asked what had happened to me. My manner had changed completely. My nervousness had gone and I spoke fluently. I said I'd been using this occasion as a sort of rehearsal, to see whether I could make a public appearance using the techniques I've learnt. The only problem? Nicole told me I still twitch my nose.

Also, Friday had been encouraging. For the first time, I flew. I took the material where Pauline talks in the boarding house in Gaza about the tendency of Palestinians to be delighted when things fuck up. I asked Stephen, `Does it worry you that Pauline has no particular motive to be as passionate as this?' He said, `Not in the slightest.' At once I let rip. The following section, which leads us to Birzeit University, suddenly became malleable. There was that feeling of meltdown you get in all proper theatre when the material ceases to be about its supposed subject (in this case, Israel and Palestine) and instead becomes about something else entirely (faith and conviction).

Stephen and I were both amused because we had independently come to the same conclusion. It's fine for Pauline to be passionate because, in some mad way, I am Pauline. The end of the day was therefore exhilarating, with me feeling for the first time I was acting. What does this mean? I ceased to be me.

10 August Not a great day. It was 93 degrees and the sun beat down on the glass roof of the Old Vic rehearsal room. I got a parking ticket in the middle of trying to do a particularly complicated passage, where, rather like Rod Hull and Emu, I have to impersonate George Ibrahim talking to Hussein Barghouti. Stephen had come off a plane. He had been fundraising for the Royal Court in Cap Ferrat ( `Quelle vie, quelle existence!' ) and he seemed unfocused and bored. It occurred to me that maybe he has given me all the notes he has. When we went back to the beginning of the text he seemed to have remarkably little to say.

I think it is very hard for him. Listener-fatigue must set in when you have only one voice to listen to all day. It's very easy to find your judgment going, particularly in the stifling heat. The sound designer, Paul Arditti, needs to hear some of the show today. We agreed it couldn't be the whole thing because that would be too much for me. But then I left a message for Stephen after rehearsal saying I would prefer to do the whole ninety minutes. My true reason is I think it might stimulate Stephen. To get the best out of my director, I feel I have a duty to keep him entertained. We have to proceed in a way which allows him regularly to hear things fresh, or he will become too implicated, by habit.

We have decided that we will preview the play to invited audiences before we open at the Royal Court.

The best part of the day was spent in the morning with Patsy Rodenburg, the National Theatre's voice coach. I have known Patsy a long time. She operates throughout the British theatre as a kind of paramedic, an angel of expertise, rushing in wherever she's needed. Her books about how to speak are huge bestsellers because she has the gift of being able to address the specialist and non-specialist alike. She's the Delia Smith of the vocal chords.

Once, when I was going to Japan, Peter Brook gave me an introduction to meet his favourite monk in Kyoto. I approached the old man with appropriate reverence, hoping he might pass on some special wisdom. He turned out, in his youth, to have been a student at the London School of Economics. We sat in a grey pebble garden in silence for some time before he said, `I can't say I've learnt a great deal in seventy-five years, but I do know a little bit about breathing.' As the years have gone by, I have realized that to know a bit about breathing is a considerable achievement.

Patsy started by saying that I spoke from my shoulders -- far too high up -- and that my tendency was to think so fast that I rushed to my next thought before I had even completed the last. Her advice was so similar to Stephen's that I suspected collusion, which was hotly denied. Patsy showed me a series of exercises to lower my voice into my diaphragm, and to release the top half of my body. They were so good that not only could I feel the pressure coming off my voice, but I also found myself standing differently all day.

Both she and Stephen have taught me about the act of trust. Take one sentence at a time, invest that sentence with its full meaning. And trust that the next sentence is going to appear. `You know it,' says Patsy, `so it will pop up. Think of it in advance and you will destroy the performance.'

Patsy sums up my whole dilemma. `It's odd to say this to a writer, but what I shall be trying to teach you is to put your own rhythms aside so that you can find the writer's. All my teaching is to free the actor from their own voice in order to express the writer's. And so it's essential that you feel them as two different things.'

I am beginning to realize this experience is going to help me not just in the month of September, but for the rest of my life.

At the end of the day, Ian McNeil and his assistant -- everyone has assistants except me -- came in and looked fairly bored as I worked. But I have toughened enough that it doesn't any longer affect me how bored or otherwise visitors look. Fuck 'em.

(Continues...)