Series 4, Episode 7: The Problem of Not Feeling

This is not true, but useful, a pub cast from Cheek by Jal. My name is Lucy Dawkins and I've been chatting to artistic directors Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerrod about all they have discovered about life and theatre in four decades of making plays all over the world. In this episode, Declan and I sat down to talk about a question which we've heard a lot from this, is "Hello, Declan." Hello, Lucy. So to the head, it might be useful for us to talk about a question which was recently posed to you by an actor, which is, what does an actor do when they can't seem to feel what the character is feeling? It's something I hear quite a lot from actors, maybe after the run of a show where things didn't go quite as we wanted it to, and an actor will say, "Oh, I just wasn't really feeling any of it." What would you say to an actor who says, "I just can't seem to feel it." I think that the problem that we experience in the rehearsal room is actually a problem that's present in life. I can only say what's worked for me. I have a huge privilege at school to have two or three teachers who talked me through some Shakespeare plays, and it wasn't what they gave me that was so precious. What was precious was what they took away, sometimes taking something away from somebody can be an enormous gift. What they took away from me was my right to be embarrassed facing these big texts and to be embarrassing these big words and to be embarrassed to put these sort of huge thoughts. They took away my self-consciousness, as Yates says, "There's more enterprise in walking naked, and when I rehearse, that's what I try to help the actor do as well. I hope that the spirit passes through me." But there's another thing that I'd like to talk about, which is never discussed because I think it's really quite to boo, and that is that one of the intimidating things about these great plays is they seem to be about people who have this fantastic flow with their emotions, that they have these Everest feeling. They're a redrector one saying to me about doing agamemnon, it's a real Everest. I think we can get very intimidated by people being emotional and that we feel that we ought to be emotional, and sometimes we can be ashamed because we don't really feel anything at all, and sometimes when you see somebody apparently expressing a huge passion on stage, it's good to sort of look again and see that sometimes it's more like they want to feel it than they feel it, and that the feeling itself is, they're performing it in order to feel it. So are you then suggesting that these characters in, say, Shakespeare's plays who seem to be feeling these huge emotions are actually characters who are struggling from feeling empty and trying to feel things? Exactly. In Hamlet, for example, he has this explosion on stage when he discovers his uncle's murder to his father. He's a bloody, baudi villain, remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain, ovengence. It's quite hard to remember that, I always get me squirting, get it wrong, bloody, baudi villain, remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain. I think the treacherous, lecherous gives it a way, really. He's like trying to work himself into a passion. He's trying to work himself to have feelings, and I suspect that he feels he doesn't feel anything at all, really, Hamlet, or whatever he feels, it's certainly not appropriate. I think he can help us hugely as a key to get into the characters in plays, because why should Hamlet, and Lear, and Othello, and Lady MacBirth, and Cleopatra? Why should they be essentially different beings from us? Obviously, every human being is different, but the sort of huge, tectonic clashes that take place with an individual are very often there are things that are similar. So, one of the things, I think, that binds us together is a kind of hidden shame about not feeling anything at all, and we hide this from other people, because it's embarrassing if you don't feel anything at all. So I think what's really refreshing about this is that it's actually really useful to the actor when they don't feel anything, because it's something that they've got in common with the character. Exactly. Exactly. Because you don't feel it. You shouldn't necessarily feel ashamed. You think maybe that's the problem with the character as well. When Hamlet speaks those lines, when I first read them, I thought, "Oh my God, he's in such a passion, he's in such a passion." I tried to organize it, and Harry doesn't, I think he probably doesn't feel anything at all. There is an extraordinary moment in Hamlet when a group of actors comes to the castle else in North. Hamlet sees the player king act this incredibly passionate speech, and he's really thunderstruck by this incredible emotional immediacy that the actor has, and he says, "How is it possible that this actor can act this feeling when it's all completely fake? And I, who've got the course, I can't act it at all, and it's horror is being completely empty." And the sad thing is that there's nobody there to say to Hamlet, "That's okay, that's just like to be a human being." For me, that's a problem in rehearsal that the actor is often all alone, feeling actually quite frightened that they're not really anything at all, not feeling enough, not getting deep enough into the truth of the character's emotions. You want to say, don't worry about that, perhaps the character has the same problem, perhaps the character doesn't really feel, very much, or feels the wrong thing, or he's trying to have to feel the thing that's appropriate to the situation, but there's a gap between us and our feelings. Like, is it the right feeling? Is it the wrong feeling? And what I often say to actors and has proved very useful sometimes to say, "Well, why don't you make your problems that the character's problems, see if you can make that work, see if that opens any doors for you?" And very often, it magically does. I think an interesting way, for example, of looking at that first scene in King Lear, when Lear asks which of his daughters loves him most, so he can decide how to divide up the country. It's completely bizarre, except the problem is it's not really bizarre, because we wanted to know how much we're loved, and if people are feeling very insecure, they want you to say how much you love them, and you can never say it, so you know, you can have terrible rouse as somebody saying, "Show me you love me, tell me how much you love me," and it's not really something that can be told, it's something that you intuit, that you feel, to intimacy or contact, or whatever, so it's impossible situation in set-up in Lear's court, which I have to say is a pretty daily occurrence. It's not, once you think about it, it's not so unusual. And I think that roles run the word nothing, that Cordelia comes out with, but I think it's a scene about people feeling absolutely nothing, and they feel nothing because they think an awful lot about themselves, they get self-obsessed in their fear, it's the fear that makes a self-obsessed, when you end up not being able to empathise with other people or have any feeling. I'm not incidentally pointing a finger here, I'm no better than this myself, but it's worthwhile being conscious of when you dread to play like that, so I don't think you need to be working yourself up into these savage passions of emotion. And so this also seems really obvious in Macbeth, right at the very end of the play, he hears women crying somewhere in the castle and he turns round and says, "It's brilliant, I don't fear anything anymore, I don't feel anything when I hear terrible sounds, I'm such a bad ass." And then he finds out 30 seconds later that the women are crying because Lady Macbeth is dead and he still doesn't feel anything, and it terrifies him, and he comes out with tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps on this petty pace from day to day, and says a terrible thing which is she should have died hereafter, there would have been a time for such a word. He's feeling so empty and so blank and realising that he wish he could grieve, and that emptiness he was celebrating two minutes before is now devastating. One of the most amazing speeches in that entire play comes out of this emptiness. Yes, it does, but I think we should be careful not to judge Macbeth because he doesn't feel anything, because I think it's not just bad people who don't feel anything. I think it's what happens to all of us and we very often judge ourselves to be bad people if we don't feel enough outrage, enough grief, enough empathy. We can torture ourselves because we're not producing the right thing inside, and that manifests itself very much in rehearsal. There's a feeling that we have in the theatre, that theatre should somehow reflect life, and that's fine, and I'm not saying don't think that, but I'm saying maybe take five minutes to turn the thought on its head, and maybe think that actually life reflects theatre. That's the dangerous place where Shakespeare goes, is that it's not like theatre's like life, or the world is a stage. And all the men and women are merely players. No, but it's not like he's not actually saying, it's almost as if the world is a stage. He's saying no, actually the world is a stage, and actually a lot of our feelings are actually quite performed. Sometimes we feel ashamed that because we perform something, it's not sincere, but I think there's a performance element always in feelings, and very often people won't cry unless they're in public, you know, that sometimes we cry on our own, but sometimes we have to be talking to somebody. I know that I've been told a friend has died, where my love very much, and being quite shocked at feeling nothing, apart from sort of emptiness, and not even numbness, even numbness would be to feel something, to feel actually absolutely nothing, like what are we going to have for dinner, and then I went into the whole thing of, you know, you start organising the funeral, you get a bit of respect, you sort of let us, I was asked to do the eulogy, I stood up on the altar, and I started to speak about her, and I'd done it all totally dry-eyed without a shred of feeling. I suppose kind of fakes out what a feeling I'm supposed to feel when somebody I love dies. And then I started to do the eulogy and looked into the eyes of people that I'd known, and we'd all known this woman together, and halfway through I started to cry, and it was terrible, and I limped through to the end of it, that the awful thing was that it was in the communicating of it, that the feeling that had been damned up in me, I think, burst forth, it was weird, it was like in public, and that's why I think fumes are hard and so crucial for people, because you look into other people's eyes, and it's in the performance, you actually discover what you feel. Something I know I'm extremely close to, her husband died, and she said, "Dec, tell me what to feel, I don't feel anything," and it's actually, I think one of those human things I have heard, that there's something about not knowing what you feel, and not feeling anything, and kind of feeling ashamed that you don't feel anything. I'm not saying that hums all the time, and I know some people maybe have a wonderful connection to their feelings and know exactly what they feel, they just don't happen to make it into the plays that I direct, I don't think. I remember being amazed to discover, you know, the expression, the university, about the 19th century novel, the unreliable narrator, I thought, this is amazing, that an narrator can be unreliable. How's that possible? He realised that everybody in all of the great plays, they're all unreliable narrators, and they're not to be realised, that's what we are, we're all unreliable narrators. If I try, if I do the story of my life, the story I've constructed, I'm about it, however sincere, however truthful I try to be, it'll be a work of fiction, I'll be a totally unreliable narrator about it. So we kind of need to remember that, so what these people say is very often what they like to feel, but I think this thing of the absence of feeling is really key to getting into lots of characters that you just don't feel what you're supposed to be feeling. The danger is that the actor will imagine that the character is completely emotionally fluent. There are many things that actors assume about characters that are very dangerous to assume. One is that the characters are completely emotionally fluent, one is that when the actor says I'm afraid, it means that they're afraid, or that I'm angry, it means that they're angry, because how do they know? You know, if somebody says I'm really angry, how do you know, because you might actually be very afraid, and sometimes when people are very afraid, in fact, the real cause is they're actually so angry about something else. So it's quite, it's very difficult for any of us to be amateur psychologists and sort out whether people feel it's kind of dangerous, because we don't know. So one of the dangers is thinking that the character has perfect access to feelings, but there are many other things like this character perfectly belongs in the community in which they are. This character doesn't feel excluded by anybody. This character doesn't feel they're not cool enough to be in this world. But all those things that will torment actors at the lunch break are actually quite useful sometimes to put straight into the character, they torment me too instead, not just the actors. You know, nobody thinks I'm funny, well, that's sort of, you know, that's quite useful if you're playing Hamlet. But there are many things like this that when we feel our own shame, when we feel ourselves diminished because we're in the company of these giants, maybe actually we should look at it the other way around, and think that we're only doing these plays because they're about people who are actually basically about us, and that these situations aren't so remote. And that what happens in the first scene between Leonid's daughters happens. It's probably a daily occurrence, when we want to be told how much we're loved. And on that note, I think that's a good place to end for today. So thank you very much, Declim. See you next week, Lucy. Thank you for listening to this bonus episode of Not Tree, but Useful. If you've got questions you'd like to pose to Declim Donalon or Nick Ormerod, don't forget you can always post them at Cheek by Gel on Twitter or Instagram, and maybe we'll cover them in a future episode. In the meantime, you can always head over to the Cheek by Gel website to find past series of this podcast, as well as videos and images of Cheek by Gel's performances. The music you're hearing now was composed by Sergei Czechoshov for Cheek by Gel's production of Three Sisters.