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background, and that’s fine, and he will have to carry that background with
him. And the audience must be able to recognise him when he comes on.
Although it was as if he has fallen from the sky, it was as if his questions had
fallen from the sky. But you know who he was. The actor must say to himself,
I must know this know this that and the other. Character is of course very
important. But, you still have to play the play.
AB: You talk and write about having to break down defences of the actors’
to be able to enter the situation. As a director how can you break down the
defences of the actors? When you talk about enactment, you say that we have
lots of built in defences that stop us from entering into problems.
EB: Well, it’s the director’s responsibility to interest the actors in
the situation. And simply talk about them in a way that will involve the actors
in the situation. And try to open up the situation as much as possible. And
not keep providing solutions. Certainly not at all in the opening stages of
the rehearsal process. You have to say to yourself, like this evening I started
explaining about imagery of the ghost, and you have to say to yourself: well,
is that just making problems for an actor? Perhaps an actor should know
about all that, or shouldn’t be concerned with that sort of thing. I read about
a National Theatre director, and one of the actors asked him certain questions,
and the director said “don’t worry about that, leave that to me, you just play
the character.” That’s just destructive. But once you start to look at human
situations, once you start looking at them critically-analytically and so on, it’s
extraordinary how they fall apart. And what you are told is the meaning of
this, and the meaning of that, are just the ideological explanation. They really
fall apart, and then you start asking the radical questions, because if you don’t
ask them you never get to radical innocence. That has to be the response.
One useful way is to say — In rehearsals they don’t have the right clothes, the
right props very often, you should get them very quickly — well you can say,
I am putting my jacket on “No, what does it really mean that you are putting
your jacket on” and what does it mean to do the buttons up? Because that will
tell you not how to do your buttons up, but who you are. And they are telling
you the situation you are in. Alain Francon said, and it is particularly true of
French theatre, which is often rhetorical, in my plays you can’t play the big
abstractions, you must play the small things and if you don’t get the small
things right nothing will work. And Chris says, in Birmingham, if you don’t
get the set right the play will not work. Because the set isn’t decoration, the set
is analysis. That’s a problem for us, because now we have the “empty room”.
The empty space. A wonderful opportunity for modern theatre, that we can
use our imagination in a particular space. Well, no space is empty. Because
this space, you have to pay rent for it, so the space itself immediately asks
all the economic questions. No space is ever empty. If you look at the Greek
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