I'm quite good at learning scripts. I've been acting in plays for about 16 years now and whatever can be said about my talent on the stage, I could never be criticised for not knowing my lines. Over the years I have developed an almost fool proof method of getting the words in my head and getting them to stay. Take note forgetful people because this is as technical as it gets. You take your script and a blank piece of paper, find somewhere comfortable and quiet for a few hours, fold the paper in half, read your first line a few times, then cover it up with your paper and see if you can remember what you just read. If you can't recall, then repeat the process until you can. Alchemy it is not.
Mundane but true, the best method I have for confidently stuffing hundreds of lines into my brain is none other than hard work and study. Ironic considering these two were the things I did the least amount of in my education. Things have taken a very strange but fascinating turn for me lately though; I will expand on this later but first let's look at some other ways and means;
Some people prefer to record their lines and listen to them through headphones and good luck to them. I've heard this approach is very effective. Its major flaws in my opinion are thrice fold. Firstly I cannot stand hearing the sound my own voice, not a good start for a technique that involves many hours of doing just that. Although there is the option of asking some kind soul with a dulcet sweet voice to record them for you, but this brings me to my second pitfall. If I had the script of a play I was working on recorded on my iPod, every time I picked it up to begin some hard aural study, I would scroll down the list of artists, pick Nick Drake (insert any cult suicide songwriter here) and be listening to Bryter Layter before my brain even had a chance to protest. Fact is, music keeps me sane, it's my time off from everything, line learning included.*
*There isn't a third reason I just wanted to type the word 'thrice fold'.
It is a fact that the place where lines go in the easiest is in rehearsal. You associate words with actions, props, even lighting changes and they stick. Unfortunately if you’re lucky enough to have a large amount of lines to learn, you will have to get your head down and study because if you don't, there is going to be some very disparaging looks from the rest of the company when everyone else is progressing and developing their performances and you're still reading the words from the page. At some point in the rehearsal process, a bunch of bound white papers on the stage becomes as welcome as an underplayed act of genuine emotion in an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, or an original work of artistry in a Ben Elton one.
Some people opt for the minimum study/maximum paraphrase method. The delicate art of taking what the good playwright saw fit to publish on his fifteenth draft and blurting out something just about discernibly similar at around about the right time during the scene. This cretinous cast member becomes the itchy trigger finger of the entire production. Everyone from the fellow actors, the director and the author to the stage manager and technician, waits in gut wrenching anxiety for every word that comes from his lazy mouth, as he mixes up cues, switches analogies and skips massive plot advancing revelations. Twat.
My, at times headache inducing, study method has served me well and I make an almost pompous point of ensuring every 'and' 'the' and 'adieu'* is said in the place it is supposed to be said. This is not just out of respect for the author but also (as touched on above) because what the rest of the staff need from an actor during any production is predictability. It's not a romantic notion, but it's certainly more important than having the correct period crockery on the welsh dresser in the kitchen scene (Don't get me started on naturalism).
*I have never had the pleasure of saying 'adieu' in a play. The lovey side of me is devastated about this.
The production I'm currently working on is 'Slasher Kincade' by Chris Leicester. Chris is a sometime professional collaborator and great friend of mine, and also happens to be an inspirational human being. When Chris says he is going to do something, he does it, and I'm not talking about getting off the couch to make a cheese sandwich here (something which I often declare I will achieve then all too often fail miserably) I'm talking about writing four plays and taking each of them to London, The Edinburgh Festival or on tour in some of the weirdest fucking theatres in England. Writing a novel. Cycling across Australia. Quitting his 16 year senior management career in local authority on a matter of principle. There is a long and distinguished list of achievements this man has racked up but they all quite simply pale in significance when compared to 'The Bastard Rally Scene'.
For the most part 'Slasher Kincade' is a very chatty play, save for a couple of monologues and one brief full cast scene, it is made up of a series of duologues (that's two characters in each scene you div). Duologues are the easiest type of scenes to learn in my experience, the rhythm of two characters bouncing dialogue back and forth seems to click favourably into place in my memory. As mentioned before, actions are a good memory trigger but more so are emotional connections and plot revelations. When you are emotionally connected to a scene you remember what you are supposed to say because it is important to you. Unfortunately for me however, Mr Leicester saw fit to include a scene in his latest play whose dialogue lacked any kind of plot drive, emotional connection, character relevance, cohesion or indeed a shred of notable consistency. This, by the standards of any playwright or indeed any sadist is an achievement on par with a measly cross continent bike ride.
The scene is a 'dream state' rally stage set on the two chairs that make up the entire set and props of the play. My character Rob sits next to his colleague Daniel (sickeningly well portrayed by my friend Gray Hughes) who is just about in control of the racing car. It is Rob's task as co-driver to blurt out instructions to Daniel on what lies ahead as they speed through the stage. For anyone who is not familiar with rally instructions they go a bit like this:
"Fifty, thirty metres, keep left, over crest into short four, right plus opens. Cover sixty to crest. Don't cut short. Six left minus."
"Sixty, line into left hand, two right minus over bump. Tightens to hairpin. Brake plus six sharpening hard over ditch."
"Dip in forty plus six, keep fifth, tightens to two, bridge in two hundred with max three at second crest after river."
The more observant readers will know immediately why this posed a problem for me. There is an entire page of this gibberish in the play, which is then repeated in the second act. Being a good little smart arse I sat down quite early on this one and started my familiar folded paper and a cup of tea method. I found it to be immediately useless, the words just would not stick, I read over and over and attempted to recant but to no avail, in fact I spent an entire flight from Paris to Liverpool (airport waiting included) trying to smash these random words into my head and amusingly I convinced myself that I'd learnt them. That was until the next rehearsal when I tried to perform the scene off script and discovered not one word of it had stayed in there.
I was beaten; my days of being the first 'off book', being an example to the other actors and the snivelling teacher’s pet of each production were seemingly over. All because of 'The Bastard Rally Scene'. It was impeding my line learning for the rest of the play too, it became a 'learner’s block' to coin a phrase. Every time I sat down to concentrate on another scene, there it would be, staring at me like the Jackson Pollack of playwriting it is. Chris had suggested that although paraphrasing is normally a no no (see above), a scene like this is not bound by those same parameters of normality (You don't....say) and perhaps a bit of improv would be acceptable. Chris had grossly underestimated how anal I am when it comes to line learning. Nope, I needed to learn it word for word, and I did. The examples I have written above are verbatim to the script, not one word out of place, and I typed them from memory. Every bastard word of 'the bastard rally scene' is firmly locked into my brain.
About a year and a half ago I read Derren Brown's book 'Tricks of the Mind'. It is a truly fascinating book and a great debunker of all things 'magical'. In this book, Brown gives us a snippet of how he achieves some of the absolutely bafflingly brilliant feats he is now famous for. A massive amount of his ability is thanks to a highly developed memory. One particular method he swears by is that of 'memory palaces', the technique of creating detailed 'rooms' inside your mind where one can store facts and figures and access them at your leisure. I was drawn into this book so much so at the time that I managed to replicate one of his particular tricks of remembering every play by William Shakespeare (all lovely 38 of them) not only by name but also by the chronological order they were written in. I amazed myself and bored friends with my new found ability for a little while but all too soon it wore off. Because these memory palaces, although magnificent and potentially infinite in size are subject to decay without maintenance. Ask me now and I can probably tell you half of them, and certainly not in their order of date.
Another of Brown's memory techniques applies most appropriately to remembering people’s names. At a music festival in Oslo in 2008, while meeting and greeting dozens of music industry delegates from all over the world (my girlfriend had sneaked me in) I was amazed to see how one particular character, Marsha Shandur (the XFM Dj and brilliant Music Supervisor for shows such as 'The Inbetweeners') was able to recall every single person's name that was given to her. It was Marsha that recommended 'Tricks of the Mind' and then explained a little bit about how it worked. It's all about strong mental images. If you meet a person called Bobby, your first mental port of call should be this question "Who do I know already with the name 'Bobby'?" If you have a friend called Bobby then use him, get a picture of him in your mind. If you don't have a friend called Bobby (then your life is the poorer for it I can tell you) then think of a famous Bobby. If I wasn't as lucky as I am to have a friend called Bobby, I would probably go for Bobby Morton from Robocop. So you have Bobby from Robocop in your mind, now you must combine the Bobby you just met with that tragically ambitious anti-hero. A good method is to imagine the new Bobby dressed up like the familiar Bobby, possibly doing a crap impression of him, badly fitting wig if necessary. In short the stronger the mental image you can create, the more likely it is that the name will stick. Marsha had also gone as far as adding another mental image to each delegate to remind her of what that person does for a living. I will spare her the embarrassment of telling you how she imagined Phil from the music newspaper 'The Stool Pigeon', but needless to say once she had told me; I was never ever going to forget his name or his profession.
This method has never worked for me. It worked brilliantly for Marsha but for me when I am introduced to someone my brain clicks immediately into lazy 'Nick Drake listening' mode and I'm over it before my reasonable hard working side has time to protest once again. I am atrocious at remembering names and even in the knowledge that this beautiful technique exists, I am a perpetual user of the 'mate' and the 'love' method of addressing people. Shame on me.
However, when applied to 'The Bastard Rally Scene', it seems that this method found its true calling for me. A few days ago while sat gently weeping over my script I decided to explore a part of my memory recall that I have always naturally done to a small extent. When a particular word reminds me of a certain image, my mind goes to it without my encouragement. I think most people have this trait to varying degrees. Listening to a song on the radiogram can do this sometimes and create an amusing form of malapropism that is now quite popular (see www.kissthisguy.com). One favourite example of mine amongst thousands now documented in the aforementioned website is from the REM song 'The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight' in which Michael Stipe seems to be singing "Calling Cheryl Baker" which if course just isn't possible, unless I have missed some sort of influential 'Bucks Fizz' link to the 90's Seattle sound or indeed if Stipe was trying to get himself on the show 'Record Breakers' for being the thinnest man...ever. Every time I hear that song I get a mental image of the lovely Miss Baker in a polka dot skirt singing terrible music.
I digress. How could I apply this accidental mental imagery to my rally scene? Well that's where my manic journey began...
"Fifty, thirty metres, keep left, over crest into short four, right plus opens. Cover sixty to crest. Don't cut short. Six left minus."
What I do here is imagine myself on a street. Next to me (on the right for practicality) are fifty parking meters with the number 30 written on them "...fifty, thirty metres...” I then thought I could remember to "...keep left..." simply because the parking meters were on the right, but I will come back to that problem in a moment.
"...over crest..." here I jump over a giant tube of toothpaste...
N:B Actually doing the jump in the initial learning process was both amusing and embarrassing even though I was alone in the apartment. And despite being an atheist I felt that somebody, somewhere was watching me and shaking their head in disappointment.
"...into short four..." the best I could come up with here was landing after the giant toothpaste jump and bumping into four Mini Coopers. I don't know why this is, obviously there is a car link what with the scene content and also the parking meters, and my mind has naturally set this scene on a road, despite some of the bizarre and often disturbing places it takes me to later.
"...right plus opens..." a pharmacy with the flashing green cross on it's front, over the road to my right opens its automatic doors, I go in and purchase a sheet with the number 60 written on it and a knife (two items which pharmacies have in abundance where I come from...Weird as Shitland).
N:B This is also my first involuntary use of a memory palace.
"...cover sixty to crest, don't cut short..." I put the sheet with the number 60 written on it over the giant tube of toothpaste and stand up only to be confronted by Hollywood comedy actor and 'Inner Space' star, Martin Short. I hold up the knife to him, but I decide not to stab him.
"....six left minus..." on my right hand side, six coal dust covered hard hat wearing pit workers applaud my decision to not to maim Martin Short (a sentence which I never in my life could have imagined typing)
I thought I could remember the 'keep left' from the first sentence but with my new method, because I hadn't assigned an image to it, every time I tried to run through the lines I would skip it out. So it needed an image. An important part of this method, I have discovered is to go with the first image that comes to you, it is most likely to be the strongest. 'Keep' morphed into 'Keith' and so there he was, in all his glory, stood to my left, the legend that is Keith Chegwin (thankfully, as I explained to Gray, he is a pre-Naked Jungle Keith Chegwin). My task spiralled out of control from there and my imagination took over the learning, and what a pleasure it was to learn too. I've always diligently learnt my lines but I would have never called it fun before now.
The method continued throughout the scene and comes to include, Fifty Cent snapping a pencil, Mad Max and his dystopian muscle car, a bloke I work with vomiting, me swimming inside a bottle of beer, the entire army from 'Clash of the Titans', many more tubes of toothpaste and pit workers and, most disturbingly of all, a random naked pervert sharpening a knife with a massive erection.
My 'learning block' is gone my confidence is back, I have the lines in my head and not just barely, I mean absolutely concise down to each and every 'and' and 'the' and every number in its rightful order. My biggest achievement in line learning in 16 years and the scary part is how easy and enjoyable it was (perhaps minus the hard on sporting psychopath).
My next plan is to try and apply to the rest of the script but my concern is that it may induce some sort of emotional detachment from the text. The problem is, I'm pretty sure now my mind is locked into this, that I can never go back to the old folded paper method. So I guess I'm going to find out soon enough.
I'll let you know what happens.
All info on Slasher Kincade by Chris Leicester can be found here:-
http://www.slasherkincade.info/
