The Actor

Cut ...

People think of acting as something superficial, like a child's game of pretend. But that's not how it is at all. It's like any skill, like learning to ride a bike: at first your movements are wobbly and deliberate. But soon enough, as you rehearse the actions over and over again, they end up becoming part of your nature. In a subtle way, by acquiring the skill we have changed who we are. It's the same on stage. At its best it comes from some place deep inside, the character flows out somehow without conscious intervention. Which, when you think about it, must mean that every character you play − the successful ones at least − are all filtered aspects of your own self, however plastic a thing that may be.

People also think ubiquitous surveillance is already a fact. It isn't yet. Not quite. In part this is no more than logistics – the world is a big place. But willful intransigence, too, is at work: a few non-conformists out there, eccentric academics and the like, who insist on keeping up a precarious existence, who don't want their protectors seeing what they are doing, at least within the 'privacy' of their own domains.

But there's no reason why that should stop us. Our brains build their view of the world, so I've been told, out of fragmented data. Our minds invent and interpolate to fill in the blanks, like a scene glimpsed through the slats of a fence and reanimated by movement to a flickering existence.

No doubt this is true. For actors it is a simpler and more intuitive proposition: we understand there will always be the need to ad lib, first to inhabit the character or characters, then to let them speak for themselves.

The scene that follows is not in the archive – but the participants are well known, their motives there to be guessed. Time for a little improv ...