Just Williams

Simon’s guide to acting

IF YOU WANT TO BECOME an actor there’s no need to go to drama school, just follow Noël Coward’s advice: ‘Learn your lines and try not to bump into the furniture.’ It’s that simple. When a young actor asked about motivation for a scene, Noël told him to think of his pay packet. Acting is not a precise business, there’s no algorithm for becoming Rylance or Dench. Some people are naturally very good at being natural, when they speak you listen; others only have to say ‘Good morning’ and you don’t believe them.

As a young actor I often went to see really bad performances a second time – there’s plenty to be learnt from lousy acting, with the good ones you’re too enthralled to see how it’s done. I used to watch Paul Scofield open-mouthed at his spontaneity, his simplicity, the forlorn baggage he brought with him. How did he catch his breath, where did the new thoughts come from? A lot of actors are good but not astounding, derivative, not original – they haven’t got the reckless private secret that makes them great.

I used to run a drama masterclass (no, seriously) at an American summer school in Oxford, where eager young aspirants would come to explore the ancient city and their inner selves. The college gardens were filled with students earnestly declaiming Shakespeare and Chekhov at one another. My brief was to school them in comedy – Coward, Wilde, etc. Mostly they seemed hell-bent on making the dialogue artificial, with the infernal upward inflection, every line a question.

When we were working on Private Lives, the scene where Elyot tells Amanda that his new wife is from Norfolk and she gives the famous sour reply, ‘Very flat, Norfolk,’ I asked a girl from Nebraska what she imagined Amanda would be thinking. She swished her ponytail and announced with a lisp, ‘There’s no hills in Norfolk?’ They had trouble understanding that Brits, with their stiff upper lips, use language to conceal emotion, not reveal it – we hide our pain with a quip. Acting is about choosing what you hide.

I was called into the principal’s office one evening and asked if it was true that I had told my class the last thing I wanted to see in their work was sincerity. I admitted it was. Sincerity is repulsive, the goody-goody at the party – best left to Hallmark cards.

Here’s a fun game to play with wouldbe actors – take this sad line from the end of a romcom, ‘It’s all over, my friend,’ and see how many of them are able to observe the vital comma, without which it sounds as if ketchup has been spilt on someone’s lap.

Simon will be appearing in Posting Letters to the Moon at the Polish Hearth Club, Kensington, on Thursday; postingletterstothemoon.com