Comfort Zone

Preparing for the first in a new series of Acting Classes that kick off tonight at the NVT (New Venture Theatre), and they're something of a new direction for me. Usually, my emphasis in these classes has been improvisation, partially because that's where I've had a great amount of experience in the past few years, but also because I've discovered that a reasonable amount of people have a fear of what they consider 'proper' acting - all that business with scripts, and learning lines, and suchlike.

Of course, just as many people have a fear of improv - this idea that you could be mad enough to walk onto a space - in front of people who are watching (and, in your mind at least, judging) you with absolutely no idea of what you're going to say next. For some of us, that's very liberating - at at the core of what we consider acting to be,whether there's a learned script involved or not - the simple idea of not going in with too many pre-conceived ideas, and remembering the joy of actually listening to the other people on stage. Done well, it doesn't matter if you have no idea what to do next: if you simply listen, then all you need to do is to react honestly to what the other person or people are doing on stage - it works as a wonderful cheat, since you'll never really have to think too hard about what to do next.

Doing workshops, ironically, is how I first became involved with the NVT. Ironic because I was somewhat scared of joining for a couple of years. Like, I suspect, far too many people, my acting degree resulted in one, single emphatic thing: the fact that I did no form of acting whatsoever for about seven years. I was living in Worthing at the time, and if there was a thriving theatrical scene in that town, I wasn't aware of it. There was in Brighton, though, and I began to take an interest - firstly via the excellent drop-in improv workshops held weekly by the Maydays (that's how that interest started), but then, eventually, a returning hankering to start acting again. I also knew that I wanted to revive a thing that I'd written at college (an early, half-hour version of Four Play), but I also knew that I couldn't simply rock up to a local theatre company and ask to direct my own script.

There were two theatre groups that took my interest - the Brighton Little Theatre, and the NVT. I circled them both, for quite some time - the fact that I hadn't acted for a while had knocked my confidence somewhat. The NVT held its regular Monday night classes as a way of easing in the less confident, but somehow even that felt too scary. It's always different when you're on the outside, looking in. I'd convinced myself that I wasn't good enough (whereas for the past four years, I've been working very hard at convincing everyone else that I'm not good enough).

Around this time, however, I was holding theatre workshops myself, for young actors. It was this that prompted a friend of mine to ask if I'd ever considered holding workshops for adults. I tend to say yes to offers like this when asked (whereas I don't tend to be very good at creating those offers for myself), and that was essentially how, despite the fact that I didn't feel brave enough to attend a theatre workshop at the NVT, I found myself actually running them for a while. Odd how things work out.

And so, that's who tonight's workshop - and the ones that follow over the next five weeks - are for. People like me, who don't feel that confident with their drama skills, who often feel that they've got nothing new to bring to the table. This is a fear that's shared by experienced and obviously talented performers as well as those who've never delivered a line of script in their lives - in fact, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the more you learn about acting - it can appear that you know less and less.

So, that's the aim of these workshops, then: stick with me, and by the end, you won't know a damn thing.