Working with Actors: Meisner Technique for Directors and Actors

by Stephen Bayly

Working with Actors provides the key to unlocking the honest, dynamic performance every actor has within them. It offers a well-articulated formulation of the Meisner Technique easy for directors and actors to use within a working context.

Through setting out an accessible training programme for practitioners working across stage and screen, this book establishes a clear-cut route to building a three-dimensional character in an organic, non-intellectual fashion, based squarely on the character's objectives.

Few books in this field venture out of the training studio, while in this book - alongside offering an intense and concentrated Meisner training programme - the focus is more on the 'pay-off': the collaborative act of developing the role and how that plays out in rehearsal and performance.

Beyond that, the books uniquely offers:

> a new modality for script reading, analysis and rehearsal through which the character is born in relation to other characters;

> a prioritisation of the key skills for coming alive in the moment – listening and putting one's attention wholly on the other character/actor;

> a historical perspective on how Meisner's methods have evolved and why they provide the basis of truthful acting;

> for directors, a format for analysis of the complete work based on Stanislavskian principles;

> for actors, complementary methods, such as Uta Hagen's 'endowment', to enhance the 'reality of doing'