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Back Stage West July 14, 2004
Brits Versus Yanks by Jean Schiffman
Perhaps it's a case of the other actors' greenroom always seeming
greener: American actors revere the golden-tongued Brits; the
English, for their part, think Americans, with our relaxed physicality
and easily accessed emotions, are the best.
So says teacher/director Dee Cannon, a self-described Anglo-American
who was born and raised in London and teaches acting on both sides
of the pond, as well as in other countries. Currently residing
in Los Angeles, where she is coaching actors and holding master
classes, Cannon is eager to share her unique perspective on the
gifts and challenges specific to English and American actors-in-training.
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are supreme at working with language plays," says Cannon,
in an impeccable British accent. "They come into their own
with Shakespeare, Shaw, Pinter, Ayckbourn, Stoppard, Coward, and
Restoration comedies because these plays are very literate and
there are not huge amounts of emotional content in them."
Clearly that stiff-upper-lip, close-your-eyes-and-think-of-England
thing did a number on young British actors-to-be. "Not to
be negative, but they feel comfortable almost acting from the
neck up."
Her own legacy is that her New Yorker mother, the late Doreen
Cannon, had studied with Uta Hagen and brought Hagen's Stanislavsky-based
psychological approach to England when she married an Englishman.
She taught at the Drama Centre in London for 20 years, then was
head of acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) for
another dozen years or so in the 1980s, training such actors as
Simon Callow and Pierce Brosnan. Dee followed in her mother's
footsteps and has coached the likes of Jon Voight, Sinead O'Connor,
and other luminaries of stage and screen.
Unlike the Brits, Dee Cannon's American students are more used
to being expressive in real life, and their bubbling emotionalism
can get in the way of good performances. "Americans know
you have to expose certain parts of yourself--vulnerability, humility,"
she explains. "Vulnerability is so important. Without it
you have one-dimensional characters.
"But here in America," she continues, "they almost
like it too much. It's difficult for Americans to separate their
own emotion from the character's. I've been told by a few Americans,
'But it was so real, so truthful for me.' I had to get through
to them that there are many different truths. I don't want to
see a contemporary truth for something that isn't contemporary.
It's all in the choices. You find those characteristics within
yourself, then you need to decide which you will use for your
character." Los Angeles actors are "so desperate to
get into a showcase to show themselves off, so happy to be onstage,"
she adds, "that [their emotions] all come pouring out, and
it [sometimes] has nothing to do with the character or the play."
Plainspoken British actor Helen Mirren (in Conversations with
Actors on Film, Television, and Stage Performance by Carole Zucker,
Heinemann, 2002) described the downside of Americans' ability
to emote: "It's facile emotion, it's not real, it's false.
It's sort of a reproduction of an emotion. When you have emotional
acting from European actors, it's far more real."
But Cannon finds that her British students are baffled by discussions
of their characters' "inner life" and don't really understand
how much of their deepest selves are needed for a role. "It's
hard work to find that inner life," Cannon concedes, "breaking
down the text, doing the research, finding all the transferences.
[British] actors are not prepared to do that. It's easier to be
external.... Years and years of English culture tells you never
to show your true feelings. This goes into what they do in life,
and you can't get rid of that [mindset] very quickly when you
come to train."
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When Cannon teaches in England--she's
been the main acting teacher at RADA since 1993--she uses animal
exercises to help the students release and open up. "I try
to throw them off their own physical center, shut off that third
eye in their head that's watching themselves," she says.
She also uses songs and music, occasionally an affective memory
exercise ("This is seriously terrifying for them!").
Still, it's often an uphill battle. Among the last group of 12
young British actors (ages 18 to 23) whom she taught at RADA,
the animal exercises seemed to have no effect. Half told her they
never get angry, half claimed they hadn't cried since they were
kids, half told her they don't know what it means to be frustrated.
Not all of her groups, however, are this disconnected.
In scene work, whether in England or America, Cannon uses American
plays (Williams, Odets, O'Neill, Shepard) and sometimes Russian
or Scandinavian drama (Chekhov, Strindberg). "The kind of
training I want to give them [isn't suited] to a Stoppard play,"
she explains. She goes for the heightened reality texts.
Cannon also reminds us that English society is based on a class
system, and "generally speaking, working-class actors are
more connected to their emotions, those with middle-class backgrounds
less so." That's why, she believes, there are exceptions
to the repressed-Englishperson stereotype; she mentions working-class
types Albert Finney, Gary Oldman, Bob Hoskins, and Michael Caine.
And she singles out some of the more middle-class British actors
who have managed to transcend the stereotype, among them Janet
McTeer, Vanessa Redgrave, Helen Mirren, and Judi Dench. "They
are able to take the best of English training--voice and movement--and
throw away this English self-consciousness, make the characters
live and breathe."
Interestingly, Cannon says that in the other countries where she's
taught and directed--including Sweden, Israel, and the Philippines--young
actors are more like Americans in terms of being able to tap their
deepest emotions, although it may sometimes take them longer than
it takes their American counterparts to understand the concept.
She also notes that students in England who come from an Irish
or other mixed European background also respond more the way Americans
do.
Irishman Stephen Rea might disagree, though; in In the Company
of Actors (Carole Zucker, Routledge, 1999) he comments that the
assumption that the Irish are somehow "natively more spontaneous,
less intellectual" than Britons is bogus and, if extrapolated,
could seem racist. "Nobody made more plans and schemes than
Cyril Cusack," he said, of his fellow countryman. Rea, raised
on American films, always identified more with American than British
actors.
I asked Cannon about the aspirations of young American versus
young British actors. "British actors all aspire to be like
their American counterparts," she says. They admire Ethan
Hawke, Brad Pitt, Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman. Only about
a quarter of them want to make their future in film, though; most
are hoping to get into the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Globe,
the Royal National Theatre, or other smaller companies. Angelenos,
it goes without saying, want to break into film; in New York,
where she also teaches, they are more stage-oriented. She also
notes that in England most students train in three-year programs
and then feel through with training altogether, whereas in America
only a handful have gone through three-year programs and are more
likely to attend independent workshops or hire private coaches,
especially for film roles. In England, as a matter of pride, once
you've graduated from your program, you're unlikely to go back
for more training.
Cannon says that it's easy for audiences to be fooled by British
actors: "They sound so genuine, but when they go offstage
you know they're just walking into the wings; there's no sense
of previous circumstance, of living a life. Americans are basing
their opinions of British acting on films, or from seeing a few
shows on the West End, and they're bowled over by the slickness,
the professionalism, the quite seductive external qualities."
Hugh Grant, Kristen Scott-Thomas, and the late Alan Bates come
to mind for me--enormously charming actors who skim the surface.
Cannon, to my surprise, mentions Alan Rickman, Ian McKellen, Ralph
Fiennes, Derek Jacobi: "All coming out of a very similar
school of acting, all mannered onstage. Yet Jacobi's I, Claudius
[on TV] was fantastic. When I saw Paul Scofield onstage, I almost
had to leave the theatre, his voice was so grating. He'd found
the character through the voice."
However, Janet McTeer, asked about the difference between British
and American acting (in In the Company of Actors), said, "The
way acting is taught is ultimately slightly immaterial. If you're
really good, you'll get at the truth." However, she added,
"That desire to be totally, totally real in its essence is
something that we don't really do in England, or certainly not
to the same extent [as in American films].... I've always been
drawn to the kind of thing that's considered to be very British:
the wonderful speaking of text. But for me, if the wonderful speaking
of text has no heart, I'd rather read it."
I suspect it's ultimately healthy that on the whole we Americans
admire the skills of our English brothers and sisters, and vice
versa. Surely each group can learn from the other.
Contact Dee
Cannon:
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