If that happens, they may want to get in touch with Dee Cannon,
an acting teacher who works at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art
(Rada) and for private clients who have included Matthew Modine,
Jon Voight, Courtney Love, the singer Craig David and the former
soccer star David Ginola. She followed her mother into this work.
The legendary Doreen Cannon was an acting coach in New York until
she married an Englishman and came to teach in London at the Drama
Centre, for 20 years, then at Rada. Her students included the
likes of Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Simon Callow (whose book,
Being An Actor, includes a gripping account of her classes). Eight
or nine years ago, her daughter was working as an actress but
taking additional jobs to bring in money - in her case, by teaching.
So when Doreen needed cover for a holiday, RADA called in Dee
and judged her good enough to make her a permanent fixture.
We sit in her lounge, on the third floor of a block in a leafy
street in Ealing, west London. The room is brightly decorated
in primary colours. A fan hums quietly to keep down the high temperature
outside. Cannon, who is in her 30s, wears sunglasses on the top
of her head and sits back on the sofa with legs crossed - but
leans forward urgently to explain the mysteries of Stanislavsky's
Method, and particularly his use of emotional memory.
In classes, she explains, students lie on the floor. To relax,
they're encouraged to imagine themselves on a beach, or in a garden.
Then she asks them to look back on a traumatic episode. "It's
normally death, to be honest," she says. "Or it could
be a car accident." Whatever it is, the memory must be at
least five years old, because the emotion associated with anything
more recent may be too strong to control. Cannon invites them
to shut their eyes and consider every aspect of that event. "You
get them to go back to the beginning of that particular day,"
she explains. "Where were they? What were they wearing? What
were the sounds and the smells? You try to get them right up to
the moment when they picked up the phone and heard the bad news."
Gradually, this forensic attention brings most
students to tears. Is it odd, for Cannon, to see everybody crying
at her feet? "A little." But also gratifying? "Oh,
absolutely."
Afterwards, she asks students to identify the precise detail
that elicited the tears. "It could be the look in someone's
eye, or an intake of breath, or the sound of the telephone."
Whatever it is, that's the trigger they take with them into the
studio, or on to the stage.
Another method she recommends is to choose a piece of music. By
replaying that constantly, actors teach themselves, like so many
Pavlov's dogs, to cry whenever they hear it. (Researchers at the
University of Keele have investigated the effect of musical passages
on the emotions. Among other things, they found that shivers were
most reliably provoked by relatively sudden changes in harmony,
while the heart races at acceleration and syncopation. Tears were
most reliably evoked by melodic appoggiaturas, or grace notes, in
which a note above or below the main tone precedes it, creating
tension that is released when the tonic is then sounded. Listeners'
expectations are aroused, frustrated and satisfied in fairly mechanical
ways - so much for profound emotional response.)
Not so long ago, Cannon directed
a play, Steel Magnolias, in which an actress had to come on crying
because of the death of her daughter. "She found a piece
of music, a classical piece, and she listened to it for 10 or
15 minutes beforehand, then came on sobbing. It worked throughout
the rehearsals and the performance. The only thing is, I don't
think she had enough control. She came on crying at once, because
the music was so powerful. I would have liked her to hold on for
a few minutes into the scene."
Yet another technique is to use objects with sentimental significance,
such as a ring or a photograph. "I get students to talk about
it, where they were when they were given it and what was their
frame of mind. You build up a whole picture. And by talking about
it and sharing that slice of their life they quite often find
tears rolling. I'm absolutely overjoyed when that happens. Quite
often you can get the whole group to cry. These personal objects
are your friends, you endow them with memories and use that in
performance." Any object will do, so long as it has emotional
resonance. "I could go through this apartment and show you
what all kinds of things mean to me." She picks up a cushion
and waves it. "Even this."
Whichever technique they use, actors - and politicians,
or their wives - must then work out how long it takes for the
memory to produce tears, and build that interval into rehearsals
so that they cry exactly on cue - and that's rather more difficult
than it sounds.
As in representations of drunkenness,
says Cannon, the most effective criers appear to struggle against
their condition. Thus, just as it's funnier to watch drunkards
straining for sobriety than mere slurring and staggering, an audience
is less likely to be moved by incontinent sobbing than by characters
who fight back their tears. The prime minister's wife seemed to
do that, in her speech last year. An exceptionally gifted performer,
as we have seen, can do this. Could Booth? Perhaps, but she'd
endured a tough week. Is it possible, boringly, that something
unscripted flickered in her brain, the lacrimal gland started
to produce tears and - pace William James - she only registered
her miserable mood when it was too late to stop? What does Cannon
think?
"Well, it doesn't always take much to produce tears, especially
if you're feeling a bit low in the first place... " She pauses,
remembering something that is interesting, particularly for students
of rock music, but which leaves me no more sure than I was before
about my own tears; and less sure about Booth than my father was
about me, justly, all those years ago.
"The point of acting techniques,"
says Cannon, "is that you are in control. Vulnerability
and sensitivity are not techniques - although if you are clever
you can use them. When I worked with Sinead [O'Connor] she would
just tap into something and cry. It was amazing. But she would
say, 'I'm on my period, I was feeling vulnerable before I came
in.'"
John-Paul Flintoff is contributing editor
of the FT Magazine
