Top Highlights

• impose your actor’s will upon it, not in a random or perverse way, but by applying an analytical process which encapsulates each moment of a play into a single word that you yourself have selected.
• It is essential that when you first get up to rehearse a scene, you are only playing one
• What events happen in the scene, which change the situation?
• Put simply, the Actioning technique requires you, the actor, in the early stages of rehearsing a play, to divide up your own lines into separate phrases or thoughts, to assign each thought an ‘action verb’ which expresses the underlying intention of the line, and then, having assembled this series of verbs, to attempt to speak and act each thought ...
• The verbs themselves must be ‘transitive’ – in other words, something your character can do to another character, such as ‘prod’, ‘ridicule’ or ‘encourage’, rather than non-transitive verbs such as ‘muse’, ‘cry’ or ‘hesitate’, which tend to pull your focus back onto yourself. This means that each thought, spoken with a particular action verb in min...