The Bullshit Meter

Ruth sidled up to me the other day and told me that there are times when I go 'on my voice', as she called it, and suddenly I'm manufacturing the emotional stakes in the scene instead of playing the intention and letting the text work on me. It was a moment of vertigo. I had to think about going back to square one and started to try and play the text like it didn't matter whether I could be heard, and that wasn't easy, esp given my experience in presentational outdoor theatre.

I could draw you a simple graph: just a line really with a gap in it. The gap represents the acceptable mode of acting - of playing. It looks like this:

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(Bloody hell. Blogger won't let me put in a true gap. They don't like space wasters, I suppose.)

The space to the left represents too little committment: the state of standing on stage and mumbling your lines and giving nothing. The gap represents the area in which you can work. The huge long line to the right represents (at least today, for me) the huge realm of bullshit that you can wander through freely, thinking that you're doing your work, imagining that you're creating something like a performance. When you're not.

It seems to me though that the gap is a bad way to represent this rich vein. I don't mean to illustrate an absense, but rather the realm of playable human behaviour. It comes from a place of quiet, not bravado and brio and noise. It should be a series of gold stars. I imagine I can't do much more in this weblog than represent it with asterixes.


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Perhaps that's better? (Well, in fact it is better, because it shows the proper size for the gap I want to show.) Anyway, I just want to keep the valves on the bullshit meter nicely oiled and in prime condition.