Studies in Theatre Performance, Vol. 23 No. 1
by Peter Thomson, © 2003 Intellect Ltd

In this beguilingly crafted secular sermon to actors, Declan Donnellan mentions Stanislavsky by name only once, but there is no mistaking the stylistic provenance. This book is, in its authorial strategy, a fascinating variation on An Actor Prepares. By inventing as his first-person narrator a naïve but earnest trainee actor, Stanislavsky was able to project himself as Tortsov — a director/trainer with a transforming vision of theatre. In The Actor and the Target, Donnellan allows Tortsov to speak for himself, replacing Stanislavsky's narrator with a notional trainee actor whom he calls Irina and whose growth into the role of Juliet provides him with a usefully illustrative running theme; but that shift of narrators should not blind us to the two fundamental tenets that guide both Stanislavsky and Donnellan:

1. that acting is a thing of great beauty, and the nearest humans can approach to truth;
2. that acting is a universal human mode, constrained only by custom and the blocking effect of the ego's intervention.

Donnellan's purpose, like Stanislavsky's, is not to train actors so much as to guide them towards a self-discipline that will enable them to remove the blocks that obstruct their natural expressiveness. Separated by almost a century (Stanislavsky was born in 1863, Donnellan in 1953), these two inspired ('inspirited' might be a better word) directors seek to release actors from the burden of the ego in the belief that only through this release can the craft of acting aspire to art. To be sure, Donnellan is more reluctant than Stanislavsky to employ the language of the mystics (in Russia, the corridor from the intellect to the soul was often shockingly short), but his book is informed throughout by an attitude towards theatre at large and towards acting in particular which is 'hotter' than respect and rarely out of range of reverence.

It is properly for actors, not academics, to test the efficacy of The Actor and the Target. At the outset, Donnellan identifies eight 'cries for help' from blocked actors. Each one, he notes, begins with 'I': "a dangerous word for the actor. 'Me' is usually more helpful" (p.26). Actors with their eyes on a target (Stanislavsky would talk of 'objectives' and 'super-objectives') are less vulnerable to the ego's blocking of progress: "The actor must see through the character and not into the character" (p.50), since "[a]cting is not a question of how we see things; acting is a question of what we see" (p.54) — "who I am is what I see" (p.83).

In the body of the book, each of the identified 'cries for help' is treated in turn, sometimes reflectively, sometimes by reference to studio exercises which Donnellan has found helpful. The territory is not unfamiliar: it lies provocatively, as it does in Stanislavsky's writing, between truism and paradox: "one cannot pay attention to something and concentrate on it at the same time" (p.28); "bad news for the character is always good news for the actor" (p.43); "the imagination shuns the general" (p.23); "the rehearsal must be safe so that the performance can be dangerous" (p.32); "feelings do not come waving passports. They come under pseudonyms" (p.168); "all thoughts are targets" (p.187); "the target is not how I perceive the target. The target is what I perceive" (p.200). It might be argued that the apophthegm is Donnellan's 'fatal Cleopatra', but he rarely leaves the embedded insights unexplored. His pedagogy, again like Stanislavsky's, is patiently systematic, but it is never dull.

This is a richly knowing book, enlivened by metaphor and schooled in the rehearsal room. No drama school should be without multiple copies, and every Shakespearean aspirant should read the concluding 'Note on the Verse'. After reading this book, I feel about Donnellan in 2003 what Andrew Marvell felt about Charles I in 1649: "He nothing common did or mean / Upon that memorable scene".