When they had finished with parts and personalities and I had put Joseph back into his cot, they started off on the theory of acting. For those who had never heard actors discuss their trade, I may say that there is nothing more painfully boring on earth. I think it is their lack of accuracy, their frightful passion for generality that rob their discussions of interest. They were talking, this time, about that ancient problem of whether one should, while acting, be more aware of the audience or the person or persons with whom one is playing the scene. I must have heard this same argument once a fortnight over the last four years, and never has anyone got a step nearer to any kind of illumination, because instead of talking rationally they just wander round the morasses of their own personalities, producing their own weaknesses for examination as though they were interesting, objective facts about human nature, which, I suppose, in a way they are, and that is why I continue to listen. David, of course, true to his contempt for the paying public, was taking the line that one should concentrate wholly on one’s co-actor, on what is going on between two people on the stage; he was being opposed principally by Michael Fenwick, who was an avowed believer in technique.
“It’s all a question of truth,” David was saying. “You can’t tell the truth if you have one eye on how it’s being taken all the time, can you? You have to narrow your circle of concentration down to the situation you’re playing, you can’t keep listening for reactions.”
“But the whole art of acting,” said Michael Fenwick (and who else but actors ever claim that acting is an art?) “consists in communication. You have to convey your ideas to the public, you have to adjust your performance to what they can take.”
“That’s just dishonesty,” said David, “that’s all that is. You mean that if you’re playing Tennessee Williams in Cheltenham you gloss over all the punch lines for fear of offending the old ladies. What good does that do anyone? They don’t get a performance, they don’t even get the play. You might as well give them what you believe to be true, not what you believe they believe to be true, mightn’t you?”
“You seem to forget,” said Michael, big, lumpy Michael, forgetting in an instant his last statement about art, “that acting is basically entertainment, the actor isn’t there to instruct, he’s there to amuse, and you can’t amuse people unless you pay attention to their reactions. It’s like fishing: you give them a bit of line and see if they’re biting, and if they are you give them a bit more.” I do not think that Michael Fenwick had ever seen a live fish in his life.