Reflections

Watching Pride at the National Theatre made me think about something in acting. About that relationship between the actor and the character. What makes a character so alive that you feel it as if they were real.

Jhon Lumsden as Mark is speaking, holding the room the way Mark always holds a room, and Lewis Cornay's Bromley is watching him. Not watching the way you watch someone you're waiting to answer. But watching the way you watch someone who is telling you, without knowing it, that you have found your people. There is an admiration, yes, but underneath it something more fragile: the realisation that he belongs. One could say it was an infatuation for Mark, but no, it has to be something deeper than that. Stanislavski spent his later years chasing exactly that quality, not truth as reproduction but truth as imagination fully inhabited. What I saw in Bromley's face in that moment was an actor who understood the assignment completely. He was taking in Mark's words. His eyes, his posture, his whole body was alive while he stood in the background of the scene. One of six being spoken to.

But it wasn't only in those listening moments that Lewis Cornay revealed Bromley's inner world. It was in his body. A friend who watched with me thought he was too stiff, too rigid. I understood exactly what they meant and I disagreed completely. That stiffness was the character. Bromley carries his tension in his body, in the same way someone carries shame, unaware. All of this is inherent to the person. The vast majority of us humans don't know if we hold the shoulders up, or that we walk with a slight spring. Such mannerisms are dictated by the environment that created us. In many ways the untrained body is unaware of how it stands.

Bromley's body is held, tense, awkward. He doesn't inhabit his body in full. He has to police himself as he is not out.

And then, in one of the ensemble numbers, a cabaret scene, feathers and thigh-high socks, I went looking for the actor in the crowd. He was playing a different character entirely, freed from Bromley's story for a few minutes. And there he was. Loose. Fluid. Alive in his body in a way Bromley never allows himself to be. That is what acting should look like. An actor disappearing for the character to emerge.

But Bromley was not alone in this. What Matthew Warchus has achieved with this ensemble is something that is easy to watch and very hard to do. Look at any member of the company in any scene and you will find a person, not a performer. Each one carrying a specific weight, a specific hunger, a specific reason to be in that room. The Welsh miners with the particular pride of people whose identity is built on physical labour and community. The activists with the particular restlessness of people who have learned to fight because nobody fought for them. None of this is stated. All of it is present. That is good directing and good acting.

Stanislavski spent decades searching for a system that would make acting truthful. Everyone became obsessed with truth. But the later Stanislavski, the one less quoted and more important, understood that truth alone was not enough. Truth can be imitated. What cannot be imitated is imagination fully inhabited. When an actor stops asking what is true and starts asking what it feels like to be alive as this character, in this moment, in this room, that is still truth to Stanislavski but rooted in the world of the play. We as audience feel it without being aware of what happened. You stop seeing a performance and start believing the person. That is what Pride does, consistently, across a company of fifteen. It is so well crafted that it doesn't need to ask you to suspend disbelief. It stands by itself as truthful.

Read my Pride the Musical review