Size Matters: Unlocking the Heightened Realism of Shakespearean Acting Technique

How Can We Perform Truthfully In A World Of Poetry?

Every actor with any experience at all in Classical Theatre has likely heard a director or acting coach say, “I need you to be bigger.” I’m not sure that anyone every truly knows precisely what they mean by that, which can be infuriating for an actor. I heard that note far too many times early on in my own career, and was basically left to my own devices when it came to figuring out exactly what that meant. It was incredibly frustrating, and it took me several years to finally decipher what those directors were trying to tell me.

When I first started out, I would find my in, or my connection to the emotional core of the character. I’d scrape and mine that one piece of the puzzle until I felt like I was in the right place to deliver a strong performance. But I think my exposure to modern films and television and my early training in contemporary drama had given me a false sense of security when it came to performing classical work. It didn’t matter how many classes I had taken, or how many new plays I’d read. None of that had given me a foundation for Shakespearean acting technique.

I was not ready.

I simply had no frame of reference. Sure, connecting emotionally to a character is important. It’s what makes an actor believable, especially in contemporary work. But as I said, that’s just one piece of the puzzle. And those directors were right. I needed to be bigger.

Bigger?! How much bigger can I get? I’m feeling the emotional rollercoaster of the character’s inner life, for goodness sake! It needs to be realistic, right?

Well, however compelling what I was feeling may have been, it just wasn’t reading. And that’s a very serious problem. We’re not doing this for our own benefit. If the audience isn’t feeling it, we’re failing. If they aren’t understanding it, we’re failing. We’re dealing with Shakespeare, here. Poetry. It’s more than realism. It’s heightened realism.

What it took me years to realize is that to perform Shakespeare, we have to walk a line between two “traditions,” as John Barton would say. There’s the antiquated tradition of acting, which employs a very demonstrative technique, using the voice and body to fill each word with an almost operatic quality. It’s almost comical by today’s standards, and isn’t likely to get an audience’s engine revved up.

Then there’s the more modern acting tradition of working through the text emotionally, aiming for an ultra-realistic expression of the character. On their own, neither technique contains all the adequate tools to bring the poetry and humanity of Shakespeare’s text to life.

But when we blend those two “traditions”… well, I think that’s where the magic happens.

I’m sure we’ve all seen those overblown actors, chewing the scenery and wailing their lines to the rafters. There’s something that rings false about those performances, isn’t there? But I’m here to tell you that they’re not as far off the mark as one might think. If they were blending that old-school acting tradition, which they’ve so clearly embraced, with a little more of the modern tradition of emotional connectivity, living honestly as the character, it would have a much stronger impact for the audience.

Ultimately, Shakespeare’s text cannot be spoken like the text from a modern play. It’s heightened language, which indicates a heightened way of speaking. Imagine trying to speak Shakespeare’s language with a modern technique.

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

No one speaks this way in their everyday life, so why should we perform it as though Romeo is a character from a modern play? It’s poetry, and as such, it needs to be heightened. The language is begging you to fill the space with your voice and your emotion. In fact, not just the space, but the world of the play. It’s larger than life, and the characters feel things so much more than we do in our everyday lives.

One might rightly make the correlation to Musical Theatre. I’ve often heard it said that the reason characters sing in a musical is because the emotions are so great that the words cannot simply be spoken. They must be sung. The same is true here, which is why I believe that Musical Theatre actors are already trained with many of the necessary skills to perform Classical Theatre.

If you try this, and it feels false to you, that’s normal. It’s not naturalism we’re going for here, but something more. Something loftier. To echo all those directors from my early career, something bigger.

In the end, actors can play Shakespeare’s text millions of different ways, and each of them might be compelling in their own right. I don’t presume to know the only  way to play him, it’s just been my experience that when I tried it as casual, naturalistic acting, it just didn’t work. But when I raised the stakes, the circumstances, and the emotions, everything started to click.