For some years I worked as a Theatre Director, covering ground from plays that no one had heard of; to massively popular stuff such as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals; to Shakespeare. \u00a0As anyone who has ever done amateur dramatics will tell you, let alone any professional, there comes a point in the rehearsal process when the actors have to “move off the book”. \u00a0That is, they have to put their scripts down and start to work from memory.<\/p>\n
Directors like this to be as soon as possible, generally, and actors tend to hang onto their scripts as long as possible (in my experience at least!). There’s often friction between the two camps, with actors claiming, vosiferously that they aren’t using their scripts, they’ve just got them in their hands “in case”.<\/p>\n
Rubbish!<\/strong><\/p>\n As the person who stood at the front watching the rehearsals I can assure you that (and in the bar afterwards actors will admit!) if there’s a script in your hand, you’ll use it. \u00a0Perhaps not word-for-word, every-single-line but quite a bit.<\/p>\n And certainly more than is needed.<\/p>\n It’s as though having the script in your hands stops the actors brains working properly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n On a personal note I’ve just driven a couple of hours to a training venue for today’s session. It’s a venue I know well, not least because I’ve driven here maybe 50 or 60 times before, always from the same starting point and always (except once when I got lost) using the same route.<\/p>\n And yet, because I have a satnav in my car I turned it on and – once it was on – I relied on it to get me where I was going without any attempt to either learn the route or remember it from previous drives.<\/p>\n It’s as though having a satnav in my car stops my brain from working properly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As a trainer and speaker, I see plenty of fellow speakers using notes. I’ve nothing against notes but my experience is that most notes are notes at all, but semi-scripts. \u00a0I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve heard people say to me “They’re just there in case I go blank – I won’t read them… I promise”.<\/p>\n But they do.<\/p>\n It’s as if having the script in their hands forces them to read from it!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For some years I worked as a Theatre Director, covering ground from plays that no one had heard of; to massively popular stuff such as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals; to Shakespeare. \u00a0As anyone who has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}