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I started acting when I was fifteen. It was the freedom that attracted me; years of shyness and frustration shunted cleanly out of the way with scripts and imaginary characters to hide behind. A few decades of training, performing, directing, then teaching eventually lead to two years of standing on movie sets on the other side of the world. I came to understand that the key to growing as an actor was being flexible and open; in dramatic terms, being able to improvise.Improvisation is a terrifying word to most acting students. They can't really be blamed; it's perceived by many as being instantly funny in front of other people, a skill I certainly don't have. However, to improvise is to actively leap away from the safety net of a script, throwing yourself down a creative mountain and hoping the skis hold. The trick, like all acting, is to give the illusion of freedom. Far from being the unrestricted playhouse that exists in many school drama classes, improvisation is actually a series of constructs inside which the actor can poke around and explore. To the audience, it looks like pure freedom of creative expression. The actor, in control, enjoys this sham. It can make them look very good.
In fact, there's a constant set of rules that the actor must follow to make the growing scene work: audience sightlines; listening to the words around you; watching body language to spot clues and cues. And always, a million moments, scripts and Boolean trees of dramatic possibilities bounce around inside the head, ready to slot into the characters and situations unfolding around them.
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