The audience is not stupid

It's hard to define what good acting is but we sll know what overacting is and recognise it when we see it. It's excessive emoting that isn't true to life. It doesn't allow for the audience's intelligence and this week's Words of Wisdom are The audience is not stupid.

In particular there is one aspect of intelligence in which an audience is more sensitive than an individual person and that is emotional intelligence, based on the ability to share and understand other people's emotions. As we are social creatures we are naturally equipped to feel the pain and joy of others. Someone feels a particular feeling, smeone else receives that feeling, shares it and transmits it again. It is obvious that in a large group of people the feeling will be that much more magnified. That is why a crowd will often behave much worse than any of its individual members would. That's why the larger a demonstration is the more likely it is to turn into a riot. If we are sitting at home watching a football match we can see the game perfectly, it's as if we are sitting in the best seat in the ground, but it's much more exciting to be at the match and experiencing the atmosphere, the shared emotion.

So the audience at a play also feel the shared emotion and are particularly sensitive to falsity. Often their unconscious mind will be telling them that something is not quite right. If the actors are overactiing and not believable the performance will not communicate true emotion. It may be superficially impressive but will lack honesty.

The audience is not stupid.

Create an emotion - then hide it

Today’s Words of Wisdom are: Create an emotion – then hide it. This paradoxical point is very much for screen acting. You see, most of us, most of the time, hide our emotions, particularly the negative ones. However we’re feeling inside, we try to retain our self control. How often do we hear people say ‘Yes, I’m fine’ when we know they are far from fine? So we hide our emotions, but we’re also very good at reading the emotions that people are hiding. So, the thing to do is to create a very strong inner feeling of the emotion that you want to convey – and then hide it. The all-seeing eye of the close-up camera will spot what is happening and it will appear realistic because you are hiding a negative emotion, just as people do in real life. You are avoiding the danger of over expressing the emotion in an unrealistic way. Going ‘over the top’ happens when insufficient motivation meets excessive performance: it is to be avoided at all costs. What counts in a performance is the degree of the emotion, not how intensely it’s expressed.

On the stage it’s rather different. There, except in the most intimate of theatres, you have to project and apply a magnifying glass to what you do.