Finger Fencing

There is a general principle running through this workshop, indeed it runs throughout all my work,
which is that games can not only be a way of training actors but it can also be a way of providing
entrances to various dramatic situations and provide images for them. We have a very early game in
which we do a whole series of tag games and end up after 10 or 15 minutes in which there are two
men and two women and whose object is to demonstrate the greatest gift of love that you can make
to your partner. The four are split up: a is with b, b with c, and c with d, who is in love with a. You are
there with the person that you love and that you least love. The object of the exercise is to kiss the
hand or feet of your beloved and so the game ends up with everyone rolling about on the floor. In a
way this is a model for "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and produces images that you can use in a
production. It gets the actors to play the action of the scene and they can begin to feed in the
dialogue as well; thus you get dialogue which is alive and sustained by a physical memory within the
actors. What Stanislavsky calls 'Emotion Memory' becomes not something from your biographical
past but something from the rehearsal period, something much more focused and immediate. The
prevailing feature of most theatre is that it is a conflict. Most Western theatre is based on conflict. So
what I want to do in this game is steam off some energy, but also to focus on conflict.

I've got fed up of this game over the years that I've played it. Oh Christ, not again! I usually do it first
thing in the morning. This is the first time I've done it in the afternoon for ages. After people have
done work, bringing themselves into contact, it becomes an entirely different game, producing
different results. It is a 'clash' conflict. Sometimes we get it. There were a couple of times where
somebody said 'sorry' because both banged into each other at the same time. There was a very nice
game going on there, with a lot of very subtle play, but nobody looked like touching anybody else in a
million years. They would've still been there next Tuesday, circling around each other, making feints,
but there was space of a good foot and a half between their hands, never mind their bodies, where
they couldn't have possibly been reached.

In this first game you touch your opponent in the small of the back while preventing him or her from
touching you in the small of your back. Most people find this very difficult because it is essentially a
horseplay game using blind energy. People crash into each other as they attack at the same time, or
defend at the same time and so are never within reach of their opponent's back. We play this in at
least two groups so that you can see how other people play the game. Having watched someone
playing the game you can develop more subtle alternative strategies. What you rarely see, and what
you get in professional boxing or fencing, is a player who is balanced between attack and defence.
They are not acting intentionally towards the other person but are acting subconsciously, allowing the
body to take over the action. It is said that you should look at your opponents' eyes because they will
telegraph where the punch is going to come from. This isn't actually true because the eye-righting
process would take over and you'd be thinking from the slower front and not the much quicker back
brain. What one is trying to do is put the boxer in a balanced position so that they can react quickly
off the inspiration of the brain. This comes back to the fact that for me theatre is about response and
not statement, it is about a continuing process of questioning, and response to questioning, rather
than a series of dogmatic or fixed statements which are ultimately boring. The audience then has to
work something out rather than being told something. I have sat in theatres and realised that I am
being asked to watch the action, this is quite unfamiliar to many West End or repertory theatre
audiences who are all too often being told what to think. The theatre becomes a literary and not an
acting medium.