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TEACHING DRAMA TO THE "PIXELLATED GENERATION"

Young aspiring actors are highly media literate. They've been raised on computers, games and a sense of entitlement to fame. Joanna Pitman considers what this means for  the stage ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

It is a Tuesday morning on a bitterly cold January day, and a crowd of aspiring actors has gathered outside Studio One of London's Central School of Speech and Drama, one of Britain's top drama schools. It is audition day for some of the 5,000 young men and women applying for one of the 45 places on the acting degree course.

There are all sorts here: dancer/model types, so thin they look like Pre-Raphaelite corpses, and nervous chatterboxes, including one hectic young woman who pauses after each cataract of speech, as if assessing the latest damage her mouth has caused. There are girls with long, straight curtains of glossy hair, playing hide and seek with an imagined TV camera. And a few young men looking gawky and shy, ready to smile without actually smiling.

At last the panel, which today includes Geoff Colman, Central's head of acting, calls them in. They take up positions around the room, bolted by fear to their chairs and suddenly silent. Each candidate has prepared a classical and a contemporary monologue. Grappling with difficult roles, they wrestle with skeins of intrigue like grannies on a hard knitting day. Some appear wide-eyed and possessed, mad as the figures in a Fuseli painting. Others are sunny souls who seem to have strayed into the audition, seemingly untouched by expertise. The panel listens with more tolerance than enthusiasm, boosting themselves with frequent transfusions of coffee. Among the auditioners I heard, only one seemed to smuggle real passion into her roles.

"Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame was meant as a philosophical provocation, but lots of young people think that they have a right to be famous," says Colman. "They've watched 'X-Factor' and they think they can dazzle us with their costumes or their personality. But what we want is a real and raw revelation of self. Frankly I think many of the applicants who apply to us are deluded about what acting is."

The talented individuals who do win places are very different from the acting undergraduates Colman taught ten years ago. "They are highly media literate," he says. "They can understand split screens and can read images. They've grown up less with books than with computers and multimedia games, and they feel comfortable in a multimedia or an interactive performance environment. They've colonised a mindset that is quite different from the linear, text-based school.” This, Colman suggests, is a problem. “I still believe that the word underscores the visual art of theatre,” he explains, “but there has been a shift in emphasis to the extent that I can no longer assume that they can read and absorb a play."

Colman calls them the "pixellated generation", and his experience is common to most drama schools in the country. "Young aspiring actors are less well-read and less exposed to the classics than previous generations," says Paul Caister, director of the Poor School, another London drama school. "They are just as smart but they have simply learned in a different way. They have an almost completely visual vocabulary, an amazing ability to access screen-based communication. That's how they communicate with each other, and that's the way entertainment is heading, so naturally it needs to be integrated carefully into their theatrical training."

Theatre is often a morally serious enterprise. At its centre are life's important themes, and our artful efforts to consider them. Colman believes he needs to give his undergraduates a sense of the canonical traditions of acting, while also providing them with the intellectual rigour and muscle to evolve with the times. "There are museum courses which venerate the canonical tradition, but we have to give them much more than that," he explains. "They have to have skills above and beyond the traditional 'core' fundamentals of acting, voice and movement." Essentially, they must be prepared for the fast-changing, culturally diverse theatre of the future.

The fundamental relationship between actor and audience has not changed. Yet theatre is always evolving, and new technology is introducing new techniques on stage. For example, Complicite’s "The Elephant Vanishes" by Haruki Murakami, staged at the Barbican in 2004, featured multiple projected images, moving screens and elements of the cast appearing in film on the stage. Then there's the National Theatre’s recent production of "The Revenger’s Tragedy", which relied on projected images, a live orchestra and DJs.

Stuart Worden, assistant principal at the Brit School, agrees that drama productions are beginning to feature more technology. “Companies like Complicite integrate film and interactive elements into their productions. Also, the recent production of 'Black Watch' by John Tiffany made very clever use of modern technology and visual media. Our students enjoyed the way different media were layered into the production.”

More fluid cultural forces are at work. No longer is it the dream of every promising young actor to join the RSC and take on the Mount Everest roles of yore. Most want to go straight into film and television (86% of Central's graduates do). Some go on to study abroad, for example, at the renowned Grotowski Institute of Theatre in Poland, which Central has links to. An enterprising few form theatre companies and put on their own independent productions in warehouses or under railway arches, much in the way that the Young British Artists of Damien Hirst's generation carved their own place independently of traditional art dealers.

Actors have to be more versatile than ever, says Peter Hinton, a recent Central graduate who has since worked in television and film, as well as with the RSC and the National Theatre. "Central's ethos is to give students as many practitioners' viewpoints as possible so that they have the tools to deal with whatever kind of work comes along. This could be completely traditional, like the Trevor Nunn production of ‘King Lear’, which I've just done, or it could be a more contemporary production, or it could be film or TV, interactive performances or many other things."

Theatre is about the art of communication. If young audiences are accustomed to integrating life experiences with a highly sophisticated mix of media, then that is what actors should be able to achieve. Theatre consistently adapts to current realities while maintaining what's valuable from the past. The result is something richer and altogether more relevant; it is about looking forward, without negating the past.

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com, Nic's events (both via Flickr)

(Joanna Pitman is an arts critic and feature writer at the Times.)