4 - Performance

Summary

For an actor to be effective on the screen it is not enough for him to be understandable. He has to be truthful.

Andrei Tarkovsky (2003: 155)

When Rebecca phoned me up and said about the part, I said, ‘I’m not an actor,’ and she said, ‘That’s the point. Ken likes you just to be yourself.’

Charles MacLean (Rory McAllister)

One wet morning, sometime early in 2005, a small bus winds its way through the quiet country lanes of West Cork. Inside, twenty or thirty men regaled in green and brown military attire are belting out anthemic Irish Republican songs as the grassy-green landscape glides slowly by. The men are en route to film the ambush of a group of British soldiers during the Irish War of Independence and seem to be relishing this opportunity to get into character. I am with them, although not in costume, gathering material for an on-location newspaper feature on the film they are preparing for, The Wind That Shakes the Barley. When I ask the red-headed man sitting next to me, William Ruane, what he expects from the day, he responds that he anticipates a confrontation but is uncertain of detail. His contract is soon to expire, he says, and, as such, is braced for his character’s death, but he hopes for a stay of execution, for his character and for his contract. This encounter highlights something of the ongoing tension between the true and the false, the authentic and the artificial, the real and the constructed, that is embodied in the relationship between actor and character as they enter and assemble the fictional cosmos in Loach’s cinema.

As outlined in Chapter 2, Loach often discusses his work in discourses of truth and authenticity, discourses which are also brought to bear on performance. In press coverage of The Angels’ Share, for example, Loach uses the term ‘emotional truth’ to describe Paul Brannigan’s performance as Robbie. His collaborators often do likewise: for instance, in identifying Loach’s directorial strengths, Tony Garnett comments, ‘Ken just gets truthful moments better than anyone I’ve ever come across.’ Phillip B. Zarrilli (1995: 9) highlights the prevalence of discourses of truth in performance and articulates the rationale behind it when he notes,

The use of ‘believe’ or its commonplace synonym ‘be honest’ by many acting teachers and directors stems from the predominant viewpoint implicit in realistic acting that a character must conform to everyday social reality as constructed from the spectator’s point of view.