This is a very good article written on by the independent and helped explain not only his technique, but also how his technique has impacted on some of my favourite actors lives "(i.e. Sir Ian Mckellen)
Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/alfreds-way-more-method-less-madness-1349648.html
Alfreds' way: more method, less madness
Mike Alfreds is a revolutionary director. He believes in actors, not sets
"Nobody seems to be doing anything unusual. Actors walk and talk and
writers write words on paper, so people believe a director just says 'Go
over there and say it like that.' There's something very amateur about
everyone's view of theatre." There's nothing amateur about Mike Alfreds.
He has no films or mammoth musicals to his credit, he is virtually
unknown outside the profession, yet Ian McKellen has described him as
one of the three best directors in the country.
For Alfreds, the job is about skill. Or, rather, skills. "A
lot of work is done by people on instinct; they've got a hunch and a
little flair. That's all right up to a point, but it doesn't carry
through. The trouble is people think, 'I'll direct,' and it seems
possible because the role is not defined. It's not like saying, 'I'll be
a choreographer,' because that would mean you'd have to learn about the
body."
He started reading plays early - "I was loving Coward at 12
and, I think, understanding it, rather surprisingly" - but then read a
couple of books about film direction. "A great bell chimed in my head
and I thought, 'That's it.' All feelings I had about wanting to be in
theatre suddenly focused." After doing his national service in
Singapore, he was demobbed, got in a cargo boat and went across the
Pacific to the US. He worked in the publicity department at MGM but left
to study directing at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh.
"We learnt to make technical drawings and set models. We
learnt about colour, we analysed paintings to see how the eye was
carried through. We had to act and stage manage, build scenery, make
costumes, do make- up, write publicity. I go into workshops now with
young directors and I'm amazed. You ask them what part of the stage is
hot and what's cold and they haven't a clue. We did endless exercises on
that sort of skill and faced a barrage of questions about work we
directed for which you had to have answers. It was an extraordinary four
years."
That sense of rigour has remained. A warm, urbane,
soft-spoken figure with a hint of Lionel Bart about him, he comes across
as a man with a mission but with little to prove. In the Seventies, he
did away with elaborate sets, costumes and lighting to return the focus
to the actor, embodying the philosophy in his influential touring
company Shared Experience, performing his own adaptations of literary
classics on the scale of The Arabian Nights, Bleak House and A Handful
Of Dust. His equally acclaimed Chekhov productions led to an associate
directorship at the National Theatre in the mid-Eighties, climaxing in a
multi-award-winning Cherry Orchard with Sheila Hancock, who described
him as "the perfect director to coax a performance out of me".
In the TV and video age Alfreds is passionate about the
essential "live" quality of theatre. Warming to his theme, he points to
the exciting things that happen in rehearsal that almost never happen in
performance. "Those electric moments where an actor opens up and
discovers something amazing or where two actors suddenly take off in a
scene. That is usually contained and neatly reproduced and the impact is
lost. The truthfulness, the immediacy and vivacity, the spontaneity,
the daring and vulnerability, all the things that actors have, must be
worked on to give them freedom.
"I have auditioned about 200 actors in the past 18 months,
and again and again they tell me that although they've been busy,
they've had no useful experience. They haven't been pushed or changed.
It's because there's no real process and I don't believe you can give
anything to an audience unless you go through something. You can give
them tricks or externals like timing or charm or your standard
repertoire, but to give audiences something real the actor must stretch
him or herself."
To achieve this, he and his actors create a complete
infrastructure and framework, breaking texts down into simple actions
and then connecting the actors back to it once they have made all sorts
of discoveries about character and motivation. "They do an awful lot of
work on the environment and space, their relationships, style and what
the play's actually about, hopefully embodied in a very organic way
through the very long and elaborate rehearsal process. Then, whatever
they choose to play will be right, because it's true to that particular
moment. They have to give up getting, say, a laugh on a specific line.
You must be absolutely in the moment, playing whatever the moment
demands."
If that sounds like all talk and no action, Alfreds is at
pains to refute the charge. "I make them forge the work on the floor.
They have to discover by doing. Get them free with the text so they
never do it the same way twice."
His latest venture is the reinvention of the repertory
system, spending a year working with a cast of four on his own
adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Noel Coward's Private
Lives and a new Philip Osment play, Flesh and Blood. To do this, he took
Cambridge Theatre Company by the scruff of the neck, shook it up and
renamed it Method and Madness. Judging by the overwhelming response -
audiences often returning for all three plays - the move is less mad
than the new company's name suggests.
His method hasn't always worked. If an actor is resistant to
the approach, problems quickly arise. Alfreds regards his production of
Emma as a failure - "I just couldn't find a consistent convention for
the show" - but cresting the wave of a successful tour, he exudes quiet
confidence. The response to Private Lives, particularly from younger
audiences, has taken him by surprise.
"Coward said that the second act was the hardest thing he
and Gertrude Lawrence ever did. Here I am doing it with actors who have
never done Coward, but it just works." So how did they cope with the
style? "Style is not something you put on, it's a world view, an
attitude to life, a set of values. Coward's characters have a lot of
money, they talk fast and strike poses, but it's the result of
something. Why do they talk fast? Because they don't want to be found
out. There's a lot of smart talking in order to keep your emotions held
in." The company rehearsed the Coward for seven weeks. "I doubt he's
ever been rehearsed that long," laughs Alfreds, but then he loathes the
convention of how theatre is put on. "It works against the actor. You
rehearse for three or four weeks, the actors never get near the scenery
until a few days before the opening and often don't get costumes until
the last minute. It's nonsense. A writer does a draft, leaves it, comes
back to it, but there's a period where you can just leave it to cook.
This never happens in the theatre."
Unless you're working with Method and Madness, that is. Jude
was rehearsed for 10 weeks, performed, then left alone while the cast
worked on Private Lives instead. When they revived Jude, says Alfreds,
"they played it without the sweat. Doing the Coward, they had learnt to
relax."
Alfreds knows he's asking a lot, creating that unfashionable
thing, a true ensemble company. As with Theatre de Complicite, whose
work he admires, Mike Alfreds's actors return to work with him time and
again. "They've got to have that text completely fluently; they've got
to be totally in command of their bodies and their minds and then come
out and improvise and go with whatever happens for two-and-a-half hours.
In Jude, they're handling puppets, moving scenery, acting as narrators
and playing highly emotional characters and dealing with a whole series
of conventions creating spaces and places, creating worlds." He grins.
"They've got to be extraordinary people."
