One Way Into Character

Going beyond: 'This is how I'd say it'.

This month, it’s all about how you look at the world. Here’s a telescope.

In a chapter of Jonathon Coe’s The Rotters Club, a Welsh character monologues to the book’s lead, an English teenager, about the English treatment of Wales over the centuries. It goes on from pages, from Owain Glyndŵr to holiday cottages. He is, in summary, not happy. At a loss for how to reply, our hero mumbles: ‘It’s a point of view.’

It was a popular early 2000s book in a newspaper-bestseller kind of way whose leads were the same age as me. I loved it. My personal Holden Caulfields were a group of kids dealing with the uneasy state of seventies Birmingham. It’s twenty and a bit years later and they’re still squatting in my head.

That sentence has lived with them for as long. For a while, I thought ‘It’s a point of view’ was a way of sounding clever without actually engaging with the point and I filed it into a box in my head marked ‘Useful’.

And then I learned how Point of View relates to Character.

Character Study

Let’s clear up definitions. In common use, character takes an article or a pronoun. A character. The character. That character. Shorn of these, the word means moral fortitude or interesting quirks: Say what you like about The Very Hurtful Caterpillar, he had character!

In the acting world, Character is a field of study. It’s the bit that’s left once you get past the vocal and body health, the text analysis, the swords, the microphone technique, the hitting-your-mark, and so on. It’s the famous bit, the pretending you’re somebody else bit. It’s the bit that inspires people to talk about range.

Point of View, by contrast, has many names for one concept. You might say perspective. A company will have a mission statement. You might refer to it obliquely: ‘[Quality] is in your DNA!’ or ‘[Virtue]? [Virtue]’s my middle name.’ Point of View is a belief. A useful belief for an actor because it informs your choices.

I first came across Point of View as a tool for working with Character in the improv world. Finding and committing to a strong Point of View is a tool we use to build a scene from nothing.

To illustrate, say I have found myself playing a blacksmith. What kind of blacksmith am I? Unknown for now. Perhaps the scene goes:

Me, a blacksmith: Ahhh, Old John Snakes, how good to see you in my shop this merry morning.

The other player aka Old John Snakes: And good to be here! I think the first buds of Springtime are but days away. Have you heard? The king’s horse has slipped a shoe!

My turn. I could say anything. The only stipulation is that I move the scene along. To do this, I will add some new information into it. Here’s three off the top of my head:

• That poor old nag, have it over and I will see it cantering happily in no time!

• Hah! The king! What a fool! I’d have liked to see that.

• I am not surprised. The quality of iron we see today. How is everything getting worse?

Whatever I go with, I am setting up a Point of View for the blacksmith. Notice that they’re not contradictory, just different. In the first he is an animal-lover. In the second, an anti-royalist. In the third, a pessimist. Perhaps he’s all three but we’re going to pick just one. One which is stronger than no Point of View at all.

• …huh.

Once we have our Point of View, we have a blueprint for playing this character. It will inform our choices as we proceed. Whatever else they are, they are somebody who believes that thing. Let’s fast forward and drop in on a later moment:

Old John Snakes: I have secured a crate of small beer for the feast tonight!

Animal-Loving Blacksmith: I shall put out a saucer of it for the dog.
Anti-royalist Blacksmith: Let us send word to the palace that the king is not invited.
Pessimist Blacksmith: It will rain and I will die.

The longer we spend with the character, the more we flesh them out using the Point of View as a base. Perhaps we will find the root of the belief, perhaps we will find others that correlate to it. It is through this exploration that we find the nuance.

The length of time we have on stage limits how deep we can go. If we’re carrying this character for a scene or two, our strokes will be broader than if we have time to explore and watch their journey over two hours plus interval.

Happily, there’s this thing called scripts.

Point of View in Scripted Work

Although we meet him in Act 1, it’s not until Act 2 that G. B. Shaw gives us a description of Henry Higgins in Pygmalion. He wrote his plays to be read as plays as much as performed, so Shaw is not a natural miser when it comes to offering character description and stage directions.

He appears in the morning light as a robust, vital, appetizing sort of man of forty or thereabouts, dressed in a professional-looking black frock-coat with a white linen collar and black silk tie. He is of the energetic, scientific type, heartily, even violently interested in everything that can be studied as a scientific subject, and careless about himself and other people, including their feelings. He is, in fact, but for his years and size, rather like a very impetuous baby “taking notice” eagerly and loudly, and requiring almost as much watching to keep him out of unintended mischief. His manner varies from genial bullying when he is in a good humour to stormy petulance when anything goes wrong; but he is so entirely frank and void of malice that he remains likeable even in his least reasonable moments.

In scripted work, unlike improv, the who-what-where that provides a scene’s foundation is done for us. However, the Point of View is still not always clearly spelled out. We must do character maths.

In the above passage, once you’ve recovered from having to play someone as appetizing, you might notice that Shaw breaks down Higgins into a list of building blocks. First his look, then his dress, then his energy, then the impression he makes. Put together, you could perhaps say that: ‘Higgins believes facts to be more important than feelings.’

Armed with this information, let’s look at his first line in the first scene. Eliza is selling flowers in the street. He is making notes about the way she speaks. When a bystander tells her what he’s up to, she panics. Higgins’ says:

There, there, there, there! Who’s hurting you, you silly girl? What do you take me for?

Four theres is a hell of a line to start us with. Who says ‘there, there’ twice on the trot? With no break? What’s with the exclamation mark? Is he trying to empathize with her? Is he admonishing? The ‘you silly girl’ might lead us to believe that he is looking to demean. It would be very easy to play him as immediately headmasterly but how does that fit with the rest of the character description? Taking Eliza down a peg in public doesn’t seem ‘void of malice’ and ‘likeable’ to me.

Let’s apply our Point of View. Higgins believes facts to be more important than feelings. If that’s true, then all this commotion is nothing but a nuisance because it gets in the way of his work. If he can get Eliza to recognize that he is not out to hurt her, the disturbance will be over and he can return to his work. She might even be interested to help! If I were playing this, I would be tempted to lean into his confusion.

Point of View does not have to be static. A character’s journey, their growth, allows it to shift from beginning to end. Macbeth is convinced during the play that he deserves to be king. Frodo takes three books to go from knowing his place is the Shire to knowing his place is somewhere else. Doc Brown decides to ignore the very clear evidence of the first two films to declare: ‘The future hasn’t been written yet so make it a good one.’

Whether we decide that by the end of Pygmalion Higgins believes feelings to be as important as facts or Higgins believes feelings to be more important than facts depends on what we glean as we work through the play. No two actors will come up with the exact same journey. You, on reading the character description, may came up with a different Point of View to me. But yours and mine are linked by being based in decoding the original text and it is our separate character maths which give us distinct takes on playing the character.

As we go through the play, keeping track of where we think the character’s point of view is will inform the actual lines. All those little exclamations and interjections, the ‘Oh!’s and ‘As you say’s and ‘Right’s now have a guiding light to help us decide on their impetus.

Carrying Spears

Let’s imagine we haven’t been cast as the lead in a famous play.

Instead, we have one line in an advert. Or maybe a walk-on to support the main characters in a drama.

Man in advert. He believes that orange juice is neat.

Here’s our scene.

MR TRENCH, teacher, looks up from a pile of homework as the class come in.

MR TRENCH
Alright, settle.

That’s it. Cut to the kids.

We have almost nothing to go on. Therefore, we can do it anything with it. Is he happy about the class being there? Is he a cool teacher? Is he fearsome? Nervous? Who knows. But if we apply a bit of character maths, we pull a Point of View from him and relate our choice to the text.

In this description, the character is not being introduced to us as FELIX but rather by his teacher name, MR TRENCH. We know that when we meet him, he is working. Perhaps, then, we can guess something about his values - that professionalism is important to him. We can say Mr Trench believes is important to be professional. From that, we can deduce that the line is directed to a rowdy class.

But it doesn’t say the class is rowdy. The director might direct them to be but for now, they are not. To my mind, Mr Trench is saying a thing that teachers say because it is a thing that teachers say and he wants to appear teacherly. As it happens, that is an interesting thing to play.

On the other hand, perhaps the script reads:

FELIX, teacher, looks up from a pile of scratched lottery tickets as the class come in.

FELIX
Alright, settle.

How nice, lottery tickets. Felix believes in luck. The writers probably called him Felix on purpose. That’ll be helpful to know if his least talented student hands in a very good piece of work and Felix gets some visionary bit of dialogue like:

Alternatively, oh no, lottery tickets! Felix is always looking for a shortcut over hard work. Bet the class love him except for that terrible student he doesn’t know how to teach and usually ignores who gives him an incredible piece of work later on in the scene.

The beauty of Point of View is that you will always bring your own experience to it. You can’t not. But you do so while allowing the writer to guide you in a way that pulls out the most useful of your own experience. Your acting becomes a collaboration with the writer, living or dead.

As I think back to that monologue in The Rotters Club, I think of the reply not just as a stalling tactic. I think that Coe is unintentionally describing the person who is speaking. Character: it’s a point of view.