The Actor's Apprenticeship | Documentary | Feat. Judi Dench, Imelda Staunton, Derek Jacobi

With the collapse of vaudeville new talent has no place to stink.

George Burns

I doubt anyone much remembers how my practice of posting a Saturday Night Radio Drama started, it started when I got into a brawl with one of the people who troll me after I wondered why I'd never heard of actors, on their own, as a part of practicing their art, getting together to go through great plays by themselves with other actors trying to learn how to act, the way that musicians routinely do as part of their practice.  

That some might or might have, I don't doubt, though I've never heard any of the actors I've known talk about doing it. It's something you'd think was as much a no-brainer as a musician practicing the repertoire of their instrument or voice or a painter drawing pictures or a writer writing stuff they rip up and don't present to the public.   An actor or director who doesn't practice is about as likely to produce good work as a musician who never does, it's not likely to happen. 

That was before I knew that radio drama, in most places not much done on radio anymore, was being transformed by writers-actors-directors into computer based audio drama much of which is as bad as most movies and TV but which doesn't waste anything like a tiny fraction of the resources and time that those most expensive and, so, least creative of media do.   And, being a voluntary effort, they are as creative as the creators, the writers or improvisers or actors or directors want to make them - no producers or backers or a paying audience to answer to.   The audio-drama that stinks is a good thing, it's trying and trying is better than not trying and it's a chance to make the mistakes that you have to make to get better. 

Somewhere in that brawl I pointed out the excellent series of TV productions based on Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe that A&E financed in the 1990s, which were some of the best TV ever produced with some of the most incredibly good actors I've ever seen but which must have cost a fortune to produce because they reproduced, slavishly, the period look and costumes and settings of the period of the books, between the 1930s to the 1960s.  Though Archie,  the fine Timothy Hutton, and Nero Wolfe, the excellent, late, Maury Chaykin,  didn't seem to age along the way.  I contrasted that with the excellent radio production that the CBC did of many of the same Rex Stout novels, the ones I'd read quite faithfully reproduced in full-cast productions but without the cost of visuals.  I'd love to know the cost difference between the two.  The acting in both was excellent,  though I certainly would never talk down the work of some of the extraordinarily fine actors in the TV version, Kari Matchett, Christine Brubaker, Debra Monk, James Tolkan, Robert Bockstael, etc.  in some ways I think it would have been better if there weren't the visuals.  I'd rather have foregone the costumes and sets for having more of them. 

This video of some of the best British actors, many of whom, such as Judi Dench,  have done radio acting, lamenting the decline of municipal and regional repertory theaters in Britain - the apprentice system that makes so many British actors so much better than most American actors - is probably something that is not going to be turned around.  I think any actor or director, any would-be playwright who wants to be better at what they do should consider that their best chance is to do what a musician who wants to get better has to do and that if they want their practice to be presented to a public that their best hope would be to buy a good, inexpensive digital recorder, learn to get the most out of it that they can, write their best script and do it in audio form.  They can listen to it themselves and learn from their mistakes because unless things turn out a lot different from how they appear to, they're not going to get to do it on stage.   They won't learn much from doing it on TV or movie set, they probably won't ever get the chance to try.

What is said about people who get a chance and who, once they've made a splash have no learned skills to back it up getting spit out by TV and the movies is all too true.  If they'd gotten their chance when they didn't have the money to get into serious trouble before a public - before the inevitable amnesia that TV and the movies induce sets in - they might walk away with at least their dignity intact.  I wonder if there would be fewer stories of self-destruction associated with show biz if they went through an apprenticeship.  

I love theater when it's good.  I love it when it is fun but more when it says something.  I think you're entirely more likely to get that through audio drama than through something with sets and makeup.