Acting

Maybe the best piece of advice on acting Shakespeare comes near the start of Acting, a documentary showing at IDFA 2024 that’s directed by Sophie Fiennes. In the scene, Declan Donnellan of the theatre company Cheek By Jowl tells his actors that they need not bother about meaning in Shakespeare at the beginning. That time will come. For now, they only need to break the text into syllables.

Just get “the sounds of the words going” and “the idea of the size of breath that you need to do it comfortably,” he tells them. The idea is for them to not have to think about breathing as they act out words from Macbeth, the play for which they are rehearsing. It sounds like solid advice—even to the ears of non-actor. Shakespeare, after all, was as much a poet as he was a drama man.

Fiennes film itself seems to follow a similar wisdom. Her documentary is purposefully elliptical—it must be: She isn’t presenting a play in the manner that thousands saw, for example, Lee Manuel Miranda’s filmed stage play Hamilton. She isn’t necessarily introducing anyone to Macbeth either. If she’s up to anything at all, she is giving viewers a Cliff Notes of a masterclass on acting.

This frees her up to both convey some important bits of the coaching offered by Donnellan and his partner Nick Ormerod using a rhythm fashioned by Fiennes.

And yet, even in chopped form, the master here is the collection of words from Macbeth. Shakespeare remains unrivalled put in the mouth of an eager thespian. Every time Donnellan’s actors get it right—and they do so almost every time the camera gets them running a monologue, the coach pointing out quasi-imperceptible adjustments—it is very much unlike a rehearsal. It comes to seem like with any degree of seriousness applied by an actor, Shakespeare’s text would rise to offer a hand in assistance. These actors are ready; the text was born ready.

Under the tutelage of Donnellan, a less rumpled Alfred Hitchcock, the actors Fiennes capture imbue Shakespeare’s readily quickened text with even more liveliness. Seeing their excellence, one wishes some sort of biography of each actor was provided by the film but Fiennes is obviously more concerned with Shakespeare and with what the actors’ work. There is a reason the film is titled the way it is. All that we get here is acting. Not overacting or underacting. Just acting. Maybe if Fiennes could produce just the disembodied act without the actors, she would have.

But that’s just her. In directing his actors, sometimes Donnellan offers a perspective that seems to encapsulate living even as it is about acting—as when he says, “All ideal forms are dodgy. Truth. Beauty.” He goes on to elucidate the thought: “We have our perceptions of them but they tend to make us very unhappy.”

This is a quality that is also seen in Shakespeare. The Bard may have written about the dangers of grasping power by illegal, unethical means in Macbeth but if you wandered into a section of the play without quite knowing or understanding its arc, you might hear something indelibly true about guilt, about spousal relations, about the governance of human life by metaphysical forces.

Shakespeare can be about one thing and about other things. So, too, is Cheek By Jowl’s Donnellan. His teachings are about one thing—acting—but it is about other things, too.

In the hands of Sophie Fiennes (who’s also the film’s cinematographer and editor), the performances and the commentary attain a cinematic quality. Adding to the sense of the cinematic already brought to bear by the presence of a camera is the ancient building in which it all takes place. A rather cavernous entity, it has a film set quality. And Fiennes makes excellent use of the space by punctuating a selection of mostly still images that have no obvious narrative use but gives her project a near-palpable texture.

At over two hours, it must be said that Acting is about a half-hour too long. But it is an understandable impulse. Fiennes is serving two masters with her documentary: Donnellan and Shakespeare. To edit or not to edit Shakespeare? We all know the answer to that one.