LEARNING LINES

Somebody said to me the other day about how clever I must be to remember all those lines - what an incredible memory and so on. It’s true I have been in many plays and have memorised some big parts but I have never seen it as something that takes ‘cleverness.’

In fact in my experience actors seem to learn lines at much the same rate regardless of whether they are ‘clever’ (whatever that may mean exactly) or dull. Or, for that matter, what method they use for learning lines. I can only detect two broad trends - but would be most interested to know if my observations chime with those of others - one to do with age and one to do with accuracy.

Young people do seem to learn their lines faster than older people - or maybe they just find it easier to remember them for one can learn a line quite quickly - the real question is that once learned, how long will it be remembered? On the other hand older people have more experience, more memory ‘tricks’ at their disposal. So the actual difference in practice seems to me to be hardly noticeable.

The accuracy question - that is whether you remember a line exactly, down to the last jot and comma, or whether you learn what the line means and therefore find yourself inverting phrases or using synonyms - throws up more differences. Some people can learn lines and deliver them at first rehearsal with pin sharp accuracy. That is something that I personally find very hard to do. I start with something that approximates to the lines - it is all my memory will allow - and then these gradually becoming more accurate and more focused as first night approaches.

You might expect these two effects to be related to the method of learning lines. Some people record the play and then listen to the lines over and over. They then re-record it leaving spaces for themselves to deliver their lines. Indeed this is probably the commonest way of line-learning.

I have done this but in general I prefer simply to go through the text repeating a line over and over until it is remembered and then going through chunks of the play in my head, or while moving a card over the page so that the line I have to deliver is covered up.

For some reason I find walking helps while doing this - a long country walk - is fine to practise the lines out loud though it is not without the occasional embarrassment when someone creeps up on you unseen.

Speaking the lines also helps you to get an idea of how to play the character. I remember Peter O’Toole being interviewed once and being asked the question “What do you do to prepare for the character, apart from learning your lines?” Peter O’Toole rather implied that there wasn’t anything apart from learning the lines; that once the lines were learned well the character would be there. From my experience I would go along with that.

But I cannot detect that the recording method necessarily leads to more accurate learning. Not trying to mimic a recording does however leave you freer to explore how to deliver each speech.

Whatever way you choose, learning a big part is a lot of work, bashing away at the script day after day, even when you ‘know’ the lines, for you can be sure that lines you thought you knew will vanish under the pressure of a performance unless you know them so well that you could say them in your sleep.


Then it no longer seems on stage that you are speaking lines at all - you just slip into character and say things and respond to what others say, quite naturally, without thinking. The character suddenly becomes alive - you are not acting, rather you are being, and the situation on stage determines what you say and how you say it.

That’s when you experience the thrill of the stage, drifting out of your own personality and into someone else’s. Although in real life the play is a play and the action is fiction, on stage the words and actions are real, the only possible actions there can be.

How one remembers lines in a physical sense I haven’t a clue - which part of the brain, which traces. I suppose something somewhere must physically alter, some synapses must become weaker, others stronger. Yet there is redundancy too for sometimes even a well-known line can be forgotten completely, as if there has been a break in the track. But a moment’s pause and you can ‘think your way around’ the broken link establish a new pathway.

Anyway, none of this is ‘clever.’ Anyone, I maintain, can learn lines if they are prepared to work at it.