As an actor presented with a script, your first questions should always be: “What does my character want? How do I get it? What obstacles are in my way?” These questions help unlock your character by building an understanding of their motives as presented in the script.
However, there is a technique used widely in the UK that looks much more closely at each sentence in each scene and asks: “What do I want with this line? How do I want to make the recipient of this line feel?” It asks the actor to assign an action word to each thought. This technique is called actioning.
Actioning originated with the British Joint Stock Theatre Company in the late 1970s under the guidance of directors Bill Gaskill and Max Stafford-Clark. The company famously used actioning in all its rehearsal rooms, and many British actors who worked with them carried the technique to other companies. Actioning is now widely taught in UK drama schools and is part of the actor’s lexicon in the UK, but it remains less influential elsewhere.
According to Nick Mosley, who wrote in Actioning – and How to Do It: “For Gaskill and Stafford-Clark, actioning was partly a response to the difficulty their actors seemed to have with motivation, especially in the case of political and polemical texts.” It is a technique that can be used when the psychological Method approach isn’t suitable. One such case is with the works of German playwright Bertolt Brecht. The Brechtian acting style is distinct in its aims to prevent the audience from getting emotionally immersed in the narrative, encouraging them to be critically detached and think about the socio-political messages of the play.
JUMP TO
A process that arises early on while working with a script, actioning involves coming up with a verb (an action) for each line of the text, or even each thought within the line, and writing down or memorising that action as your driving force when delivering that line. It is a process of digging down into everything your character says and asking, “What is my intention here?” For this, you need to use transitive verbs – a verb done to someone else. An easy test is whether you can put the word ‘to’ in front of the action. For example, ‘to deflect’, ‘to warn’, ‘to attack’, ‘to entice’, or ‘to repel’.
It is a fun exercise to try either alone at home or in the rehearsal room. Test a few different actions for each line until you settle on one that feels right. For example, the line, “I love you” can be said in a way “to seduce” or “to reassure”, but it can also be said “to provoke” or “to humiliate”. The last two are harder to play, but delivering your lines with these intentions can transform a line into something entirely different to what you thought on first reading.
One of the best things about this technique is it encourages you to make bold and interesting choices with your lines and brings you closer to understanding what your character wants in each scene. In addition to providing actors with a clear sense of purpose for each line, actioning in acting can also help maintain a consistent performance throughout an extended run.
Some people attribute actioning to Russian theatremaker and actor Konstantin Stanislavsky. However, Stanislavsky’s active analysis is more about improvising around the given circumstances of the play and only coming to the playwright’s text at a much later point, when relationships between characters have been established through improvisation. Actioning is different in that it starts with the text and establishes the relationship between characters once intentions have been set with each line.
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If you try this technique, it is helpful to build a list of transitive verbs for yourself. You can do this easily yourself, or you can bookmark this very useful list of actioning words prepared by the Canadian company Arts Umbrella.
If you would rather have a book that you can return to again and again, then it is worth investing in a copy of Actions: The Actor’s Thesaurus, which includes long lists of transitive verbs together with their synonyms to help you find the specific action you’re looking for.
In the entertaining introduction, director and playwright Terry Johnson reflects: “I have worked with actors whose foreheads hit the table at the very mention of an action. I have worked with actors who energetically resist the idea that rational thought might be part of their creative process. But I have helped transform some young actors by converting them to a belief in actioning. More instructively, I have worked with many actors (and I include in this all the best ones) for whom actions are a second language. Not a foreign language or an exotic one, but a technical articulation of the elusively human. A good actor talks about actions like a builder-decorator talks about the nature of nails or the colour of paint. Actions can lean an actor from confusion to clarity, from muddle to magnificence, from the clichéd to the complex.”
Needless to say, actioning can be a valuable tool for actors. You can create a clear roadmap for your performance by assigning specific verbs to lines. This technique can also demystify complex scripts, providing a practical approach to dissecting and delivering lines with intention. However, actioning may not suit every actor or every type of performance. For instance, in improvisational or highly emotional contexts where natural responses are crucial, the prescriptive nature of actioning could hinder your ability to perform authentically. If you thrive on spontaneity or like to have a more holistic grasp of your character, you might find the method constraining because it compartmentalises your performance into discrete actions rather than a fluid emotional expression.
Whether you choose to use actioning will depend largely on the demands of the specific role or production, but it is a useful technique to have in your toolbox.