Acting Out

Actors from the London Stage, a touring troupe of five actors from such prestigious companies as the Royal Shakespeare Company, were in-residence here in mid-March, performing Othello three times and sitting in on more than two dozen classes.

The actors visited many theater and English classes, including Dennis Huston’s Shakespeare on Film, which compares Shakespeare plays to the film versions, and several acting classes taught by Trish Rigdon. But Actors from the London Stage were found in unexpected classes as well, like Bart Sinclair’s Professional Issues for Electrical Engineers and Nanxiu Qian’s Original Beauty of Chinese Literature.

“Students in all sorts of classes can benefit from having the actors there,” says Rigdon, a professor in the English department and head of Rice’s theater program who organized the troupe’s campus visit. “I encourage faculty to think outside the box and be as creative as they want to be in having the actors in class.”

Sinclair, lecturer on electrical and computer engineering, thought his students could learn important lessons about oral presentations. Stage and film actor Andrew Dennis talked about many aspects of presentations, including being fully prepared, knowing the information thoroughly, speaking to all the audience, making good transitions, and even breathing properly.

“A couple of things he told the students that spoke to his main theme were, ‘You’re in control. Enjoy that,’” Sinclair recalls. “Also, and he attributed this to Marv Levy, the former coach of the Buffalo Bills, who said prior to his team’s third appearance in the Super Bowl, ‘There is no place that I’d rather be than right here, right now.’ That, Andrew said, was the attitude that you need to have when you stand up in front of an audience.”

Engineers, Sinclair explains, often are called on to make presentations to their peers, managers, and customers, especially early in their careers. “We know that we produce graduates who are technically well prepared,” he notes. “I hope this will help them be better able to present their ideas and be recognized for their ability to communicate, too.”

Actor Julia Watson visited several acting courses, and she also visited Jane Chance’s Chaucer class, where the discussion centered around The Knight’s Tale. “I talked about the characters and how I would examine the text and research it and how I would play these characters,” says Watson, who, in addition to being a stage actress, stars on a long-running BBC series.

She also discussed with students the nuances of language, not just that of Chaucer and Shakespeare but even the language of modern writers. “There’s the misconception that actors just learn lines and recite them,” she says. “But you have to know what you’re saying and what you’re talking about, and you have to study modern language just as much as the classic writers.”

Theater students learned from the actors not just through their classroom discussions but also by watching their performance of Othello. Since there are only five actors on tour, each actor portrays multiple characters. The play is not cut, but props and scenery are sparse compared to a full-scale production.

“You get to flex your acting muscles in a way that you can’t do in any other play,” Watson notes. “I’ve been in other productions where I’ve spent a considerable amount of time waiting in my dressing room.”
In Othello, Watson portrayed a man and a woman, Roderigo and Emilia. “I died twice,” she laughs. But stranger things than that have happened in productions of Actors from the London Stage. In Twelfth Night, Watson, portraying two characters, actually had to talk to herself. And Huston, professor of English, recalls a performance of As You Like It where one character had to wrestle himself and another had a duel with himself. “What an actor does to play a character is truly evident when they have to play more than one role,” Huston says. “They subtly change their body language and speech patterns as they move between characters. It’s amazing.”

Actors from the London Stage, now in its 13th year, tour as many as 20 U.S. colleges and universities each year. Rice will be a regular stop thanks to a endowment established by English professor Alan Grob. The Alan and Shirley Grob Fund for Shakespeare in Performance stands at about $200,000, which also includes donations from former governor Bill Hobby and his wife, Diana, and Rice Board of Trustees member Bruce Dunlevie ’79 and his wife, Elizabeth.

—Dana Benson