Lend Me Your Ears presents an approach to actor training that centres arguing as the essential activity of performance.
Disagreement arguably is the essence of drama and Shakespeare stretches this principle to its furthest limits. Essential to Shakespeare's plays is the character's belief that the person with who you are arguing is changeable. If you, the actor, are not on board with this belief in changeability, the endeavour fails.
Part-manual and part-cultural study, the book offers intellectual and practical tools for approaching Shakespeare with power, presence and confidence. From Brutus and Cassius disagreeing over leadership in the 'tent scene' in Julius Caesar to Romeo and Juliet disagreeing over names in the 'balcony scene', robust argument exists throughout Shakespeare's oeuvre.
Indeed, the author makes the case for argumentation as the centrepiece to the actor's work on Shakespeare and, along the way, offers exercises as well as classroom and rehearsal room anecdotes as means to turn theory into practice.
By centring argument and persuasion in Shakespeare training, the book addresses the two most
common habits that nearly all new actors bring to their work:
(1) playing the problem
(2) merely imitating emotional states
Actors, teacher, and directors will undoubtedly recognize these habits and seek solutions for them. Lend Me Your Ears offers such solutions.
We are living in a time when good-faith argumentation has receded from public life in the face of a mindset generated by social media and political polarization. Shakespeare is an antidote to such an anti-argumentation mindset, since his characters believe, as perhaps we all should, that even your greatest foe in changeable.