“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;”
Jacques in As You Like It, Act 2 Scene 7.
William Shakespeare
Directing the play
Some people's career motivations are clear to them from an early age. They identify a career path they want to pursue, and do so. For others, it’s not quite so straightforward. They aren’t clear on their motivations or the range of jobs they’d enjoy.
Identifying our motivations can give us insights as to why we make the career choices we do and help us harness them to control our direction of travel.
In this regard, what can we learn from actors about identifying motivations?
Acting the part
Acting in a naturalistic way is an art and takes great skill.
A technique often employed by actors to develop realistic characters focuses on defining a character’s motivations to provide the unspoken reasons that compel the character to act the way they do.
The Stanislavski System proposes that by understanding a character’s psychology, the actor can play a role more realistically because they understand why the character behaves in certain ways and this informs how the actor portrays the character in each moment.
Objectives
From a character development perspective, the actor will identify the objectives the character has throughout the play. This provides insights to a top layer of the character’s motivations.
An actor might ask: What is the character’s objective in this moment, in this scene, in the play as a whole? What are they trying to achieve? What do they want? What do they need?
Actions
When clear on the character’s objectives, the actor will decide how to portray the actions the character will take to attain their objectives, and play the part accordingly.
So, if the objective of the character is to get another character to do something, they might act the part in a way that represents taking a carrot or a stick approach, such as trying to achieve their objective by being flirtatious or aggressive.
Backstory
Beneath the objectives and actions, lies the character’s backstory. This may or may not be written into the script but creating one is something many actors will do to aid naturalistic portrayal and to help them identify the character’s objectives and their actions. The backstory provides the root causes that prompt the character to behave in the ways they do.
For example, if within a character’s backstory there is a chaotic home life, and one of their objectives is to get someone to do something, the actor might choose to portray them being controlling in their approach - the character being motivated to take control of situations as an antidote to their chaotic childhood. Or the actor might decide that the character behaves in subservient ways because this was how they navigated their childhood experience, and use this as a basis for portraying the character’s actions.
With a well-written script there are often many ways an actor can play the part to realistically manifest the character’s objectives and motivations.
The process
So underneath a character’s activities throughout a play will be numerous objectives, actions and their backstory.
The process an actor follows to determine these might be summarised as follows:
Define objectives: What the character wants that prompts them to act the way they do.
Identify actions: What the character will do to achieve their objectives.
Create a backstory: The root causes that prompt the character to behave in the ways that they do.
Analysing each of these facets of a character provides insights to underpinning motivations that the actor can choose to define in terms of how they play the role.
Defining our role
What can we learn from this actor’s process?
Gaining a deeper understanding of our motivations can help us understand the unconscious reasons why we make certain choices. Looking underneath our actions and considering why we do certain activities and behave the way we do, can give us useful insights for defining the direction we want to take. Knowing our motivations can help us harness them in beneficial ways to write a better future story for ourselves.