Kelly Reilly is an actress who I have known for many years. I first met her when she was an eight year old, as a member of an ‘Arts in Education’ team working in her primary school in Chessington Surrey, where she vouchsafed to me the dream that she wanted to be an actress when she grew up. 

Later, as a GCSE student at a local secondary school I directed her in her first major outing as an actress as Philomele in Timberlake Wertenbeker’s ‘The Love of a Nightingale’ for a youth theatre company in Kingston, and finally I was her ‘A’ Level Drama teacher in the years when she made the transition into professional work as an actress in Prime Suspect with Helen Mirren. 

She has gone on to make a major career for herself as a theatre actress, winning the ‘Ian Charleson Award’ for the best performance by an actress in a classical production for her work in Dominic Dromgoole’s West End production of Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’, and also being the youngest ever nominee for ‘Best Actress’ in ‘The Olivier Awards’ for her performance in ‘After Miss Julie’ at the Donmar Warehouse.  I interviewed Kelly for this dissertation in May 2006.

In 2024 I’m aware that she has since received another Olivier nomination for her performances as Desdemona in Othello at the Donmar Warehouse. In addition to her extensive screen work in film and television in America with the likes of Kenneth Branagh, Kevin Costner, Tom Hanks and Denzil Washington.

When I asked her about her first reading of a script she gave a very interesting answer...

The process begins with the first reading of the play.  Whenever I’m reading for a part I’m always reading it with an ‘imaginative eye of feeling’. In that situation, for me, the character exists as a first raindrop, and it is that first dip into the character that is the cleanest, the most telling of what I’m feeling and how I feel about the play as a whole. “

When I asked her whether that became her key reference point in her work on the text she replied....

You try to get back to it all the time because it’s the first time you say it out loud.  Usually you don’t stray too far away from it, not in its essence, obviously in its colours and in its range it develops, but in its essence you try to keep it true to that first response. You have to trust the writing but then its still within the senses and with the instinctive connection you make and I trust that because that’s part of what I dip in and out of all the time anyway; it’s just trusting what I feel; that’s always my jumping off point I work up to the head and then back out again.

The interesting notion here for me within this dissertation is about the ‘affective’ engagement this actress makes with the content of the play she is working on. Within the argument I have constructed here in this thesis, such an engagement with the text brings the actor into closer correspondence with the originating elements of the play in the playwright’s imagination. Yes, she the actress tries to make sense of the journey she is exploring with the character, but her instinct is to return to the non-verbal word of feeling, emotion and sensation.

In 2024 I’m struck by the ‘sensual’ approach she suggests to the process of acting. The initial deep dive for her into the text is to make contact with an affective understanding of the character and their situation. As a playwright I’m so used to taking an analytical, reflective position to my own work and that of others, but I need never to mistake the fact that the initial work must emerge out of a ‘feeling’ engagement with the dramatic moment. Indeed, what it is underlining for me is the clear division that lies between the initial writing of the work and its subsequent re-shaping through the craft of writing. Perhaps it is a signal to me not to attempt to mix the two. 

In terms of defining the relationship between the work of the playwright and the work of the actor it is interesting to note the way this actress makes conscious the link between the senses and what she feels as a result of working with the text. 

Phenomenologically speaking, I believe, the playwright works from senses, into feeling into the language of the text - a consequence of the realisation of the ‘virtual action’ between the imagined characters, whereas, what seems to be described here on the part of this actor is a process that moves from initial encounter with text, to feeling, to senses and on into physicalisation. 

Indeed, it is the central tenet of my argument that actors and playwrights travel the same road, but they travel that road in different directions? At the end of the journey, both have travelled through the same landscape, but they have done so from different starting points, and whilst they will know the places visited in much the same way, the experience of the journey, will always be different.

In 2024 I’m really encouraged by the fact that I believe this still pertains, and is perhaps a real mark of a great production where this is clear for the audience. It seems so important for the work of the actors to be congruent with the essence of the play, rather than ‘running their racket’ of ‘I know what works best for audiences like this!’ In short, it must always be about the play and the actors’ job is to reveal the embedded truths for their audience. And there, in short, is the task facing the director.

When I asked Kelly about whether she felt that she brought something as an actress to the playing of any character she portrayed in the theatre she answered...

It can only come from what’s written and then it’s like meeting it halfway almost.  I can’t bring something to it that’s not already there.

Kelly’s answer here makes it quite clear that she sees her role as an actress as one in which she works with what is given to her by the playwright, rather than one where she, as with Derrida’s thinking, becomes a ‘free’ reader of the text she is presented with. However, such a statement, once again seems to conjure the metaphor of the journey for me, as there is a sense in which actor and playwright must meet each other somewhere halfway in this model. And to apply the metaphor again, I have to say that as a playwright, actors constantly re-present my work back to me in a way which throws up new meaning and insights that come fresh and new, and present me with new perspectives on the intentions that gave life to the play in the first place. It’s not a new play, still what I originally wrote and intended, but sometimes it can wear new clothes. And here it becomes clear that there is a commonality of intention on the part of both playwright and actor to tell the same story about a common journey; in different ways perhaps, but still the same story if from different points of view.

This position is reinforced by the next section drawn from my interview with Kelly where I question her about the way she describes each new role, play, film as a ‘new adventure...

“So every role, every play I approach; I don’t have a set way.  All I know is that it’s like putting your hand in a black box. You are just feeling around; you are blind and it’s the trusting part of it that I love”

Once again there is here the sense of the actor in physical/psychical contact with the play - experiencing it in a way that is almost, surrender. Earlier in this thesis, drawing on one of Stanislavsky’s observations about the relationship between the actor and the playwright, I conjured the image of lovers. Kelly’s image here again makes use of the metaphor of touch, of physical exploration, and later in the interview she expands on this representation of the relationship still further...

“The two have to marry at some point, it’s sort of an offering up to each other; a serving of each other.  

She goes on to discuss aspects of this relationship still further when speaking about a reading she was invited to do this year, in the ‘50^th Anniversary Celebrations’ of the Royal Court Theatre. The theatre invited the cast of their production of Sarah Kane’s ‘Blasted’ in 2001 to reprise that moment through a rehearsed reading of the play under the direction of, James MacDonald, who directed not only this production of the play but also the premiere of the play in 1994. About this reading, Kelly interestingly observes...

Last week I was very fortunate to be invited back to the Royal Court Theatre to do a reading of Sarah Kane’s ‘Blasted’. I was given a draft - a first draft of 

Sarah’s. But the thing is, I don’t know how many drafts there were, but the first day James McDonald, the Director, handed us all copies of the play, we all thought it would be the same text that we did in 2001. But this draft turned out to be the rehearsal script for the 1994 production. As we were reading it, the Stage Manager had one that was more recent and was trying to change it and James was very surprised because he had forgotten that she had made so many changes to the finished script in 1994. Now those changes only came out through the rehearsal process of the first production.  But she had seen the need for them, they had been felt and they had gone in and had stayed [in the published edition]. 

Here is a clear example of the way in which the actor and playwright mutually support each other in the development of a play, and how, for the director of both shows, the essence of the play remains intact despite the changes to the language of the text. Is this an example of the theatrical process firming up the ‘manifest content’ in order to make the ‘latent content’ of the play more accessible to the audience? The fact that James MacDonald, the director for both shows had not recognised the changes makes me believe that the essence of the play, the ‘latent content’ still remained the same. In 1994, whilst Sarah Kane rewrote the text before her death, the actors under the direction of James MacDonald were seeking to perform the same play, although the two texts were substantially different. Were I to be looking for a better example of the way in which actors work to support the communication of the essence of a play, I don’t think I could find a better one.

So in 2024 I’m struck by the importance of both roles in the bringing of a play to performance . Clearly both have very different tasks but the play does no really ‘live’ for an audience until both actors and playwright are congruent. So Peter Brook was right! It’s the director’s job to enable the actors to reveal the virtual truths embedded in the playwright’s text. What I realise in 2024 though is that can be a complex task in that the encoded meaning is largely in the words, but may also be as a consequence of the structure of the piece. Clearly, being a director is a tough gig!