Carol Burns plays the character of Amanda Wingfield in Queensland Theatre Company’s production of The Glass Menagerie. This interview was recorded in Bille Brown Studio on 14 June 2007.

To view the full teachers notes for this production visit:
http://www.qldtheatreco.com.au/education/teachers_notes

Approaching the role of Amanda Wingfield:

Within The Glass Menagerie there is a distortion of memory. Before I start to work I ask myself questions. So what do I play? Do I play the one-dimension view that my son Tom might have of me as an older merchant marine who’s looking back to when he was aspiring to be a poet?

Every actor utilises themselves in the creation of a play and of a character within a play. So I go back to the text all the time and I try to take all my signals from the text, then I’ll do peripheral reading and that’s when I’ll find out this play is all about Edwina Williams. But he (Tennessee Williams) has chosen to alter that, so it’s my responsibility as an actor to not play his mother, but to play the character he has written which is Amanda Wingfield.

I tend to start working by instinct. I read the play a lot then I look at the play in detail from my character’s point of view. When I actually get on the floor or get with the rest of the company and the director I tend to go by my instinctive response. As an actor you have the opportunity to find out where somebody is in relation to the people that they are responding to.

An acting exercise:

There is an exercise that I utilise to believe in each moment. If you start at the top of Queen Street Mall and you try to open yourself up and be aware. Just open up your senses, walk down the mall and find how assaulting it is to walk down that mall.

I did this for myself many years ago, when I was living in Sydney. I was up in King’s Cross. I started at one end of the Cross and I decided to walk along the Cross, being aware of above me, below me, beside me, people, sounds, smells, all of those sorts of things. I got to the end of the Cross and I found that I was cringing. I had hunched down, closed off, folded my arms and was walking along. I thought my God, how important is environment and how much we survive by closing off.

The rehearsal process:

This is the thing. As actors we are asked to open, to expand, to be aware of each other and our circumstance. Only then are you able to represent being closed off. Once this is realised you don’t stop finding out things about your character. All the way through you’re learning, or you should be, because that’s how you keep it alive. We are re-presenting all the time. So that’s re-creating, re-interpreting. Your job is to give yourself things to find. In the rehearsal process you’ve got big experiments to make - big things to find. They are things of a moment which almost don’t coalesce until later - you don’t know that you discovered something in the first week until it’s still appropriate in the third week.

Responsibility in performance:

When you’re in performance you have a duty to keep consistency, because you are working to an audience. They have a right to see a cohesive production because every play can be produced in so many ways. You need to stick to your production, but within that you need to find elements to continually work on. They are relationships. They are nuances. And every night you will be trying something, because it’s live theatre. Live performance. After all that’s what acting is, we don’t do it standing in front of our bedroom mirrors for ourselves, we do it for an audience, with a team, in collaboration. Which is why I’m not sure it’s an art form: it’s a craft.