How creative?

A short one today!

The non-leisurely part of my life has two main foci at present (in no particular order): on the one hand, thinking and writing about the past, and on the other hand, acting, singing and Musical Theatre. I’m one of those people who, rather than being good at lots and lots of things, tries to be good at two big things, both of which I find fulfilling and which I think of as important in ways that relatively few other pursuits are.

I have always sung – there is nothing I do or love more, and there is never a day in my life when I do not sing. And through singing I got to Musical Theatre and to acting, particularly from the age of about 13 onwards. This felt like a very natural development, and I’ve always felt that to be a really good singer you need to be able to act, because what sets the voice apart from other instruments most of all is its capacity for words and storytelling, and what makes a story most tellable is, not just good music, but good acting and performance.

History I came to quite late. I always liked history and was good at it, but I was never sure that that was what I would one day want to spend so much of my time doing. When it came to university I initially investigated all sorts of weird degrees – PPE, Philosophy and Physics etc. – before settling, for a long time, on Maths. I did Maths, Further Maths, Physics and History at A-level so in some ways History felt like the odd-one out (actually my fellow Cambridge bod Blaise and I first bonded over the fact that we’d studied these very subjects!). But then I came slowly round to the view that I had more flair for history, more room for free-thinking, and a level of risk which would keep me more interested.

Me doing both the things I do best - reading a history book during a show rehearsal!

So these are the things I do, and for a long time I’ve tried to think about why exactly it is these two things that interest me: whether I am interested in them both for fundamentally similar reasons. I actually made a (crass but nevertheless quite on point) attempt to link them in my Personal Statement applying for university, when I suggested that both acting and history involved the task of ‘imaginative understanding’, a term that belongs to the historian E. H. Carr; both of them involve getting into the shoes of others in order to understand and recreate their worlds. I have written elsewhere on this blog how important I think empathy is, and empathy is both for many actors and for many historians the key process that they have to go through to read an understanding and a connection, with characters or with past peoples.

There’s something missing from this, though, and it’s the missing piece that I want to dwell on here. Both acting and history are often associated with art or the arts (or at the very least the humanities), and yet as I noted above there is a considerable degree to which they both reflect processes, not of creation, but of re-creation. As actors, our creative capacities are in so many ways constrained: the words are written for us, we are told where to stand, we know that we must speak loudly enough to be heard, face in the right directions, and so on. The process of ‘creation’ that goes into a play or musical does not at least at first sight have the most active role for actors and performers, especially when the play or musical is not being performed for the first time or by its original cast. Ditto history; the historians goal is not to be ‘creative’ per se, but to represent ‘the past as it really was’, as Leopold von Ranke put it. Historians have to be good writers, but can they really be thought of artists, too? They control the presentation, yes, and this requires an imagination of sorts, but they cannot control the content; instead they must bow down to the evidence, and the truth.

Imaginative understanding is not the same as imaginative creation. It is more about getting somewhere specific than creating something new. So how creative do you have to be to be an actor or an historian?

Maybe. It’s clear that if ‘re-creation’ is a big part of acting and historical writing, creativity is important too. Actors might not be at the earliest stages of a creative theatrical process, but they remain very much at the centre: the manner in which actors interpret and formulate characters is itself an integral part of putting on a show, as I have been so strongly reminded recently by watching the extraordinary Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters in the original production of Sunday in the Park With George on video. The whole show would have been completely different had it not been for these specific actors playing their very active parts in bringing the show to life. So too in History you can’t stand on your laurels when it comes to creativity; I have an ongoing spat with my friends at Christ’s about how far History is ‘scientific’ in intent, and though I tend (for largely contrarian reasons) to emphasise its scientific aspects more than its artistic ones the latter are clearly important. History, like acting, is about telling stories. If you cannot tell those stories than the history cannot come to life, and storytelling is a fundamentally creative process even if you are working within the constraints set by what actually happened in the past. Read the end of George Dangerfield’s ‘The Strange Death of Liberal England’ and you will see what I mean; though this is actually a bad example, because despite being one of my favourite histories and one of the best to read it is also woefully wrong on all sorts of important points, including the title point about the decline of ‘Liberal England’. There are so many actors and historians who wouldn’t hesitate in naming their passions as fundamentally creative and artistic enterprises.

Undeniably both acting and historical writing are – and have to be – quite mechanical. I think very carefully about the mechanics of the way I deliver my lines: I often use a system of dots and arrows to ensure that I get a consistent tone, pace, rhythm and pitch in my delivery so that I’m not switching things up from performance to performance if the lines have the effect I want them to. Similarly, in History one very much has to follow clear and learned structures and patterns of writing in order to develop a clear and sustained argument about the past. But then maybe I’m exaggerating how far these things are different from more conventionally ‘arty’ things. There are all kinds of rules and how-to’s that people follow in painting and drawing, for instance; ditto composition. Nor can it be said that these forms are totally about ‘creation’ as opposition to ‘re-creation’; so much of art is about representation, after all, be that of a model, of the sounds of trains (as in parts of Rhapsody in Blue), of a Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

I’m running short of time so I’ll leave these thoughts here without reviewing them. These questions of how you define acting and history are in some ways totally pointless, because it matters less what you call the things that you do than the fact that you do them and enjoy them. But I am interested to hear what people think, because I don’t really have answers to the questions and themes I set out here, and I’d be interested to hear people’s perspectives.

RJLF