The Story of the Actors’ Temple: 2003 - 2013

 

The Actors’ Temple (AT) was conceived in 2003 in response to my experience as a professional actor.  Although I had drama school training, a good agent, and some success in the audition process and commercial world, there seemed to be an enormous chunk of the ‘acting puzzle’ missing.  I had no real understanding of what I was really doing. It seemed that good and bad acting were just hit and miss.  Despite those years of training and professional work, I had never heard anyone able to define what it was we actually did, let alone how to do it.  There was ‘an elephant in the room’ as far as acting was concerned and no one had the knowledge to describe it or offer some workable solutions to the practical problems associated with it.

 

So I decided to set up my own place where actors could get together and train and learn and work at their craft in a friendly, relaxed environment. I called it The Actors’ Temple as a romantic gesture to the person I was in relationship with at the time, whose surname was 'Temple'. Early classes identified the need among my peers to meet up on a regular basis, to practice what we thought might be useful and generally to feel like we were in the right company and not alone. Numbers grew on a weekly basis and a spirit of community was born. The classes very much modelled on the type I had experienced at drama school and I ran them from my living room and the back studio of a gym where I worked as a personal trainer. I asked teachers/directors that I knew to lead the classes and paid them the money that I raised from the actors who attended, about four pounds a head per class back then. About two months into it all I was introduced to a guy called Tom Radcliffe, an actor (and a graduate of the Central School of Speech and Drama, as it was then). He had worked a great deal in his ‘twenties but had given it up. Subsequently, he had done some teaching but was now working as a mental health professional. After drama school, and between professional acting jobs in the UK, Tom had travelled back and forth from America to study with one of the pioneers of modern acting, Sanford Meisner, who had been a founder member of the Group Theatre in the 1930s along with Elia Kazan, Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg among others. Meisner had in his turn trained many great Hollywood actors.

 

Tom's approach was completely different from anything any of us had ever experienced, despite our drama school training, and for the first time we were confronted with something real, challenging and tangible.  He was the first person to stand up in front of me in an acting exercise and tell me direct to my face that I was dishonest in the way that I was relating to others - a pretty challenging thing to hear for me at the time, resulting in my leaving his class for a few weeks to allow my bruised ego to heal. As it turned out, he was absolutely right and it was the most important and useful thing any teacher of acting had ever told me.

 

At the same time, Ellie Zeegen, an actress, started attending some of the classes I was running and offered some 'behind the scenes help'.  Ellie had been having similar ideas to myself about creating something different for actors and we instantly hit it off.  Despite some doubts I was having about continuing this work, Ellie gave me the support and insights I needed to keep going and together we kept the classes alive and we continued to run the classes from rented rooms around town.

 

In 2005, we had the opportunity to take on our own space.  We rented a basement from an extras agency that had just taken on a building near Liverpool Street station.  We built a little stage and modified it to suit the requirements of Tom's class, which needed a door on to the stage in a specific position to support the technical exercises we were now becoming familiar with.   For the first time we were able to offer regular courses with regular students.  Ellie and I gave up our other jobs, we stopped running the drama school-style classes and put all our focus on what Tom was teaching us.  I had found what I was looking for, a useful, clear, exciting and challenging way of developing as an actor which not only opened me up to my own potential but, in its essence, required actors to come together and work for and with each other in a generous compassionate way - staple ingredients for any creative enterprise.  The Actors Temple was now a real business with a website, regular courses, regular students and an ever-growing database of actors who had mainly come through our doors thanks to word of mouth.

 

We stayed at Liverpool Street for a year before having to move, as our landlords required us to return the use of the building to them.  After a long search and within only a few weeks of having to vacate Liverpool Street, I found premises on Warren Street, just off Tottenham Court Road.   This was another basement, an ex-betting shop which had been empty for a couple of years, so I was allowed to negotiate a good price.  Its amazing what you can achieve when a group of people share a collective spirit, we had very little to work with but the desire to ‘make’ it work enabled us to convert the space into a studio specifically designed for our needs. These included a reception area and office.  This was 2006 and the quality of Tom's teaching meant we could be charging competitive rates for our courses.  By that time I had been studying with Tom for nearly two years and so I and another actor, Simon Furness, a former student of Tom’s, started to teach classes and courses, thus enabling us to expand our timetable.

 

By this time, we had gained a reputation for being an underground studio where acting was looked at in a deep and powerful way.  This had the effect of attraction and repulsion.  The truth is that many actors out there are scared of experiencing their full potential.  In think it was a Sandford Meisner observation that many actors feel a lot bigger on the inside than the outside, it’s challenging to express enormity of what is really going on and many prefer to not go there.  I know because that was my experience and it took me quite some time to trust what Tom was teaching and the level this work goes to. We were also quite outspoken at the time with our views about the commercial word of theatre, film and TV and I think this put some people off.  We don’t hold those views now, but at the time we were so focused on acting as a pure art form, which never sits comfortably alongside the constraints of the commercial world.  It was a necessary time in our evolution, we needed to go there to have the time and space to really progress our understanding of the work without distraction.

 

Two new additions in 2006 were Tanja McGhie who joined as our studio manager, dealing with the ever-increasing flow of enquiries and Gary Condes, who had trained under Tom, alongside Simon and myself, and who became our fourth teacher.  Teaching this work is incredibly challenging. Experience is everything and there is no doubt you get better with time.  Challenging people to face up to the reality as relates to their acting is tough, but the resulting quality of work is so incredibly powerful for all concerned that the resistance sometimes faced in the classroom is a price worth paying.  I think I speak for all of us who now teach at the Temple when I say that teaching is both an exhilarating privilege and occasionally a burden, but it is something that keeps us coming back to share our knowledge and experience with others.

 

In 2008 we produced our first play 'Three Sisters' by Anton Chekov.  We performed it in a big country house in the Scottish Borders (Ellie's husband’s ancestral home).  We did seven performances to an audience of twenty each night.  A great success from an artistic point of view but obviously commercially not so, but that was our situation. We needed to experiment with the work and in some way to prove to ourselves that we had hold of something special in our approach to acting and in our ability to act as well as teach.

Between late 2009 and 2011, I went to live in Madrid and started training actors there.  The London courses were full and we had a period of relative calm, simply running courses, but the desire to be actors ourselves was waiting in the wings and we were becoming ever more restless.

 

Just before Christmas 2011, we produced Hamlet in the crypt of St Andrew’s Church in Holborn, a chance for us to have a break from teaching and to get back in touch with our own acting.  Again, the emphasis was on doing the play in the way we felt it should be done, rather than to make money.  We had been rehearsing for a year on and off and all the key personalities and teachers at the Temple took the major roles, I played Hamlet, Ellie Ophelia, Simon Horatio, Gary Claudius and Tom directed.

 

The rest of the cast consisted of actors whom we had trained over the years. There were no auditions.  We invited friends to come and work together.  We opened the rehearsal process to anyone who wanted to watch, culminating in ten performances (which sold out) and again a great success from an acting point of view, but commercially a great cost to the company (only 50 audience capacity). Yet the value of such a human experience is inestimable. To work on such a giant of a play, in a way that was inclusive and harmonious for everyone concerned, was priceless.  We had come full circle from our 2003 beginning, from those first days when I had felt that the world for an actor meant being dictated to by others, and that you were just a chancer waiting to be exposed for the ‘faker’ you were, to a place where actors could get together and independently produce great work, with self reliance, real knowledge and collaboration, all within a supported, friendly and loving environment.  In short, we had the ingredients needed for great work.

 

 In 2012, literally weeks after Hamlet, we embarked on a feature film project with BAFTA and RTS award-winning director Liviu Tipurita with whom we had developed a relationship over the previous two years.  Again cast entirely by AT actors with Tom this time as an actor in the lead role, we shot 'Luck' on the streets of London.  It has now been fully post produced and we hope that it will have an audience platform very soon.  The experience was very challenging for us, as we had to deal with those elements we had been hiding from for so long - namely money and values driven by the need for commercial success.  It was a big wake up call - the reality of making feature films, and we have learned a great deal from it.

 

We now have a very clear vision for our future.  Developing our own creative ideas with our friends has become our priority with several exciting productions including a feature film and a TV series in development.  The courses we now run and will continue to run are aimed at working alongside the demands of modern actors.  It has been an incredible journey so far.  The Actors’ Temple exists in its current form as a result of every single person who has ever walked through our various doors and the human contact which has resulted.  We have, and will no doubt continue to, come up against challenges that make it sometimes seem pointless.  Like that moment before walking out on stage when the fear imposed on us by our ego and self doubt takes a ferocious grip, and the impulse to run away and hide seems almost overwhelming, but somehow we don’t run and we step out into the unknown, we keep going in spite of all obstacles.

 

There are eight of us that now make up the teaching and administrative company in London.  We have also travelled to and established courses in several European countries, including Spain, Switzerland and Poland.  Over the last year we have welcomed Lesley Willis as our technical advisor and in-house editor. She will be starting courses in editing and film photography for actors in January 2014.  In recent months, Stephen Christos, an actor and friend has been managing the studio whilst Tanja was away, having her daughter Molly.  We have also welcomed Thais Curiáto and Emmanuel Jimenez who have started to run courses under the Actors’ Temple banner in Madrid.

 

I am eternally grateful to the many hundreds of actors who have invested their time, money and trust in The Actors’ Temple over the last ten years.  The legacy has far exceeded any dreams I may have had in the beginning. Short films, feature films, TV pilots, theatre companies and plays have all been conceived, developed, written, produced, directed and of course acted in, by actors who have trained with us. In the wake of this, they have made contacts with other industry professionals.

 

Last but by no means least:  I must mention and express gratitude to a man whom I never had the privilege of meeting, but whose insights and life’s work gave us all the foundations from which to develop ourselves as actors and live as part of a creative community that is The Actors Temple:  the late and great Sanford Meisner.