“Remember: There are no small parts, only small actors,” the revered Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavsky once said.
Characters are never just conduits for a writer’s script or pawns driving a story towards its conclusion. To be believable, and to fully convince us of their status as “real,” they have to have context.
To find that context, you’ll want to think about the events that have brought them to their place in the narrative. A character’s backstory can be imagined in the following terms: who, what, when, where, why, and how? These are known collectively as a character’s “given circumstances.” Here’s a closer look at what that means and how to apply it to your acting practice.
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Given circumstances are the details, situations, and external conditions that inform and influence a character in a dramatic narrative. They are the factors that determine how a character lives. They include:
- Background: Where are they from? What is their cultural, economic, and social status? Are they an insider or an outsider in the society they inhabit?
- Beliefs: What do they believe about the world? Themself? The people around them?
- Relationships: What are their connections to other people in their orbit? Or to those in their backstory?
- Desires and motivations: What are their intentions? What do they want? What’s driving them to think or behave as they are?
Appreciating these circumstances will help you map the who, what, when, where, why, and how of a character, and ultimately understand them more fully. And this world-building for your character will help you deliver an authentic performance.
Given circumstances is one of several modern acting methods pioneered in the early 1900s by Stanislavsky. It’s one of four pillars (along with actions, an objective, and emotional memory) of Stanislavsky’s method, which broadly detailed how to deliver an authentic, truthful performance through naturalistic acting.
Stanislavsky believed that actors needed to understand their character’s given circumstances to fully embody them and behave in a way that was believable.
1. King Lear: In Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, the title character’s given circumstances include his abdication, his desire to bequeath his kingdom to his daughters, and his (misguided) trust in those who praise him the loudest.
2. Death of a Salesman: In Arthur Miller’s profound 1949 play, Willy Loman’s given circumstances include his lower-middle-class background, his status as the patriarch of a nuclear family, and his belief in the American Dream.
3. Mean Girls: In Tina Fey’s cult film, Cady Heron’s given circumstances include her childhood spent in Kenya, her previous homeschooling (resulting in an unfamiliarity with American high school politics), and her desire to fit in.
Armed with an understanding of what given circumstances are, it’s time to apply these principles to your character.
Who is your character?
Write a biography for your character, and include as many of the following pieces of information as you can find in the script.
- Age
- Background
- Gender
- Key relationships (and how they feel about them)
- Occupation
- Major life events that have lead them to the present moment
Where is your character?
Where is your character when they enter the narrative? Think about this question both in terms of geography and environment.
- What country are they in?
- Are they in a city, town, or the countryside?
- Are they indoors or outdoors?
- Are they somewhere public or private?
- Are they somewhere familiar or alien to them?
When is your character living?
- What year is it? Does it correlate with any major historical events?
- What season is it? Or time of day? And how does this influence your character? (Are they hot? Cold? Tired? Wide awake?)
What is your character doing?
- Are there physical actions that accompany their appearance in the scene?
- How have they arrived at the present moment?
- What were they doing just before the scene began?
Why is your character behaving as they are?
- What are they hoping to accomplish in the given moment?
- What’s their motivation for wanting it?
How is your character doing what they’re doing?
- Are they using brute force?
- Are they psychologically manipulative?
- Are they going about it gently, quietly, lovingly, or another way?
Understanding your character’s given circumstances will help you deliver an authentic performance, but it’ll also let you make informed choices in the rehearsal room. Being on top of their background, beliefs, relationships, and motivations will aid the way you deliver lines, move, and take cues from your director, and it will likely earn you brownie points with that director too.