We spend years teaching performers to develop their individual voices, bodies and artistic instincts. Yet, when it comes to acting, we sometimes seem keen for them to abandon those instincts and perform like somebody else. What can the latest evolution in a century of dramatic thought teach us about the relationship between personal experience, inherited tradition and the characters we bring to life?

By the time an actor approaches Hamlet, or a soprano first prepares Violetta, they will already know how a dozen celebrated predecessors have interpreted the role. They will have absorbed specific gestures, vocal inflections, and emotional choices and inherited a clear idea of how much emotion should accompany each moment. With a long tradition to respect, success can seem dependent upon how closely one learns to reproduce it.

But what happens when the desire to get a character “right” prevents us from discovering what we ourselves might bring to it? As directors and educators, we spend years encouraging artists to develop their individual voices, bodies and imaginations, only then to ask them to reproduce somebody else’s interpretation when we get into the rehearsal room. How often have we seen performers start a project with an invitation to bring themselves to the process, only to find their initial responses quietly quashed in favour of a more prescriptive approach? And how much more authentic might these performances have been if we had instead encouraged them to draw on their own lived experiences rather than trying to force them into the shape of what we think a successful performance should look like? In the quest for authentic performance there is a stark difference between learning from the past and feeling obliged to repeat it.

One of the reasons contemporary audiences seem so appreciative of “authenticity” in the theatre is because of the recent evolution in the value society places on identifiably genuine human interaction. Whether on stage or on Tik Tok, the trend for superficial perfection has now been superseded by a desire for genuine connection with genuine people – and the question for modern theatre-makers is how best we can craft authentic characters without any of the poison of performative perfection.

Contemporary thinking about identity has increasingly challenged the idea that people are entirely self-contained individuals, somehow separate from the relationships and cultural histories that have formed them. Post-individualism encourages us to appreciate that we are each shaped by a myriad of external forces: family, community, language, social expectations and the lived experiences that change our understanding of who we are.

Post-individualism in theatre

What did your family teach you about expressing anger? What does your community consider courageous? How do you recognise authority, intimacy or betrayal? Which assumptions have you inherited, and which have you spent your life questioning?

An actor approaching Juliet will never have experienced her exact circumstances, but may understand implicitly the exhilaration of first love, or the frustration of being underestimated, or the suffocation of family expectations. A singer approaching Carmen might be drawn first to her desire to be loved without being controlled, or her experience of being judged by others, or the tension between public confidence and private uncertainty. These different starting points will produce radically different performances, and that is the point. The most exciting thing about getting to tell the same stories through different lenses is that each new approach will reveal further and deeper layers of character and interpretation. There is a freedom in realising that there is no “correct” version of a character in a story – and an even greater sigh of relief in understanding that audiences are not expecting one. Instead, by embracing the multiplicity of identities that you carry within yourself, you can’t help but create characters that carry a genuine human authenticity. This is because each moment on stage will have been informed by a genuine human – you.

For performers, this may complicate the traditional idea of bringing ‘yourself’ to a role; we can no longer just solipsistically mine our private memories for emotional material as advocated by some “Method” approaches, nor will audiences reward reliance on tropes or archetypes that would have succeeded in other eras. Instead, this new focus on “authentic” performance insists that we utilise our entire network of influences, assumptions and relationships to build characters that carry an aura of holistic truthfulness about them.

The person behind the character

One assumption that persists in many performance approaches is that an actor must somehow leave themselves behind to become another person. In practice, this is impossible - we cannot suspend our histories, bodies, habits of thought or understanding of the world simply because we have entered a rehearsal room. But these fixed aspects of our identities are not obstacles to truthful performance - they are among its most essential resources.

Leading the vanguard in this post-Individualist landscape are dramatic theorists like Dr Cristal Chanelle Truscott. Rooted in Black storytelling modalities, Dr Truscott’s practice and scholarship challenges “traditional” assumptions about how an actor’s unique individual experiences can be embraced to generate authentic performances. By inviting us to consider how ancestral knowledge, contemporary consciousness and the fullness of an artist’s own identity might inform creative practice, Dr Truscott encourages artists to draw upon the knowledge they have uniquely built through their own lives, creating a “Cultural Conservatory” as rich in character-building resources as any training institution.

By reframing the value of the relationship between professional technique and personal experience, Dr Truscott asks us to look beyond the necessarily narrow limitations of the training institutions where our artistic skills are honed, and instead embrace the lessons of the other educational path that each student of performance has subconsciously embarked on since birth – our own lived experiences. The music heard around the family home, the stories told by grandparents, the emotional codes of a particular community, and the experiences that have changed our understanding of love, power or loss – these are the foundational aspects of our characters that have too often been subjugated or suppressed by a desire to perform a part “properly” according to someone else’s performance traditions.

After all, why should we exclude from our practice any intrinsic part of our own selves when we are seeking to play truthfully authentic people on a stage?

You are an individual, but you did not invent yourself

How much should I copy a famous and successful performance of a role I am about to undertake, or should my own experiences as a person shape my approach to that character?

This question has occupied actors and theatre-makers ever since people started arguing over motivation and approach, especially in our current climate which rejects the notion of a “correct” interpretation that exists in a vacuum-sealed bag ready to be unlocked and worn by whoever seeks to tackle the role.

It is important to remember that a play, musical, or opera is not simply a structure intended to be reproduced accurately; its language, music, silences and dramatic relationships contain tensions and possibilities that performers must not merely discover intellectually, but must inhabit imaginatively, physically and, crucially in the contemporary sphere, with a truthful authenticity.

Of course, making a work your own does not mean doing whatever you please. Shakespeare remains Shakespeare, Verdi remains Verdi, and artistic freedom does not excuse an indifference to the text, score or historical context. But precision and personal freedom are not opposing forces; the more secure your understanding of the material – and yourself - the more possibilities available to you as you exploit the intersections of your own lived experiences and the material you are performing.

Two actors can approach the same line with equal intelligence and reveal entirely different dramatic truths. One might find anger beneath apparent tenderness; another might uncover fear, or an attempt to conceal it. Both interpretations are illuminating, provided they emerge from a genuine intersection of the play’s circumstances and your own feelings as an actor.

In this way, the future of performance lies not in choosing between tradition and individuality, or between the self and the character, but in taking that relationship more seriously and in making choices more deliberately.

So, by all means encourage actors to bring all of their history into the rehearsal room. Whether actor, singer, or director - bring all of your experiences, your cultural knowledge and the things you still do not understand. And then allow the words, the music, the character and the people around you to complicate what you thought you knew.

You are not Hamlet. You are not Violetta. You cannot be. But by embracing your own unique interests, the communities that nurtured you, and the lived experiences that shaped you, you may discover something about your characters that nobody else could ever have found in quite the same way.

And that, surely, is what keeps an art form alive.

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Greg Eldridge

Greg Eldridge is an Australian stage director. He has worked on over 90 productions across a 15-year career throughout the USA, UK, Europe, and Australasia, and has previously served as Professor of Directing at CCM at the University of Cincinnati, Executive Director of Opera Project Colombus, and on the board of Stage Directors UK - the industry body advocating for directors of live theatre in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. A vocal advocate for improving equity and access to theatre, he has worked with Young Artist Programs from Los Angeles to London and has also been engaged as a consultant on repertoire, intimacy, and artistic administration for several major companies. He continues to work at some of the world’s most prestigious theatres and writes regularly for arts publications worldwide.

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Further Reading

Are the Arts Essential? — Alberta Arthurs & Michael F. DiNiscia, NYU Press

Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches — Sharrell Luckett, Routledge

Postdramatic Theatre — Hans-Thies Lehmann, Routledge

There are individuals who lose their ability to be amazed prematurely. Life steals it, covets it, slowly or immediately, and they deem it the price of maturity. But there are others who do not falter. They persist through life’s dead-ends, through fields of blossoms and carpets of thorns, and step out still capable of smiling at the sight which first made their gaze soften.

Melanie Hughes is one such spirit.

Theatre was her wonderland. A magnetic destination which she journeyed towards intuitively. She skipped school just to watch the legendary Laurence Olivier perform at the Old Vic, not out of rebellion, but for a recognition she needed to decipher. She described what she encountered there as “power.” Not the power of an impressive spectacle, but more a sensation which made her surroundings clearer to her. “An audience is a piece of clay. Unformed. It is up to you, as an actor, to tell the story of that character throughout the journey of the play.” Theatre, she would say, was “another world that helped me see my own world.” Not a distraction. A way of finally opening your eyes.

To study the art became inevitable. She trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama with John Jones. A man whom she described as “difficult but enormously gifted.” He imparted a metaphor to her which would outlive every role she would ever play: “People have their own music.” The cadence of their voice, the words they reach for, the silences they are unable to fulfil. Before inhabiting a role, one must first live the rhythm of that person’s life. Who they are. What they lived and saw. Scars are the buried voices of our very being. She described it as “mining.” Delving into the undergrowth to find the how, what, and most essentially, the why. She would take this method as her own. The spine to her every written word.

Ken Russell. Perhaps the most prolific, eccentric and arbitrary director of British film, she met him by chance. Some moments are never engineered. They just are. She was at a dinner party, seated next to him. He was never one for small talk. Perhaps what he perceived, looking beyond the conversation, was a woman who could unconsciously turn the tide and make a lapsing production surface. D.H. Lawrence was on his mind and they spoke at length. Later, she found herself on location for three months of Lady Chatterley, with its “Frankenstein” script, as she describes it, to salvage. Regardless of his temper, which could ignite without provocation, she was aware that she was in the presence of a genius who could and would, surprisingly, listen. A most humble quality which cannot be freely attributed but, without hesitating, in solemn reverence, she says: “possibly the most intelligent and imaginative human being I’ve ever met.”

Our experiences are moulded by some, inspired by others and sealed by few. Ken Russell was one. The first exposure came before, when she was younger, in a small role, in the presence of great names and bewitching rehearsals. Long before script edits and the novels that followed, there was the playwright Athol Fugard and his Dimetos.

It was no ordinary cast. That much is certain and for one so vulnerable it was extraordinary to have been granted that space. To witness Paul Scofield, Yvonne Bryceland and Ben Kingsley at work and under Fugard’s direction. She recalls that watching Scofield’s and Bryceland’s rehearsals was what performance would be to others. To breathe a role without a single restraint. No reservation. And to sense the earth move in utter surrender.

Audiences can be fickle. Some come wreathed in veneration while others judge without foundation, without knowledge. This is the ignorance of the spectator and the unacknowledged toils of an overworked cast. Dimetos closed after six or seven weeks. The venue was wrong. The West End was not for this calibre of production, nor for the intense reaction its subject matter could provoke. It deserved a stage where careful thought would override frivolity and an audience capable of human openness, deserving of its content, instead of drunk reviewers who would stagger out mid-performance. The devastation in Fugard’s eyes was something she would never forget. And so Dimetos failed. Not because of its formidable direction, but because of the mediocrity that artists are so often subjected to.

The significance of Dimetos, its content and the full weight of what it carries, sowed itself into her, each stitch a reminder of what silence can create if it is not broken. In her youth, she became acutely aware of the intricacies of human existence which would find their way into her future novels. W.H. Auden was her helm when reliving this moment: And each in the cell of himself. To exist while wrestling with emotions difficult to articulate and impossible to release is in itself a slow, internal death. To have lived it, felt it in all its inexplicable pain, demanded a place to let it rest. Words.

Nita, her mother-in-law, was the origin. A woman as extraordinary as the archive she left behind when she died. Countless diaries and letters which held an entire existence within their pages, a life immortalised in words. These were the ones which spoke to Melanie. Nita held onto everything, her love bound to India through marriage, deeply immersed in its cultural realm. She was withdrawn and secluded, which made her life on paper contradictory, as her life had been adventurous. She broke rules, challenged them, changed them only to break them again. A modern woman born into an erroneous era. A member of the clandestine India League, she travelled to India in 1943 and and four years later witnessed Partition, which swept through the whole of India and Pakistan. Lahore, as capital of the Punjab, was the eye of the storm, where riot and great bloodshed took place. She felt love intensely only to divorce and continue without asking for redemption. She fought for a liberated life, one which others could only take for granted when for her it was an oath.

In reading her words, there was an eclipse of revelations, jarring events which could only be softened by the forgiveness of a younger voice. The rare chance to materialise such richness came naturally because she had learned to transmit effectively, across a theatrical lifetime, voices onto the page. She recognised the grave responsibility to portray another person’s life in the literary sense, a wealth of emotional episodes which needed to be treated with care, precision and, most importantly, respect. To tell another’s story as though it were one’s own is a territory which calls for delicacy and requires caution. This is a language ingrained in her, an understanding forged through years of observation, which has given her the indisputable knowledge of what it takes to expose something so close to one’s very core to others, to allow it to be experienced in all its vulnerability. She says, as a promise: Comprendre c’est tout pardonner.

Delhi — City of Spies is an unresolved secret living within Nita’s undisclosed dimension. There was a murder. The investigation lasted twenty-four hours and was quickly buried. The report lacked substance, given the brutality it described. A life disposed of and conveniently stored in boxed files. Never mourned. Locked.

Like all novels, it has a scaffolding for context and atmosphere and this tale lends itself to being told, but beneath its historical setting, the Cold War and the political struggle between East and West, this is one about human beings, about individual faces remembered and yearned for, their lives snatched mercilessly from them and their truth reclaimed through justice.

How can you speak for one without words? How can you belong in a silence you never heard, a vision you never shared? How can you write and be authentically believed? Hetty Baynes, a gifted actress and friend, who married Ken Russell, gave her an image, a metaphor to articulate the unspoken. She said: “You have a plant, a flower. You think that’s just a flower. But if you look down, there’s a whole root system, spreading not only down but across.” The woman, brutally discarded, was not a case but a being who possessed scars, personal experiences without written record, a life undocumented, memories irretrievably lost. And yet to bring her to life on the page demanded understanding, compassion and the courage to give her resolution. Even in silence. Even for anonymous eyes.

For her, interpretation heeds compassion and writing asks for self-belief anchored in courage. The French writer, Colette, referred to the blank page as an incitement, a reproach which demanded and accused simultaneously. Writing has its own trepidations, its hounding demons and a constant jury conjured in one’s mind, answerable only to the writer’s own unforgiving expectations. “You don’t need anyone’s permission to be creative. It’s not collaborative. And that is its great strength.” The writer’s path is a solo one to walk with no companions to share the tension, shape the structure, resolve its errors and no immediate audience whose held breath is a unanimous response to a flawless portrayal. And yet there is attainable beauty in the silence of a room which witnesses the frantic scribbles of a soul in full creative flight, suspended between the realms of wonder and realisation, what she calls “heady, boundless and bliss,” a pure culmination of self-expression.

Actors. Writers. Why separate when creativity itself is innate. They dwell in each other as they enhance the intimacy that they both possess. These two arts fused in her. The page. The stage. From both she inherited life. For what is existence without what it gives. She does not need to choose because they both articulate through her cemented devotion to character and human nature, and she has thrived in both.

The looking glass is the enigmatic portal. What is it that makes her feel what to us, as spectators, we can only lean towards, dare to perceive:

“That wonderful, heart-catching moment when the lights go down before the stage lights go up. The earth moves for me. It always will.” — M.H.

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Melanie Hughes is a former actress and novelist whose career has spanned stage, screen, and the page. Trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama, she worked alongside some of the most distinguished names in British theatre and film before turning to fiction. Her fourth novel, Delhi — City of Spies, is published by Holand Press. On Tuesday, 20th October 2026, Melanie will be in conversation at a Tea & Talk event with Shadow Road Productions in Barnes, London.

Follow her on Instagram

Written by: Maria Teresa Rivera-Schreiber | Editor-in-Chief | Exits & Entrances