Acting out

Katie Mitchell on applying the science of emotion on stage

Three years ago in Stockholm I was visiting a photographic exhibition and saw an old book open inside a display case. The entry at the top of the left-hand page read "Helplessness" and the text beneath described how people raise their shoulders, turn their palms outwards and swivel their eyes upwards when experiencing it. The right-hand page featured sepia photographs of men enacting the same emotion. The tiny rectangular strip next to the book said it was written by Charles Darwin in 1873 and called The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. I was amused by the exaggerated facial expressions and charmed by the entry, which I copied down on the front of my catalogue. I promised myself I would track down the book but other projects got in the way and it slipped to the bottom of my list.

Two years later I was doing some research into the Russian theatre practitioner Constantin Stanislavsky and stumbled on a reference to William James. In 1884 James had written an essay called "What is an Emotion?", which influenced Stanislavsky's later practice. Stanislavsky moved away from what he called "affective memory", which meant using the actors' real emotional experiences to build fictional characters, to what he called "physical actions", which meant working mainly with the body to create accurate representations of emotions. James, a leading 19th-century philosopher and brother of the writer Henry James, made a crucial observation about emotions: you are walking through the forest, you see a bear, you turn and run and then you realise you are afraid. (Before James, it was widely thought that you felt the fear first and ran second.)

I could see how this might have affected Stanislavsky in the 1890s, but I wondered whether James's observations would hold water today, and therefore whether they would be of concrete use in my work as a theatre director.

I was complaining about my ignorance of biology over fish soup at a friend's house when the name Antonio Damasio came up and a big book with a blue cover hit the dining room table. Damasio is a Portuguese-American neuroscientist and his book The Feeling of What Happens (1999) uses emotions as a gateway to understanding consciousness. There was something rather quaint and digestable about James and his bear, and Darwin's photographs of uncomfortable men demonstrating helplessness, but consciousness seemed altogether more difficult.

However, my patience was rewarded when I quickly discovered references to James and Darwin. It turned out that the observations of emotion made by these two men more than 100 years ago have not yet been discarded by neuroscience, although with modern brain-imaging techniques a fuller and more complex picture has emerged. Perhaps Stanislavsky's practice has stood the test of time because he based it in part on the writings of a scientist whose key observations remain undisputed? My attitude to those quaint sepia photographs started to change and this process was accelerated when I read that there has been comparatively little work done on emotions since the late 19th century.

Damasio, like James, argues that an emotion consists primarily of a visible change in the body. This change is legible in our facial expressions, tone of voice, posture and even our internal bodily processes. There is a gap of about half a second between the stimulus - seeing the bear in the forest - and becoming conscious of the emotion - fear - and by the time we are conscious of what is happening we would naturally have run several metres away from the bear. All this seems a far cry from theatre until you start to apply it, which is what I promptly did in a workshop with five actors, supported by a Nesta Fellowship.

We re-enacted situations involving one or more of the six primary emotions which are universally recognised by people throughout the world. They are happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. The situations included a rat in a flat, a sudden, heavy rainfall in Queensland, a child's first phone call to his father, a surprise birthday party on Hampstead Heath and a finger trapped in a car door. We studied what happened to the body in minute detail and quickly discovered that it was the half-second delay between the stimulus and becoming conscious of the change in the body that was either edited out of our perceptions altogether or the hardest to recall.

In the cases of fear and surprise, we noticed that in this half-second we could perform high jumps on to tables or leaps of several metres. We realised that the delay occurred because the body jumped before we became conscious of the emotion and so we didn't always "remember" what we had done. We moved on to social emotions, like embarrassment or jealousy, and secondary emotions that are bodily changes caused by the imagination. Finally we explored background emotions, which are feelings operating at a low level, like when you say you're feeling "a bit down" or "under the weather".

In our exercises James's observation of the delayed recognition of emotion stood up. We realised that we tended to do a slightly more discreet and tasteful version of emotions on stage, compared with what actually happens in life. It was also sobering to find out that there is part of the brain that is dedicated to recognising emotions in other people, and that this information is gathered by reading the body. If we were to edit out vital frames in the film of an emotion as it is played by the body then it might not be legible to the audience.

All this work was duly airlifted into my production of Iphigenia at Aulis, which played recently at the National Theatre and in which, if you looked closely enough, you might have noticed the constant flutter of the background emotion of anxiety in the chorus, or Achilles's three-metre leap backwards when he is told he is going to get married, or Menelaus's panic attack when Iphigenia arrives. If the work was clearer I owe it to three scientists and to the bravery of the ensemble cast for taking the risk of acting differently.

It was Damasio's book that drew all the threads together and it is a strange coincidence that he not only uses a play, Beckett's Happy Days, to illustrate core consciousness, but also opens with a story about an old man getting on a boat in Stockholm, the city where I first saw Darwin's book with its sepia photographs taken by the French scientist, Dr Duchenne, in 1860.