There's No One Way to Peel an Egg

On borrowed maps, bastardised methods, and the work itself.

I love to cook. It is my de-stressing method, my reset, the thing I do when the work has taken everything and I need to come back to myself. But there is one thing in the kitchen that frustrates the hell out of me, and I have researched it extensively. Peeling an egg. There is no perfect way to do it. Every method has its advocate. Every advocate is convinced they have found the truth. And every egg, in my experience, has other ideas.

At the opposite end of the frustration scale — and I mean the complete opposite — is something I learned in my training and have believed my entire career. There is no one way to act.

Before we go any further, let's ask the question that sits underneath all of this. What is it, exactly, to act? Not how. Not which method. What is the thing itself?

Stanislavski spent a lifetime trying to answer it and kept revising his answer — which is why he remained relevant. Meisner answered it one way. Chekhov answered it another. Grotowski stripped everything back and found something else entirely. Brecht wasn't even sure the question was being asked correctly. After a career of making and teaching theatre I have my own answer — partial, provisional, and ever changing. And I suspect that is true of every honest practitioner in this field.

At its core, acting is relational. It does not exist inside the actor alone — it exists in the exchange between people. Between actor and actor. Between stage and audience. The moment you remove the other person from the equation, you are no longer acting. You are performing at someone rather than with them. That distinction sounds small. In the room, it is everything.

One of the best acting lessons I ever received, I received as an audience member — though I should say I was being paid to be there, which helped considerably. I was working as a barman in a theatre during my training years, which meant I watched the same production night after night. There are worse schools. An actor sneezed. Not a character sneeze — she actually sneezed. Her fellow actor didn't break character. He didn't add a line or signal to the audience that something unplanned had happened. His body responded to it — a slight muscular change, the kind that happens when the atmosphere of a scene shifts and a truthful instrument registers it before the mind has decided anything. He simply lived the moment as his character — a person who had just witnessed someone sneeze. He registered it. He moved on. It was one of the most precise demonstrations of relational acting I have ever seen, and it cost nothing except the willingness to be completely present to what was actually happening in the room.

The complement to that story is one from my own acting. I was playing a character who had to sneeze in a scene. In rehearsal, the director turned to me and asked: when did your nose start to itch? It was a genius piece of direction. Not — sneeze more naturally. Not — make it feel unplanned. Simply: find the cause, not the result. Go back before the moment and live toward it. That is the work. Not the prepared moments. The ones you find your way into truthfully. Thrilling.

Which is why I have always been more interested in what acting surrenders than what it controls. The actor who arrives in a scene pre-planning exactly what they are going to do has already closed off the most important part of the work — the part that responds, that changes, that is genuinely altered by what the other person gives them. Acting is less about transformation into a character and more about the disciplined surrender of control, so that something unpredictable and alive can occur in real time. That aliveness is not an accident. It is the whole point. I have fortunately worked with many actors that respond this way. As an actor, working with Andrew Lewis was a delight in this sense. He was one of the most responsive actors I have ever come across.

And here is the paradox that sits underneath all of it. Acting demands both rigorous preparation and the ability to set that preparation aside. Think of phasic relaxation — the principle that you must release physical tension not in order to become passive, but in order to become available. The body that is gripping cannot respond. The body that has released can respond to anything. It is the same principle applied to the whole instrument. You prepare everything — the text, the circumstances, the physical life, the through-line — and then you walk into the room and allow it to be disrupted. The actor who cannot be disrupted is not acting. They are executing. There is a difference, and an audience feels it within seconds, even if they cannot name it. It is worth investigating Feldenkrais. While not an acting methodology, I am certainly grateful it was a core area of work during my training.

So when someone asks me what acting is — really is, underneath all the methodology and the technique and the argument about which approach is correct — I come back to this. It is the rigorous organisation of spontaneity. Everything else is in service of that. And really, it is a conversation to have over a pot of coffee or a bottle of wine, not an interview question. Its answer is wonderfully endless — as it should be — and a much more enjoyable discussion than who has a job and is there one for me.

In its simplest form, though, I keep returning to Meisner. Acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances. I have tested that definition across a career and against every methodology I have encountered. It has never let me down. Not as a method. As a north star. I'm jealous of Meisner that he said it so succinctly. It gives permission for evolution, creation, and exploration — and it is the most concise aim I know for keeping a check on your work. Whatever technique you are using, whatever process you are inside, that sentence is the question you can always return to. Are you behaving truthfully? Are you inside the imaginary circumstances? If yes, keep going. If not, find your way back.

Something I have returned to throughout my career, and recommend without hesitation, is reading psychology. Not as an academic exercise — as a practitioner's tool. The more I have understood how people actually work — why they do what they do, what they want underneath what they say they want, how they protect themselves, how they change — the more I have had to draw from in the room. Acting technique without human understanding is a vehicle with no fuel. It's no wonder actors make great lawyers and therapists.

Which brings me to the question of how you develop that understanding — and who you trust to help you do it. Because the way theatre culture talks about training does not always help. There is a persistent and damaging idea that somewhere out there is a master — a teacher so complete in their understanding of the craft that proximity to them is enough. You find the guru. You absorb the method. You become.

This is wrong. Not romantically wrong — structurally wrong. A room full of disciples is a room full of people performing the same approximation of someone else's process. That is not acting. It is imitation dressed as training. When only one person's ideas are permitted in the room, everyone else stops questioning. They surrender their own judgement to the teacher's certainty and, over time, come to believe that surrender is the same thing as learning. It is not. It is the beginning of a narrowed instrument.

Robert Benedetti — whose book The Actor at Work was the central text across my three years of training at WAAPA — said it plainly: "I am against dogma and particular techniques. Some techniques instead of empowering you can actually imprison you as an actor. I have never believed in acting teachers becoming gurus." He said it in the context of actor training. But the principle reaches further than a classroom.

Einstein, from an entirely different world, arrived at the same conclusion: "Blind obedience to authority is the greatest enemy of truth." Krishnamurti, from the part of the world where I am writing this, put it differently but landed in the same place: "Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem." Both were pointing at the same danger — the practitioner who stops questioning and starts believing their certainty is the same thing as wisdom.

Which brings me back to Benedetti — and to the simplest possible proof that his approach actually works.

Hugh Jackman trained at WAAPA a few years after me. He has called the same book "the greatest foundation any actor could have." We are not, by any measure, the same kind of actor. That, I would suggest, is entirely the point.

Meisner understood it too. "No two persons are alike," he wrote, "and therefore no universal rule is applicable to any two actors in exactly the same way." Which makes the guru problem a particular kind of irony — the teachers who build the most impenetrable pedestals are often the ones most loudly invoking the masters, while doing precisely what those masters argued against.

The word guru is not always the wrong word. My teacher at WAAPA, Lisle Jones, was a guru. I use that word deliberately and with enormous respect. What made him extraordinary was not the methodology he carried — it was what he did with it. He would walk us through the textbook version of a technique with rigour and precision, and then re-examine it through the Benedetti lens — questioning it, opening it up, asking what it could become in the hands of a specific actor rather than what it demanded of every actor equally. He was devoted, entirely and without exception, to finding what was particular to each person in the room. He saw us as individual eggs.

We once suggested to Lisle that he should write an acting book. His response was that it had already been written. He was, of course, referring to The Actor at Work. I still have my copy from 1984.

That is mastery. That is what the word guru should mean. The teacher I am arguing against is a different creature entirely — the one who has confused their own certainty with wisdom, and who requires their students to confirm that confusion by never questioning it. Many young actors do not research the workshop they are considering thoroughly enough. The most important question is not what method a teacher uses. It is whether they can actually teach what they are preaching. A teacher without genuine practical experience is dangerous to a young intelligent actor. Reputation is not evidence of what happens in the room.

The tradition, approached honestly, is not a series of competing orthodoxies. It is a toolkit. Peter Brook described himself as a magpie — someone for whom life, and therefore practice, was "a patchwork of influences." Brecht, Artaud, Greek theatre, Shakespeare, India, East Asia. He drew from everything and committed to nothing as doctrine. He also said that "the director who comes knowing what he expects of the actor is a rotten director." Though the distinction matters here, because strong vision is not the same thing as dogma. There is a director whose work I admire enormously — whose productions are extraordinary — who has a reputation in some quarters for being a dictator. I know him, not well, but I know him. What I suspect is happening is a confusion between two different kinds of control. He knows exactly what he wants and directs the mise-en-scène with precision — where bodies are placed, how the stage picture is composed, the visual logic of the whole. He does not dictate vocal quality. He does not prescribe how an actor gets to a moment. He does not invade the actor's process of achieving what he wants. The external architecture is controlled. The internal process is the actor's own. That is a director with a clear aesthetic. The word dictator — like the word guru — can flatten a distinction that matters. Controlling the mise-en-scène is not the same as controlling the actor's instrument. One is a directorial right. The other is an overreach.

The problem is the director who mistakes their vision for a prescription — who arrives in the room with the work already finished in their head and needs only the actors to execute it. That is not directing. That is puppetry. The vision should be a territory, not a destination. Though it is art, and the rules of art exist to be broken. The director who arrives with the work complete in their head and pulls it off is not wrong. They are simply rare. And they are usually the first to admit that what the actors brought exceeded what they imagined.

This is also why casting matters as much as it does — and why the audition is about more than finding the right actor for a role. You are building a room of humans who will need to trust each other, challenge each other, and ultimately like each other enough to take risks together. My production of Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Opera House in Mumbai brought together nineteen actors trained across different institutions — NYU Tisch, FTII, NSD, Shri Ram Centre for Performing Arts and others — each carrying different processes, different relationships to text, different cultural instincts about what theatre is for. What they shared was a respect for each other that went deeper than professional courtesy. They genuinely liked each other. And in my experience, that is not a soft observation. It is a structural one. A room where people like each other is a room where risk is possible, where one actor's process does not feel like a threat to another's, where the differences between people become the texture of the work rather than the source of its friction. There was one actor who was resistant — to my direction, to the room's way of working. The others dealt with it beautifully. Not by confronting it, not by ignoring it, but by holding the environment so generously that the resistance eventually had nowhere to go. That is ensemble. Not a methodology. A quality of human relationship that no method can manufacture, but that every method, at its best, is trying to create the conditions for.

Which is why I try to write strong audition briefs. I want an actor to read it and say one of three things: yes, that's me — or no, I don't think I'm what he's looking for — or I don't look like what he's describing on the surface, but I understand what he wants and I'm going for it anyway. All three are valid. All three are honest. This is why it matters to bring yourself to an audition. Not what you think the director is looking for. Yourself. You are not a mind reader, and the assumption that you are is a form of disrespect — to the director, and to your own instrument.

Once they are in the room, I give them time. I let them do their audition as they have rehearsed it — that is theirs and I respect it. Then I direct the monologue, because I want to see if they can take direction the way I like to give it. And then I talk to them. That conversation is sometimes the most telling part of the whole process. It is partly selfish — I want time with the actor, I want to know who I would be working with. But it is also where I find them. Not the prepared performance. The person. I often suggest to students that they write out and genuinely know the answer to one question: tell me about yourself. Not their acting resume spoken aloud. Not their training history. Themselves. I get frustrated with actors who cannot address this question instinctively, mostly because I highly suspect their life is more interesting than they think it is. The actor who knows who they are — and can speak about it with ease and without performance — is already telling me something important about how they will be in a room.

Something I notice in auditions, again and again, is the actor who has not yet made peace with what they actually are. Not what they want to be cast as — what they are. That is not a limitation. It is the foundation of a sustainable career. The actor who knows their castable range and works within it with imagination and commitment will outlast the one who auditions against type for every role and wonders why nothing is landing. A director arrives knowing what they are looking for. But the best thing that can happen — the thing every director worth the title is genuinely hoping for — is to be surprised. You cannot surprise anyone by performing what you think they want. You can only surprise them by being genuinely, specifically, unapologetically who you are. A dozen actors can read the same brief and walk through the same door. A dozen different eggs. A dozen different ways to peel them.

The methods I have drawn from across a career are not separate from any of this — they are the tools through which all of it becomes possible. Over the course of my career, the two methodologies I have returned to most consistently are Meisner and Michael Chekhov. They pull in different directions. Meisner insists on behavioural truth, on living in the moment, on what the other actor is actually doing rather than what you planned to do. Chekhov opens the imagination, works through psychological gesture, through the imaginary body, through images that bypass the analytical mind entirely. Between them they gave me a ground and an air. Neither gave me everything. Neither was meant to. Over the years I have also drawn from Viewpoints, from Cicely Berry's work on voice and text, from Stella Adler, from Boal, from Declan Donnellan. The list goes on. Each one offered something the others didn't. A dozen eggs can use a dozen methods to peel.

None of what I studied or investigated stayed the way I found it. I used it, argued with it, let it change how I work, and refused to let any one of it become the whole answer. If I didn't make these methodologies my own — bastardise them, in fact — my uniqueness would be gone. And uniqueness is the whole point. Every method you encounter that resonates, that makes the work happen, should be adapted, twisted, pulled apart, and rebuilt in your own image. That is not disrespect to the tradition. That is exactly what the tradition is for. The practitioners who stop at one methodology have confused the map with the territory.

Let me give you a concrete example of what this stealing actually looks like in practice. Michael Chekhov's psychological gesture is traditionally used to find the physical expression of a character's overall psychology — a single gesture that captures who they are at their core. I don't use it that way. I use it quickly, in the moment, to find the gesture that carries the emotional subtext of a specific beat. Not who is this character — what is happening underneath this line, right now. It takes seconds. It bypasses the analytical mind entirely and goes straight to the body's understanding of what the scene needs. Is that what Chekhov intended? Probably not exactly. Does it work? Every time. That is what I mean by stealing. You take the tool, you find a different use for it, and you keep whatever works. Many practitioners I know have made this steal before me. I am amongst an excellent den of thieves.

One of the things I love most about being in a room with actors is the sheer scope of who they are as people and as actors. The intellectual actor who arrives with the text mapped and argued, every choice deliberate. The instinctual actor who barely knows what they're going to do until they're doing it, responding entirely to what the room gives them. The emotional actor who finds the character through feeling first and thought later. The physical actor whose body leads — whose work makes the room live in ways no amount of psychological preparation could produce — and who reminds us that the instrument is not separate from the person. It is the person. Knowing your body and your voice — their range, their habits, their limitations, their possibilities — is not a technical exercise. It is self-knowledge applied to the craft. None of these is the correct type of actor. All of them are necessary. What I have always looked for in a room — as a teacher and as a director — is openness, flexibility, and the ability to experiment. Uta Hagen put it simply: overcome the notion that you must be regular. It robs you of the chance to be extraordinary.

Some actors work from the inside out — the psychology of the character generates the physical life. Others work from the outside in — a way of walking, a costume, a prop unlocks something internal that no amount of internal preparation reached. Both are legitimate. Both can be extraordinary. But the outside-in actor needs to be honest with themselves about one thing: whether the external choice is unlocking something or avoiding something. A prop can be a key or it can be a hiding place. As a director, part of my job is working out which one I'm watching. And the inside-out actor needs to be careful that they don't just live inside the head of the character — they must remain responsive to the outside world. The internal life is only useful if it connects outward. If it doesn't, you are giving a performance only you can see.

Though I should say — in professional theatre, not student theatre, I actually do not care how the actor gets there. I only care that they do get there. My job is to be part of that journey, but I am not interested in hearing about the homework. Show me, don't tell me rings true again here. The process is yours. The result is ours.

I remember being in a rehearsal where a fellow actor was not quite getting the physicality of a character — and because the physicality wasn't landing, the psychology wasn't ringing true either. The director asked him to visit wardrobe and find the largest shoe size available. He came back wearing shoes three or four sizes too large. The physicality shifted immediately — and with it, the mental state of the character moved in exactly the direction it needed to go. This was an actor who would firmly place himself in the inside-out camp. An outside-in solution unlocked him completely.

I have also worked several times with an actor who would always ask for a wig or a personal character prop at the start of a process. It was not always necessary — we both knew that — and we would laugh about it together in rehearsals. But it was how they entered the work. They would ask for the outward thing, try it on, discard what wasn't needed, and then do the work. A waste of time? Maybe. But it allowed them to begin, and they always did good work. The process that looks inefficient from the outside is sometimes exactly the right process for the person inside it.

You need both the inward and the outward. No two actors find their way in through the same door. A good teacher — and a good director — knows which door each person needs, and doesn't make them feel strange for needing it.

The approach that served you in an Anton Chekhov may be precisely wrong for a Harold Pinter. What worked in a Bartlett may need to be entirely dismantled for a Barker. When someone asks me what my process is, my facetious answer is always: show me the play and I'll tell you my process. What I mean is this — plays of heightened text such as Shakespeare require a more deliberate mining of the language. You have to earn every word before you stand in them. A Pinter is dedicated to mining the subtext, to what is not said, to the weight of the silence between the lines. These are not the same task and they do not respond to the same approach. Table work — simply sitting with the play, reading it, arguing it, pulling it apart before anyone stands up — is one of the most powerful tools available to an actor and one of the most frequently abandoned in the rush to get on its feet. Shakespeare demands it. Pinter demands it differently. Barker demands it for reasons neither of them would fully recognise. The text will always tell you what it needs, if you are willing to sit still long enough to listen.

And underneath all of it — the process, the methodology, the rehearsal room, the ensemble — there is a third relationship that everything is ultimately in service of. The audience. Not as a passive receiver but as an active participant in what happens when the work is finally released into the room. The actor who prepares only for themselves, or only for the director, has not yet completed the circuit. Acting is relational at every level. The audience completes it.

There is a scene in Dead Poets Society that has stayed with me. Keating asks his students to stand on their desks. Not to recite. Not to perform. Simply to look at the room from a different height. To see what changes when the angle changes. The actor needs exactly this capacity — to step outside their habitual perspective on a character, on a scene, on their own process, and ask what it looks like from somewhere else. No method gives you that. It is a quality of mind. And it is one of the most exciting things to find in a room.

When actors with different processes share a rehearsal room, it can be the most stimulating thing in the work. It can also be a battlefield. The instinctual actor and the intellectual actor can find each other maddening. The physical actor can feel unsupported by a partner who is still entirely in their head. The emotional actor can feel exposed alongside someone who seems to be holding everything at arm's length. Without the willingness to understand how another actor works — and to respect it even when it differs from your own — the room becomes a competition rather than a collaboration. What I have found, consistently, is that the actor's job is to be true to their own process while remaining empathetic to their collaborator's. This requires a conversation — an honest one, and early. A room where everyone works the same way is a room that has already decided what the work will look like before it has begun. And surprise — for the actor, the director, and ultimately the audience — is the whole point.

Peter Sardi has written thoughtfully on the damage that methodological dogma does to exactly this kind of collaboration. His article "When Acting Techniques Become Dogma and Acting Teachers Become Gurus" is worth your time. You will find it on LinkedIn.

What I have always looked for in a teacher is someone who has actually stood in front of an audience and been changed by what happened. Not someone who has read about that experience. Someone inside it. Theory without practice produces a particular kind of confidence that the rehearsal room dismantles very quickly. The absence of real experience in a teacher is something you will feel before you can name it. The best thing I ever did with a good teacher was remain a student rather than become a disciple. Take what serves the work. Question what doesn't. A teacher worth their place in the room not only allows that — they require it. The teacher who needs you to agree is the teacher who needs you more than you need them.

No one can tell you how to peel an egg with any assurance it will work. They can show you what has worked for them — the tap, the roll, the careful lift of the shell — but in your hands it either comes away cleanly or it doesn't. Acting is no different. No one can tell you how to do it. They can only show you what they know to be true. The rest is yours: to test, to discard, to recognise what actually allows you to do the work.

Which is why the best advice tends to sound almost insultingly simple. Do your homework. Be on time. Don't be an arsehole. These are not shortcuts. They are conditions. They don't make you an actor, but without them, whatever you are doing is unlikely to hold.

One of the great privileges of teaching is watching young actors in the middle of working it all out. It is a brilliant stage of a career — messy, uncertain, occasionally chaotic — and the more a young actor can embrace that journey with joy rather than anxiety, the more they are likely to discover what actually works for them. I say at the beginning of most workshops, and sometimes in rehearsal: it may not work, but all I ask is that you try it. That invitation is not a safety net. It is the whole point. The actor who is willing to try something that might not work is already closer to the truth than the one who only does what they are certain of. My advice? Start breaking eggs.

Beyond that, there is very little anyone can guarantee you. There are different kinds of actors. There are different roads into the work. What matters is not that you agree with what you're shown, but that you can use it — or leave it — without needing permission.

Ambition requires the industry's cooperation. Passion does not.

Part Two — How to Be the Egg You Want to Be — is coming soon.

A note from the author: the ideas, arguments, and experiences in this article are entirely my own — drawn from forty years of working in theatre, film, and actor training. I used AI tools during the writing process to assist with spelling, grammar, and the verification of facts. What it cannot do — and did not do — is think for me, feel for me, or replace the professional experience from which every observation in this article comes.