Advice from Lucian Msamati, from Actors’ & Performers’ Yearbook 2025

October 23, 2024
Acting, Articles, Book Extracts

The Actors’ and Performers’ Yearbook 2025 is the 20th anniversary edition of this celebrated performing arts industry directory that supports actors in their training and search for work in theatre, film, TV, radio and comedy.

It is the only directory to provide detailed information for each listing and specific advice on how to approach companies and individuals, saving hours of further research. From agents and casting directors to producing theatres, showreel companies, photographers and much more, this essential reference book editorially selects only the most relevant and reputable contacts for the industry.

With the listings updated every year, the Actors’ and Performers’ Yearbook continues to be the go-to guide for help with auditions, interviews and securing/sustaining work within the industry.

The Actors’ and Performers’ Yearbook 2025 is fully updated and includes a new foreword by Artistic Director and Chief Executive of The Big House Theatre Company, Maggie Norris, and four new industry new interviews, giving timely advice in response to today’s fast-changing industry landscape.

Below is an extract from the yearbook – a contribution by Lucian Msamati (an actor in TV and film, appearing in Ultimate Force, Spooks, Ashes to Ashes, Doctor Who, Death in Paradise, Luther, Game of Thrones, Gangs of London, Black Earth Rising, His Dark Materials and Taboo among others) – on an ‘imperfect creative marriage’ between acting and writing.

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Actors and writers: an imperfect creative marriage

I have an ugly, honest confession: I am that annoying actor who believes he always has a better version of the dialogue than the meticulously crafted efforts of the writer, even before I have actually bothered to commit a single line to memory. Everyone from Soyinka to Shakespeare, has had the displeasure of my wilful mangling of their worded wizardry. In my defence, and by way of grudging apology, there are three fairly sound reasons for this near sacrilegious compulsion of mine, none of which have anything to do with a spectac- ularly unself-aware ego, I promise.

Firstly: after acting my next great love is writing. I burn an eternal candle for every playwright and every play I have ever been involved with. I fell in love with playwrighting aged 10 playing the cowardly lion in Avondale Primary School’s production of The Wizard of Oz in Harare, Zimbabwe, where I grew up. It dawned on me one afternoon during rehearsals that someone made up the characters, words, and songs we were learning and that if I were that someone, I could create and perform anything. It was quite a eureka moment for my young mind! I am admittedly embellishing things a little under the influ- ence of the warm afterglow of nostalgia and a slightly better vocabulary, but this is precisely why I am in ageless awe of writers and brilliant writing. The ability to capture in words the essence of a moment and have an audience experience it anew again and again is a superpower like no other.

My early efforts to make my own magic included a two-page ‘sequel’ to The Wizard of Oz, consisting mostly of bastardised song lyrics from the original and short scenes I’d later learn were called ‘sketches’, lovingly plagiarized from my favourite TV shows. I owe back- dated royalty cheques to Lenny Henry, Tracey Ullman, Team Blackadder, Eddie Murphy and the late, great Zimbabwean comedian and band leader Safirio Madzikatire (aka ‘Sekuru Mukadota’) from the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation’s classic Mukadota Family sit- com, to name but a few. They were truly my first writing and performing instructors, and I am proud to call myself a glorified living hack-job tribute act to them all. As intellectual curiosity expanded in my teens, I fell under the spell of the greats of neo-colonial African literature such as Wole Soyinka, Charles Mungoshi, Dambudzo Marechera and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o who were soon followed by the likes of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Albert Camus, James Baldwin, and Jean-Paul Sartre to name, yet again, a few! Crucially though, these particular names all had one thing in common: they loved and made theatre. It wasn’t some smug, intellectual side hustle for them to flex their literary chops but a legitimate, uniquely powerful extension of their creativity. From this moment on, the distinction between ‘writer’, ‘actor’, ‘director’ and ‘intellectual’ for me dissolved: they were all one and the same thing.

With that in mind, might you then strike a note of empathy on your tiny violin for my second sort of sound reason? As an actor, I am artistically allergic to being treated like a glorified sock-puppet in the rehearsal process. Granted, learning, and delivering lines on repeat for the duration of the gig to the best of your ability is your literal job description. However, the shrill, entitled inner artistic voice in my head screams, ‘Hey! Esteemed Play- wright, I am not just a voice with great stubby legs, you know! I have ideas and feelings about those ideas! Sure, you spent years in excruciating, creative labour to deliver unto us your wordy treats, but I breathed literal oxygen into your scribbling and made them real! I’ll therefore mangle them however I see fit, until they fit!’. All this is really just a cack- handed act of creative self-preservation. The rehearsal process starts off as democratic until the necessary divisions of labour make it a benign despotism. At the point when the discussions have to stop and someone has to get up and physically make the play a real thing, the creative collaborator whose job it is to be most exposed (i.e. the actor), is often the person whose opinion can feel like it matters the least. It is a necessary, quirky irony of an actor’s creative responsibility. From the moment you get a script, you have to park your critical faculties in order to find the human and relatable in the play. You can’t build empathy out of strong opinions, can you?

Strong – and, increasingly, loud – opinions are only ever an interpretation or a stance on the truth and don’t tend to make for interesting stories because they are the antithesis to curiosity. And curiosity is the beginning of empathy. As an actor your opinion therefore has to be secondary to your capacity for empathy. It can be the most dangerous, tenuous but rewarding creative currency to trade in. As the designated ‘grown ups’ in the rehearsal process (i.e. the director and the writer) work out the bigger picture from a remove, the actor intimately embraces and inhabits all the imperfections of this make-believe world. The necessary cutting, pasting, editing and reworking of the text therefore aren’t just practical exercises for an actor. These actions can sometimes feel like major, instantaneous, emergency organ-replacement surgery. With time and experience of course, you can learn as an actor to better manage the emotional and psychological wrench that can occur, but it is and always will be a delicate dance. After all, you’re dealing with human beings trying to play human beings (or lions, or trains) that have to feel human enough to connect with a room full of strangers who have parted with good money to be entertained. It’s kind of intense! And will invariably get mixed in with ego. That’s usually when phrases such as, ‘You know, I think my character would do X!’ or worse, ‘I don’t think my character should say Y!’ come into being.

It is an exposing, exhilarating exercise because the actor has nowhere to hide in the process: exposure is your process. If I had a penny for every time I heard a director say, ‘Yeah, I know it’s not great, but please can you just do it as it is for tonight?’. And, of course, in the end the actor delivers because, ultimately, it’s a creative duty of care to the writing. Sometimes the greatest lesson for a writer is to see and hear their words out loud. An idea may read as glorious on paper and in your head but be a shambolic mess in the flesh and vice versa. This is the great challenge of writing language for performance. It has to start in theory and be continually polished in practice but for the actor it’s all practice; there is no room really to theorise because for better and for worse, your job is to be.

Perhaps it’s a crude analogy but an actor ends up becoming something of a creative foster parent to the play. The writer absolutely brings it into the world, but the actor nurtures, raises, and brings it into maturity. It isn’t a static thing to picked up and discarded from a shelf. For a time, it is literally a lived, parallel experience for an actor in a way that it isn’t for the writer. This is perhaps why certain interpretations of well-known characters in celebrated plays become ‘definitive’; so inexorably linked to one actor that to ‘see’ or ‘hear’ that role any other way is impossible. How can you as an actor not be a greater authority when it is becomes your identity? Maybe the answer is in the idea of being a ‘creative foster parent’ or ‘Legal Artistic Guardian’. You invest in it knowing that the play eventually returns ‘home’ to the writer. You invest in it on the understanding that no matter how much you love, care for, understand and maybe even elevate it, it’s a beautiful and benign thing. It can never love you the way you love it so you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t!

All of which leads to my third unpicked bone: the love-hate relationship between writer and actor. Let me be more specific and say my love-hate relationship with writing which kind of then extends to writers. To be fair, ‘hate’ is actually too strong a sentiment. It’s something closer to a conjugal, creative contempt, between my two great loves which might actually be worse! The actor and the writer are connected to each other through the words. It’s a beautiful, unspoken intimacy that could be a perfect romantic creative union except for the fact that, in practice, the marriage has to constantly be managed by the necessary interference of the director. It’s like having to have the priest conducting events on your wedding night. All three of you are then invested in the child you make together (don’t ask) but are convinced that their way is the best way to raise it, whilst being fully aware that the other parents have skills and knowledge we can never match! Legendary American playwright Eugene O’ Neill, famously, did not trust actors. This might explain why some of his stage directions are so detailed, thorough and read rather brilliantly like screenplays. I think I might have a sprinkle of empathy here because where there are issues of trust, a relationship with vulnerability is not far behind and this actually, is where the beautiful schism really lies between actor and writer.

The writer drills down into themselves to bring up a thing of clarity and beauty. It can be a painstaking, lonely pursuit. The completed play therefore is living proof that the writer has successfully negotiated and largely overcome a very personal and private face-off with their vulnerability. A published text is a fait accompli. Whether that work ever gets pro- duced or not, that text is a tangible, relatable and autonomous artistic statement. To hand off your ‘art baby’ to be brought to life by strangers is terrifying. And yet? Regardless of the whether the show is a hit or a dud, the text remains. As an actor though, you have to be vulnerable twice. Firstly, as an individual with a unique lived, professional experience that has to be open to the story, characters, and the play. The actor then has to push past that and for a time become both the conduit and defender of the writer’s vulnerability. To serve this properly the written word has to become the authority in the room and in performance; the play must always have the literal and metaphorical final say. Of course it must: that’s why we have all gone through those weeks of joyous torture to serve and bring to light! And maybe this the root of my love-contempt: the presumption of intellec- tual authority over everyone and everything else in the rehearsal room and beyond. What part of this assumed intellect is at play on a rainy Wednesday matinee when that killer line that had the audience rolling in the aisles with laughter on press night, lands like a lead balloon? Same delivery, same timing, same action: tumbleweed. This is the territory that the actor navigates on behalf of the writer. Regardless of the reactions of the crowd or the intentions of the writer, the actor has to become a master of every single permutation of that line and still make the story flow. You cannot intellectualise the unknown. There is an intelligence at play in these moments that is an alchemy unique to the connection between the actor the word and the audience.

When we speak of the ‘writing’ of play A or show B being good or bad, what do we actually mean? Sometimes I think we are acknowledging the writer’s technical ability. Any passionate reader or seasoned theatre goer can hear or spot that. At other times though, the distinction between the technical skill on the page and the interpretation we see on stage can get blurred. Maybe what we ‘re all plugging into is a combination of the two things that look, feel and read as authenticity. We make our greatest art when we trust that those outside of ourselves battle with and value the formless as we do. We diminish the sanctity of that relationship when we try to codify and control it. So many times, those transcendent moments on stage are nothing to do with brilliant writing, acting, direction or even a particularly receptive audience on any given night. It’s an alchemy unique to that shared, complicit moment. It is ephemeral. Once the lead becomes gold, that’s it. It’s gone. What you as an actor is left with is the memory of the sensation of that first time. You can either spend the next however many shows trying to recreate or recapture that fluid alchemy and live with all the frustration that comes with that unholy quest or you start again every night. That’s exhausting. And terrifying. And counterintuitive. And all made possible by the bedrock of those beautiful uncontrollable words, words and more words as gifted to us by the writers and as mangled – lovingly at first and then devotedly! – by an epically un-self-aware actor whose delight it is to make you the audience fall in love with these great stories and characters again and again and again; I promise.

Lucian Msamati is an award-winning actor, writer, director and producer on stage and screen.

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Actors’ and Performers’ Yearbook 2025 is now available via Bloomsbury.com