BRITISH ACTORS AT OCCIDENTAL : ‘MAKING WORDS BREATHE’ ON STAGE

The college class was discussing William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” and actor Tom Mannion found it difficult to stay seated.

Comfortably clad in a black sweat shirt and pants--and leaning so far forward that his metal chair often tipped perilously close to unseating him--Mannion helped explain the exotic romance, externalizing the character’s emotions and successfully completing many sentences with body language.

It may have been an unorthodox approach to teaching a dramatic criticism course at Occidental College, but that was the point. At the same time, across campus, another actor from the Royal Shakespeare Company, Bruce Alexander, was teaching students in a European Cultures class how to read the Declaration of Independence.

Visiting American colleges and universities under the auspices of the Alliance for Creative Theater, Education and Research (ACTER), the two British actors and their colleagues Trevor Baxter, Sarah Berger, and George Raistrick, are teaching the fundamentals of their profession to Occidental students this week, and doing workshops for high school students and teachers on the Eagle Rock campus. Part of the troupe’s residency includes three performances of “The Tempest” in which the five actors take on several roles each.

Tuesday morning, Mannion, who has played Cassio to Ben Kingsley’s Othello and Christian to Derek Jacobi’s Cyrano De Bergerac, seemed to restrain himself so as not to succumb to the temptation of doing a one-man performance of the play. Eventually, he joked cavalierly that “You have a r-r-right to fail!,” encouraging students to read scenes, which he said, is the best way to understand dramatic literature.

“I remember they taught us ‘Hamlet’ in school (in Glasgow) for about two years,” he explained. “I (learned) nothing about ‘Hamlet.’

“When I went to acting school, an actor taught it to us. I got intrigued . . . because an actor can make words breathe.”

Alexander uses the Declaration of Independence to teach public speaking courses “as a tool for language.” Speaking Shakespeare’s language--or, for that matter, that of America’s forefathers--is only 10% of an actor’s challenge. “Getting out there and expressing it is the problem,” he said.

“You’ve got to see the words in images,” Baxter told students studying a sonnet. “You’ve got to see it as if it were real.”

Working with professional British actors is at first intimidating, but inevitably rewarding, said John Bouchard, an instructor in theater arts at Occidental.

Both acting and directing students staged scenes from American classics and were directed by Raistrick and Berger.

“The only way a director can learn about acting is to do it,” said Raistrick. “We’ve all been directed by directors who don’t know acting. It’s essential they do.”