Choose a verb that gives you something to do to someone.
Actions: The Actors’ Thesaurus
You write a note beside your line: sad. Then you try to be sad. You may become absorbed in your own state while the person opposite you disappears. Director and acting teacher Marina Caldarone offers another kind of preparation in her best-known book. Actions: The Actors' Thesaurus, coauthored with Maggie Lloyd-Williams, offers a vocabulary of active verbs that can help you make a scene more playable.
Caldarone’s work spans theatre, actor training, and audio drama. Mountview's biography traces a directing career beginning in 1984, an early Channel 4 Regional Theatre Young Directors Award, four years as Associate Director at Theatr Clwyd, six years as Artistic Director at the Queen's Theatre Hornchurch, and a residency at the National Theatre Studio. That background connects the book to sustained professional rehearsal.
The teaching and the collaboration
Caldarone has taught and directed in British drama schools, coached across theatre and screen, and worked with the Actors Centre and Actors Guilds. Her radio and audiobook production includes directing for The Archers. That range gives you a useful perspective on action. A choice must work through the medium available to you, whether your audience receives your whole body, your face in a frame, or your voice alone.
Maggie Lloyd-Williams is the coauthor of Actions. The publisher identifies her as an actor with work at the National Theatre, Soho Theatre, the Tricycle, Shakespeare's Globe, and in television. The collaboration brings together a directing and training perspective and a performing perspective.
First published by Nick Hern Books in 2004, Actions collects verbs for a rehearsal practice often called actioning. In plain language, you assign a playable action to a piece of text and test it with your partner. The publisher describes the book as a way to refine the action-word until it serves the performance. Its organized vocabulary provides a rehearsal resource for exploring an established acting practice.
What your verb can change
What are you doing with your words? You might reassure, challenge, tempt, warn, or recruit. Each answer sends your attention toward an effect on another person. You are no longer preparing only a description of yourself. You can test whether your words carry an attempt to alter the situation. A useful verb gives you somewhere to direct your effort.
Consider the ordinary sentence, You can stay. You could reassure someone who expects rejection. You could tempt someone who is trying to leave. You could challenge someone who keeps threatening to go. The words remain the same while your relationship to the person changes.
You can judge a candidate action by its consequences. Does it fit the circumstances? Can you do it through the line? Does it give you something to discover in the other person's response? A striking word on the page may be useless in your mouth. A plain word may immediately clarify what you need. Your task is to choose an action you can pursue, not to win a prize for sophisticated annotations.
Your score remains adjustable
You can use actioning as a rehearsal score: a sequence of intentions that helps you find the scene. But a score can become rigid if you defend every chosen verb against what happens in rehearsal. You have to remain available to the partner, the director's adjustment, and the unfolding event. Preparation earns its place by helping you act.
For your own investigation, take four lines from a scene and choose a simple action for each. Play the passage. Then ask your partner what the attempts felt like from the receiving end. Change a verb that produces nothing or that fights the text. Play again. The point is to connect the word on your page to behavior in the room.
You can also notice where the scene changes without requiring a new label for every breath. If you keep dividing the text until your attention is trapped in the margins, return to the larger need. What do you want from the person across from you? Which actions help you pursue it? Your analysis should make the encounter clearer.
What you take from the book
Read Actions as a working companion. Consult it when a habitual choice has become vague, when two lines sound identical, or when an emotional description gives you nothing to do. Keep your chosen verbs subject to rehearsal. You are building a more exact connection between language, purpose, and another human being.
Read further: Actions by Marina Caldarone and Maggie Lloyd-Williams at Nick Hern Books.