Accept, explore and find the truth

In Acting and Reacting , Nick Moseley has created a textbook for teachers and students of drama that offers "tools for the modern actor", but is also a polemic that challenges Stanislavski and the revolutionary attitudes of David Mamet.

Moseley acknowledges the debt theatre owes to Stanislavski. He laid the foundations of modern theatre, but, as Moseley notes, the introspection of Stanislavski's system grew from a social context bogged down in a "recent history of feudal slavery and rich educated classes". It was a system that allowed actors to ignore their social environment. Ironically, Anton Chekhov, so frequently linked to Stanislavski, embraced a more progressive view of drama, showing us "the fragility of people rocked by change over which they have little control". For Moseley, and for Chekhov, theatre is not about tragic heroes acting in a bubble or the "grand eternal truth but the microscopic social truth". Every actor in an ensemble creates the world of the play and forms an organic community.

Moseley is not the first to contest Stanislavski's hegemony. Mamet's True and False (1997) argues that drama schools are unnecessary; the actor's job is simply to convey the writer's meaning by delivering lines of dialogue.

For Moseley, this stance is untenable: it assumes the untrained actor will be familiar with the physicality and language of any historical dramatic context, and even the familiar context of Mamet's plays demands "astonishing vocal resources". They agree, however, that an actor's skill lies in interaction, or, as Moseley states: "Emoting is not acting, reproducing is not acting. Reacting is acting."

Moseley's approach is based around "transactional improvisation", which acknowledges that all human interaction exists within a context of offers and demands that can be accepted and fulfilled or countered with further offers and demands. He trains his actors to enter every scene with an agenda, which they may be diverted from, rather than a fixed Stanislavskian objective that they doggedly pursue.

However, before an actor approaches a text, Moseley insists on the importance of self-awareness and openness. In one exercise, the group suspect one of their number only superficially likes them. She must approach the group with the phrase, "I don't give a shit about any of you", and convince them of the truth in this statement. In another exercise, an actor who can convince the group of the truth in the statement, "I have no talent", ironically proves the opposite. Trust in a dramatic context should recognise "the darker statements and truths that lie beneath the smiles".

The actor's space exists outside the permissions of the everyday world, and the trusts within that space must acknowledge as much.

Moseley's advice is appropriately Nietzschean: "You cannot afford, at least in the acting space, to hold fixed moral views about anything, or to be judgmental of others." Morality depends on circumstance and, crucially, on the world of the play. The most fascinating theatrical characters exist within a dynamic social environment. What is Hamlet without the politics of Elsinore, or Hedda Gabler without the patriarchal society that informs her actions? An actor must understand the "world of the play" from "within that world, not from outside". Moseley's methodology is sociological, based on parameters and permissions and the understanding that "we all have within us the capacity... to be all things".

This is an inspirational approach to acting - a combination of ideological discourse, shrewd analysis and practical exercises. A rehearsal studio or a room above a pub has the same magic as the National Theatre, and the role of the actor is "always to accept and explore, never to reject and deny".

Jeremy Piper is head of drama, Dr Challoner's Grammar School.