Renewing the Purpose of Playing (Part 1): Why We Need a "Multi-Story Why" for Acting in the Twenty-First Century

To be caught between the past and the future is not the same as living in the present.

Yet, for the past few years, this is precisely the space in which much of UK actor training has seemed to find itself. Haunted by what was. Unready for what’s to come. Knowing something is rotten in this state of perpetual crisis – but not being sure what to do about it.

Sadly, our own angst rarely reaches the articulacy of Hamlet’s.

We try to solve problems like panicked GCSE students. Scribbling down answers without having read the questions.

And, within that sweaty exam hall, the biggest question that’s being missed is why we are training actors in the first place.

What is acting for? What is its purpose in the twenty-first century? Why should we even bother?

Without answers to these questions – not “right” answers, but meaningful ones – even the most wonderful techniques become weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. “Tools” are divorced from the contexts that gave them life. Philosophy is reduced to facile hints and tips. Craft to a series of hacks. Once radical, rich approaches to our art become like keys copied too many times. They look like the originals but no longer unlock the doors that they’re supposed to.

Without a real why, we cling instead to pleasing The Industry, appeasing The System, placating students by treating them, not as serious artists, but as children, customers and consumers, whose short-term “satisfaction” becomes more of a metric than real transformational learning.

And it’s not just training that suffers. It is precisely within these institutions that some of the deepest conversations about purpose could (and should) be happening. But such conversations aren’t simply about making training “better”. They can’t be. They speak to the purpose of acting in the world. What it can offer both artists and audiences. What it can offer society. How it can respond meaningfully to the complexities of life today.

The ACT of Moving Away

ACT, the psychological model at the heart of my own practice, gives us a simple way to understand what’s going wrong here.

In ACT, we talk about towards moves and away moves. Towards moves are actions guided by what truly matters to us – our freely chosen values. Away moves are actions driven by the urge to escape, avoid or control unwanted thoughts and feelings.

When we connect with our values and commit to moving towards them, our lives become richer and more meaningful – even when the process of doing so feels difficult and uncomfortable. In contrast, when we prioritise avoiding problems and making ourselves feel better, we tend to exacerbate the problems and end up feeling worse.

The difficulty is that, without clear, chosen values, there is nothing to move towards.

Everything becomes an away move. Every decision is made in reaction to the latest crisis, the latest complaint, the latest demand. Either we live on loop (like a Sisyphus who isn’t smiling) or we make life’s journey one of retreat, subtraction, and ill-conceived compromise. Taking away and taking away. Until there’s nothing left.

The implication, then, is that if we want to move them forward, our conversations about acting and actor training needs to take values seriously.

“BUT,” I hear a wild-eyed course leader cry as she spits her seventh coffee of the day across some airless office, “we are talking about values! We barely have time to talk about anything else!”

Well… yes.

It is true that in many institutions, and especially those of higher education, the word “values” does tend to get bandied about a bit. Though often its meaning has been subtly changed from “things that really matter” to “things we put on posters”.

Facetiousness aside, it is still true – undoubtedly so – that there are real, genuine, truly important values now being talked about in training and education, the profession and the industry, and in wider society. I’m thinking particularly of those that relate to issues such as equity, diversity, inclusion, access, safety, respect, and care for emotional well-being. These are vital, essential, and ought to be non-negotiable in any future worth fighting for. It is an intrinsic part of the ACT for Acting project to support and promote such values.  

But unless they are properly interrogated and integrated as part of a wider philosophy of practice, these exist primarily as social and interpersonal values rather than as artistic ones. They tell us how we want to go about doing acting, but they don’t necessarily define the reasons for doing it in the first place.

This doesn’t make them less important. But it does make them different. And one cannot act as a substitute for the other. There is limited value, I suggest, in saying that we want more people to have access to training if the training they get to access is of no real value to anyone.

Unless we attach them to a primary why for acting, the danger is that our attempts to move towards these values become shallow and tokenistic, distorted into away moves of their own (“How do we avoid accusations and complaints?”), or simply used as fig leaves to conceal our other inadequacies.

If we allow that to happen, we cheapen the very causes that we claim to be championing. All we end up with is snazzy new window dressing for a shop with nothing to sell. Progressive slogans for conservative governance. A banal personality with an eye-catching Tinder profile.

My suggestion, then, is that rather than displaying such values like flowers in a vase to brighten a dingy bedsit, we ought to prepare the ground for them to grow as deeply rooted qualities. Parts of the living garden of our practice.

Multi-Story Thinking  

To my mind, breaking the stuck cycles that we’re in requires a form of multi-story thinking.

By this I mean, firstly, that the why needs to operate on at least three levels:   

1. Personal: How does engagement with acting provide a sense of meaning, direction, and purpose for the individual practitioner?

2. Collective: What shared mission unites us as artists?

3. Societal: What does acting offer to the world, to audiences, and to the communities we inhabit?

Together, I believe, these three layers create a useful framework for thinking about the why of acting in a way that is simultaneously expansive, grounded, and flexible – offering a compass for both the choices we make in training and rehearsal, and the impact we aspire to have in the wider world. It can help us resist rigid dichotomies, stale certainties, and the false comfort of thinking in binaries, opening space for curiosity, nuance, and real human complexity.

Secondly, by multi-story thinking, I mean that our three-level why must not be a doctrine of rigid prescriptivism nor an invitation to fractured, confused eclecticism. Rather, it must offer a flexible framework that can hold diverse practices, perspectives, and experiences while still providing a shared narrative and purpose.

It is worth noting that none of this requires the why to be wholly original. It can have its origins in decades, centuries, millennia of thought, practice, and wider human experience. What matters is that we’re connected to it.

In ACT terms, our task is not to come up with values that nobody else has thought of. It is simply to clarify and choose the values we want to live by – here, now, today – and then do something about it.

So, as is the case when we choose to put on a play, it doesn’t have to be new, but it does have to be renewed – refreshed, revitalised, reinterpreted – so that we can connect with it now.

What Are We Moving Towards?

In this post, I have tried to demonstrate how easy it is to get caught in loops of fear, crisis, and short-term fixes. And to argue that without clear values, committed action stalls.

The question now is simple but urgent: what are we moving towards?

In part two, I’ll attempt to set out a vision for acting and actor training that moves beyond survival and slogans – a framework grounded in values that give our work purpose, meaning, and freedom.

Meanwhile, I’d love to hear from you. What’s your “why” for acting in the twenty-first century? Is it personal, collective, societal — or all of the above? Join the conversation in the comments or get in touch directly.