Actings Books! What to read?

By far the most useful book I've ever read on acting was 'True and False: Heresy for the Actor' by David Mamet. It's particularly useful if your other reading is focused more on Stansilavski-inspired techniques. Having said that, whilst Mamet's book is easily the most practical out of any I've encountered, it isn't the whole picture - whilst he is writing in his capacity as an acting teacher rather than his capacity as a famous play-wright/script-writer, he overtly works on the assumption that the actor is performing to a solid script (a fair assumption when you're David **$$%%^ Mamet:-). He's had a substantial influence upon a number of acting schools, with a focus upon performing the script rather than making up a character outside of the script, but he'd be the first to admit that it isn't a lot of help if the script sucks (in fact he does state this somewhere in his book, with the advice not to do badly written work). Frankly its worth reading just for interest if nothing else - Mamet is always a clear and entertaining read. He starts with what at the time was a controversial premise: that the Stanislavski method is a distraction and hindrance to acting, and makes a pretty good fist of arguing it over the rest of the book (even if he does exaggerate the differences between Stanislavski's and his own views). There's copies in the UWA library, and I'd bet that they're also in the other university libraries as well. Actor, martial artist and soon-to-be Philosophy post-grad student. Making myself less employable one step at a time:-)