STARRING MACBETH: David Pearson as Macbeth in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
By Umer Nangiana
Whether it is as a theatre critic and satirist in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, the treacherous innkeeper and antagonist Thénadier in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables or William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, he has aptly brought every character to life on stage.
Since discovering his knack for acting eight years ago from the platform of the city’s oldest community theatre group, he has changed various hats, playing some of the most formidably challenging roles in the history of drama and theatre.
For David Pearson, it has always been ‘the more challenging it is, the better.’ For someone who discovered theatre later than most, almost in his mid-30s, Pearson has been a first league choice for most directors for some of the most challenging roles in their plays.
Prior to arriving in Doha in 2007 from American South, and joining Doha Players, the six-decade-old amateur theatre group, Pearson had only acted in high school plays.
In these eight years, however, he has featured in all major productions by the group such as The Woman in Black, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Aladdin, Romanoff and Juliet, The Wizard of Oz, The Importance of Being Earnest, Oklahoma, Macbeth and most recently The Tempest.
He never trained to be an actor. It was all down to learning on the job and building from experience. When he first tried it, Pearson fell in love with acting. A university teacher by profession, he then went out to research and teach himself the art.
“What I found works for me is to learn the lines so well that it is like driving a car. So that you don’t even have to think about your lines, they come automatically to you. Then you can be on top of it, you can react in the moment,” Pearson tells Community in a chat recently after his The Tempest performance where he played Antonio.
Evolving as an actor, he has developed certain techniques involving a bit of method acting but Pearson realises that acting is much more than merely delivering lines correctly. It involves emotions. Yet, he believes mastering lines is the key.
“It allows you to be really emotional. When the lines are well written and you practice them over and over, something clicks in your head and the lines themselves start to create emotion,” says Pearson, still under the influence of his character Antonio, wearing his green tunic and the matching Bedouin-style head gear.
And for the quality of writing, he loves English Playwright William Shakespeare. “No playwright that I have ever experienced is as good at that as Shakespeare. When you really learn his lines and really understand what you are saying, all of this emotion comes out naturally,” explains the amateur theatre actor, adding, he actually feels those emotions on stage.
People give it different names. Some call it acting with method. However, Pearson does not want to take away from technique. And he realised the importance of technique from an experience he had while playing as lead in Doha Players’ Macbeth.
“I guess I was a bit nervous because my friends were in the audience, the British ambassador was sitting in the first row, three feet away from me and I guided an actor out through the wrong exit,” Pearson recollects.
“There was a young actor there, his son, and he was just stranded out in the middle of the stage. I didn’t know that I had done it until I looked into this actor’s eyes and saw fear,” he laughs.
In normal conditions, he is feeling emotions, he says, but this one rattled him so much that he had to rely on pure technique for the next half an hour on the stage.
But then he knew his lines very well. He knew exactly what would happen after every line. So I managed it by following this technique, says Pearson.
To grow as an actor, he believes, you have to do quality roles. They do not have to be necessarily large like his character Antonio in The Tempest. “Antonio is such a delicious character, so well written that it feels like a real person. I feel privileged to do this character,” says Pearson.
About his late discovering of theatre, he believes, it actually redounded to his advantage.
“By the time I started acting seriously, I had a lot of life experience. When I played Macbeth, for instance, I loved the emotions there. I knew those emotions. He is afraid; I have fears of my own. He is angry; I have anger in me. These deep emotions are something that I had access to in my life at the time I started acting,” Pearson explains.
He says he does acting because it makes him feel more alive. However, he believes acting is a craft that can be learnt, if you have it in you.
“You can learn acting, you can. There was this article in a newspaper where the author had argued that drama schools are a waste of time. You are either a born actor, or you are not. I do not think that is the case,” argues the actor.
“It is a craft. No-one would say he or she was a born footballer. No-one would say you do not have to practice it. It is all about learning how to access your emotions, at least that is how I do it and learning discipline,” he adds.
His job as a teacher, he says, helps him act better. “I joke around sometimes that teaching is just like acting (smiles). There are a lot of teachers in Doha Players because in essence you are on stage and it is sort of a good training,” Pearson believes. “I really enjoy working with people and acting complements that,” he adds.
To incorporate discipline in his acting, he practices his lines every day once he gets the script. Almost an established actor on the amateur stage, Pearson feels he wants to learn acting professionally.
“I have been recently thinking about going back (to my home country) and doing some acting training because I love it so much. I feel I fell passionately in love with acting,” says Pearson.
It there is one character that he would absolutely love to play is again Shakespeare’s Hamlet. However, he is afraid he is a little too old for it now, almost 40. “I believe if I lose 10 kilos, shave my beard, dye my hair and make the audience believe, I can do it,” Pearson chuckles.
However, in order to grow as an actor, which he does, he feels one has to do such roles. Doha, he says, in many ways has proven to be “wonderful” for him. It was here that he fell in love with theatre, from where he also found his lady luck, Mione van der Merwe, who is also an actor and director with Doha Players.
