The Actor and the Target: Declan Donnellan’s Idea, Explained

You know the moment. The scene was fine yesterday, and today you can hear your own voice. You notice your hands. You’re checking whether the line sounded sad enough, whether the director liked that pause, whether you look the way you think you look. Your partner is right there, and you’ve stopped seeing them.

Declan Donnellan, the director who co-founded the theater company Cheek by Jowl, wrote a whole book about that moment. The Actor and the Target is short on theory and long on one practical idea: an actor gets stuck when attention turns inward, and gets free again by looking out at something specific.

The short version: the target is whatever you see, real or imagined, that makes you speak or move. It is always outside you. When a scene goes self-conscious, don’t try to feel more or fix your delivery. Find the target again, look at it hard, and let it change you.

Know what the target is, and what it isn’t

Donnellan and the designer Nick Ormerod founded Cheek by Jowl in 1981, and he has won awards in London, Moscow, Paris, and New York. The Actor and the Target was an international bestseller on its release in 2005 and has been translated into 15 languages. In a 2004 interview with The Irish Times, Belinda McKeon wrote that addressing the stress actors work under was one of his chief aims for the book, which she called “at once a manual and a meditation” and which takes the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet as its focus.

The core idea is simple to state. Every action needs something to act on. You can’t plead, warn, or tease into thin air; you plead with someone, you warn about something. That someone or something is the target. The actor Marya Sea Kaminski, writing about a role she was rehearsing in 2025, put the working question neatly: what does the actor see, real or imagined, that compels them to speak or move?

Two things follow from that. First, a target doesn’t have to be in the room. It can be a person in your memory, a future you dread, a God you are bargaining with, a stain on the floor. Second, a target is not the same as an objective. An objective is something you want. A target is something you see. In our reading, the want gets going once there’s something specific in front of you to want it from.

Learn the six rules in plain words

The book sets out six rules for the target. One acting student’s summary of the book lists all six, and a student’s senior project shows several of them at work in rehearsal and performance. Here they are in our words, with what each one means in rehearsal:

1. There is always a target. Even in a soliloquy, even in a silence, you are looking at something. If you think you have no target, you’ve only lost sight of it.
2. The target is outside you, at a distance you could measure. It is never your own feeling, your voice, or your face. If your attention is on how you’re doing, it has come home, and the scene stops.
3. The target exists before you need it. You don’t have to build it from scratch every time. Your partner, the room, and the situation are already there when the line arrives.
4. The target is always specific. Not “the audience” or “my mother” in general, but this face, this expression, this version of her standing in the doorway.
5. The target is always changing. Your partner said the line differently tonight. Their eyes moved. Something is different every time, and you only catch it if you’re looking.
6. The target is always active. It is doing something to you, demanding something, threatening or tempting you. You react to it rather than deciding in advance what you’ll feel.

The fifth rule is the one that keeps a long run alive. The student describes forcing vivid images into mind before going on, and comes to see that the target changes with the state of the actor looking at it, so you can’t decide ahead of time how it will feel. Your job is to notice the change, not to repeat last night.

Why watching yourself makes the scene worse

Donnellan’s book treats fear as the thing that cuts actors off from the target, as one student’s summary puts it. In practice, that tends to mean fear turns your attention inward, toward your own feelings and how you’re coming across, and the more you inspect yourself, the less you see of anything else. The scene starts to feel dead, and the usual response, pushing harder, rarely helps. In a 2013 interview with BritishTheatre.com he put it this way: “You can’t make life, but you can stop it being blocked.”

Psychology offers two findings that help explain why the outward turn works, though neither was a study of actors. The first is the spotlight effect. In a study by Thomas Gilovich and colleagues, published in 2000, students who wore an embarrassing Barry Manilow T-shirt into a room guessed that about half the people there had noticed it. As Cornell Alumni Magazine recounts, fewer than a quarter had. We overrate how much others notice us.

The second comes from motor-skill research. A 2021 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin, pooling 73 studies of performance, found that people did better when their attention was on the effect they wanted (where the ball goes) than on their own body parts (what the arm is doing). The benefit held across ages, health, and skill levels. Acting isn’t golf, but the pattern is familiar: attention on yourself tends to make a skilled action clumsy.

Donnellan has also talked about acting as connection. In that 2004 interview, speaking about the actor’s relationship with the audience, he said: “It’s not a narcissistic thing, it’s a connection.”

Find the target in the balcony scene

Since the book takes the balcony scene as its focus, it’s a good place to try the idea. Juliet comes out onto her balcony believing she’s alone. Romeo, below in the garden, hears every word:

JULIET: O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name.
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

ROMEO: [Aside.] Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?

JULIET: ’Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.

Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2, from the public-domain Project Gutenberg text. You can read the whole scene in our free copy of the play.

Juliet’s target is imagined. Romeo isn’t there as far as she knows, so she speaks to a Romeo she sees in her mind. The trap is to play the speech as a lovely mood about love. Give her a specific Romeo instead: the boy she met tonight at her father’s feast, with his family’s name hanging over him. Then Deny thy father is a demand she makes of him, and ’Tis but thy name is an argument she’s trying to win.

Romeo’s target is real, and it’s right above him. His aside isn’t a thought he shares with the audience about his feelings. It’s a reaction to her, a split-second choice forced on him by what she just said. If the actor playing Romeo is busy thinking about how romantic he looks, the line sounds recited. If he’s watching her, the question is urgent, because the next word she says might change everything.

Five steps for when a scene goes self-conscious

Here is a short routine to use in rehearsal, or in your head between scenes, when you notice you’ve started watching yourself. It works on a monologue as well as a two-hander.

1. Name what you’re looking at. Before the scene, say it to yourself in one plain sentence: “I’m looking at Romeo, who I’ve just met and can’t have.” If you can’t name it, that’s the problem, not your delivery.
2. Make it smaller and closer. Swap a general target for a detail. Not “my father” but the way he won’t look up from his plate. A target you could point at is easier to see than an idea.
3. Notice one change. On the next run, your only job is to catch one thing your partner does differently from last time: a pause, a look, a softer word. In a monologue, find one new detail in the person or place you’re imagining. Don’t plan your reaction. Let it happen.
4. Aim the line at it. Before each speech, ask what you want the line to do to the target. Words are tools to change the person you’re talking to, so treat each line as a push, not a sound. Our list of acting verbs helps here.
5. When you catch yourself, look back out. You will drift inward. Everyone does. Don’t scold yourself, which only adds a second inward thought. Just find the target again and look at it more closely than before.

If step three feels hard, it’s often because the lines aren’t solid yet and part of your brain is busy remembering. Our guide to listening on stage instead of waiting for your cue goes deeper on that, and Stanislavski’s circles of attention come at the same problem from another angle.

Practicing alone is harder, because there’s no one to look at. For an imagined target, like Juliet’s absent Romeo, sit with the speech on the page and build the target in detail before you say it out loud: where he is, what he looks like, what he just did. Then say it to that picture. If the picture is specific enough, you’ll find you stop listening to yourself.

For a scene, give yourself a voice that answers. Offbook reads every other character in realistic voices, listens while you say your line, and plays the next cue, as the video below shows, so you can name your target before each speech and aim the line at someone. The free run lines online tool does the same with classic scenes, no account needed.

Questions actors ask

Is the target the same as an objective?

No. An objective is what you want; the target is what you see. One way to read the book is that the target comes first and the want lives in your reaction to it. You can use both. Our guide on how to find your objective works well alongside this one.

What’s the target in a monologue or soliloquy?

Something specific outside you, even if it’s imagined: the person you’re talking about, the audience treated as real listeners you need something from, a decision you’re facing as if it were in the room. “Nobody” is never the answer. If the speech feels like a recital, you’ve lost the target.

Can the audience be the target?

Yes, in direct address, as long as you treat them as specific people you’re trying to change, not as judges you’re trying to please. The moment you start checking how they like you, the attention has turned back to yourself.

Do I need to read the whole book?

It’s worth it, and it’s readable in a few sittings. Later chapters take on blocks like not knowing what you want, who you are, or what you’re feeling. Donnellan’s follow-up, The Actor and the Space (2024), extends the same ideas. But you can start using the target tonight with nothing more than the steps above.