Mike Alfreds’ Different Every Night: Actioning and Points of Concentration

You’ve run the scene thirty times. You know where every laugh lands and where your partner breathes. And somewhere around the twentieth run you noticed something worse than forgetting a line: you’ve stopped hearing the scene at all. It plays itself, and you’re watching.

Many actors meet this in a long run. Plenty meet it in week two of rehearsal, once the words are in and the scene has set like plaster. The usual fixes are vague. “Keep it fresh.” “Listen.” Good advice, with no handle on it.

The short version: the British director Mike Alfreds built a whole rehearsal method around that problem, and set it out in his book Different Every Night. One way to read his method: get clear on what the character wants and does, and leave how it comes out free to change. His most portable tool is the point of concentration: you run the scene again and again, each time holding one fact of the play’s world in mind, and let that fact change the scene from the inside. You can do it alone, on any scene, tonight.

Who Mike Alfreds is, and what the book is for

Alfreds founded the touring company Shared Experience in 1975, according to his Wikipedia biography, and has since directed at the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the RSC. He’s known as an actors’ director. When the scholar David Allen watched him rehearse in the mid-1980s, he saw someone working more like a coach, prompting from the sidelines, than a director chasing results. That’s reported in Duška Radosavljević’s 2012 interview with Alfreds in the Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance.

Different Every Night: Freeing the Actor came out in 2007 from Nick Hern Books, with a foreword by Pam Ferris. The publisher’s page calls it the most complete rehearsal method in print since Stanislavsky. That’s the publisher’s claim, but the book is thorough: 384 pages on bringing a text to life and keeping it alive in rehearsal and performance.

The goal is in the title. Writing on the Nick Hern Books blog, Alfreds says he wants actors to play each night not “as if” for the first time, but “actually for the first time.” He describes Different Every Night as a detailed account of his rehearsal process aimed at exactly that.

Want, do, feel: the order the book sets out

The book’s table of contents shows the shape of the thinking. Its section on concepts includes a chapter called Want! Do! Feel!, and the chapters run in that order: objectives first (scene objectives, through-lines, super-objectives, counter-objectives), then actions, beats, and obstacles, then emotion, then given circumstances.

The order is the point. Ian Spiby, reviewing the book for ReviewsGate, sums up its central idea: break a character’s lines into actions, get the actions right, and motivation and emotion will follow. You don’t play the feeling. You play what you want and what you’re doing to get it, and the feeling arrives on its own, a little different each time.

If the vocabulary is new, two of our guides cover the foundations: how to find your objective in a scene and how to find the given circumstances in a script. Alfreds builds on both. What he adds is a set of rehearsal steps that keep them from hardening into a fixed performance.

Actioning is one strand, not the whole method

People often hear “Alfreds” and think “actioning.” It’s in the book, but it’s one step among several. Under the heading for work on the text, the contents list Actioning; Text, No Text, Text; Feeding-In; Points of Concentration; and Logic Text. Separate sections deal with character and with the world of the play, including a chapter on self-blocking, before a chapter called “Bringing the Strands Together.”

Actioning isn’t only Alfreds’s tool. The theater company Out of Joint associates it with its director, Max Stafford-Clark, and defines it as giving an action or intention to each line or idea in a script, written as a transitive verb such as “teases,” “threatens,” or “distracts.” Our list of acting action verbs has plenty to choose from.

Actioning has a known weakness, and it explains why Alfreds doesn’t stop there. If you memorize your verbs and play them the same way every night, you’ve traded one fixed performance for another. One post on the Acting Coach Scotland blog argues exactly this: lock the verbs in and you stop responding to what’s actually happening in front of you.

That’s where the steps after actioning earn their place. Actioning gives you a clear sense of what you’re doing to your partner. Points of concentration, the step the rest of this guide is about, are one way to keep how you do it from setting.

Points of concentration: one thing in mind, the whole run

Here’s the exercise as people who watched him describe it. In Performing Chekhov, David Allen writes that Alfreds runs each act over and over, giving the actors a different point of concentration each time. Patrick Miles, in Chekhov on the British Stage, describes the same thing on The Cherry Orchard: whole acts run again and again, with one point named for each run.

A point of concentration isn’t a feeling or a line reading. In Acting in Aotearoa, Hilary Halba and David O’Donnell describe it as something that has happened in the world of the play that can affect a character. It’s a fact. You hold it in mind, play your actions as usual, and see what it does.

Miles gives two of the points used for the first act of The Cherry Orchard: the time, two in the morning, and the fact that Ranevskaya has been away for five years. Both are in the first minute of the scene.

LOPAKHIN: The train’s arrived, thank God. What’s the time?

DUNYASHA: It will soon be two. [Blows out candle] It is light already.

LOPAKHIN: How much was the train late? Two hours at least. ...

Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, Act One, translated by Julius West.

A few lines later Lopakhin says Lubov Andreyevna, Ranevskaya, “has been living abroad for five years.” Run the scene with the time as your point, and Lopakhin is groggy, irritable at himself for oversleeping, and maybe Dunyasha keeps her voice down so as not to wake the house. Run it with the five years, and the same lines are about waiting: what will she look like, will she remember me. Nothing in the words changed. The scene did.

Miles also notes that the points help actors pin down what the characters want. That’s the quiet benefit. Each run tests your objective against a new fact, and the ones that matter to the character show up fast.

What makes a good point

• It comes from the play. Time of day, the weather, the season, how long since someone left, what happened just before the scene, who might be listening, money owed.
• It’s concrete enough to feel in your body. “It’s two in the morning and I’ve been asleep in a chair” plays better than “it’s late.”
• It’s shared or private. In a cast, everyone can hold the same point. Alone, pick one that matters most to your character.
• It’s new for this run. Try a new one each time, the way Miles describes a different point for every run.

How to run points of concentration on your own

Alfreds works with a company and plenty of rehearsal time. Alfreds himself says his methods need a long rehearsal period, and, as reviewer Ian Spiby reports, that one month is not enough. You probably have less than that, and no company. The core of the exercise still works for one actor with one scene. Here’s a way to adapt it:

• Get the lines mostly in first. Alfreds himself prefers words absorbed through rehearsal, but alone you’ll need enough of the text to keep your attention free, and you can’t hold a fact in mind while hunting for your next word.
• Read the scene once for facts. Write down ten or more things the play tells you about the world: time, place, weather, what just happened, what each character knows. Our given circumstances guide works through the opening of The Cherry Orchard (in Constance Garnett’s translation) the same way.
• Write your objective and your main actions at the top of the page. These stay fixed; how you play them is what the point changes.
• Pick one point. Say it out loud before you start.
• Run the whole scene without stopping. Play your actions. Don’t push the point into the lines; just keep it in mind.
• Afterwards, jot two or three things that changed: a line that came out differently, a pause that appeared, a moment that suddenly mattered.
• Pick the next point and run it again. Four or five runs in one session is a good start.

The hard part alone is the other characters. You need someone to say their lines every run. One way to do that alone: realistic voices in Offbook read every other part and wait for your line, and you can pause, skip ahead, or loop the scene so it starts again as soon as it ends, as the video below shows. That leaves you free to name the next point and go again.

If you want to try it on a scene right now, our Cherry Orchard page has the play, and the free run lines tool lets you rehearse other classic scenes with voices reading the other parts. For more on working without a partner, see our guide on how to rehearse a scene alone.

Absorb the words through the work

Alfreds has a view on line learning that’s worth knowing. In the Radosavljević interview, talking about adapting stories with his actors, he says the words were learned as they rehearsed, and that it’s better if actors “absorb the text through the work” rather than learning it “like parrots.”

That fits points of concentration well. Every run is another pass through the words, and each pass ties them to something real: the cold, the hour, the person who’s late. Most of us won’t get Alfreds-length rehearsals, so you’ll likely still need to drill the words before the first run-through. But once they’re mostly in, repeated runs with a fresh point each time can do a lot of the rest.

There’s a caution. A fresh point doesn’t license fresh words. If a run with a new point makes you paraphrase, go back to the page and fix the line before your next run. The freedom Alfreds wants is in the playing, not in the text.

Keeping it different every night

The title of the book is a promise about performance, not rehearsal. In the same interview, Alfreds recalls one of his company’s early shows, built from the Arabian Nights, where each scene had a fixed start and finish and the actors found the way between them live: “They had to improvise every night.” He says it took a lot of discipline.

You won’t usually be working that loosely. Most productions fix the blocking, the words, and the shape of the evening, and your castmates rely on them. But the principle carries over to any show. Keep what’s agreed: the lines, the moves, the objective, the actions. Let the inner life move. A different point of concentration on a Wednesday matinee changes how you hear your partner without changing anything they need from you.

That’s also why the method suits a long run. What deadens a long run is knowing what’s coming. A point of concentration gives you something you don’t know yet: what tonight’s fact will do to this scene. For more ways to stay present over a long run, see our guide on keeping a performance fresh in a long run.

Questions actors ask

Is Different Every Night only for directors?

No. The book is written for both actors and directors, according to its publisher. Reviewer Ian Spiby describes the first half as setting out Alfreds’s approach to acting and the second half as advice on directing with it. An actor can get a lot from the concepts and the text work alone.

Is Alfreds’s method the same as Stanislavski’s?

It builds on Stanislavski. Reviewer Ian Spiby describes it as based on Stanislavsky, his Wikipedia biography also names Laban as an influence, and the vocabulary (objectives, actions, given circumstances) is his. What Alfreds adds is a detailed rehearsal process aimed at keeping a performance open, with steps like points of concentration.

Can I use a point of concentration in an audition or a self-tape?

Yes, in preparation. Run your sides with several different points, notice which ones bring the scene alive, and go into the room with your objective and actions clear. Don’t try to juggle a new point while you’re being read in for the first time. Keep it simple and let what you found in practice show up.

Should I tell my director I’m working this way?

You don’t need to. As long as the lines, blocking, and agreed choices stay the same, what you hold in your head is your own business. If a point makes a scene play very differently, mention it in rehearsal before trying it in front of an audience.