I’m sure we all had at least one of them in our class at drama school. The effortlessly confident, charming, effusive type who could swan through their training on natural talent alone; turning up late and usually hungover, stumbling over lines in the last week of rehearsals, sometimes skipping classes all together, but always somehow dazzling in performance.

How infuriating these people are! Most notably because they are often universally well-liked and admired as performers, by students and tutors alike, a presence on stage that shines beyond any taught craft. They graduate with flying colours, pick up agents and generally go from great job to great job lighting up people’s lives. The bastards.

Let me be clear about this: I am not, and never have been, one of these people.

At drama school, I initially hid behind books and character research for fear of actually letting go and exposing myself to criticism, learning my lines before the first day of rehearsals, trying to intellectualise a role rather than fully inhabit it. When we did our first Shakespeare project in the second year, I convinced myself I needed to read all 38 of his plays  in preparation.

So, instead of relaxing and letting the lessons of my first year bed in, I spent my summer slogging my way through the entire History Cycle on Australian beaches. I devoured Shakespeare biographies and even academic studies contextualising his work, convinced I needed to know everything there was to know about the man before I could even think about starting work on the play in question.

Did this help me come to grips with inhabiting the role in rehearsals? Not really, no.

But it’s not quite as clear cut as that. In the context of Shakespeare of course, the more you read, and the more you speak it, the more familiar it becomes; but can speculating on how Shakespeare really felt about his wife, or researching into his father’s financial circumstances ever have any true bearing on the end product?

David Mamet, whose book ‘True and False’ I discussed in this column last month, unsurprisingly takes a hard line on this issue: “It’s just words on a page, people,” he reassures us. The most important job for an actor is to understand the objectives of a character and then play the actions he uses to try and achieve them. Anything else results in “untruthful performances” and “funny voices”, he says.

Now, the 19-year-old me could have done with a dose of this, that’s for sure. A much needed kick up the arse into letting go of the passive, academic approach and actually using the language actively; but is there ever a place for developing the behind-the-scenes research? Many would argue that to create a fictional back-story for your character that works in conjunction with the facts provided in the script is essential in any role, no matter how big or small. Big champions of this method, such as Stanislavsky and Hagen, would demand further specifics before starting work on a scene: What time of the day is it? Where have you just been? What is the weather like?

In my time as an actor I have become better at recognising my shortcomings, and although I might indulge my obsessive side every so often (I recently read all 1,400 pages of ‘War and Peace’ for a production of Anna Karenina, which didn’t exactly have a direct relation to the play in hand), I now like to think of asking these basic questions as the necessary groundwork undertaken in order to facilitate that fascinating spontaneity in performance.

The theory work in moderate amounts will always inform your performance in some way, even if the majority of this is invisible to the audience; many fundamental character choices cannot be made by the actor without using a certain amount of imagination, but this work needs to be abandoned in the rehearsal room. Learned and then forgotten about.

Audiences don’t go to the theatre to see an actor’s opinion on a play, they go to see a play. It is no coincidence that the word play is itself an active verb – we go to the theatre to see things happening.

Your instincts are as important to you as your analytical skills in the theatre. This is not to say you should subscribe to the slovenly “it’ll be alright on the night” credo, more that you should learn that after a point, it’s just you and your wits out there – so keep them about you.

When we have fully understood what is needed from us in a piece, and have settled into the blocking, we can start to enjoy ourselves, and that’s when a company really starts reacting to each other and playing each moment at a time.

And that my friends, is true spontaneity.