I have been talking to more directors recently, and one such conversation helped me think about gesture a little better than before. Gesture is a crucial part of the eighteenth-century stage: actors’ attitudes were frequently commented on, and books and manuals both reproduce classical oratorical rules for using the body and proffer their own advice on everything from the kind of paintings actors should imitate to the exact degree at which their hands or feet should be held. I haven’t really been able to think about all this stuff with a great deal of sophistication, and this recent conversation helped me on the way to doing so.

The director was telling me about her rehearsal practice, especially the way in which she included lots of physical games and unusual movement exercises, like climbing on tables or performing yoga poses. She did not do this because such movements were an integral part of her vision for the drama she was working on, but rather as a way of extending the physical vocabulary of her performers. When her actors came to work on scenes with her, they would hopefully then feel enabled to do a greater range of things on stage than they would normally do: after all, why on earth would you have the reflex to climb up on a table in the middle of a scene, without having practiced doing so a couple of days previously?

It was the idea of extending an actor’s physical vocabulary that struck me, as I realized that eighteenth-century advice about gesture might have the same purpose. Rather than carefully striking a pose or making a prescribed movement on a certain line, actors – many of whom would be performing plays with only cursory preparation – could instead draw on their own experience of gesture dynamically, as opportunities presented themselves in the course of a scene. Advice about gesture is thus not tied to a specific script or even sentiment: following such advice would instead build up a performer’s toolkit of stage behaviours, providing them with a greater variety of actions. After all, why would you stretch about your hands and lean back on your knees, if you had not got such movements into your body as a suitable representation of fear?