Location: NUHRI Creative Practice Event, Newcastle Stella Adler was trained by Stanislavski and went on to train Marlon Brando, Robert de Niro and Harvey Keitel. Her Studio of Acting in in Los Angeles and New York continues to this day. This paper puts Adler’s actor training methods into conversation with writing about acting from the…

Location: Oxford Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture Seminar (online) Francis Gentleman wrote of how David Garrick’s Jaffeir ‘beggars description, by an amazing variety of transitions, tones and picturesque attitudes’. Such praise was not uncommon: many of those writing about the stage in the eighteenth century praised the ability of playwrights to script and actors to execute…

Location: SELLL Visiting Speaker Series, Newcastle University (online) A chance to present my newly published book to colleagues.

Location: Newberry Library and R18 Collective Workshop (online) This event began with four key questions: How might we conceive of Restoration and eighteenth-century plays as part of our living repertoire?  In what sense are they vital for this moment? What is their performative potential in the present? How might we conceive of Restoration and eighteenth-century…

Location, BSECS 2022, Online This was a contribution to a roundtable on ‘Eighteenth-Century Theatre Today’. Here are my notes for my contribution. ‘Read not Dead’, R18C revivals, ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’ are all – to a greater or lesser extent – inspired by Restoration and eighteenth-century texts. They are focussed on a ‘product’: it’s about getting…

Location: NUHRI Research Event, Northern Stage, Newcastle This talk consisted of a presentation of my forthcoming What Would Garrick Do? book, and my participation in a ‘fishbowl’ discussion. For the latter I, and two others had to respond to the question: What is the value of humanities research to performance practice and what are the…

Location: BSECS 2020, St Hugh’s College, Oxford University Recent work on this play – a companion to Centlivre’s The Gamester (1705) – has explored its critique of gambling, its representation of female agency, and its engagement with natural philosophy. My approach is a different: I propose to take the common eighteenth-century parallel between the stage…

Location: Department of Education, University of York I propose to do three things in this seminar. First I will briefly present the unprecedented quantity of writing about acting that appeared in England in the 1700s as a rich, but neglected, source of material for contemporary practitioners and teachers. Second, I will argue that unlocking the…

Location: Middle Modern Seminar, Newcastle University This work-in-progress session allowed me to share work on my book introduction, and to launch a debate on how we write introductions to research into the period 1700-1900. I identified three tensions as sources of difficulty: Familiarity and Alienation Summary and Preparation Change and Inertia

Location: International Congress on the Enlightenment, Edinburgh Aaron Hill’s translation of Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732) was first performed in 1735. Writing a preface to the English play in 1817, Richard Cumberland enumerated the work’s numerous faults: the verse was ‘not sufficiently diversified’, the plot ‘cannot boast of that intricacy which perplexes, and that denouement which surprises’,…