Location: BSECS 2024, St Hugh’s College, Oxford In the eighteenth century it was common to a call a poem, a statue, or a painting a ‘performance’. One of the things that the word meant, for Samuel Johnson, was ‘composition’ or ‘work’. Nowadays this meaning of ‘performance’ has faded, marked as rare in the second edition…

Location: Swedish National PhD Lecture, Uppsala University, Sweden Eighteenth-century English writing about drama, both on the page and on the stage, frequently makes use of the concept of nature. The acting of David Garrick was praised by Arthur Murphy as ‘an exact imitation of nature’, while Samuel Johnson claimed that Shakespeare’s plays offered ‘just representations…

Location: Performance Research Network Collaboration Workshop, Newcastle University, UK As this was a short contribution to a roundtable, based on one of my book projects, I provide the entirety of my script below. Thinking of something to say today was difficult. I find talking about collaboration difficult. On one hand, I can say, in a…

Location: BSECS 2023, St Hugh’s College, Oxford This was a workshop rather than a presentation, which I pitched as follows: Learn to play basset, ombre, and other such games, and try your luck against the bank in a laid-back setting. In so doing, I hope we’ll learn something about eighteenth-century sociability, the antics that led…

Location: Actio! Actio! Acio! Symposium, Leiden University, Netherlands For the last year, I have been working with theatre professionals around the UK to develop rehearsal exercises inspired by eighteenth-century acting theory and practice. This paper tells the story of one such exercise, based on an account by John O’Keeffe of one of Charles Macklin’s actor…

Location: BSECS 2022, Online This paper was my first attempt at reformulating something I cut from early plans for my book. That book, Criticism, Performance, and the Passions is all about the way people wrote about the performance of emotion in the eighteenth century. Specifically, I was interested in how writers paid a lot of…

Location: Newcastle Inter-Faculty Seminar on Emotions, Online I redelivered a version of this paper for this event.

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.