Location: TaPRA 2024, Northumbria University

Three hundred years ago, in response to a theatrical culture shaped by the 1737 Licencing Act, literary nationalism, mass media, a star culture, and more, writing about acting in English exploded. For the last five years, in professional and amateur setting around the UK, I have been seeking ways to share this historical reflection with contemporary acting practitioners as a way of using the past to make new work today. One of the greatest challenges in doing so has been the language of my material. Charles Macklin, Susannah Cibber, David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, and others did not use the same words that we use now. In particular, they and their contemporaries used the language of ‘passions’ to describe and teach the process of acting.

In this fifteen-minute paper, I detail briefly the features of the language actors and others used to write about and teach performance three hundred years ago, while also showing how using and translating that language might – with care – produce a generative framework for contemporary pedagogues engaged in training tomorrow’s performers. I draw on examples taken from my recent publication, What Would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth Century (Bloomsbury 2024), and thus offer here a reduced version of that volume’s argument in favour of a paradigm shift in the ways that modern practitioners incorporate historical material: not as something to be recreated into a new product, but rather as a means of inspiring new reflection on theatrical process.