This project examines whether eighteenth-century material about the theory and practice of acting can nourish contemporary performance work. It won a Newcastle University Humanities Faculty Impact Fund grant in 2022.
I am working with theatre companies in Tyneside, Teeside, Bristol and London to develop rehearsal exercises inspired by sources from the 1700s. Those exercises, along with essays describing their origins and development, will be published by Bloomsbury in a book called What Would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth Century.
If you would like to find out more about this project, please contact me on my Newcastle address. I also provide a (slightly updated) extract from the book proposal below.
This book offers two things.
First, it gives its readers an analytical synthesis of the vast amount of writing about acting that appeared in the course of the eighteenth century. This writing, which includes letters, diaries, treatises, anthologies and much else besides, was unprecedented in English culture and responded to both an expansion in theatre audiences and the emergence of such star actors as Susannah Cibber, David Garrick and Sarah Siddons. My research reveals how such writing, although little studied now, laid the foundation for debates and training methods that continue to this day.
Second, this book uses eighteenth-century writing about acting as the foundation for a series of exercises, developed collaboratively with professional actors, directors and voice coaches. These exercises will help readers study and perform plays from any period, and not just those performed in the 1700s. Thus simultaneously rooted in historical practice and adapted to the needs of contemporary theatre professionals, these exercises can also be studied either individually or as a fully integrated process for preparing a performance. In either case, such active engagement with the theatre-making of the past provides the following:
- A challenge to contemporary theatrical norms, encouraging the independence of actors in rehearsal and performance while providing directors with a new vocabulary for framing their vision of a play.
- A model for the integration of other artistic practices into theatrical process, following eighteenth-century actors’ own endeavours to incorporate sculpture, music and painting into their performances.
- A re-contextualisation of theatre training techniques, revealing the connections between the practice of the 1700s and the theories of Stanislavsky, Meisner, Meyerhold, Bogart and others.
- A new approach to research collaboration between practitioners and academics, thanks to a focus on historically-informed process and preparation rather than on the public performance of an academically-significant text.
In addition to these four points, the historical material at the heart of this book also sustains in general a distinctly non-prescriptive approach to theatre training. By combining the sensibilities of academic theatre history with the practical demands of theatre method, this work avoids presenting itself as another gospel on how to become a great actor or director. Instead, it encourages its users to become co-creators with the theorists and performers of the distant past, at first exploring their work through the exercises provided and then making their own innovations as they incorporate their experiences into their own practice.
The book breaks down into an introduction, conclusion and eight short chapters (Feelings, Cultivation, Observation, Character, Voice, Action, Company, Audience, Reflection). The introduction provides a general overview of eighteenth-century theatre and demonstrates the rich and inspirational quality of the period. Each of the eight chapters offers an account of one aspect of theatre from the 1700s, and then tells the story of, first, how sources relating to this aspect inspired and exercise, and, second, how this exercise then evolved through workshops. It is left to readers to continue the story of the exercise and make it their own. The conclusion offers some advice for how to do that, and also looks at how certain exercises may be better suited to different kinds of actor training (theatre, film, TV, young adult, toddler, etc.)
A small note:
The title of this book echoes an eighteenth-century title. It also contains a pun that captures the two kinds of material I will be using. First, material describing what Garrick and others would actually do, six days a week, on the stage in the 1700s. Second, material written in this period by people who enjoyed hypothesizing about what great actors would need to do to produce the best possible performances.