Don’t try this at home
We’ve all done it. Whether it’s putting up shelves or running a marathon or writing a book called The History of Acting in Twelve Chapters and realising too late you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.
As I pass the halfway point in my enterprise I realise that trying to cover five hundred years of theatre history in a book of manageable size means I can only devote a few pages to each person or topic. This means a large amount of research has to be whittled down to what I call the essence.
I am very fond of the word essence. When I’m teaching theatre to students I ask them after each play we see to try to sum it up in a few words, in other words to look for the essence, or what they think might have been the spark that first triggered the idea in the playwright’s head, to mix a metaphor.
Essence is an essential part, you could say the most essential part, of every creator’s work. A novelist or playwright may start out with one idea, even one sentence, that grows and morphs and may well end up quite different as the project develops. But without that initial spark, that essence, the project would never have happened in the first place.
So when I write about actors I am trying to look for their essence, what it was about them that made them so extraordinary in the eye of the beholders and commentators. It involves a huge amount of research that I then have to whittle down, so I inevitably begin with Wikipedia (What?? – I hear you cry in horror) – for several specific reasons.
A lot of the books I have been using for reference were written a long time ago, and much of the information in them, researched in all good faith, has been shown more recently to be not quite on the mark. A (minor) case in point is that John Rich built the theatre at Covent Garden on the proceeds from his production at Lincoln’s Inn of The Beggar’s Opera. Another is the cause of the some of the theatre fires, and the issuing of the two theatre patents.
As new information comes to light it appears immediately on Wikipedia, and in all honesty I have yet to come upon anything downright inaccurate on that website. Not only do the editors quote their sources – which I use as a reference for my research – the pages are updated regularly. Moreover Wikipedia gives us condensed versions of their subjects’ lives, and from that it is easier to get an idea of their essence.
But it’s not easy. As Mark Twain once wrote to a friend:
“I apologize for such a long letter. I didn't have time to write a short one.”
Writing a biography is easy. All you have to do is research, research and research and then stick it all down in a readable manner and let the reader draw their own conclusions. Distilling a person’s life into two pages requires a lot more skill and understanding, and risk. The upside is that anyone giving my pages anything approaching a close reading should come away with something from every chapter. (How many times have you read an entire 250-page biography and felt you end up not knowing what the character was really like?) The downside is if I’ve got it wrong, I’ve got it seriously wrong. And the hope is, dear reader, that someone out there will point it out to me.
So far the most elusive person I’ve come across has been Sarah Siddons. She was undoubtedly a superstar, believed to be the greatest actress who ever lived at any time anywhere. She was not particularly flashy. She was no good in comedy. Unlike many other actresses she led an exemplary life offstage. She was versatile, immersed, intelligent, hard-working and able to convey raw and uninhibited emotion on stage – qualities that could be applied to many actresses throughout the ages up to today.
It is frustrating, but perhaps it goes to show that the essence of our greatest actors did not have to lie in their innovation or their flashiness or in their radically new interpretations of traditional roles, but in something less definable. I shall let myself off this particular hook by passing the buck to William Hazlitt:
‘Her nature seemed always above the circumstances with which she had to struggle; her soul to be greater than the passion labouring in her breast . . . She did the greatest things with child-like ease; her powers seemed never tasked to the utmost, and always as if she had inexhaustible resources still in reserve.’[1]
[1] Hazlitt essay on Macbeth in Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, cited in Sarah Siddons, Roger Manvell