The history of acting in twelve chapters
A personal and unscientific meander through five hundred years of British theatre
Introduction
Yes, it is my intention to post a chapter, or parts of a chapter, in chunks, every month, of a book about acting.
I've worked in and been intrigued by the world of theatre all my (long) life. I am not an academic, and as with all my books this one is written for the purpose of entertainment first and edification second, hence the subtitle. It will be comprehensive up to a point, and of course thoroughly researched, but I may dwell on certain aspects or on specific people not because they are significant but because they happen to intrigue me, or because I have already researched them for my novels.
What is an actor?
An actor broadly speaking is someone who spends his or her working life pretending to be someone else. It’s an odd way to make a living but there is never a shortage of people wanting to do it. This, in more recent times at least, possibly springs from the image of the star of stage or screen living it up in LA, Paris or London (or all three) and constantly gracing the pages of tabloids and social media and being witty and sexy on the Graham Norton Show.
These people of course are the tip of a large iceberg, but it’s not often you hear about the large majority of actors who at any one time are out of work. I won’t call these people failures because the acting business is above all fickle and unpredictable, so what separates the working actor from the resting actor is as often as not luck, or useful contacts, or the ability to network or be in the right place at the right time. Talent doesn’t necessarily lead to success, and a lack of talent doesn’t necessarily preclude it.
As I said, it’s an odd way to make a living.
Acting is not a glamorous profession
Even for the successful actor, so-called, there can be hours of tedium waiting all day on a film set, often in horrendously hot or cold conditions, just to film one minute of screen time. On stage there’s the tedium of replicating a performance in a long run night after night for months or even years.
And that’s to say nothing of the gossip and the rumours and the intrusion from the press and social media, and the loss of freedom and anonymity or the ability to eat a meal in public without a camera appearing from nowhere to record the innermost workings of your throat.
So why become an actor?
There are as many reasons for wanting to be an actor as there are actors. One could not be blamed for assuming actors are show-offs who like to be the centre of attention, which is true in one sense although a surprising amount of actors are actually quite shy. The general public may be quite disappointed to find the hilarious extrovert they have watched on stage is actually rather reserved and introverted off it.
When you think about it however it makes sense. A lot of actors don’t really think they exist unless they have been given a character to play created by someone else. Actors as a whole I might argue don’t have the strongest sense of identity, hence the desire to spend their time being someone else.
As times goes on I intend to collar a few of them to find out the answer to this and to many other questions.
It was very different in the past
Right up until late in the 19th century acting was not a profession to be proud of. That’s not to say that actors, and in particular actresses (and unfashionably I intend to use that word to draw the distinction between the two) were no better than they should be. There were actors of stature such as David Garrick and William Macready, who was head boy at Rugby school, but generally speaking until Henry Irving became the first theatrical knight in 1895 acting was not regarded as a particularly respectable profession, and many would-be thesps were ostracised by their friends and family for their choice of profession and regarded by the public at large as ‘rogues and vagabonds’.[1]
How did these people get to be actors in the first place?
In a number of ways, is the answer. Nowadays an actor has usually trained at a drama school for three years, or perhaps studied drama at university. Now that the actors’ union Equity has a looser hold on the profession others find their way into the spotlight by what I might term dubious means: through reality television or open auditions.
It’s a tricky one, this. Three years at a drama school won’t assure you steady work, or even a deep depository of talent. And there are plenty of actors – older ones usually, such as Michael Caine – who never trained at all. Formal training in England didn’t exist before the beginning of the 20th century. Before that actors learned on the job, from other actors or from writers or theatre managers or anyone else who considered they had the right to tell an actor how to do his or her job. An apprenticeship in the provinces was usually the best initiation. Henry Irving spent sixteen years in the provinces learning his craft before he ever appeared on stage in London.
In the past – and to some extent in the present – it helped if someone in your family was an actor. Ellen Terry came from a family of actors and it was assumed she and her sister would follow suit. Her father taught her elocution and of course knowing something about the profession and the people who worked in it was invaluable.
On the other hand having an actor parent – or in my case an actress mother – isn’t necessarily an advantage. My mother, like many others, did all she could to dissuade me from entering what she described as ‘this wretched profession’. She knew the pitfalls, the heartaches, the uncertainty and the downright unfairness. But like many others her recalcitrant daughter took not the slightest bit of notice.
How does an actor find work?
That’s the million dollar question.
Actors nowadays rely on agents to find them work. They also rely on their contacts, people they know or who they’ve worked with before. The ambitious actor will network and promote himself with ruthless dedication, it’s regarded as a necessary part of the job.
In the old days there was an old boys’ network – and I use the word “boys” advisedly – that existed in social spaces such as the BBC Club Bar, where I spent many agonising hours attempting and usually failing to attract the attention of directors and producers and casting directors. The ability to ‘schmooze’ should not be underestimated.
I once experienced what it was like to be the other side of the casting desk, so to speak. By chance I found myself working as casting assistant to a director on a West End play. It was my job to contact actors’ agents and invite them to send their clients for an interview with the director, followed for the successful applicants with an audition.
There was one actor in particular – I forget his name, and I wouldn’t name him even if I could remember it – who schmoozed the director in the interview in what I thought was a particularly obvious and obnoxious way. Yet to my surprise the (extremely experienced) director was totally disarmed and called him back to audition. When the actor, as I predicted, faded to nothing on stage the director turned to me and said, with no trace of irony, ‘That is so surprising, he was so impressive in the interview’.
It seems even the most hardened director is not immune to false flattery.
The other side of the casting desk is another world; a world where the agents who used never to return my calls were suddenly on the phone to me at all hours of the day or night. Where actors who would normally not give me the time of day became my best friends.
Yes, if you need your ego boosting become a casting director, not an actor.
So, who am I?
All you really need to know is that I was once an actress, for around twenty years and an awfully long time ago; before computers, before social media, almost before tabloids. That I began my career as an acting ASM (assistant stage manager) in provincial weekly rep, where we produced a new play every week and where, without an ounce of training, I learned the business the hard way, by just doing it. There’s no space here to go into the pros and cons of such a beginning; although I will say that having worked backstage I not only learned how a play is put together I appreciated the inestimable value of the people who work their socks off backstage and are rarely noticed until they misplace a prop or mistime a lighting cue.
From there I spent the next twenty odd years on stage in the provinces and playing small parts on television in England, and larger ones in Australia, before I finally gave up when I had my first child. Since then I’ve continued to work in one form or other in the entertainment business, firstly as a scriptwriter, a play scout and a script reader and later, unexpectedly, as a theatre teacher and lecturer. In between times I founded an organisation called The Children’s Musical Theatre of London producing devised musicals with primary school children in partnership with a composer and choreographer. I’ve written the lyrics to songs for musicals and cabaret, and I have organised theatre tours here in London for overseas visitors, mostly students.
Most important of all perhaps, I have been on this planet for a very long time and when it comes to theatre I have seen a lot of changes. While I admit I’ve spent what at the time felt like an eternity losing the will to live watching Very Boring Plays on stage, I retain what I can only call an abiding curiosity about this strange profession and the people who work in it. In a world prone to hyperbole, there is simply no experience in my opinion to compare with sitting in the audience watching live actors acting their hearts out on stage just for me, or so it seems.
Enough. I will have nothing to
say for the remaining chapters.
See you soon for Chapter 1: Shakespeare and before.
[1] ‘Rogues and vagabonds’ was a term used in the 16th century to describe people, including actors, who wandered around the country without authorisation; hence the need for Shakespeare and his contemporaries for aristocratic patrons. More on this later.