Acting Styles

Introduction

Illuminating a play’s text for the audience remains the primary task for actors, which they accomplish according to the nature of the literature they are called on to perform. A fiery melodrama with stock characters, for example, requires broad gestures and declamatory speech, whereas a realistic play with complex characterization necessitates a more lifelike approach. At the same time, actors, as the principal instruments of drama, reflect, as all artists do, the values, tastes, and fashions of the society in which they perform. Because a theater audience registers its approval or disapproval at the moment of artistic “creation” (in the sense that all stage plays are fully created only when performed), the actor remains one of the few artists who immediately respond to the demands of the public. Theater represents the most immediate of art forms, reflecting societal moods and anticipating change; thus, as society evolves, it creates new trends in dramatic literature, with acting styles reflecting those changes. A twenty-first century American audience viewing a nineteenth century melodrama would find the broad gestures and declamatory speech laughable; conversely, the nineteenth century audience would be bored and confused by the stark realism of twenty-first century American stage.

Actors are their own instruments. Whereas sculptors have clay with which to mold their art, actors use their voices, bodies, and individual characteristics as their clay. Actors’ methodology—how they create a role—lies at the center of a debate that has raged for centuries. One theory holds that actors should create the role through mechanical means; that is, they should not experience the emotion of the character but should simulate it through logical and deliberate choice of gesture and vocal inflection. In contrast, the creative or psychological approach insists that actors should create from the inside, emphasizing motivation and emotion. The first theory, or external approach, presupposes the importance of characterization over the personality of the actor, whereas the second, or internal approach, emphasizes the importance of the actor’s emotions projected through the character. In the early 1900’s, the great Russian actor-teacher Konstantin Stanislavsky fused the two theories into one system.

Renaissance Acting

In the mid-twentieth century, scholars looking back at the Elizabethan stage focused on what acting styles may have looked like in plays such as Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (pr. c. 1585-1588) or William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601) or King Lear (pr. c. 1605-1606), debating on the differences between a more formal style of acting—with an emphasis on the technical aspects of delivery—and a more natural style, emphasizing the internal, psychological life of the character. The two great actors from the English Renaissance—Richard Burbage, the leading actor of Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and Edward Alleyn,leading actor of Marlowe’s company, the Lord Admiral’s Men—typified some of the differences in acting styles that characterized the period. Each was praised as the finest talent of his day; however, Burbage, as Hamlet, instructs the visiting players on proper playing, clearly distinguishing between poor acting—the tragedians who “strut and bellow” and “saw the air too much” with bad gestures, and the clowns who improvise and upstage fellow actors—and correct acting, suiting “the action to the word, the word to the action” so as to observe and not go beyond the “modesty of nature.” (It must be added that relatively little is known about acting styles on the Elizabethan stage.) While the arguments about Elizabethan acting styles focused the debate between what constituted “formal” or “natural” acting, Alfred Harbage’s seminal article in 1939, “Elizabethan Acting,” argued for a more formal style, while Marvin Rosenberg’s response to Harbage, “Elizabethan Actors: Men or Marionettes?” (1954) argued for the opposite. Shakespeare’s company probably employed a more lifelike approach than that of its rivals. The Globe Playhouse, like other playhouses of its day, precluded the use of much scenery, thereby focusing the audience’s attention on the actor. However, Burbage, using the lines written for him by Shakespeare, made an advertisement for a superior style of playing in the midst of Hamlet, and clearly the Chamberlain’s Men believed they presented a more “realistic” style of play than that of other London acting companies.

The characters in Shakespeare’s plays (especially in the later ones) are complex compared with those of his contemporaries. Burbage, who played Othello, Hamlet, and King Lear, must have employed a subtle style in order to capture the many nuances of those multifaceted heroes. Nowhere is the disparity in characterization more evident than in Marlowe’s treatment of Barabas in The Jew of Malta (pr. c. 1589), a role played by Alleyn, and Shakespeare’s treatment of Shylock, probably played by Burbage, in The Merchant of Venice (pr. c. 1596-1597). Compared with the complex Shylock, Barabas represents a one-dimensional arch villain roaring his way through a melodramatic revenge tragedy. Broad characters require the actor to use broad strokes, and Alleyn, like Burbage, must have adapted his delivery to suit the material. Perhaps Shakespeare had Alleyn in mind when Hamlet, in his advice to the players, speaks of actors who “tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings . . . .”

Restoration Acting

Acting styles on the Restorationstage borrowed heavily from the French Baroque theater. English audiences traveling to France to see plays during the Commonwealth expected similar fare when the English theaters reopened. One notable difference in the reign of Charles II was the appearance of women on the stage, heretofore portrayed by young men and boys. Interestingly, audiences had some trouble adapting to the change because real women seemed physically larger than the young men and boys to whom audiences were accustomed. Still, the actor’s delivery, particularly in tragedy, was highly formalized and declamatory.

Reflecting the classical tastes of high society, aristocratic norms of decorum, temperance, politeness, and simplicity governed the actor; actor-playwright Colley Cibber, in An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740), said that the theater should be “a school of manners and virtue.” Discussing the actor’s methods, the leading actor of the period, Thomas Betterton, said that the actor carefully catalogs “the passions and habits of the mind [that] discover themselves in our looks, action and gestures.” That the Restoration actors’ approach to their roles was external and technical seems evident in Betterton’s assertion that acting should “never transport the speaker out of himself.” The actors played primarily on the wide apron, or forestage, in front of the proscenium arch, rarely doing something so informal as sitting. Scenery, almost never used as a function of action, served as a backdrop within the proscenium. In 1712, theater manager Christopher Rich, to increase audience capacity, removed the apron at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. This moved the actors farther from the audience and forced them to use the scenery.

Nevertheless, the grandiloquent style of acting flourished. In the early 1700’s, James Quin specialized in vocal effects and formalized acting that exhibited the form rather than the content of tragedy. Versatility became nonexistent because actors were hired to play specific roles that then became their property, unlike the earlier Elizabethan stage, where actors demonstrated versatility by doubling roles. Gradually, however, some actors, such as Charles Macklin, referring to the “hoity-toity tone of the tragedy of that day,” adopted a more natural delivery. Macklin taught his students first to speak the lines as they would in real life and then to add force to them for the stage.

The great actor-manager David Garrick thoroughly revolutionized acting. Criticizing the artificiality of oratorical delivery, Garrick emphasized the use of the correct gesture suited to the spoken line, as well as a more natural delivery (echoing Hamlet’s advice to the visiting players, and underscoring that every age defines what it considers to be “natural”). A masterful technician, he observed people in real life, then meticulously cataloged gestures and movements for the stage. Garrick’s natural delivery caused Quin to remark, “If this young fellow is right then we have all been wrong.” A highly versatile actor, Garrick excelled at both tragedy and comedy, and although his style was considered fresh and natural, he was “not above the stops and starts and drawn-out death scenes that drew applause.” Sarah Siddons, a protégé of Garrick, fulfilled the ideal of tragic acting espoused by François Talma; he described her style as “the union of grandeur without pomp and nature without triviality.”

Nineteenth Century Acting

Excessive emotional display, considered undesirable by actors throughout the Restoration and eighteenth century, became the norm with the rise of English melodrama and the nineteenth century tragedians. Melodrama which flourished in both England and the United States, afforded the actor an opportunity, in Hamlet’s condemnation, to “tear a passion to tatters.” As a way to circumvent the consortium of London playhouses that held licenses for dramatic fare, melodrama, in its original sense, meant theater set to music. A continual musical accompaniment set a tone for emotional scenes on stage, and because the characters were stock villain, hero, heroine, comic man, and comic woman, characterization became simpler. So important did action become to the melodrama that authors wrote elaborate stage directions for the actors, including descriptions of facial expressions such as “revenge burning in his eye” or “his countenance disordered.” Strict conventions governed each stock character, and each type was marked by its idiosyncrasies. The comic characters dressed ludicrously and indulged in such low comedy as face slapping, falling down, and bumping into one another. The villain generally sported a black top hat, frock coat, and cape and boots; his delivery was marked by facial contortions and furtive asides. William Brady, writing of New York’s Bowery Theatre around 1870, recalled a special technique for the villain’s death: “elbows stiff, spine rigid, then fall over backward square on the back of your head.” Audience participation was not discouraged. The villain was regularly hissed and booed and the hero cheered on in his efforts, and it was not uncommon for audience members to comment aloud on an actor’s performance or a piece of stage business. In turn, audience involvement required the actors to become more aggressive in their style. Movement and gesture were performed as broadly as possible, and speech was marked by peculiar pronunciation and special rhythm. Each syllable was voiced with elaborate distinction and sometimes elongated for effect.

The flourishing of melodrama spawned a number of star actors in both England and the United States. These giants of the stage, most of whom got their start in melodrama, assayed the great Shakespearean tragic roles, developed their repertoires to include the parts in which they particularly excelled, and honed their talents to such a degree that their dramatic feats became legendary. The first of these great actors in England was Edmund Kean, whose powers were so great that he reportedly caused an actress playing a scene with him to faint; the Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, allegedly was so carried away by Kean’s performance of Hamlet that he was seized with convulsions. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s comment that watching Kean act was like “reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning,” doubtless meant as a compliment, may provide some insight into the histrionics of Kean’s acting style.

The first great American actor of the period was Edwin Forrest. The feud that developed between Forrest and the English actor William Charles Macready nitiated a lively rivalry between English and American actors that continued into the twentieth century. Because Forrest was not as well trained as his English counterpart, his style was considered blunt, natural, and impulsive, while Forrest and other critics accused Macready of being artificial, cold, and mechanical. The feud culminated in 1849 when Macready, attempting to perform Macbeth (pr. 1606) at the Astor Place Theatre in New York City, was booed off the stage. A riot ensued, and 134 persons were killed. An interesting facet of the Forrest-Macready feud is how acting styles reflect the Zeitgeist. The United States was a young country living out a spirit of revolution and pioneering, and it was natural that Forrest’s simplicity appealed to Americans, just as Macready’s sophistication played successfully to a more complex English culture that had been developing for centuries. Consider, for example, the play President Abraham Lincoln saw at Ford’s Theater when he was assassinated: Our American Cousin (pr. 1858) had the brash, uncouth American outsmart his English cousins, using such homespun language as “sockdologizing”—a word that assassin John Wilkes Booth, himself an actor, knew would draw laughter and conceal his gunshot. Booth’s leap to the stage after shooting Lincoln emulated his own performance in Macbeth months before the assassination.

Versatility was of little importance to the nineteenth century tragedians. They adapted the character to suit their personalities, and unlike the leading actors on the twentieth century English stage, who would later play virtually every role of importance in the Shakespearean canon, these earlier stars played only a few parts and were best known for one or two portrayals. Kean was most famous for his King Lear, Macready for his Macbeth and his Hamlet, and Charles Kemble was regarded as the outstanding Mercutio of his day. Later in the century, Sir Henry Irvingwas acclaimed for his Hamlet, and in the United States, Edwin Booth, brother to John Wilkes, was most famous as Othello. Another American, Joseph Jefferson, achieved star status with his portrayal of Rip Van Winkle. Audiences did not go to the theater to see King Lear or Othello—they went to see Kean as Lear or Booth as Othello. English actress Ellen Terry noted that although Henry Irving “expressed himself in a multiplicity of parts, . . . he was always the same Irving.”

This practice of infusing the part with the actor’s personality was criticized by the French actor Benoit-Constant Coquelin Writing for Harper’s Monthly in 1887, he asserted that the English practice resulted in “revolting hideousness” and “naked realities. People do not go to the theatre for that sort of thing.” This prompted a reply from Irving, who wrote that Coquelin “had lost sight of the fact that in tragedy . . . it is rather the soul of the artist than his form which is moulded by the theme.” Dion Boucicault joined the debate, saying that although Shakespeare’s great heroes suffer from different causes, they suffer alike, in the same historionic key: “Booth, Forrest, Macready, Kean, (Tommaso) Salvini always presented the same man in a different costume.” Coquelin fired a parting salvo, saying that the French actors are great “generalizers,” whereas the English concern themselves with the individual.

The French actress Sarah Bernhardt, when asked to list the requirements of great acting, replied “voice, voice, and more voice.” Her English and American contemporaries probably concurred, as ample evidence suggests that vocal technique was the principal instrument of tragic acting of the late nineteenth century. Drama critic and author William Winter, commenting on the English actor James William Wallack, said that “his sonorous tones flowed over the action in a veritable silver torrent of musical sound.” Shortly before his death in 1893, Edwin Booth recorded, on one of the earliest phonographs, some lines from Othello’s senate speech. Booth employed a distinct vibrato—a slightly tremulous effect—in reading the lines. Booth’s contemporaries doubtless used this vocal device, and the custom of “singing the lines” continued well into the twentieth century.

A number of factors caused the decline of melodramatic acting. With the increasing complexity of society, the trauma of World War I, and the twentieth century fascination with psychology, artists began focusing on the realistic and naturalistic aspects of life. The stately grandeur of the nineteenth century theater gave way as playwrights and actors began creating complex characters in real-life situations.

Another factor that contributed to the decline of melodramatic acting—perhaps the most significant—was the advent of the cinema. As the art of cinema developed, audiences expected actors to adopt cinematic techniques for the stage, and by the time sound motion pictures were made, the broad style of melodrama was considered cheap and hammy. Ironically, the earliest films were heavily influenced by melodrama, and some of the more famous melodramas were made into motion pictures, including Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903), The Count of Monte Cristo (1913), and Under the Gaslight (1914). The broad gestures that actors employed in the silent cinema provide an insight into the acting styles of the nineteenth century stage. In those silent films, audiences had to “read” the emotions of the actors before reading their dialogue, which lagged behind the action on the screen.

Impact of Stanislavsky

In the early 1900’s, disillusioned by the staleness of his own acting and in part inspired by the work of the Italian tragedian Salvini, Konstantin Stanislavsky et about to formulate a system of acting that would allow actors to develop their character properly and sustain the portrayal through many performances. The precepts that Stanislavsky set forth in An Actor Prepares (1936) and Building a Character (1949) did more to revolutionize acting styles on the English-speaking stage than any factor before that time. Stanislavsky divided his “System,” as it came to be known, into roughly two parts: the actors’ work on themselves and their work on their roles.

In An Actor Prepares, Stanislavsky asserts that actors must establish the inner life of the character through the use of realistic action combined with their own creative imagination, their concentration, and their physical relaxation. Stanislavsky points out that because emotion is a result of action, it cannot be acted; a correct lifelike action will produce a correct lifelike emotion. Actors stimulate the creative imagination through the use of the “magic if,” postulating an imaginary situation, as in “What would I do if my father died?” It follows that actors can believe in imaginary or theatrical truth as sincerely as they can believe in real truth, just as a little girl believes in the existence of her doll. The System maintains that actors placing themselves in an imaginary situation similar to a real-life situation will experience a real emotion on stage. This concept of emotional memory later played a key role in the American adaptation of the System. To help the actor develop concentration, Stanislavsky introduces the concept of “public solitude”: Even in a crowd, Stanislavsky notes, individuals have their own capsule of space, which moves with them. Tension, Stanislavsky emphasizes, becomes a barrier to natural action, and actors must relax their muscles.

Stanislavsky’s chief teaching tool was improvisation, wherein the actors, working without a text, were given a set of lifelike circumstances and, using their creative imaginations, reacted accordingly. Improvisation became especially popular in the United States, so much so that by the 1960’s some American groups used improvisation even in performance. However, improvisation must be aided by one’s emotional memory or by external stimuli. One exercise had actors choose together the furniture for their stage home from the property room, much as if shopping; in this way, the scene when rehearsed or improvised held a stronger sense of the personal and familiar.

Building a Character addresses the external methods by which the actor creates a characterization. In this work, Stanislavsky stresses the importance of such technical factors as tempo and rhythm, voice and diction, fluidity of movement, and observation of nature. Stanislavsky asserts that the actor must cultivate a sense of aesthetics and likens the composition of a role to that of a musical opus.

By combining the internal or creative approach with the external or technical approach, Stanislavsky evidently thought he had defined the actor’s creative process. He objected to its being called “his System,” saying there is only one system—creative organic nature. Stanislavsky’s teachings and their derivatives, especially as practiced by the Group Theatre and the Actors Studio, were the most important influence on acting styles in twentieth century America.

Although articles describing the System had appeared in American journals as early as 1906, it was not until Richard Boleslavsky (a protégé of Stanislavsky) came to the United States from Russia that the System became known to American actors. Boleslavsky was the first proponent of the System in the United States, teaching at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City in 1923. He also published an article, “Stanislavsky: The Man and His Methods,” in the April, 1923, issue of Theatre magazine. That same year, American Lee Strasberg ourneyed to Moscow to study the System and to attend performances at Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre. Strasberg, an immigrant from Austro-Hungary, had grown up speaking only Yiddish and had spent his early years as an actor in the Yiddish theater. He became fascinated with the acting process and would spend his life teaching and writing on the subject.

The Group Theatre

In 1931, Strasberg, Harold Clurman, and Cheryl Crawford, united by a common interest in the System, founded the Group Theatre Until that time, actors in American theater—following the nineteenth century practice—were cast by type. The Group Theatre founders believed that typecasting stifled the actor’s artistic growth, and they set out to form an ensemble of actors who could express their creative imaginations in the tradition of Stanislavsky. The Group Theatre located a farm in Brookfield Center, Connecticut, and retreated there to live and work together. Some of the notable actors in the original Group Theatre were Franchot Tone, Elia Kazan, Sanford Meisner, Morris Carnovsky, and Stella Adler. Using improvisation as their principal rehearsal technique, the actors began preparations for the first production. Strasberg’s insistence that emotion or affective memory was the most important element of an actor’s creative life led to divisiveness among the Group Theatre’s members and caused a controversy that lasted for many years. Nevertheless, the initial production of Paul Green’s The House of Connelly (pr. 1931) was successful, with drama critic Stark Young pointing out that “there was not an instance of stage cheating for effect, or of hollowness.”

Not all the actors, however, were happy with this approach. Stella Adler, an actress with a decided flair, felt out of place with what she called the “untheatrical” personalities of some of the others. Strasberg termed her style of acting “Jewish emotionalism,” and a disenchanted Adler traveled to Russia to meet with Stanislavsky himself. In Moscow, she worked with Stanislavsky for five weeks, during which time she took careful notes. On her return to the Group, Adler accused Strasberg of misinterpreting Stanislavsky’s writings. Some of the other actors agreed with her, and Strasberg and Crawford, angered by the revolt, promptly resigned.

The Group Theatre’s influence on American acting style was enormous in that the Group Theatre introduced to the stage a new realism that evidently appealed to audiences. Elia Kazan’s performance in Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty (pr. 1935) was so believable that many in the audience thought Kazan was a real cabdriver. The acting style of the Group Theatre was not without its detractors, however, and drama critic Brooks Atkinson accused Kazan of “getting to be a self-conscious actor with purple patches,” who is “studiously spontaneous.” Angered by Atkinson’s review, Kazan quit acting and turned to directing. Other critics accused the Group Theatre of clannishness and of cultivating a mystical reverence for Stanislavsky. Actress Laurette Taylor, famous for the portrayal of the stifling mother Amanda in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (pr. 1944), among her many roles, asked, “Why must they make acting a malady?” Hampered by continuing criticism and financial difficulties, the Group Theatre was forced to close its doors in 1941.

The Actors Studio

Believing that the actor was undervalued in the American theater and united in a desire to pursue realism on the stage, Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis founded the Actors Studio in 1947. At their headquarters on West Forty-eighth Street in New York City, twenty-six actors gathered to study their craft. Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Julie Harris, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden, E. G. Marshall, and Maureen Stapleton were among the original ensemble. Invited to join the Studio in 1951, Lee Strasberg eventually assumed control. Strasberg and Kazan continued the work they had begun at the Group Theatre, stressing improvisation and emotional memory. Actors were required to perform simple exercises such as threading a needle or peeling an orange—the goal of the tasks was not to achieve a mimetic effect but to capture the sense or emotion of the moment, paying attention to the seemingly unnoticed details of the experience. The emphasis on emotion and the private moment signaled a departure from Stanislavsky, with Strasberg referring to his technique as the “Method,” or an “adaptation of the Stanislavsky system.” The Method actoraimed for absolute verisimilitude on stage, especially in terms of the actor’s own feelings. Thus, the audience became a kind of voyeur, and this unique actor-audience relationship bred in some Method actors a contempt for the audience.

In 1947, Brando, considered by many as the prototype of the Method actor, stunned the theater world with his remarkable performance as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Probably more than any other actor, Brando deeply affected the realistic acting style in both theater and cinema. Film actors were naturally intrigued by the Actors Studio and its Method, and in the 1970’s actors such as Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall, and Jack Nicholson joined the Studio. Boleslavsky and Michael Chekhov (another of Stanislavsky’s protégés) had been teaching the System in Hollywood for years, and in 1966, responding to a demand from the film community, Strasberg founded the Actors Studio West

The Method created an enormous debate in American theater. Critic Robert Brustein described the Method as a “subjective, autobiographical approach to acting . . . through a mistaken reading of Stanislavski.” Other critics complained that the Actors Studio’s “torn T-shirt school” ignored the technical aspects of an actor’s training, resulting in actors with poor diction and sloppy stage movement. The emphasis on emotional reality evidently caused some actors to hang on to an emotion at all costs, thus isolating them and preventing interaction with other players on the stage. Indeed, many non-Method actors believed that practicing the Method was neurotic, and indeed, Method actor James Dean called acting “the most logical way for people’s neuroses to manifest themselves.” By the 1970’s, the Actors Studio catered more to film actors than to stage actors, and by the 1980’s, the Method was so out of vogue in American theater that the stage actor generally used the term “Method actor” as an insult. In New York City, acting schools that tried to find a middle ground sprang up everywhere, with the Herbert Berghof School in the West Village, including such teacher/actors and writers as Austin Pendleton, Uta Hagen, and Horton Foote, as but one example. Hagen’s book, Respect for Acting (1973), represents a solid integration of study, technique, and exercises for finding an emotional life for the actor.

English vs. American Approach

English actors, too, were influenced by the movement toward realism, though much less so than the Americans. The English had their acting schools, most notably the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, but the emphasis remained more focused on the technical aspects of acting. Courses in fencing, stage movement, and voice and diction were a regular part of the English student actor’s curriculum. While the American theater had become indigenous, its actors performing in the heavily realistic style of their native drama, the English were more eclectic in their tastes. The proliferation of the repertory system and the founding of the National Theatre of Great Britain(1963-1964) allowed the English actors to continue their classical tradition. Twentieth century English actors gained respect for their important contributions to society: Actors such as Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, and Michael Redgrave, who worked their ways up through the repertory system to emerge as major stars, much like their nineteenth century predecessors, were awarded knighthoods, and Olivier was the first actor to be made Lord of the Realm.

Mid-twentieth century English and American actors regarded one another’s styles with a mixture of admiration and scorn. While the Americans admired, and even envied, the English actors’ ability to perform the classics, many believed that the English actors were cold and artificial. Conversely, the English admired the emotional exuberance of the American actors, but it was not in the English character to attempt such style. Here, perhaps, we might note an anecdote about two fine actors, one from the English tradition and the other the American—Olivier and Dustin Hoffman—who starred in the 1976 film The Marathon Man. Apparently Olivier, on learning that Hoffman had stayed awake all night and even screamed himself hoarse in preparation for a scene in which he shows the signs of torture, asked Hoffman if it were true; having been assured that it was, Olivier is said to have remarked, “My dear boy, why didn’t you simply act?” The American theater in the first half of the twentieth century, however, with the possible exceptions of John Barrymore and Paul Robeson, produced no stars in the English classical tradition.

New Approaches to Shakespeare

The dramas of Shakespeare played a key role in changing acting styles. The twentieth century witnessed a renaissance in performances of Shakespeare’s plays in both England and the United States, Shakespeare being the most frequently performed playwright. Shakespeare festivals had been held regularly since 1879 at Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace, and in 1961 the Royal Shakespeare Company was formed. Interest in performing Shakespeare quickly spread to Canada and the United States, the Bard’s plays becoming so popular in the latter that by the 1980’s virtually every state in the United States had at least one Shakespeare festival, many with facsimiles of the first Globe playhouse.

Innovations of the 1960’s and 1970’s

By the 1960’s, American actors, growing disillusioned with the Method, were searching for new techniques. The politicization of American society at that time led to the formation of agitprop theater companies such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe (formed in 1959 by R. G. Davis), whose chief aim was to make a political statement. The acting style of these groups was rough, broad, and forceful, borrowing from the Italian commedia dell’arte. The performances were often improvised, with the actors working only from a scenario. This kind of “street theater” was not in the mainstream of American theater; further, the orientation of such groups was political, not artistic.

By the 1960’s, the American actor’s training had fallen primarily into the hands of the universities. Most universities had a drama department, and some institutions, such as the Yale School of Drama and the University of Washington, were associated with professional companies. A renewed interest appeared in performing the classics, especially Shakespeare, and those universities with professional training programs provided the student actor with a broad base of classical training, including, like the English schools, courses in voice and diction and stage movement.

In 1962, as artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Peter Brook captured the attention of the theater world with his innovative staging of King Lear with Paul Scofield and Peter Weiss’s production of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (pr. 1964), commonly known as Marat/Sade. The acting was rough, blunt, and simple, and Brook’s work with the actors at the Royal Shakespeare Company resulted in a new physicality in acting style.

In the early 1970’s, Brook’s controversial production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream toured the United States. Brook staged the play metaphorically as a circus, requiring the actors to perform feats of tumbling, juggling, and trapeze-swinging. The idea of “physicalizing” the dramatic moment caught on, and the resultant acting style saw more physicality, simplicity, and clarity of expression. Brook’s insistence that the only essentials for theater were an empty space, an actor, and someone to watch (that is, the audience) elevated the actor’s role in theater to preeminence. The thrust stage became the most popular form of theater architecture because it brought the actor closer to the audience and minimized the use of scenery. The actor’s task was to find the simplest form of expression. Conversely, the stage became more like its Elizabethan predecessor, where actors on the expansive stage were never more than a few feet away from spectators in the pit or those in the balconies before and above them.

Brook’s ideas, as outlined in his book The Empty Space (1968), had the most significant influence on acting stylesince Stanislavsky. Brook asserts that only when the actor’s work is “immediate” can it be fresh, compelling, and exciting. He argues that “Deadly Theatre,” or bad theater, is made deadly in part by preconceived notions about how a particular play should be staged or how a particular role should be played, and “nowhere does the Deadly Theatre install itself so securely . . . as in the works of William Shakespeare.” Brook points out that it is virtually impossible for actors to speak Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”—probably the most famous line on the English-speaking stage—and make it sound fresh. Only by rephrasing the line in their own words can actors begin to make the phrase live. Thus, improvisation is an important tool in that it forces the actor to create from moment to moment—a technique the actor must possess even in performance. Brook objects to the phrase “building a character,” adding that only the mediocre actor builds a character the way a mason builds a wall, brick by brick, working up to a finished product. Truly creative actors, Brook asserts, must be willing to forsake all that they have learned, to “discard the hardened shells of [their] work,” so that in performance they appear “in front of an audience, naked and unprepared.” Only then will the actor’s performance be immediate. Brook arrives at a formula: Theater = R r a. That is, theater is (R) repetition, (r) representation, and (a) assistance. Repetition means the mechanics of the actor’s performance, the repeating night after night the same gestures and lines; representation is the actor’s performance; and assistance is the communication that the actor receives from the audience.

Stanislavsky no doubt would have agreed with much of Brook’s thesis. Both attempted to provide the actor with techniques that would allow the actor’s performance to remain fresh and exciting. Both also shared a concern that the actor continue to explore new styles and techniques. Long after Stanislavsky’s death, the Moscow Art Theatre continued to stage his productions exactly as he directed them. Stanislavsky would have disapproved of these carefully preserved museum pieces, since he cautioned actors that his System was itself subject to ceaseless revision, changing every day. Brook agreed, arguing that in theater “the slate is wiped clean all the time.” He stressed the importance of Stanislavsky’s “magic if,” pointing out that while in life “if” implies fiction and evasion, in the theater it is truth. When the actor and audience “are persuaded to believe in this truth, then the theatre and life are one.”

Role of Cinema

The most notable distinctions in modern acting styles have to do with the emergence of cinema as an art form. Acting schools across the country, and especially on both coasts, reflect the differences in acting formats: classes center on stage work, film acting, and even commercial and soap opera acting. Film schools, such as New York University among many others, offer classes in cinema, which include acting specifically geared toward film and television. Film remains a director’s medium. Many successful film actors rely on the nuances of direction—in close-ups, editing, and camera work—to help them create a role. Film actors often, however, seek “legitimacy” by appearing on the stage. The Public Theatre’s productions of Shakespeare in the Park in New York City’s Central Park affords this opportunity to many actors. The founder, Joseph Papp, ought to make Shakespeare understandable and approachable to the everyday public, which meant using stars from the ubiquitous cinema to draw people to the free performances. As a result, audiences and critics alike were often confronted with well-known and highly praised film actors who had difficulty in delivering Shakespeare’s poetic dialogue or moving comfortably on the stage. Audiences were forced to recognize the differences between the stage and film.

Actors in contemporary cinema rely on many technical aspects of film to popularize their abilities: action stars, handsome and beautiful actors, and even special effects, which emphasize the cult of personality rather than the inherent abilities in their craft. However, that is not to say that many popular stars of the cinema are not capable and talented actors in other venues. Rather, it serves as a reminder that the medium for the actor’s art depends on the anticipated reception of society and its continuing reflection of what each era deems “natural” or “realistic.”

Bibliography

Benedetti, Jean, and Alice L. Crowley. Stanislavski and the Actor: The Method of Physical Action. New York: Routledge, 1998. Benedetti is a well-known Stanislavsky scholar and here provides the first English version of Stanislavsky’s later notes and practical exercises. Benedetti adds his own analysis of Stanislavsky’s acting approach and rehearsal methods.

Brestoff, Richard. Great Acting Teachers and Their Methods. Lyme, N.H.: Smith and Kraus, 1995. A good introduction to some of theater’s renowned teachers and an exploration of how their techniques are used today in universities and acting groups. Each chapter presents a sample “class” to provide the reader with insight into the ways in which methods have historically been taught.

Chekhov, Michael. Lessons for the Professional Actor. Edited by Deirdre Hurst Du Prey. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1985. Chekhov was an actor with the famed Moscow Art Theatre, who trained in the Stanislavsky system of acting and established a studio in New York to work with young Broadway actors. Chekhov’s variation to the Stanislavsky system lay in his emphasis on physical movement, which both blocked “articulation” and could free an actor’s emotions for his stage representations.

Hagen, Uta. Respect for Acting. New York: Macmillan, 1973. Offers acting students a solid starting point for balancing the necessities of technique, a study of the period and the literature to be acted, and exercises that develop an interior life, as well as underscoring the proper technical skills necessary for the actor.

Harbage, Alfred. “Elizabethan Acting.” PMLA 54, no. 2 (1939): 685-708. Harbage’s article began an interest in Elizabethan acting styles that grew in intensity for the next four decades. His contrasts between “formal” and “natural” established the terms in the debate.

Hill, John. The Actor: Or, A Treatise on the Art of Playing. 1755. Reprint. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972. This reissue of Hill’s 1755 work offers enjoyable insight as to what an Englishman in the eighteenth century saw as the “science of acting” and the rules whereby one could perfect the art.

Hirsch, Foster. A Method to Their Madness: A History of the Actors Studio. New York: Da Capo Press, 2001. Traces the evolution of Stanislavsky’s methods from Moscow to the Group Theatre and finally to New York’s Actors Studio. Examines Lee Strasberg’s controversial techniques and the Studio’s famous alumni and goes behind the scenes to observe its modern-day sessions, interview its members, and trace its internal politics.

Rosenberg, Marvin. “Elizabethan Actors: Men or Marionettes?” PMLA 69 (1954): 915-27. Rosenberg’s essay presented a contrast to Harbage’s “Elizabethan Acting,” using some remarkable examples from the Shakespearean era to argue for a more natural approach to the acting on the Elizabethan stage.

Stanislavsky, Konstantin. An Actor Prepares. Translated by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1936. Stanislavsky’s first and most important work on the art of acting, dealing mostly with the actor’s interior life.

Stanislavsky, Konstantin. Building a Character. Translated by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1949. Argues that body, voice, and movement should be united in preparing the actor for his role.