What Would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth Century

James Harriman-Smith (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

256 Seiten

2024
Methuen Drama (Verlag)
978-1-350-17195-4 (ISBN)

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The stage of the 1700s established a star culture, with the emergence of such acting celebrities as David Garrick, Susannah Cibber, and Sarah Siddons. It placed Shakespeare at the heart of the classical repertoire and offered unprecedented opportunities to female actors. This book demonstrates how an understanding of the practice and theories circulating three hundred years ago can generate new ways of studying and performing plays of all kinds in the present.
Eight short essays – on emotions, cultivation, character, voice, action, company, audience, and reflection – provide two things: a vivid introduction to the practice and ideas of the eighteenth-century stage, and the story of how these past practices and ideas were used in collaborative workshops around the UK to create new rehearsal exercises. Designed to work alone or in combination, these exercises are also open to further adaptation and analysis as part of a work that treats theatre writers of the past as potential collaborators for those interested in theatre today.
Marrying academic and professional theatre expertise, this book ranges through a vast archive of writing about acting, from private letters and battered promptbooks, through to philosophical treatises and celebrity biographies. The exercises, stories, and ideas shared here capture the strangeness of this material – and sometimes its surprising familiarity, as questions asked of actors then seem to anticipate those questions we ask now.
A truly unique offering, What would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth Century offers a fascinating deep-dive into an important time in theatre history to illuminate practices and processes today.

James Harriman-Smith is a lecturer and public orator at Newcastle University, UK. His research focusses on writing about acting in the 18th century and he has published widely on aesthetics, editorial and performance theory.

Introduction
The Essays:
Emotion
Cultivation
Character
Voice
Action
Company
Audience
Reflection
The Exercises:
Garrick’s Scale
Dramatic Gesture
Attitudes
Type and Scenario
Proteus
False Tone
Cue-Script
Macklin’s Garden
Emphasis
Universal Expression
Five Rooms
The Hiss
Great Sensibility
Clairon’s Model
Appendix
Works Cited
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	09.01.2024
Zusatzinfo	15 bw illus
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	138 x 216 mm
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Theater / Ballett
Themenwelt	Schulbuch / Wörterbuch
ISBN-10	1-350-17195-6 / 1350171956
ISBN-13	978-1-350-17195-4 / 9781350171954
Zustand	Neuware