Legitimate Cinema: Theatre Stars in Silent British Films, 1908-1918 available in Hardcover
Legitimate Cinema: Theatre Stars in Silent British Films, 1908-1918
- ISBN-10:
- 0859897257
- ISBN-13:
- 9780859897259
- Pub. Date:
- 01/03/2003
- Publisher:
- University of Exeter Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0859897257
- ISBN-13:
- 9780859897259
- Pub. Date:
- 01/03/2003
- Publisher:
- University of Exeter Press
Legitimate Cinema: Theatre Stars in Silent British Films, 1908-1918
Hardcover
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$112.00Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780859897259 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Exeter Press |
| Publication date: | 01/03/2003 |
| Series: | Exeter Studies in Film History |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Legitimate Cinema
Theatre Stars in Silent British Films, 1908â"1918
By Jon Burrows
University of Exeter Press
Copyright © 2003 Jon BurrowsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85989-725-9
CHAPTER 1
'Only in England is Such Characterisation Possible'
Class, Taste, National Values and the Edwardian Stage Actor
In 1914 Harold Z. Levine, a writer for the American trade paper Moving Picture World, gave some advice to American exporters to the UK who were finding that 'pictures that are winners over here fall flat over there'. He felt there was a simple way to discover which subjects and styles might find a more ready welcome on the other side of the Atlantic: 'The American agent may arrive at some very profitable conclusions by following the English speaking stage. It is interesting to observe what pleases their audiences.' This opening chapter is an attempt to follow Levine's recommendation and explores the cultural image and working practices of various representative types of professional stage actors in the late Victorian and Edwardian era. The exercise is necessary in order to understand better the 'heritage' which British filmmakers were drawing upon in hiring theatre stars: the stylistic and cultural values they intended to adopt and the kinds of audiences that, following Levine's logic, could be expected to tag along with them. It is important to get some sense of how the stage legends of the period fitted into their primary professional sphere in order to grasp more clearly what kind of discursive field British producers were intervening in and borrowing from. The information will also help to directly contextualise some of the films analysed in this book which feature specific examples of the modes of performance discussed here.
The chapter therefore addresses a series of simple questions. What were actors and acting like on the stage at this time? What were the key trends and styles? What did critics see as the aims and values of good acting? Which kinds of actors did they celebrate and valorise most? Are there major differentiations in tastes across social classes with regard to audience preferences for particular actors and styles of acting?
In a London newspaper review of a film adaptation of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's play Trelawney of the Wells made by Hepworth in 1916, the critic, in applauding the achievements of some of the (theatrical) actors on view like Henry Ainley, suggested that 'only in England is such characterisation possible'. The idea that there might be a performance style able to stand as a marker of national cultural identity and which might then be adopted in a formulation of national cinematic values is an intriguing one. This chapter will show that around the turn of the century a new emphasis on restraint and moderation in stage acting was indeed acclaimed in critical discourse as a style capable of transmitting and reflecting certain qualities traditionally privileged as defining national traits—albeit qualities associated principally with elite social groups. But it will also be shown that alternative practices flourished in Edwardian theatre. Modes of acting involving different forms of demonstrative gestural display were sustained and developed in conjunction with particular spectacular staging techniques and also in a vogue for 'abnormal realism' associated with a new form of character acting. Furthermore, a theatre of gestural force persisted in certain quarters as the legacy of a popular melodramatic inheritance. In this sense it will be seen that the Edwardian theatre housed a complex multiversity of schools and styles in which values often clashed and canonical 'Englishness' frequently abutted an exotic 'otherness'.
Breeding and Propriety
One of the few reliable truisms typically used to characterise the theatre and its actors in this era is the suggestion that it was in a state of flux. New styles were appearing, professional goals were changing, and most written works of instruction for aspiring actors were stridently keen to reject the teachings of their predecessors. In 1897, for example, one such book appeared with the title The Actor's Art. It thus deliberately referenced a well-known book of the same name published fifteen years earlier by Gustave Garcia. Garcia was a teacher of acting for thirty-six years at the London Academy of Music (latterly LAMDA), and his book is typical of most nineteenth-century acting manuals: it contains many pages of diagrams illustrating elaborate gestures which it recommends students study and adopt in order to express successfully the particular emotions each pose was associated with according to conventional practice. The message in 1897 appears to be somewhat different. Garcia is singled out for ridicule, along with the school of thought he represents:
There are numerous books which pretend to teach the whole art of gesture in so many diagrams, giving the student such priceless information as 'A clenched fist held out and shaken at another person signifies rage, anger, passion, &c. or, The arms outstretched, with the palms of the hands turned outwards, the head looking downwards in the opposite direction, signifies "fear", "terror", "repugnance" ', &c. Precisely; and when you kick a man on the part of the anatomy usually associated with a kick, that means you do not love him! All such 'guides' to gesture are foolish and futile, and the student who endeavoured to guide his gestures in accordance with their rules and regulations would become about as graceful as the famous 'Purple monkey, climbing on a yellow stick'.
Competing aesthetic paradigms had begun to emerge during the Victorian period. There is little doubt that from as early as the mid-1860s onwards, distinctive new styles of performance and a substantially new critical discourse determining the artistic aims and cultural status of acting began to permeate British theatre. Both contemporary commentators and successive theatre historians have tended to isolate a singular catalyst for this change in the influence exerted by the upper-middle-class society comedies of T.W. Robertson, and the methods of staging used to present them by Squire Bancroft and his company in the 1860s and 1870s. Robertson wrote a number of plays for the Bancrofts which purported to offer truthful and observant reflections upon contemporary life. The most famous of these was probably Caste (1867), a comedy of manners concerned with the social consequences that unfold when the son of a marquis marries beneath his class.
George Taylor has pointed out that the subject matter was of less consequence for the evolution of the Victorian theatre than the style of its presentation: 'It was neither psychological complexity nor social analysis that made the play seem "modern", but the look of the sets and the style of the acting'. As the lessees of the Prince of Wales Theatre, the Bancrofts instituted a revolution in the arrangement of mise-en-scene. They presented elaborate box sets furnished in minute and exact mimetic detail with the authentic features and fittings of fashionable contemporary drawing rooms. This impacted on the work of the actors. In order to harmonise and blend in with a surrounding which matched the contours of everyday life, they attempted to behave according to similar standards of verisimilitude, to reproduce the mannerisms of recognisable social types. As E.J. West explains it,
If a homogeneous effect was to be attained in a type of drama which aimed only at the imitation of life and which therefore ruled out the elocutionary reading and the measured movement of the old school actor, it is fairly obvious that the new school actor had to cultivate restraint and control ... [I]t was necessary for the stronger actor to hold himself in, lest he should upset the effect. He attempted to make a virtue of necessity, and prided himself upon his 'reserved force'. The force being rarely called for, frequently new members were added to the new school groups who really possessed no force to reserve.
'Reserved force' was widely adopted as the buzzword for this performance technique. The term suggests a deliberate suppression of any largesse of movement and voice projection. Flamboyant gestures were replaced with smaller, daintier acts of 'by-play', which mirrored authentic social habits and peccadilloes.
West concludes that the vogue for reserved force concomitantly served to heap odium upon an older gestural style of playing: 'The interest aroused by the novelty of seeing people acting on the stage as they did in real life ... discredit[ed] in large part the players who acted the traditional repertory by traditional methods'. The standards by which actors were frequently praised and the skills for which they were most admired over the next few decades had seemingly little to do with aptitude in the use of demonstrative gestures. In 1912 an instructional guide for stage aspirants venerated the actor-manager Charles Hawtrey as an ideal model in the following terms:
I would again enjoin [the young actor] to watch Hawtrey if he gets a chance, for no one understands more thoroughly when to stop acting than that admirable actor ... The effect of spontaneity and effortlessness is produced. To do nothing extremely well on the stage often seems to be the last lesson that many actors learn. Surely it should be the first.
Instead of pronounced rhythmic movement and sweeping gesticulatory arcs, actors came to be lauded for their qualities of absolute repose. It is interesting to compare the above comment with Alfred Hitchcock's famous pronouncement in 1938 that 'the best screen actor is the man who can do nothing extremely well'. We can see that what Hitchcock valued in acting technique was not simply a practical response to the demands of the camera. It was just as much the historical product of influential arguments and evaluative criteria initially articulated within Victorian and Edwardian theatrical culture.
Actors like Hawtrey were deemed to be so undemonstrative and lifelike in their efforts that the 'craft' they practised on stage barely qualified as acting. In a study published in 1899 entitled The Actor and His Art, Stanley Jones pointed out that acting trends and audience tastes had shifted so dramatically by the end of the Victorian era that 'there are actors whom the public do not expect to be other than themselves on the stage'. Jones also highlights Hawtrey's career as an exemplary case:
In Charles Hawtrey the new style of acting, as distinguished from the old, reaches its highest degree of perfection. Mr Hawtrey is natural or nothing; he gives you the impression that he is so much himself that you can hardly believe he is acting; he never raises his voice too high nor lowers it unduly. His effects are calculated to a nicety ... The actors of the present day ... are simply not actors, but only themselves.
This perception of the new breed of actors may well have been reinforced by changing conditions in the way that theatrical entertainments were organised. Elaborate and costly settings were partly responsible for the move to a 'long run' system of presentation, in order to maximise revenues from expensively mounted productions. Within the terms of such engagements, the same actor might continue to play the same role over the course of many months, and then possibly go on tour with it in the provinces. The demand for versatile players well-versed in a huge repertory of parts was consequently diminished, and this system would have encouraged critics and audiences to associate one actor with one particular part for a considerable period of time. The links between an actor and a synonymous role would understandably become firmly established, and boundaries between the two might tend to become blurred or entirely effaced in the minds of critics and audiences.
But the appearance of a discourse on acting like this at the turn of the century cannot be straightforwardly attributed to changes in scenic art alone. It would be an overstatement to claim that actors reined in self-conscious gestures purely and simply as a means of blending in with their settings. A number of other material changes in the constitution and organisation of the acting profession functioned as a complementary framework within which the emphasis on 'reserved force' was developed. Michael Sanderson has documented what he sees as a dramatic change in the social origins of those who entered the acting profession in the latter part of the nineteenth century. By the 1880s and 1890s acting was becoming a socially respectable career; the clearest visible symbol of this came in 1895 when Henry Irving became the first actor ever to be knighted.
Previously, recruitment to the stage was monopolised to a large degree by applicants with a family background in the theatre—and these would often be working- or lower-middle-class in status. This 'dynastic' tradition helped to maintain the craft basis of acting as an art, and also the continuance of a consistent system of meaningful gestural 'business' which was bequeathed from generation to generation. Sanderson argues, though, that this pattern was decisively disrupted by a marked influx of actors with public school educations and professional middle-class backgrounds. In many cases this meant that actors came from exactly the same milieu that was represented in the Robertsonian style of play. This made their own personalities and intimate knowledge of this social world a more valuable resource to be exploited on stage than a training in stock, conventionalised gestural techniques. Many avoided this kind of training anyway, and leapt straight from the amateur ranks to West End stardom. The trend represented more than just a happy coincidence of form and content, however, and became institutionalised in new definitions of acting excellence. For one thing, actors from a more distinguished social background brought with them a middle-class professional ideology which encouraged the development of careers founded upon minute variations and refinements of the same kinds of repeated role. As Michael Baker has suggested, the broad and stylised 'versatility' of the old school actor 'went against the professional idea which implied specialisation—which bestowed in its turn exclusiveness'.
Such notions of exclusiveness and refinement in acting were in turn privileged by dramatic critics. The new restrained style of acting reflected particular class-based values. Indeed, 'reserved force' and upper-class social manners were often identified together as one and the same thing. In 1892 Percy Fitzgerald defined the '"storage" of force' not so much as a technique which could be learned but as an instinctive awareness of '"propriety", by which we would understand the limits of expression: that is the extent to which an actor should go in exhibiting the phenomena of his character'. This could never be appreciated, he added, by 'Vulgar minds [who] associate power, with its manifestation, either by speech or action'. Upon the occasion of Sir George Alexander's knighthood in 1911, The Era identified his chief claim to distinction in the fact that 'He possesses in a remarkable degree that quality of perfect self-possession which Hazlitt, in one of his essays, described as being the great characteristic of good breeding'. Stanley Jones praised the notable understatement of Charles Wyndham in terms of his mastery of the rules of social etiquette:
In the nice conduct of a cane, or the manner of drawing off his gloves, Charles Wyndham's is finished acting, as compared with the deliberate acting of another, who puts a stick under his arm as if the destiny of the heroine depended upon it, and takes off his gloves as it might be to an accompaniment of slow music.
The new style was not only conceptualised in terms of social class. It was also celebrated for the degree to which it embodied and reflected characteristics which were regularly metonymically extrapolated as distinctive national attributes. The valorisation of a certifiably national tradition of English acting is a striking new feature of late Victorian theatrical discourse. Michael Baker has pointed out that British audiences had previously demonstrated a considerable reverence and affection for continental theatrical visitors. The popularity and esteem vouchsafed to overseas performers on the English stage in the mid-nineteenth century represented 'a striking preference for an age when, in most aspects of public life, the British were intensely patriotic and xenophobic'. Some historians have therefore identified a major turning point and volte-face of critical attitudes in the reception which greeted a touring company from the Comédie Française during its visit to London in 1879. Their performances were forcefully ridiculed by a number of metropolitan critics. They were variously denounced for being too mechanically technical and unnatural in their acting: 'no one can say that these French artistes strive when they are in a drawing-room on the stage to do what would be admissible in a drawing-room off the stage. This is the aim of the modern English comedy acting.' Compared with English restraint and observational perspicacity, the French seemed determined 'to perpetuate a stagey and conventional mode of acting'.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Legitimate Cinema by Jon Burrows. Copyright © 2003 Jon Burrows. Excerpted by permission of University of Exeter Press.
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