Riots in the stalls

The age of Garrick, Norman Poser, a law professor, insists, gave us much of what we take for granted today in the theatre: ‘naturalistic’ acting, and, as Dr Johnson remarked, the very idea of the business of acting as a profession. Hence this book’s portentous title. Its curtain raiser trumpets themes of fame, personality, interiority and cultural self-knowledge, but regrettably Poser’s main show offers a trawl through anecdotes in a style and structure more wooden than the monopedal comic actor Sam Foote’s peg leg.

Naturalism in acting, it is often said, originated in this era. But it’s a subject as large as it’s slippery. There is limited source material on what the style was really like, and there is no obvious chain of apostolic delegation to be found, as Poser asserts, from Garrick through to Stanislavski, let alone to ‘Marilyn Monroe, Al Pacino and Hilary Swank’.

As Lord Fellowes recently remarked, every generation, no matter how it repines the passing of old times, believes two things of itself: that it has worked out a better way to parent and a better way to act. That’s always wrong. The point is to try to work out what might have changed and when and why. The power and metaphorical heft of theatrical art is its evanescence — it exists for that moment and that audience. Quoting the musical Hamilton or referencing Angelina Jolie in the body of the text, while showing a suitable enthusiasm for the performing arts, isn’t enough to understand these changes and that audience. Much better to turn to the novel, or indeed to the portraiture of Garrick’s friend Reynolds, or the works of the French philosophes with which Garrick was familiar, to discuss what might have been the burgeoning sense of interiority and how it was represented.