Historical Background

HAMLET:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and I beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness. O! it offends me to the soul, to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings; who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows, and noise.

– William Shakespeare

(Hamlet, Act III, sc. ii, lines 1–13)

In recent times we have seen a proliferation of university degrees and courses in acting, drama, performance and various specialisms within theatre. Curiously this rise in interest has been at a time when there is a significant decline in available jobs within the industry. The increasing popularity of drama and theatre as secondary school disciplines indicates that this trend may continue for some time unless the growing rise in tuition fees slows it down. Undoubtedly the abundance of television talent shows has had something to do with the increased desire to seek fame. Whilst initially it may seem curious, I believe the answer also comes from an understanding and belief in the process of drama. As many educationalists know, the drama process offers new and engaging ways of learning. The broad applicability of drama as a way of understanding oneself, other people and the world, would seem to have something to do with this increasing trend. I believe we are seeing a global reaction to twentieth-century assumptions that suggested all could be measured and implicit trust given to scientific objectivity. Aesthetic education puts humans back in touch with their ability to feel as well as think.

Of course the ability to help people feel in addition to think has always been an actor's job. But how has the job of acting been learnt? How has acting been taught and by whom? The history of actor training is an interesting journey that has been documented by other writers (e.g. Nicoll 1976; Harrop 1992). It is nonetheless worth reminding ourselves briefly of the origins of actor training and the eventual development into formalised drama school training with the birth of what is typically called the drama school.

Genesis of Actor Training

Actor training is firmly rooted in historical practices themed by a tradition of apprenticeship and learning by doing. Acting, particularly in the western world, has been seen by some throughout the years as a rather dubious undertaking and at times as a challenge to the fabric of society itself. 'Plato regarded actors as hypocrites, players of illusion and falsifiers of truth' (Harrop 1992: 109). This began what appears to be a fascinating paradox, where actors were responsible for revealing truths; yet they were themselves pretending.

Although institutionalised actor training is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon (Harrop 1992), its roots are as old as acting itself – dating from the beginning of the fifth century bc. It is likely that the Choruses of Greek drama were trained, particularly in the area of voice control. In the canon of literature Thespis is credited with the distinction of having introduced the first actor as distinct from the choral leader in the sixth century bc. Ever since Pisistratus established the first dramatic festival (Nicoll 1976) the competitive nature of these events provided the necessary impetus for actors to develop their craft.

Medieval drama in France, Italy and England offered no such competition as was formerly evidenced in ancient Greece. One sixteenth-century record offers this fascinating critique of the actors who performed in mystery plays:

[Actors are] an ignorant set of men, mechanics and artisans, who know not an A from a B, untrained and unskilled in playing such pieces before the public. Their voices are poor, their language unfitting, their pronunciation wretched. No sense do they have of the meaning of what they say.

(Cited in Nicoll 1976: 112)

Whilst many participants in these dramas took their work seriously, they were largely amateurs. Professional entertainers such as minstrels and jongleurs (an early version of mime artists) were increasingly used to support the plays (Nicoll 1976), which no doubt offered audiences an element of observable cleverness and skill.

By the sixteenth century, professional and amateur players proliferated in English and European towns; however the court plays were becoming increasingly more professional. Queen Elizabeth I and her court came to depend more upon the skilled services of professional players than upon amateur actors. 'Companies of boys [the Children of Paul's, the Children of the Chapel and the Queen's Revels, and the Children of Windsor] became, in Elizabeth's reign, virtually professionals' (Nicoll 1976: 199). However, these boys were disparagingly described by Rosencrantz in Shakespeare's Hamlet as 'an aery of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for't' (Act II, sc. ii). A growing interest in the stage by adult males formed numerous professional companies of players. The construction of the Theatre by James Burbage in 1576 saw the beginning of many purpose-built theatres in London.

In the East, drama was also developing its own traditions and conventions of actor training. The Japanese Kabuki, developed at the beginning of the seventeenth century and was derived from the Chinese culture. It employs precise, familiar, conventionalised movements and gestures. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Kanami Kiyotsugu and his son Seami Motokiyo developed No drama that also retained the precision of prescriptive rule-based traditional actor training (Nicoll 1978). Similarly, Kathakali from southern India is another example of early eastern actor training. Kathakali is described by Phillip Zarrilli as 'a rigorous and arduous process of transmission of embodied performance knowledge achieved through constant, daily repletion of basic exercises' (2000: 66).

It is quite possible to draw an analogy between Kathakali's notion of the actor becoming one with the character and how some western actors trained in Stanislavskian methodology might describe acting (Zarrilli 2000: 65). Indeed, eastern theatre and its techniques began to influence western theatre training from the first part of the twentieth century (Hodge 2000) with a continual and growing interest in more systematic approaches to actor...