Review of "Martin Banham, Jane Milling, Extraordinary Actors: Essays on Popular Performers University of Exeter Press (2004)"
Identifieur interne : 000A97 ( Istex/Corpus ); précédent : 000A96; suivant : 000A98Review of "Martin Banham, Jane Milling, Extraordinary Actors: Essays on Popular Performers University of Exeter Press (2004)"
Auteurs : Emily CarrSource :
- Theatre Survey [ 0040-5574 ] ; 2008.
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DOI: 10.1017/S0040557408001051
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Edited by BanhamMartin and MillingJane. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2004, pp. 256. 20 illus. $85 cloth.</note></notesStmt><sourceDesc><biblStruct type="inbook"><analytic><title level="a" type="main" xml:lang="en">Review of "Martin Banham, Jane Milling, Extraordinary Actors: Essays on Popular Performers University of Exeter Press (2004)"</title><title level="a" type="main" xml:lang="en">Review of "Martin Banham, Jane Milling, Extraordinary Actors: Essays on Popular Performers University of Exeter Press (2004)"</title><author xml:id="author-0000"><persName><forename type="first">Emily</forename><surname>Carr</surname></persName><affiliation>University of Calgary</affiliation></author><idno type="istex">50342C04A49DCB715B990CDD0CC6570E4838038E</idno><idno type="ark">ark:/67375/6GQ-DPWB2KW4-0</idno><idno type="DOI">10.1017/S0040557408001051</idno><idno type="PII">S0040557408001051</idno><idno type="article-id">00105</idno></analytic><monogr><title level="j">Theatre Survey</title><title level="j" type="abbrev">Theat Surv</title><idno type="pISSN">0040-5574</idno><idno type="eISSN">1475-4533</idno><idno type="publisher-id">TSY</idno><imprint><publisher>Cambridge University Press</publisher><pubPlace>New York, USA</pubPlace><date type="published" when="2008"></date><biblScope unit="volume">49</biblScope><biblScope unit="issue">1</biblScope><biblScope unit="page" from="143">143</biblScope><biblScope unit="page" to="146">146</biblScope></imprint></monogr></biblStruct></sourceDesc></fileDesc><profileDesc><creation><date>2008</date></creation><langUsage><language ident="en">en</language></langUsage></profileDesc><revisionDesc><change when="2008">Published</change></revisionDesc></teiHeader></istex:fulltextTEI><json:item><extension>txt</extension><original>false</original><mimetype>text/plain</mimetype><uri>https://api.istex.fr/ark:/67375/6GQ-DPWB2KW4-0/fulltext.txt</uri></json:item></fulltext><metadata><istex:metadataXml wicri:clean="corpus cambridge not found" wicri:toSee="no header"><istex:xmlDeclaration>version="1.0" encoding="US-ASCII"</istex:xmlDeclaration><istex:docType PUBLIC="-//NLM//DTD Journal Publishing DTD v2.2 20060430//EN" URI="journalpublishing.dtd" name="istex:docType"></istex:docType><istex:document><article dtd-version="2.2" article-type="book-review"><front><journal-meta><journal-id journal-id-type="publisher-id">TSY</journal-id><journal-title>Theatre Survey</journal-title><abbrev-journal-title>Theat Surv</abbrev-journal-title><issn pub-type="ppub">0040-5574</issn><issn pub-type="epub">1475-4533</issn><publisher><publisher-name>Cambridge University Press</publisher-name><publisher-loc>New York, USA</publisher-loc></publisher></journal-meta><article-meta><article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.1017/S0040557408001051</article-id><article-id pub-id-type="pii">S0040557408001051</article-id><article-id pub-id-type="publisher-id">00105</article-id><title-group><article-title></article-title><alt-title alt-title-type="left-running">Theatre Survey</alt-title><alt-title alt-title-type="right-running">Book Reviews</alt-title></title-group><contrib-group><contrib><name><surname>Carr</surname><given-names>Emily</given-names></name><xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1"></xref></contrib></contrib-group><aff id="aff1"><institution>University of Calgary</institution></aff><pub-date><month>05</month><year>2008</year></pub-date><volume>49</volume><issue>1</issue><fpage seq="13">143</fpage><lpage>146</lpage><product product-type="book"><target id="ref1" target-type="product"></target><source>Extraordinary Actors: Essays on Popular Performers</source>. Edited by <name><surname>Banham</surname><given-names>Martin</given-names></name> and <name><surname>Milling</surname><given-names>Jane</given-names></name>. <publisher-loc>Exeter</publisher-loc>: <publisher-name>University of Exeter Press</publisher-name>, <year>2004</year>, pp. <fpage>256</fpage>. <comment>20 illus. $85 cloth.</comment></product><permissions><copyright-statement>Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2008</copyright-statement><copyright-year>2008</copyright-year><copyright-holder>American Society for Theatre Research</copyright-holder></permissions><counts><page-count count="4"></page-count></counts><custom-meta-wrap><custom-meta><meta-name>pdf</meta-name><meta-value>S0040557408001051a.pdf</meta-value></custom-meta><custom-meta><meta-name>dispart</meta-name><meta-value>Book Reviews</meta-value></custom-meta></custom-meta-wrap></article-meta></front><body><sec id="sec1"><title></title><p>The essays in <italic>Extraordinary Actors</italic>, edited by Martin Banham and Jane Milling, are collected in honor of the retirement of the University of Exeter Drama Department's Professor Emeritus, Peter Thomson. Thomson's diverse research interests include William Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British theatre. The anthology's ambitious project, according to Banham, reflects the wide range of Thomson's scholarship. The claims laid out in Banham's brief introduction are certainly ambitious; they include investigating the nature of extraordinary performance and charting the changing shape of popular performance from stage to screen. The three sections that follow chronologically examine particular historical moments as the context for an articulation of extraordinary acting. Individual essays cover a wide terrain, writing across the seventeenth through twentieth centuries and the United States, Britain, and Europe. The inclusive editorial focus forces disparate performance traditions into conversation; seventeenth-century Shakespearean performers are discussed next to Russian <italic>commedia dell'arte</italic>, Yiddish vaudeville, American television comedy, and Irish national theatre. The essays explore both marginalized and familiar figures and, in terms of historical overview, offer a series of well-informed perspectives on the evolution of the relationship between acting and popular culture over the past four centuries. With its commitment to the intersections between disparate disciplines and iconographies, this volume addresses issues pertinent to both theatre studies and performance studies and will appeal to a diverse audience of scholars.</p><p>Banham's brief preface locates extraordinary performances in the “dynamic limbo between reality and the imagination” (1). Extraordinary actors put themselves at risk on the state, enraging, astonishing, and—ultimately—engaging their audiences. These actors are also popular. “Popular,” according to Banham, relates to the performer's impact rather than a particular style of performance. Overall, Banham's introduction is optimistic, and perhaps, in relation to the arguments the essays make, overly so; Banham claims that the extraordinary actor “does it all on our behalf, so that we may the better bridge the gap between the curiosity of our minds and the limits of our experience” (1). While the essays depict actors who do in fact bridge the gap between curiosity and experience, they do not suggest that the actors are doing it on “our” behalf; rather, the actors are depicted as responding to a complex matrix of societal pressures, cultural mores, and personal ambitions.</p><p>Section 1, “The Idea of Acting,” considers the professionalization of the theatre actor in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. The collection starts with promise; the first two essays are, arguably, the strongest, at least in terms of clearly defining the extraordinary characteristics of a particular actor in relation to the actor's cultural context. Alexander Leggatt's “Richard Burbage: A Dangerous Actor” and Jane Milling's “Thomas Betterton and the Art of Acting,” challenged with considering actors whose physical bodies have all but been erased from the contemporary moment, reconstruct the two seventeenth-century actors by analyzing texts that were written for them. Both essays contrast the man and the actor; onstage, Burbage and Betterton have a dangerous, volatile, sexually charged presence that transforms into an exemplary gentleman offstage. The final essay in this section, Laurence Senelick's “Tom and Jerry in Russia: Popular Imagery of the <italic>Comedia dell'arte</italic> from Peter the Great to Catherine the Great,” broadens the focus from an individual actor to a performance tradition.</p><p>Section 2, “The Celebrated Actor as Cultural Icon,” deals with the circulation of theatre actors' images in popular culture and the connection of mass-produced iconography to the formation of national identities in Britain, Ireland, and America in the nineteenth century. One of the strengths of this collection is that it is able to sustain conversations concerning the intersections of art and life across historical moments. Read against Leggatt's and Milling's essays, Jan McDonald's “‘Acting and the Austere Joys of Motherhood’: Sarah Siddons Performs Maternity” and Viv Gardner's “Gertie Millar and the ‘Rules for Actresses and Vicars’ Wives,'” for example, address the increasingly complex relationship between actors' public and private personae. For women actors, confronted with the need to convince audiences to excuse their “unwomanly” ambition as actresses in a public sphere, the stakes of representation are even higher (58). In the nineteenth century, the actor's image could be mass-produced and circulated, often without consent; thus, the female actor as sex object onstage becomes inextricably linked to the female actor as private individual offstage. Both Siddons and Millar, in order to balance popularity with public approval, resort to constructing their identities to justify their public presence, in effect performing both onstage and off. Sarah Siddons, herself a mother, becomes known for her portrayals of motherhood; likewise, Gertie Millar, a rag-to-riches success story, chooses to play rags-to-riches romantic leads. The section also includes an essay by Don B. Wilmeth on British actors on the early-American stage and an essay by Ger Fitzgibbon that locates the development of Irish theatre in an acting tradition (broadening the traditional focus on the rise of modernist dramatic literature).</p><p>Section 3, “Extraordinary Acting for Popular Audiences,” engages the narrative complexity of twentieth-century performance. The strongest essays in this section, Baz Kershaw's “George Formby and the Northern Sublime” and Joel Schechter's “Leo Fuchs, Yiddish Vaudevillian,” complicate the conversation begun in the volume's first two sections by addressing intersections among performance disciplines. Kershaw's essay documents Formby's trajectory from music hall to stage, praising Formby for undercutting traditional expectations. Formby is not exceptional because he is volatile or his presence sexually charged; rather, it is Formby's blending of genres, lack of sexual power, intimacy with his audiences, vulnerability onstage, and manipulation of silence that makes him an extraordinary actor. Similarly, Schechter emphasizes Fuchs's vaudevillian talents and comic presence. In contrast to Burbage and Bretton, Fuchs is a genius of failure whose transformations onstage challenge his audience's conceptions of identity. ‘Exceptional’ has evolved from consistency to malleability, from the heroic leading man to the subtle character actor. This is the longest section and aslo includes: Christine Dymkowski's essay on the English actress, Lena Ashwell, and her company; Christopher McCullough's essay on Brecht's influence on the acting of Peter Lorre; Richard Boon's essay on the British comedy duo, Morecambe and Wise; the transcript of a conversation between the actress Maggie Steed and the theatre writer Colin Chambers; and Martin White's essay on the Mark Rylance, who was appointed Artistic Director of the New Globe in 1995.</p><p>Unfortunately, the text has two weaknesses: the essays are inconsistent in their approaches to the volume's project, and the most interesting conversations are often those across rather than within sections. At least one essay in each section falls into historical anecdote, discussing cultural phenomena rather than the singular actor. Despite the essays' unevenness, the case studies presented are, overall, well written and thought provoking. Colleagues of Thomson will appreciate the homage; graduate students and serious scholars of the history of acting will be engaged by the volume's attempts to define extraordinary performance.</p></sec></body></article></istex:document></istex:metadataXml><mods version="3.6"><titleInfo lang="en"><title>Review of "Martin Banham, Jane Milling, Extraordinary Actors: Essays on Popular Performers University of Exeter Press (2004)"</title></titleInfo><titleInfo lang="en"><title>Review of "Martin Banham, Jane Milling, Extraordinary Actors: Essays on Popular Performers University of Exeter Press (2004)"</title></titleInfo><name type="personal"><namePart type="given">Emily</namePart><namePart type="family">Carr</namePart><affiliation>University of Calgary</affiliation><role><roleTerm type="text">author</roleTerm></role></name><typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource><genre type="book-reviews" displayLabel="book-review" authority="ISTEX" authorityURI="https://content-type.data.istex.fr" valueURI="https://content-type.data.istex.fr/ark:/67375/XTP-PBH5VBM9-4">book-reviews</genre><originInfo><publisher>Cambridge University Press</publisher><place><placeTerm type="text">New York, USA</placeTerm></place><dateIssued encoding="w3cdtf">2008</dateIssued><copyrightDate encoding="w3cdtf">2008</copyrightDate></originInfo><language><languageTerm type="code" authority="iso639-2b">eng</languageTerm><languageTerm type="code" authority="rfc3066">en</languageTerm></language><note>Extraordinary Actors: Essays on Popular Performers. 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