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Acting Transmutations: From Imitation to Interpretation

This book chapter is part of a larger project of research on the aesthetics and politics of the early modernist theatre and the emergence of the director’s theatre as a philosophical theatre that is the subject of my monograph to be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2014. The chapter explores the shifting acting and dramatic traditions – from imitation (actor-manager theatre) to interpretation (modernist theatre). My investigation focuses on the origins of this shift and examines the aesthetic transmutations that took place in the period of theatrical change: from the actor-manager theatre to a director’s theatre. The significance of this chapter for current historiography is that it traces modernist trends in the practice of the actor-manager theatre (especially from the mid of the 19th Century onwards) and examines the impact of the modernist aesthetic of a director’s theatre to the normative practices and conceptual paradigms of the actor-manager theatre tradition, which has not been done before. The aim is to provide a fresh reading of this transition while closely exploring the early articulations of the modernist aesthetic in the theatrical tradition of the actor-manager theatre.