The brief biographical essays give us some idea of the changing styles of acting, particularly the recurring debate between actors known for their declamatory powers and those who embraced a more naturalist mode. And although only a matter of incidental interest to Wells, we can appreciate the frustration felt by many an actress (a term now largely discarded) about the limited roles available to women.

According to Wells, Sarah Siddons was the first woman to play Hamlet, as early as 1775: many would follow her example. The American Charlotte Cushman, who made no secret of her lesbianism, played Romeo to her sister’s Juliet. According to one astonished observer, ‘her amorous endearments were of so erotic a character that no man would have dared indulge in them coram publico [in a public place]’. The Fool in King Lear was another role sometimes allotted to a woman. During World War II, when male actors were in short supply, Sybil Thorndike relished the opportunity to play a range of male characters. Today, of course, cross-gender casting is common, and Melbourne recently saw Lear undergo a sex change, with Robyn Nevin as Queen Lear (2012).

Thomas Gainsborough portrait of Sarah Siddons, 1785 (courtesy of the National Gallery, London, via Wikimedia Commons)

David Thomson is also concerned with changing styles of acting, but in the context of evaluating why acting matters, the book apparently forms part of a Yale series, though no other titles are listed. Thomson is an engaging writer, and from the beginning he insists that ‘realism’ in drama and film is a deception, as acting is always a form of ‘pretending’, ‘an escape from reality, as well as an exultation or despair over it’. I am reminded of the poet Dorothy Porter’s moving essay On Passion (2010), a farewell credo, in which she recalls what is for her the ‘one singularly unforgettable scene in Shakespeare’ – the gouging out of Gloucester’s eyes in King Lear. ‘Why,’ she asks, ‘even as my soul squirms, do I keep returning to this scene?’ I, too, vividly recall this scene in John Alden’s legendary 1951 Sydney production, with Gloucester bound to a kind of giant wheel. We know, of course, that this is ‘acting’, yet the horror is ‘real’ enough. Porter asks, ‘Is the charge of physical and moral revulsion simply another way of feeling more intensely alive?’

In pondering the mystery of acting, Thomson sets up a comparison between Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando, with Vivien Leigh, whose marriage to Olivier was a drama in itself, at times getting into the act. An unlikely pair? But, as Thomson point out, director Francis Ford Coppola was torn between these two actors for the role of Vito in The Godfather (1972). Olivier here serves as a prime example of the actor with the traditional skills and Brando as a representative of the new method acting associated with the Actors Studio and its use of sense memory.

‘Some actors and performers are blessed with that mysterious quality we call presence, which certainly gives them a head start’

Olivier is sometimes seen as an actor concerned with surfaces, always looking for the mannerisms and gestures appropriate for the character he was playing. He was a dab hand at make-up and physical transformations. He never had John Gielgud’s reputation as a speaker of Shakespeare verse, but, as Wells points out, he achieved ‘an impression of naturalism’ while moulding the verse with the skill of a great orator. Brando’s only experience of Shakespeare was playing Mark Antony in the film Julius Caesar (1953). Gielgud, who was Cassius, helped him with the verse, and was clearly drawn to the American; he invited Brando to join him and Paul Scofield in a London season, the one condition being that Brando would have to play Hamlet. Brando declined the offer; according to one version of the story (and actors are good with such stories) he said he was going scuba-diving. Brando never got to play Hamlet.

Promotional image of John Gielgud and Margaret Leighton in the 1959 Broadway production of Much Ado About Nothing (via Wikimedia Commons)

Method acting raises the question of the extent to which an actor should be possessed by the part. Paul Scofield was praised for his ability ‘to inhabit his characters while remaining himself’, but some actors do seek a fuller immersion in the part. There can be risks in such a loss of self. Thomson quotes the extraordinary case of Daniel Day-Lewis who, playing Hamlet, was also at the time agonising over his relationship with his own dead father. Poor reviews contributed to Day-Lewis’s obsession, and in the middle of one performance he broke down and simply walked off the stage. That was the end of his Hamlet, and his stage career. Vivien Leigh, always ‘perilously suggestible’, played Blanche in the West End production of Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Olivier, for eight months and ended up having shock treatment.

As a contrast to actor–celebrities like Olivier, Leigh, and Brando, Thomson points to the example of Michael Bryant, who had a distinguished career at the National Theatre and in film and television, but had a low public profile and was averse to analysing or theorising about acting. However, Thomson doesn’t mention the revealing story about Bryant rehearsing the part of Badger in a production of Alan Bennett’s adaptation of The Wind in the Willows. Cast members were encouraged to make a study of the animal they were playing. The next day they were invited to report their findings. When it was his turn, Bryant announced ‘what I’ve noticed is how all badgers bear a distinct resemblance to Michael Bryant’.

While Great Shakespeare Actors is a useful survey with some interesting cameos, Why Acting Matters is a much livelier and more inventive narrative, brimming over with ideas and paradoxes. But I could do without Thomson’s imagined snatches of an actor’s life, which come close to being patronising.

In spite of the number of films and plays about theatre and acting (Thomson sees Hamlet itself as ‘a play about theatre’), actors maintain a sense of their own alienation from society. They work strange hours, they are used to shifting communities of fellow actors, they share a theatrically camp sense of humour and are often superstitious. And they can relate to the players Hamlet welcomes to Elsinore as members of the same tribe.