Garrick, iconic acting, and the ideologies of theatrical portraiture

Abstract

Occasionally one still hears the term ‘legitimate’ in theatrical parlance, but it rings as a curiously anachronistic locution. Historically it signifies a complementarity of the written word and its theatrical embodiment that appears to have lost currency. It is academic (in every sense of the word) to speak of a legitimate drama, uniquely suited to its medium by virtue of its literary qualities, because it no longer seems to be an issue of law or custom that the theatre legitimately be in service to the written word. To decry Andrew Lloyd Webber's immensely popular musical extravaganzas as ‘illegitimate’ because their books are paltry excuses for song and spectacle seems a quaint, even reactionary gesture when a generation of auteurist directors is proving in regional theatres that visually articulate stagings of classical drama can draw patrons for whom neither the intrinsic merits of the literary text, nor arguably even its declamation, hold much interest. Only the authors of the production — the director, actors, and designers — can resuscitate the authors of great dramatic poetry for today's audience. The dominance in most contemporary theatre of nonverbal mise en scène over the spoken text is a recent and momentous cultural phenomenon that is not universally welcomed. Many of those who lament that the commercial theatre offers little more distinction — and far less money — to the playwright than its new sister art does to the virtually anonymous screenwriter would revise Dr Johnson's famous maxim for our century: the theatre's laws the cinema's patrons give.

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