Abstract
The modern English actress enjoys an unprecedented versatility and freedom of interpretation within a partly-constricting professional power structure. At times, she operates against the preconceptions of directors and audience alike within a more or less updated range of female stereotypes. With some notable exceptions, she is still handicapped by plays which reflect a dilatory society and fail to present women as existing in their own right rather than on the periphery of masculine arenas. Faced with such conflicting expectations of them, how are young actresses responding?
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Notes
See Marilyn French, Shakespeare’s Division of Experience (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982). In discussing As You Like It, Ms French holds that Shakespeare presents gender as two sides of the same human coin, as country and court are two sides of the same society. Rosalind, in her view, is able to develop areas of her personality that could not be gracefully revealed if she were in female apparel.
Carol Rutter, Clamorous Voices (London: The Women’s Press, 1988), p. 23.
K. Rutter, p. 4; Francis King, Sunday Telegraph (17 October 1982);
John Barber, Daily Telegraph (14 October 1982);
Michael Billington, Guardian (13 October 1982);
Irving Wardle, The Times (13 October 1982).
Andrew Rissik, Independent (10 September 1987); Eric Shorter, ‘Lessons in Marital Politics’, Daily Telegraph (10 September 1987).
Judith Cook, Women in Shakespeare (London: Harrap, 1980), pp. 124–5;
Hugh Kretzmer Daily Express (30 October 1974);
M. Shulman, Evening Sandard (30 October 1974);
Irving Wardle, The Times (30 October 1974);
M. Billington, Guardian (30 October 1974).
I. Wardle, The Times (14 October 1982);
M. Coveney, Financial Times (14 April 1983);
Gareth Lloyd-Evans, Drama (Spring 1983);
Terry Grimley, Birmingham Post (8 January 1983).
Janet Watts, Observer Magazine (7 April 1983).
John Barber, Daily Telegraph (15 November 1980).
Neil Taylor, Plays International (April 1986);
Helen Carr, Women’s Review Number Two (October 1985);
John Peter, The Sunday Times (20 October 1985).
Victoria Radin, New Statesman (2 October 1987);
I. Wardle, The Times (1 March 1988).
Ian McEwan, The Imitation Game and Other Plays (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), pp. 173–4.
Janet Watts, ‘When Women Go to War’, Observer Review (20 April 1980); Jennifer Lovelace, The Stage and Television Today (1 May 1980).
M. Billington, Guardian (19 November 1981).
M. Ratcliffe, Observer (11 November 1984).
Peter Kemp, Independent (28 March 1987);
Claire Armitstead, Financial Times (27 March 1987);
M. Ratcliffe, Observer (29 March 1987). Claire Armitstead’s description of Juliet Stevenson’s developing performance gives the best account of its uncompromisingly graphic nature.
Irving Wardle, The Times (18 November 1981).
Irving Wardle, The Times (9 January 1986). When I remarked to Juliet on how many of her characters were, like her Mme de Tourvel in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, under the spell of their love for men, her heartfelt reply was, ‘I spent two years every night, playing people madly and passionately in love and it’s terribly knackering. One’s experience of life is not always about being in love, but centuries of writing have placed women in plays as being there to represent the heart, while men are there to represent the mind’.
Robert Hewison, The Sunday Times (5 February 1989).
Bronwen Balmforth, The Sun (17 May 1980);
Eric Roberts, Daily Mail (24 May 1980); Patrick O’Neill, ‘A Story of Unbridled Passion from Juliet’, Daily Mail (3 March 1980).
Daily Express (13 May 1981); Sean Day-Lewis, Daily Telegraph (13 May 1981); Russell Davies, The Sunday Times (17 May 1981).
Michelene Wandor, Carry on Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 51, 95. See also Wandor, pp. 47–9, 83–93, 108–12 for an account of the origins, formation and development of the Women’s Theatre Group.
Lizbeth Goodman, ‘Waiting for Spring to Come Again: Feminist Theatre, 1978 and 1989’, New Theatre Quarterly, VI, No. 21 (February 1990) 43–51.
Lynn Alderson, ‘Writing Our Own History: Feminist Theatricals’, Trouble & Strife, XVI (Summer 1989) 52. Quoted comments and publicity material were generously supplied to me by Gillian Hanna, a director of Monstrous Regiment, and by its Administrator, Rose Sharp.
Vera Lustig, ‘Soul Searching’, Drama Magazine, IV (1988) 15. Harriet Walter disagrees that Hare portrays unstereotypical women. Like many actresses of her generation, she looks more to women dramatists like Caryl Churchill for more recognizably female characters.
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© 1993 Sandra Richards
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Richards, S. (1993). The Recent Actress. In: The Rise of the English Actress. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09930-6_11
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