Nell Gwynn and The Attitudes
Complementing the return of Nell Gwynn to the Globe Theatre, we are delighted to present a selection of photographs by Michael Wharley from his ongoing project ‘The Attitudes’. Stimulated in part by the play, which was first performed at the Globe in 2015, the project includes a number of Nell Gwynn company members. Michael visited this week to install the display, and describes his inspiration for the project:
What are ‘The Attitudes’?
It’s a catch-all name for an approach to acting that held sway for centuries, whereby actors learned specific formal postures to communicate emotions like fear, despair, joy, or love. Some were clearly illustrative (storytelling) or symbolic gestures (perhaps drawn from masques or rituals), others were formalised versions of natural physical reactions to emotion. They seem to have emerged in England in the Restoration, when King Charles II reopened the theatres: actors returned from France and beyond, bringing Continental styles to mix with our native acting style and tradition of rhetorical gesture.
How formalised the approach became and how soon, is hard to say. Nell Gwynn author Jessica Swale takes some comic liberties in having actor Edward Kynaston lecture Nell on ‘all 372 attitudes… [with] 21 varieties of grief as expressed by the left eyebrow’, but by the 19th century that was scarcely a joke. There are 102 Attitudes in Edmund Shaftesbury’s 1889 book Lessons in Acting: A Thorough Course– pages of which are on display here – including such minute (and to a modern eye, pedantic) variants as ‘Listening’ and ‘Listening to a Bird’!
In the 21st Century, with theatres possessing highly sophisticated lighting and amplification, not to mention our constant on-screen scrutiny of actors in close-up detail, realism seems the paradigm. Gesturally formal, heightened acting, tends to be either a very specific production choice, or simply seen as bad, even hammy.Reading Lessons in Acting, many Attitudes do seem extremely hammy, but as the project has progressed we’ve found surprising truth in many.
Recreating sometimes says something about the past alone; Greg Haiste in ‘Disguise’ or David Rintoul in ‘Stealth’ could be straight out of a Victorian melodrama; not how they’d act in a modern comedy. But Mark Springer in ‘Contemplation’, Gemma Arterton in ‘Silence’, or Susie Trayling in ‘Attention,’ could easily be stills from a contemporary film, communicating exactly the desired idea to a viewer, even though two are very literal gestures.
The ability of a seasoned performer to extract something believable from the page has made the seemingly-absurd entirely credible. Chris Logan brought a palpable sense of loss to ‘Hopelessness’, while experienced screen actors Chizzy Akodolu and Nicholas Pinnock, bypassed melodrama to find something truly affecting in ‘Mental Anguish’ and impendingly violent in ‘Threatening,’ respectively. Technique, instinct and skill are as important today as they’ve ever been, perhaps it’s just that our taste today is for hidden technique. We like our acting invisible…
It’s hard to reconcile this view of heightened acting throughout British history with Hamlet’s nuanced advice to players, which sounds a little like a call to realism to modern ears: ‘Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature.’ But theatre was a newly commercial medium in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, establishing its conventions and practices, so acting itself was in professional infancy. Academics like the Globe’s Head of Higher Education & Research, Dr Farah Karim-Cooper have suggested that if we could time travel back to 1599 and watch Julius Caesar in the original Globe, we might find more to recognise than in later eras. Perhaps not modern naturalism, but likely a subtly flexible acting technique, in which silence, intimacy, understatement and stillness formed as great a resource in communicating with an audience as heightened characterisation, highly stylized gestures or simply physical storytelling.
The Attitudes project and Nell Gwynn
The idea for this project came at one of the first public readings of Nell Gwynn at RADA in 2014; references to ‘The Attitudes’ in Jessica Swale’s play flicked a switch that connected my academic education, training as an actor, six years on stage, and work as a photographer. Attitudes from Shaftesbury’s book made up a small part of the background resources the actors and director Chris Luscombe used to enter Nell’s world. And in a spirit of happy reciprocity, company members including David Rintoul, Greg Haiste, Gemma Arterton and Matthew Durkan later gave their time and talent to shoot for the project.
I’ve now shot over 30 actors and counting. Normally it takes 20 to 30 minutes: after a cup of
tea and a biscuit (the only sure way to an actor’s heart) we chose an
appropriate seeming Attitude or two from the book and either recreate it or
devise a modern equivalent. I aim to give the shots a timeless feel: seamless,
hand-painted backdrops feel like ‘somewhere, but nowhere’. Using a single light
source means shadow, as much as light, emphasises the narrative of body shape,
while still allowing the actor’s facial expression to speak.
Nell Gwynn & The Attitudes: The Art of Acting is available to view for free in the Globe’s main foyer
until 21 May 2017. The project is raising
funds and awareness for the charity Acting
for Others.
Don’t miss Jessica Swale’s Nell Gwynn, which is now playing in the Globe Theatre until 13 May 2017.