THE HOW AND WHY OF ACTING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 462, 30 April 1948, Page 10

THE HOW AND WHY OF ACTING

THE AMATEUR AND THE THEATRE, By Bonamy Dobree. Hogarth Press, Through the British Council. O people disinterestedly interested in the theatre the amateur is something of an embarrassment-he is sometimes too good not to be taken seriously and often too bad not to be treated as a joke. Dobree in The Amateur and The Theatre puts him in his place, and it is a high proud place which only an amateur can fill. . The theatre by the very nature of its medium tends always to turn in upon (comtinued on next page)

(continued from previous page) itself, to value "good theatre" and""‘technique" ("a grandiloquent name... a word which is thought to cover a whole ragbag of sins") as ends instead of means and so loses "just that contact with the common apprehensions of life without which an art becomes stale or thin." The amateur with his surer knowledge of life as it is lived and his healthy ignorance of life as it is supposed to be acted can help to hold the mirror at the right angle and do a real service to the art of which he is so enamoured and he may do for some new and different play what amateurs did for The Seagull and The Family Reunion when they were new and different. Dobree, whose opinions on the art of acting are in line with those of Shakespeare and Tchekov, has the craftsman’s attitude towards the theatre and his essay is as sound and as simple as an honest piece of carpentry. In_ short, The Amateur and The Theatre is a concise, clear analysis of the nature and purpose of the amateur’s contribution to the theatre-the how as well as the why of it. I wish\some amateur producer would insist that his cast read it befote the first rehearsal and would hand it out with the programmes for the audience to read in the intervals between the. acts.