Making performance happen — acting technique, directing, and the stagecraft, lighting and design that carry it.
11 topics · 26 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
On Actors and the Art of Acting
George Henry Lewes · 1875
Surveys great actors of the century to argue that first-rate acting combines natural sensibility with deliberate, learnable technical control, not…
+9 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Masks or Faces? A Study in the Psychology of Acting
William Archer · 1888
Tests Diderot's paradox against testimony from working actors and argues most describe a controlled dual consciousness on stage rather than a total…
+7 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Paradox of Acting
Denis Diderot · 1830
Argues that the greatest actors feel nothing while performing, because genuine emotion is inconsistent night to night and only cold, studied…
+7 more at this level
12 of 26 works
George Henry Lewes
Surveys great actors of the century to argue that first-rate acting combines natural sensibility with deliberate, learnable technical control, not one or the other alone.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Dion Clayton Calthrop
Traces English dress period by period as a resource for stage designers, arguing that historical accuracy in silhouette and detail is what makes a costume read as of its period rather than fancy dress.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Dolman
A manual for the ambitious amateur company arguing that a production is one designed whole — the actors' movement, the setting and the play's rhythm all serving a single visual and dramatic idea — rather than a script simply staged as written.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Keith Johnstone
Argues spontaneity is not a rare gift but a skill blocked by fear of failure, and that status transactions between characters, not clever ideas, are what make improvised scenes cohere.
National Theatre
Argues that theatre sound is dramaturgy rather than decoration: what the audience hears establishes place and time that the set cannot, and must survive a live room every night.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charlie Mitchell
Introduces theatre as a set of interlocking crafts rather than a literary form, arguing that a production's meaning is built jointly by actor, director, and scenic, costume and lighting designers, so that reading a play well means understanding the decisions each of them must make.
link checked 17 Sept 2026National Theatre
Frantic Assembly's Scott Graham leads a devising exercise built entirely from partner-based physical contact, arguing that a scene's shape and story can be generated from the body's movement vocabulary before a word of dialogue exists.
link checked 17 Sept 2026National Theatre
Follows a set design from model box to stage, showing that the designer's decisions are constrained first by how bodies move through the space and only then by how it looks.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Royal Shakespeare Company
Argues that Shakespeare's metre is a set of instructions to the actor rather than decoration, because where the stress falls and where the line breaks tell you what the character is doing.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Royal Shakespeare Company
Shows that Shakespeare's switches between prose and verse track status, sanity and intimacy, so the choice of form is itself a piece of characterisation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026William Archer
Tests Diderot's paradox against testimony from working actors and argues most describe a controlled dual consciousness on stage rather than a total absence of feeling.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Francois Delsarte
Systematises gesture, posture and voice into law-governed 'attitudes' that a performer can train and combine deliberately, treating expression as a teachable science rather than inspiration.
link checked 17 Sept 2026