ABSTRACT
The acting profession changed profoundly during the first half of the twentieth century. For one thing, increasing numbers of actors came, like Sybil Thorndike, Laurence Olivier, Seymour Hicks and Ernest Thesiger, from professional or Services backgrounds, and, especially after the First World War, Oxbridge graduates like Tyrone Guthrie, Norman Marshall, Michael Redgrave and Terence Rattigan, joined them. Plays and settings of the 1920s demanded a ‘quiet’ acting style, restrained behaviour lifted bodily from real middle class life. It was an art of understatement and implication, meaning created through the nuances of stillness and silence. Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times praised the acting of Peggy Ashcroft and Roland Culver in Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea because it seemed ‘to touch the greatest heights of which acting of the quietest school is capable. Most notable among non-acting directors was probably Basil Dean, known for the perfection of his photographic ‘realism’.
