ABSTRACT
What is it that makes a performer compelling to watch? We might explain the fascination in terms of the performance itself as a display of exceptional talents, but history is full of examples of stage celebrities who gained pre-eminence in spite of quite obvious deficiencies in looks, technique or discipline. Even where supremacy in skill is unquestionable, we may still find commentators struggling to describe how there was something more than this in the performance, something experienced as uniquely powerful, perhaps even transcendent or magical. It is the ‘x’ factor in the actor’s art. As Joseph Roach summarises: ‘Poets have It. Saints have It. Actors must have It’.1
