ABSTRACT
The alternative theatre companies have been largely performer-managed; a feature which highlights the fact that in traditional theatre work the performer is the least powerful in the creative process. Since the demise of the actor/manager (or the occasional actress/manageress) the performer has generally come to be seen as an interpreter of the text’s and/ or director’s intentions. As part of the post-Second World War changes in the theatre industry, the ‘image’ of the performer changed too. The star system, still very much in evidence throughout the West End theatre of the 1950s, was undergoing modification. A shift in the class content of postwar drama affected the image of the male actor:
Within ten years suave actors had been replaced by rough ones as heroes, metropolitan accents by regional ones, complacent young men by angry ones, stylish decadents by frustrated ‘working-class’ anti-heroes. (John Elsom, Post-War British Theatre, Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1979, p. 34)
Elsom concentrates exclusively on the image of the actor-but gradually changes in the family and the position of women also began to affect the image of the actress. Sheila Allen, who left the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1951, commented:
The current heroine at that time was five foot, four inches; a sort of fluffy little blonde, light, effervescent. I
was five foot seven and a half inches, and I was told at drama school that I would have problems because I was very tall. By the mid-sixties that had changed-with leading ladies like Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson, now you could be a heroine and it didn’t matter so much what you looked like.
