ABSTRACT

European theatre is rich, dynamic and variegated throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, something that is continually reflected in the accounts we have of acting, staging and audience responses during this time. One of the most significant studies of acting theory has been Joseph Roach’s The Player’s Passion. The practice of acting and attitudes towards acting varied from country to country, although need for larger theatres and greater spectacle, and the development of new dramatic forms such as melodrama certainly encouraged performance styles that focused on narrative clarity and a pictorial level of communication. The nature of audiences and of spectatorship itself changed radically during the period. Reference has already been made to impact of darkening the auditorium in the late nineteenth century and the fact that it enabled a more controlled and passive audience. As the composition of audiences broadened and theatres sprang up outside the urban centres of towns and cities, a proliferation of neighbourhood theatres occurred.