Respectable Romantic acting

Of all the great British actors, Henry Irving’s genius may be the most elusive, though some modern commentators such as David Mayer and Peter Thomson have shed genuine light on the enigma. It is at the heart of the dispute between Irving and the French actor, Constant Coquelin. Coquelin, confirming Diderot’s paradox, proposed that the actor could be divided in two, the controlling brain and the performing instrument. For him, the best actors never felt the emotion of the role but remained icily in control of what they were doing. Irving proposed alternatively that the actor could and did feel emotion, but that a ‘dual consciousness’ enabled him to keep control of the emotion he was feeling and direct its expression on the stage. Forbes-Robertson’s ‘right feeling’, his ‘perfect taste’ and his ‘controlled ardour’ mark the quintessence of the respectable Romantic acting of the Irving era.