The Making of the Professional Actor

London: Peter Owen. Very Good/Very Good. 1996. First Edition. Hard Cover. 8vo 0720610028 Dustwrapper price clipped. Green cloth with bright gilt lettering to spine. Foreword by Jeremy Irons. 285pp clean and tight. The Making of the Professional Actor is the most thorough and accessible study of the evolution of the art of acting, not only charting its history from medieval times, but also analysing contemporary acting styles and offering predictions about the future. Adrian Cairns, an actor and director himself, provides a lively narrative and thought-provoking analysis of the actor's work and training. He summarizes the performer's historical context, looking in turn at Elizabethan, Restoration, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conventions, and gives a detailed consideration of initiatives taken, in the twentieth century by many leading theatrical figures, among them Copeau, Stanislayski, Piscator and Brecht, Artaud, Barrault, Saint-Denis, Brook, Grotowski, Strehler, Stein and Mnouchkine. As well as extensive coverage of the contemporary theatre scene and actor training in Britain, the text includes an up-to-date commentary on conditions in the rest of Europe and the USA. Students and those who teach them have long needed a concise survey of how acting has evolved. Here they are offered much more: a wide-ranging assessment of the place, function and importance of acting in the 199os and well beyond, which will be of interest to all in the profession. Already actors are involved in the use of environmental and ritual theatre, interactive virtual reality and'cyberspace technology, and both they and their public need to speculate on the effect these developments will have on the more traditional theatrical, film and television experiences. With a Foreword by Jeremy Irons .