The Audience and the Actor

William Charles Macready (1793-1873) was the son of a travelling play­er and theatrical manager who had once performed with Charles Macklin. Although Macready's childhood was spent in and around various theatres in London, he was not at first destined for the stage. He was sent to a college where he acquired a gentlemanly education upon which he prided himself for the rest of his life. His intention was to prepare himself for the bar, but at the age of 16 he found himself involved into the stream of theatrical life. In 1810 he made his debut in the role of Romeo.

From 1810 to 1816, Macready played many roles throughout England. Scotland, and Ireland, even supporting the great Sarah Siddons in several plays. At the end of this period he was given a five years' engagement at Covent Garden. As Edmund Kean faded from the scene, Macready earned the position of leading tragedian of the English stage. He was regarded as the actor under whose management the legitimate, classical stage could peace­fully develop.

Macready's repertoire included the great tragic roles of Macbeth, Othel­lo, Richard and Coriolanus. Macready reduced the high passions of tragedy to the restraint of the drawing-room, he succeeded best in the plays of his own day, plays which infused the tragic with domestic touches that Macready pointed the way toward the refined drawing-room realism that developed in the middle of the XIX century. Macready was himself manager at different times of both the patent theatres, where he sought always to improve current methods of production by subordinating scenery and costume to the play as a whole. His manage­ments were artistically a success. He always worked to rescue Shakes­peare's text from many Restoration emendations. Macready was the first English manager to insist on full rehearsals, particularly for supers and crowd scenes. Appalled by the slipshod fashion with which plays were customarily mounted, Macready insisted on stern rehearsal discipline. In his Reminiscences, the actor-manager dwelled on the advance of the director's art toward which Garrick and the Kembles had made only sporadic contributions.

His artistry speaks for itself in the pages of his Diaries: “From circumstances that I do not remember, the season at Bath was a dull one, and the theatre suffered proportionately with the other places of amusement. But this did not prevent me from using as means of study for my improvement the practice it afforded me. A full attendance is too generally required as a spur to a performer's exertions, and to a beggarly account of empty boxes many have been in the habit of slurring over (or what is known as "walking through") their parts”.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04