Peter Ackroyd’s many books include his Dickens, of 1,200 pages (Ackroyd later produced a shorter, abridged version in paperback) and well regarded, a similarly acclaimed history of London, and four volumes on the history of England. The English imagination is his theme and the subject of Albion, the most eccentric of his books. His new book charts the history of the English actor from medieval times to the present, and his track record attests to his qualifications to write about this alluring subject. For he has also written a good biography of Shakespeare, who probably earned more money as an English actor than as a playwright, though playing supporting rather than starring roles—Hamlet’s father’s ghost rather than Hamlet. Dickens, in his later years, took to the stage, reading from his books in one-man shows, and Ackroyd quotes here Dickens’s belief that acting was “the most intelligent of professions.” He has also written about Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock and penned a thriller featuring the late-Victorian music-hall legend Dan Leno.

In this new book, Ackroyd only briefly touches on screen acting and instead concentrates on the stage. When writing about Richard Burton, Welsh rather than English and largely lost to the theater owing to Hollywood’s temptations and tax exile, even if he sometimes returned like a prodigal son to Broadway for limited runs, Ackroyd says nothing about his films or Elizabeth Taylor. Someone once told me that if you only saw Burton in the movies, you never saw Burton. Acting onstage and acting before the camera require opposite techniques, and most actors find the theater more satisfying for their art if less so for their bank accounts. The cinema is the director’s or sometimes the producer’s medium, the theater the actor’s. Peter O’Toole continued to act onstage, refusing payment when appearing in the theater because, as his former wife Siân Phillips said, he felt he needed “to give something back.”

Ackroyd seems to regard a director in the theater as something of a mixed blessing

Ackroyd seems to regard a director in the theater as something of a mixed blessing. He points out that until the mid-twentieth century, directors hardly existed in English theater. Even now, he tells us, the “auteur” tradition, “where the director is the actor’s tutor and the playwright’s master,” is a Continental European idea adopted in America but more or less alien to England. Even if the director does not interfere with what the playwright wrote, he renders the actor passive. Ackroyd quotes Simon Callow’s observation that “the English actor is innately suspicious of . . . ‘directocracy.’” During the Restoration, when Thomas Betterton dominated the English stage, there was a prompter but no director or producer. Over the next two centuries and more, the actor was usually free to find his own way, though there was a producer supervising the play’s settings, ensuring that the actors knew their lines and their moves. Actors were expected to be able to create their parts without needing someone else to coax them into a performance. Hitchcock, a film rather than theater director, expected his actors to make their own decisions about their parts but respect his directions about their places and moves. Actors trained by the post-1945 “Method” exasperated him when they asked him to help them in searching for their characters’ “motivations.” There doesn’t seem to have been any famous stage director in England before the mid-twentieth century, but, without giving a date, Ackroyd does note that Athene Seyler, possibly in her 1943 book The Craft of Comedy, complained that “nowadays directors tell you even how to move your hands.”

English theater and acting have long been revered. It is not always easy to define what makes English acting so special, and the book, rich in anecdotes and nuggets of information on legendary and almost forgotten actors as well as some alive and working now, gives more hints than clear answers to the question. English actors are more inclined to speak of their craft with jokes and anecdotes rather than with earnest confessions. For that matter, confessing does not come naturally to someone who spends his life pretending to be other people. “We don’t really know who we are,” Ralph Richardson once remarked.” “Magic has always lain at the heart of English acting,” Ackroyd writes in the book’s first paragraph, and he maintains that the written word is essential to English acting. The play’s the thing.

Ackroyd is at pains to differentiate English acting from American, though he also admits that the dreaded Method, formerly regarded with suspicion in England, is now taught in English drama schools. The Method only appeared in American acting after 1945 and was suited to many plays of the period by Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and others. Until then, American techniques in acting must have resembled those in England. Hitchcock was happy with such pre-Method American actors as James Stewart. The Method encouraged an introspective approach somewhat akin to psychoanalysis, which also became fashionable in the United States at the same time. There are anecdotes about the irritation suffered on Broadway and in Hollywood by colleagues of Marlon Brando, always mumbling his way to his character’s soul. The Method also introduced an elemental rather than intellectual approach, which made Brando and others so interesting to many, including some in England, as confirmed in Peter O’Toole’s memoirs.

I spent time in my youth at a small, eccentric drama school, now defunct, named Studio 68 in Kensington and co-directed by an American, Robert Henderson, famous as Sean Connery’s mentor. Henderson, born in 1904, learned his craft in the 1920s and worked in the United States and also with Louis Jouvet in France before spending most of his life in England. He detested the Method, which he regarded as deriving from a misreading of Konstantin Stanislavski’s teaching. The English actors and actresses at the school thought in much the same way as Robert. Their easygoing approach seemed more down-to-earth than the tormented Method.

He detested the Method, which he regarded as deriving from a misreading of Konstantin Stanislavski’s teaching.

Presence matters more than looks in acting. David Garrick was small, only five feet four inches, while Thomas Betterton was of middling height and inclined to corpulence, though Colley Cibber, Pope’s “Head Dunce,” said Betterton made up for it with an “outstanding mien of majesty.” Cibber himself, who first appeared on stage in 1690, had “a thin, piping voice,” a faulty memory, and “a wholly unheroic figure.” Edith Evans, unbecoming in looks, through willpower made herself and her audiences see her as beautiful when playing Millament in Congreve’s The Way of the World in 1924. Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier were self-conscious about their average height. A clever actor can turn defects into assets. Cibber won laughs by asking the prompter in a loud voice “What happens next?” Olivier was known for his athletic daring, but he was maladroit in handling verse, essential for the classical actor he aspired to be. The critic James Agate wrote that Olivier, then playing Hamlet in the 1930s, did not speak poetry badly because he did not speak it at all. Agate praised Olivier rather for his “pulsating vitality and excitement.” Numerous critics and colleagues remarked that Olivier was unconvincing when cast as a lover.

“Always under the sign of either Bacchus or Venus.”

Olivier belonged to a generation in the English theater that appeared between the wars, so remarkable as to be unlikely to be seen again. John Gielgud was Olivier’s great counterpart, and a generation debated the merits of the two. Almost everyone teaching at Studio 68, while admitting the merits of both, had a preference for one or the other. Voice teachers invariably were for Gielgud. He gave “loving attention to vowel and consonant,” Ackroyd writes. Richard Burton shared Gielgud’s feeling for poetical words and combined it with an earthiness similar to Olivier’s. It is obvious why so many mourned Burton’s abandonment of the stage for the camera, which rarely captured his quality. “Always under the sign of either Bacchus or Venus,” my mother quipped of Burton, whose life contained a tragic element.

Annoyingly, Ackroyd often speaks of “female actors,” even if he sometimes slips into the traditional “actress,” including when he quotes Juliet Stevenson, who seems not to mind being called an actress. There is nothing demeaning in speaking of an actress as opposed to an actor, any more than there is in speaking of a woman as opposed to a man. To give Ackroyd the benefit of the doubt, he may write about “the female actor” to appease The Guardian and to spare the tears of his publisher’s younger staff.

Ackroyd’s capsule glimpses of current actors are less satisfying than those focusing on the past and can seem to belong to the theater-fan magazine rather than a history. He tells us that today’s English actor is “a far more politicized creature” than those of earlier generations. If that is true it is a development to be deplored. For centuries, theatergoers were able to put aside any political differences and be entertained together. It is difficult now to see a Shakespeare production that is not costumed in fashions invented long after the author’s time, and not for expediency but to suit a slant generally left-wing or “woke.” The seventeenth-century English theater was obliged to be Cavalier since the Roundheads wanted to suppress it. Today’s Roundheads have taken over stage drama as they have so much else. Ackroyd contends that street theater may be the best hope. The tradition may best survive in returning to its ancient roots. We shall see. Current actors and actresses as well as the curious can use this book as a guide to the tradition’s history.