Chapter 3 - Actors

Summary

This chapter investigates how the idea of ‘service’ narrates the shifting (and sometimes consistent) ways in which actors have been understood on and off the British stage since the Second World War. ‘Service’ is a word often used casually by critics and theatre workers alike, but it contains a multitude of sometimes contradictory meanings, revealing of the peculiar social status of actors in Britain. The chapter argues that the combination of an idealist sense of service, inherited from the nineteenth century stage with the rhetoric of national duty during the war, promoted the increasing professionalisation among actors in Britain since 1945. The idea of the actor as public servant or member of the professional classes was complicated, however, by the longstanding association of actors with bohemianism, producing an ambiguous class identity for the acting profession. It is this class anxiety and ambivalence, complicated by post-war ideas of national service, that is the concern of this chapter. Finally, the chapter proposes that the rhetoric of service and the cultures of bohemianism have functioned as forms of mystification that disavow the actor’s status as a waged worker.