Between its first revival in 1771 and its last in 1871, The Gamester was performed more frequently on the London stage than any other Restoration or eighteenth-century tragedy. Most of these many performances, moreover, were given by Britain's finest actors and actresses. It should not be surprising, then, that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics who witnessed these many fine performances thought, on the whole, highly of the acted play. Nor should it be surprising that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century audiences – who also witnessed the performances of these many excellent actors and actresses – received The Gamester ‘with such genuine applause’.

Works dealing with the actor proliferated during the early decades of German Romanticism. Actors had come to be viewed as role models whose very costumes, hairstyles, and mannerisms often influenced prevailing fashions or, at least, gave them specific labels from particular plays. Popular interest in everything having to do with people of the theatre was seconded by contemporary poets, playwrights, painters, philosophers, professors, and physicians. While some of their writings concentrated on historical and philosophical concerns, others investigated anthropological and psychiatric as well as medical ones. And contemporary actors themselves contributed publications about the ways, means, and consequences of playing roles in public.

Klaus Mann, the eldest son of Thomas Mann, was among the first emigrants to leave Germany after the Nazi takeover in 1933. From the vantage point of his early exile in Amsterdam, he looked back disapprovingly at German artists and intellectuals who appeared to thrive under Hitler's regime. Especially galling to him was the success of actor/director Gustaf Gründgens (1899–1963), his former brother-in-law:

I visualize my ex-brother-in-law as the traitor par excellence, the macabre embodiment of corruption and cynicism. So intense was the facination of his shameful glory that I decided to portray Mephisto-Gründgens in a satirical novel. I thought it pertinent, indeed, necessary to expose and analyse the abject type of the treacherous intellectual who prostitutes his talent for the sake of some tawdry fame and transitory wealth.

To write of the situation of the dramatic author in present-day France is no easy task, since, inevitably, it involves making a largely negative report. Traditionally, the text in the theatre has been king; in schools and in universities, plays are above all read, and it is often – though perhaps not often enough – a revelation to those who study them to discover that the texts written by, say, Racine or Shakespeare, take on a different kind of existence when they are made flesh in the theatre. One of the qualities of such theatre is, of course, that it can be read and appreciated without any form of mediation, such as that provided, for example, by actors or directors. And it is perhaps odd that we may arguably derive as much from reading the plays of a Giraudoux, for whom the critical collaboration of his director, Louis Jouvet was crucial, as from seeing them performed. Could it be that the partnership of such a self-conscious writer with so committed a practical man of the theatre represents some kind of golden age in the relationship between the author and the director?