Why waste a whole evening, once or twice a week, in a stuffy and over-red theater, breathing zymotic air, sniffing discordant perfumery, looking at idiotic scenery, listening to the bleeding English of ignorant and preposterous actors? Have you ever, in all your life, seen five leading men who actually looked like civilized gentlemen, or even like the authentic valets, head clerks or unburied corpses of civilized gentlemen? Have you ever sat through a whole performance without wishing it were possible to take at least one of the actors out into the alley, there to do execution of the lex non scripta upon him? Eheu, Postume, what all of us have suffered at the hands of such strutting mummers and mountebanks! How we have writhed and squirmed beneath their astounding outrages upon the vulgate! What is worse than an actor? Two actors? Three actors? A whole stage full of actors! An endless succession of actors! … How we have leaped and squealed under their broad a‘s, their fearful renderings of proper names, their obscene attempts at boarding school French! How our paws have itched to grab them by the collars of their advanced coats, and to strangle them with their futurist shirts, and to anatomize them with the razor edges of their superbly ironed pantaloons! …
There are, of course, such things as good actors. Let us be just and admit it. I have seen and known a few myself, and have heard of a few more. There are half a dozen in England and as many in France. In Germany, I dare say, the police have the names of twenty. (One memorable night, in that strange land, I saw two on the stage at once!) But is the good actor, either at home or abroad, the normal actor, the average actor? Of course he is not. He is the rare actor, the miraculous actor, almost the fabulous actor. Examine a hundred bartenders and you will find that fully sixty of them actually know how to tend bar: they can mix a cocktail that, whatever its faults, is at least fit to drink, and they have the craft needed to draw a Seidel of Pilsner and to beat the cash register. But in the allied art of acting there is no such general dispersion of talent. A handful of outstanding super-actors have it all. The rest of them not only don’t know how to act, but they don’t know that they don’t know.
H.L. Mencken, “Getting Rid of the Actor”, The Smart Set, 1913-09.
April 22, 2020
QotD: Actors
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