How to Act Like a Woman: Professional Advice from English Actresses

How to Act Like a Woman: Professional Advice from English Actresses MARIA PAPANIKOLAOU If an actor has a point o/viewfrom actual experience, it seems strange that those who merely deal with these great works in a librmy should be so top lofty. If one could get a fish to talk about the sea as he fives in it he might make the work ofthe observer a little easier. - Lena AshweU, Myselfa Player 186. Tucked away in a corner of the editor's commentary page in the August 1919 issue of The Play Pictorial is an advertisement that promises a simple cure for an actress's possible bad luck in getting her break I having a successful stage career: improve personality, To do this, one only needed to get a book ("which every artiste should send for immediately") promoting the Kallone Course, a class that could teach every woman interested in a stage career how "this 'asset' [personality] can really be acquired," The Kallone Course encompassed "the whole syllabus of feminine charm," the "true secrets of perfection in face, figure, voice, manner, dress, and conversation." Indeed, in the very year that English actresses, or at least those politically minded, finally won partial suffrage, they were still losing their battle over what it meant to be "woman," competing with an entire "syllabus of female chann," For theatre historians, the ad holds interest due to both its content and prominent placement, for it signals the relevance of a subject largely absent from discussions of Edwardian and early twentieth-century theatrical culture and feminism: that of acting advice directed toward women, its rhetoric and content. The written advice that the actresses offered to readers provides a closer look at, and different perspective on, the far-reaching effects of the political and social discussion surrounding the understanding of "woman" during this period and uncovers how actresses strove to define the tenn for street and stage use. Many female theatre artists shifted in their ideas of public, private, and Modern Drama, 46:2 (Summer2003) 207 208 MARIA PAPANIKOLAOU artistic personae almost en masse in the years before the Kallone Course ad. Actresses' shift in thinking and in their understandings of themselves is most prominent in the rhetoric of their autobiographies and in the advice they offered to aspiring actresses within those pages. In so doing, these writers encountered a rhetorical and philosophic dilemma, as they attempted to give directions on how to act like a woman at a moment when "woman" was coming under critical (self-)examination and redefinition in both pOlitics and theatre -culture aesthetics. How does one give advice on how to act like a "real" woman when the very idea of "woman" is changing? Theatre historians have long argued that this time of political upheaval staged on the streets and in the theatre caused a major upturn in women's politics. The suffrage movement, the women who participated, even what they wore, has been discussed for the last decade at least, but few look at what actresses wrote. Considering the actresses as writers on the page rather than as artists on the stage clarifies not actresses' perfonnance of a text but instead their performances in a text as presenters of their own brand of feminism, of what their own definitions term "woman." I This idea of "performance in," when situated within a context of rhetorical theory and theatre history, allows an exploration of the actress as an artist, negotiating rhetorical conventions well beyond the expected terms of reference for actresses at this time. My examination builds on Leigh Gilmore's idea of autobiography as performance, as "a stage where women writers, born again in the act of writing, may experiment with reconstructing the various discourses - of representation, of ideology - in which ",eir subjectivity has been formed" (85). The actresses chosen for this study share several characteristics. First, they wrote about their craft and, sometimes, about politics. Second, they were all professional English actresses, meaning that they understood themselves as theatre artists and wrote about themselves in that context. Third, they were involved in legitimate, West End theatre (rather than musicals, ballets, circuses ). Fourth, they were exceptionally popular in their day, a factor...