Book review: Why Acting Matters by David Thomson
Screen and stage writer David Thomson’s densely packed treatise is a compelling examination of the elusive art form
by David Thomson
Yale University Press
We can all think of those moments when some sleight of acting transforms a film, or perhaps redeems it, or lodges so memorably in our minds that forever after we think about it with a kind of awe.
Off the top of my head: Diane Lane in an otherwise terrible adultery drama, Unfaithful. There is a scene in which her character, alone on a train, recalls the irrevocable step she has just taken that afternoon with a man who is not her husband: the way Lane makes laughing indistinguishable from crying is extraordinary. I've forgotten almost everything else about that film, but I wouldn't trade those few frames of imaginative virtuosity for anything.
His latest, Why Acting Matters, is a sort of chef's reduction of his style, a densely packed treatise on one of the most elusive and haunting art forms. It addresses not just the business of stage and screen performers, but the necessity of "acting" in our own lives: "Perhaps acting matters because of our dying attempt to believe that life is not simply a desperate, terrifying process in which we are alone and insignificant."
One of Thomson's motivating interests here is the paradoxical demand on all actors "to be real and fake, at the same time". He recalls as a schoolboy watching Laurence Olivier play Archie Rice on the London stage in 1957. Olivier had hitherto been the English theatre's Shakespearean god, with his triumphant incarnations of Hamlet, Henry V and Richard III. Back then, the young Thomson knew The Entertainer would be a stretch for an actor so steeped in the aristocratic and burnished by his success on screen. But Olivier's pathetic Archie got to him: "I could feel something I wasn't able to articulate: that this glittering wreck only a few feet away was as vital as one's father in life, drunk or sober."