Key Names: Class Nine

--- tags: DramaSix, names --- # Key Names: Class Nine ### Edmund Kean (1789-1833) - Romantic Actor - Fascinated and terrified audiences with fierce depictions of obsessive and uncontrollable evil. - Abandoning decorum, Kean would cringe and crawl on the floor if that’s what he felt the role demanded. - Father of Charles Kean {%hackmd zrQHekanRoOqyACo-tV_Vg %} ### Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen (1826-1914) - Considered the first modern director - Controlled all aspects of physical production including arranging the movement of the actors with military precision - Considered the stage set as “a work of art” rather than a backdrop for action - Sought historical accuracy in plays by Shakespeare, Schiller and Kleist - Fully individualized crowd scenes in which each performer had a fully realized character and stake in the action of the scene ### Madame Vestris (1797-1856) - Madame Vestris, who managed London’s Olympic Theatre (1831-39) and Covent Garden (1839-42), appealed to a newly affluent audience with comic operas, fanciful extravaganzas[^1], and middle-class comedies and farces. - Vestris revolutionized the staging of indoor scenes when she introduced the Box Set. - Vestris’s production of Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance at Covent Garden in 1841 was praised for the realism of the rooms, which were decorated with heavy molding, real doors with doorknobs, rugs on the floor and books in the bookcases. ### Effie Bancroft (1839-1921) - The Bancrofts (Effie and her husband Squire Bancroft) made the “box set” fashionable in the 1860s with their productions of the popular “drawing-room comedies” of T. W. Robertson at the 600-seat Prince of Wales Theatre. ### Montigny (Adolphe Lemoine) (1806-1880) - The table guy - In 1853, Montigny (Adolphe Lemoine) placed a table downstage center at the posh 800-seat Théâtre du Gymnase,preventing actors from forming themselves into the traditional downstage semi-circle. He placed chairs around the table and told the actors to sit and talk to each other. ### Eugène Scribe (1791-1861) - Eugène Scribe, called “the Father of the Boulevard,” enjoyed enormous commercial success in the “boulevard theaters” of Paris and across Europe from the 1830s through the 1850s with his formulaic or “well-made” comedies and vaudevilles. ### T.W. Robertson (1829-1871) - “cup-and-saucer” dramas — Society(1865), Ours(1866), Caste(1867), Play(1868), School (1869) - revealed character through the way they handled the objects and situations of daily life. ### William Macready (1793-1873) - In the 1830s, William Macready began performing Macbeth in a kilt, and in carefully researched sets that accorded with audiences’ notions of past historical times. ### Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) - See Weimar Style ## Additional Names ### Joseph Talma (1763-1826) - played the darker passions of fury and despair with such frenzied speech and violent gestures that one critic said his Oreste in Racine’s Andromaque was like “a madman in an asylum.” - Example of a romantic actor who thought of acting as a pictoral art form ### Ludwig Devrient (1784-1832) - brought a demonic frenzy to roles like Shakespeare’s King Lear and Schiller’s Karl Moor displaying a sense of raw, unpredictable power that revealed the inner turmoil in the character - [^1]: EXTRAVAGANZA (late 18th century, from Italian Stravaganza, “an extravagance”) A new theatrical genre introduced by the playwright, librettist, and costume historian James Planché, who defined it as “the whimsical treatment of a poetical subject.”