http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4680-2327
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Abstract
This article examines the ground-breaking contribution to UK actor training made by the actor and teacher Harold Lang (1923‒1970). Trained at RADA in the early 1940s and part of the circle of flamboyant malcontents surrounding the critic Kenneth Tynan, between 1960 and 1963 Lang taught acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama and his was the first class in a British conservatoire to be designated an ‘Acting Class’. A passionate Stanislavskian, Lang unusually promoted a Russian, not an American, view of Stanislavsky, additionally filtered through his interest in the Central European Expressionist movement. His teaching was considered so revolutionary that it became the subject of a dedicated BBC documentary, shot by the film director John Schlesinger. The article begins by mapping the landscape of British conservatoire training in the 1950s, dominated by traditional voice-based approaches on the one hand and an adulterated version of the improvisatory techniques of Michel Saint-Denis on the other. The article goes on to describe the exercises captured by Schlesinger’s film and concludes that Lang’s first acting class was instrumental in the establishment of a Stanislavskian strand in the teaching of acting in this country, thus providing a ‘missing link’ between the Komisarjevsky and the ‘Method’ generations.
Notes
1 A few years after watching Judi Dench emerge from her chrysalis, and having witnessed the work of a Chicago company creating drama through improvisations, Charles Lewsen (Citation1962, p. 32) will write: ‘In Britain, as in the United States, we need new theatres, and new theatre. What we do not need is a Universal West End. When the West End is worth imitating it cannot be imitated. When it isn’t, what’s the point? … Embryo authors can easily collaborate with groups of improvisers’.
2 For a list of former students of Saint-Denis and of the equally influential movement teacher Litz Pisk who became prominent teachers in British drama schools, see Mirodan (Citation2015, pp. 215‒216, n. 3; see also Lewsen Citation1993).
3 Saint-Denis’s school was actually called the Old Vic Theatre School (1947‒1952).
4 The Stage, 11 July 1963, p. 10, col. 6; and The Stage, 10 October 1963, p. 13, col. 6.
5 The place of this debate in the story of Stanislavsky’s complex relationship with British acting is charted by David Shirley (Citation2012, pp. 48‒49). Overall, Lang’s position is closest to that expounded there by Charles Marowitz.
6 ‘Ken [Tynan] told me with relish that he had died, as he liked to live, in a gay brothel in Cairo’ (Gaskill Citation2001, p. 56, col. 3). Reiterated in interview with the author 9 June 2013 (see also Fraser Citation2004, p. 221).
7 Lang was very conscious of the confusion and sometimes made the most of it: there is a photograph of him mischievously greeting his better-known American namesake at Paddington on the latter’s arrival to play Joey in London in 1955. For that London run, the American Lang had to agree with Equity to be billed as ‘Harold Lang of the United States’ (https://www.alamy.com/feb-02-1954-harold-lang-meets-harold-lang-harold-lang-of-the-united-image69287161.html).
8 Graduated in 1939 but joined the group’s extra-curricular ventures.
9 Tynan’s diary entry for 7 September 1975. John Lahr, the editor, erroneously assigns this reference to the Broadway dancer Harold Lang, who actually died in 1985. There is no evidence that Tynan knew the American dancer. Bill Gaskill, who knew both Tynan and the ‘British Lang’ well, offers a similar correction in his review of Tynan’s diaries (Gaskill Citation2001, p. 56).
10 ‘The Class’, Monitor, BBC TV, 1961. The film is in the BBC archives. A brief description can be found in Mann (Citation2004, pp. 164ff.).
11 The conflation made in Susi (Citation2006, p. 126) of Lang’s Stanislavskian teaching with ‘The Method’ is typical, and wrong. According to his students, Lang never described his approach as ‘The Method’ or even as ‘a method’. When after 1963 the same students were taught at the Drama Centre by the Uta Hagen-trained Doreen Cannon, they resisted her, as she was considered to lack ‘Englishness, irony, the outside-in approach: “I have the shell, then fill it with egg; rather than I have the egg, then build”’, as the actor Peter Kenvyn puts it.
12 Yakim and Broadman (Citation1990) offer a useful description of how the two approaches were made to work in tandem at the Julliard School, another Saint-Denis foundation.
13 For a detailed account of these events see Mirodan (Citation2013; also Susi Citation2006, pp. 128‒133).
14 This material, in Harold’s Lang’s papers (author’s collection), will form the subject of a dedicated article I am writing with my colleague Dr Benjamin Askew.
15 Lang also works with Nicholas Amer and Greville Hallam, two assistants who cover his teaching so often while he is busy with acting work that, Oliver Cotton recalls, by 1962‒1963 ‘it was a high day when he appeared to teach’.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Vladimir Mirodan
Vladimir Mirodan, PhD, FRSA is Emeritus Professor of Theatre, University of the Arts London. Trained on the Directors Course at Drama Centre London, he has directed over 50 productions in the UK as well as internationally and has taught and directed in most leading drama schools in the UK. He was Director of the School of Performance at Rose Bruford College, Vice-Principal and Director of Drama at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Principal of Drama Centre London and Director of Development and Research Leader, Drama and Performance, Central Saint Martins. He is currently the Chair of the Directors Guild of Great Britain Trust and of the Directors Charitable Foundation.