The Discipline of Acting: Craft and Interdisciplinarity in the Twenty-First Century

Contemporary actors face a tension between the deep knowledge and formational practice of craft and pragmatic demands to be adaptable. This study examines what it is to have a disciplined body, formed through training, and investigates questions of craft and craft-knowledge in relation to twenty-first century actor training in Britain. The project documents the work of three practitioners, Giles Terera (Hamilton), Joseph Calleja (Tosca), and Richard Booth (War Horse), drawing on personal observation and a range of first-hand accounts, reflections, and interviews. Building on these case studies, the thesis analyses key theoretical discourses and arguments surrounding craft, skill development, and the concept of discipline in order to illuminate the contemporary challenges which face the interdisciplinary actor. Throughout the thesis, the craft of singing is used to interrogate the craft of acting and puppetry provides another important point of reference.

Whilst contemporary British institutional actor training appears to be responding to market demands for adaptability and the development of artists as self-actualising agents, embracing the discipline of a single craft may in fact be personally rewarding, ethically desirable, and sustainable, a sensorially grounded way to continue learning and growing in new ways as an artist. The privileging of agency is not easily reconciled with the tacit and embodied forms of knowledge associated with the slow development of a craft. In clarifying the problem currently facing training institutions, trainees, trainers, and actors alike, this thesis urges its reconsideration across the field of actor training.