What Would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons From the Eighteenth Century. By JamesHarriman‐Smith. London: Methuen Drama. 2024. 244 p. £24.99 (pb). ISBN 978‐1‐350‐17196‐1.

Practical research on eighteenth-century theatre usually focuses on modern staging of eighteenth-century plays, proving the vitality and emotional power of works that might seem almost alien on the page. One only need to look at the work of the R/18 Collective or Red Bull Theatre to see the success of such projects. But What Would Garrick Do? makes a radically different proposal for the place of eighteenth-century performance in the modern world: rather than bringing eighteenth-century plays to the modern stage, Harriman-Smith offers eighteenth-century acting techniques for the modern rehearsal room. The book is divided into two main sections, ‘The Essays’ and ‘The Exercises’. Both, however, are fundamentally driven by work that Harriman-Smith did with acting groups around the United Kingdom. In each of the essays, Harriman-Smith introduces key concepts of eighteenth-century theatrical structure and performance theory, such as ‘Emotions’, ‘Voice’, and ‘Company’, then describes the implementation of an exercise in the rehearsal room, and finally reflects on the outcomes of that rehearsal. These exercises are reproduced in the second section in a more straightforward how-to format, allowing other actors and directors to easily integrate them into their own rehearsal processes. In putting these exercises together, Harriman-Smith worked with amateur as well as professional acting groups, containing actors of all ages, including young children. This is, as Harriman-Smith notes, an unusual approach — ‘a lot of excellent work has already taken place at specialist venues and with specialist companies’ (p. 5) — but is key to the book's success: the accessibility of the exercises, not reliant on extensive formal training, resources, or direction, means that anyone can pick up the book and engage, through their own embodied practice, with eighteenth-century theatre techniques. Though it is outside Harriman-Smith's aims for the book, it is worth mentioning that the material in the essays will be useful to students of eighteenth-century theatre in more traditional academic contexts. Designed for a non-specialist audience but still rigorously researched and informative, the essays are clear and concise, with directions both to primary sources and suggested further reading. Undergraduate students are usually unfamiliar with the theatre of this period. The Licensing Act, the architecture of a theatre, the makeup of theatre companies, and the structure of a night of performance all contribute to understanding texts that might appear on a syllabus; I can see What Would Garrick Do? finding its way onto many introductory reading lists to help students prepare and feel more comfortable with their primary sources. Though this utility in the academic classroom is laudable, it is not the primary intention of the book. Rather, as Harriman-Smith explains, the book aims ‘to disrupt our current theatrical norms by providing its readers with both information about how people once thought about theatre, and examples of how, armed with such information, we might think in innovative ways about the theatre, and especially acting, now’ (p. 4). In pursuing this disruption, What Would Garrick Do? makes noteworthy interventions in modern acting theory. In the essay on Emotions, for example, Harriman-Smith lays out the eighteenth-century conception of ‘passions’, the powerful emotions that drive a character, and where this notion differs from twentieth-century acting theory's interest in ‘objectives’ for a character in a scene. He raises the potential ethical concerns of ‘thinking of a script in terms of what one character inflicts on another’ and sees the eighteenth century as offering an alternative: ‘Looking at the passions a character is subject to, and acting from, instead allows us to recognize more easily how compromised an individual person's agency might be and how the performer needs to be reactive rather than proactive’ (p. 33). The success of these interventions in acting theory derives from Harriman-Smith's collaborative approach: he is responsive to and guided by the actors and directors he works with, admitting when exercises did not work as he had hoped, taking on board participants' suggestions for them, and trying again. This work is truly experimental and exploratory, which means results can be varied, but always intriguing to read. In the most exciting moments of the book, experiments lead to both Harriman-Smith and the actors making discoveries. For example, an exercise that recreated a hostile, noisy eighteenth-century audience saw one actor ‘make new discoveries in the text’ of her speech as Queen Margaret in Richard III, to ‘fight back against a hostile audience’ and ‘dominate those around her’ (p. 146). This is useful both for the actor approaching her part and for the scholar watching, thinking about eighteenth-century actor-audience interactions in a new way. Herein is the essence of the book: a facet of eighteenth-century acting has been handed over to an actor and has revealed something with significance to acting in both the eighteenth century and today.