Looking at actors

[Sir Michael Gambon as Sir John Falstaff at the National Theatre 2005, Stuart Pearson Wright]

I'm re-working an article at present, in response to some reader's comments, and in doing so I've started reading Aoife Monks' The Actor in Costume (2009). This is rather timely given that I've just been to see Simon Annand's exhibition The Half, which Monks refers to in her opening chapter 'Dressing Rooms: The Actor's Body and Costume'. Discussing Stuart Pearson Wright's portrait of Michael Gambon and Edgar Degas' painting Actress in Her Dressing-Room (1879), Monks indicates the disappointment of such pictures which only seem to offer us an insight into actors and acting:

The problem that always undermines portraits of actors in their dressing rooms is that once actors are looked at - even if they appear not to notice - their activity turns into fictional labour, they still appear to be acting even if their averted gaze and their absorption in the task of dressing suggests otherwise. Dressing room portraits promise to reveal the mysteries of acting, but they end up perpetuating it further, making the private life of the actor all the more secretive and unknowable. The "real" actor is in the end a fantasy of portraits of dressing up. (33)

Backstage space is always implicitly depicted from a spectator's point of view. The portraits that Monks refers to are made for those whose access to backstage spaces is tinged with the thrill of transgression and who seek the real behind the imaginary. But what happens if we assume that the backstage is the normative orientation towards performance and attempt to view it, and the other spaces of theatre, as those who work there do? It's my contention that in the backstage actors (in the company of technicians, stage managers, etc.) produce space that accommodates their onstage performances and counters the uncertainty and transience of their own employment and the wearing, alienating machinery of commodity theatre. This is a tactics of coping, a means of maintaining a sustainable artistic practice by producing recuperative spaces where their needs can be met. And it has nothing to do with how they are perceived by spectators, but how they perceive themselves.