Is It Really Possible to Write About Acting?

The Guardian's theater blog asks today: "How do you describe great acting?"

Andrew Haydon finds it curious that theater critics (at least in the U.K.) tend to focus on the play itself -- whether the script, the content, the stage direction, the lighting -- rather than the performances of the actors on stage.

From "How do you describe great acting?":

Something I've been finding fascinating recently is how hard it is to write about acting, to put into words what an actor's performance is like. There just doesn't seem to be an appropriate vocabulary...

There are those old examples of Kenneth Tynan spending 90% of a review describing just one performance – say, Olivier in Shakespeare. If anyone wrote that sort of review now, I suspect they'd prompt a few letters to the editor asking what the rest of the play was like...

I would argue that the reason for this lies in the very nature of our culture and language. We are predisposed to talking about ideas and politics; we have a lot of words for doing so. Acting, on the other hand, is full of intangible qualities. Little wrinkles of the eye, the faint hint of a smile – it's a series of tiny moments that would take an entire newspaper to describe. There are a few shorthands for style: acting, like porcelain, tends to be fine. Sometimes it can be "broad" or "rough", while individual actors may even merit a couple of adjectives for their characterisation.

It's an odd problem, and I don't have any kind of solution. But it is intriguing to think that at the heart of writing about theatre, there is this strange void in language that means we can't ever say what we've seen. 

Do you agree with Haydon? How does his argument translate to American theater and theater critics, or to films (or even music)?

One comment on Haydon's blog post, from user "Griffitz," argues:

I don't think it is possible to describe a good performance. A really good performance should leave the audience with no impression of the individual actor at all, just the character that they were playing. I believe the ultimate ambition for an actor in a performance is to 'show no workings'. An actor is a storyteller - if the audience is thinking about what the actor's doing then they're not totally involved in the story and so the actor has, by definition, failed in their task.

Discuss.

-- Daniel Lehman