Theatre, Dance and Performance Training

ISSN: 1944-3927 (Print) 1944-3919 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtdp20

The first class: Harold Lang and the beginnings

of Stanislavskian teaching in the British
conservatoire

Vladimir Mirodan

To cite this article: Vladimir Mirodan (2020) The first class: Harold Lang and the beginnings of
Stanislavskian teaching in the British conservatoire, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training,
11:1, 60-75, DOI: 10.1080/19443927.2019.1636856

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2019.1636856

Published online: 27 Jan 2020.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 149

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rtdp20
Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 2020
Vol. 11, No. 1, 60–75, https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2019.1636856

The first class: Harold Lang and the

beginnings of Stanislavskian teaching in
the British conservatoire
Vladimir Mirodan

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.

Keywords: Harold Lang, Stanislavsky, History of Actor Training, Central School

of Speech and Drama, John Schlesinger

Stanislavsky hidden in plain sight

While a student at the Central School of Speech and Drama in the

1950s, the future star Julie Christie gets into a scrap with one of her
teachers: she owns up to a liking for Brecht. To get his own back,
the teacher snaps: ‘You’ll go into films anyway. You’ve got that sort of

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please
see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/19443927.2020.1727204)
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 61

face’ (Ewbank and Hildred 2000, p. 14). At a time and in a place where
careers are still considered ‘proper’ only when made in the classical
theatre, Brecht is weird foreign muck and screen work infra dig.
Yet Christie and her friends cannot help but sense that something
exciting is crossing the Channel: a new generation of British writers and
directors look not only to Brecht but also to the Italian neo-realists and
the French nouvelle vague and demand something different: intelligence
as well as looks – an intelligent allure. Unfortunately, the famous
Rank ‘charm school’, that ‘cross between Lee Strasberg’s Actors
Studio and a London finishing school for young ladies’ (MacNab 1994,
p. 141) had closed its doors almost a decade before: what is a
young actor intent to carve a career other than in the classical
theatre to do?
And then, even in the theatre, new writing demands new ways of act-
ing. Trying to keep up with the times, in autumn 1956 Central recruits
James Roose-Evans, one of the Young Turks of British directing, to direct
Angus Wilson’s The Mulberry Bush. He encourages his cast, which includes
a young Vanessa Redgrave, to ‘improvise, analyse and discuss [their] char-
acters’. Redgrave is thrilled to be invited, along with the rest of the cast,
to have dinner in Roose-Evans’s flat ‘in character’ (Redgrave 1992, pp.
61–62). The problem is that neither she nor her colleagues are quite
sure how to go about this way of working.
Redgrave is luckier than most: her father, one of the greats of the
British stage, had read Stanislavsky and is a fervent adherent. But when
Vanessa finds An Actor Prepares on her father’s bookshelves, gulps it
down overnight and brings it to class the next morning shouting ‘It’s all
here! IT’S ALL HERE!’, ‘some students looked amused, others bored,
or as if their infinite tolerance was strained to the limit’ (Redgrave
1992, p. 75). The teachers’ reaction is equally cool. They have, of
course, read the works of this Russian actor, and he is interesting as
far as it goes, but his is only one approach amongst many and, in
the end, it’s horses for courses: the greatness of a British drama
school resides precisely in its generous heterodoxy. Redgrave (1992,
p. 75) writes:

It was my first encounter with ingrained English eclecticism, and I was

astonished and maddened by it. I little realised then that this open-minded
acceptance of the equal validity of all methods concealed a real hostility to
any method in particular, and especially to such a method as Stanislavsky’s,
which based itself upon objective processes in nature and society …

Stanislavsky is hidden in plain sight.

Other students of the time also aspire, in an inchoate way, towards
something more coherent, more consistent, more purposeful, more …
systematic. There is, however, no such thing in any British drama school
as an ‘acting class’ that might give one a compass with which to go in
search of this elusive ‘something’. The closest thing acting programmes
from London to Bristol to Glasgow have to offer is something variously
called ‘mime’ or ‘technique’.
62 V. Mirodan

At Central, Oliver Reynolds and Walter Hudd teach ‘mime’. Not of

the white-faced variety, but a class in relaxation and being ‘private in pub-
lic’, without words or props. Judi Dench recalls being asked to ‘walk in a
familiar garden’. Years later, her classmate, the future acting teacher
Charles Lewsen, could still summon

the image of a girl wandering in a garden, sitting for a moment on a swing,

and then departing – simple, unemphatic: the work of someone who could
already achieve repose in the presence of an audience, and who probably
had the capacity to live fully in the present. (Miller 1997, p. 23)

At the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), Michael

MacOwan, the Principal, similarly starts his course with simple, silent
‘mimes’ designed ‘to express … spontaneous reactions to a thought
or situation, and to develop the creative imagination’ (cited in Gray
and Denison 1964, p. 29). At the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art
(RADA), Mary Phillips runs under the label ‘mime’ wordless classes
that develop the students’ ability to tell a story by physical means:
asked to depict a soldier parting from his wife on the way to the front,
the actor Kenneth Cranham and his partner gain high praise for sug-
gesting the motion of the departing train by moving their feet in oppos-
ite directions.
But the most telling from our perspective is the ‘technique’ class run
at RADA from 1955 to 1963 by the actor Peter Barkworth. In his two
two-hour classes per week, Barkworth teaches entrances and exits,
drinking, smoking and eating on stage; moves towards and away from a
partner, ‘blocking’ and ‘business’ with props (‘you have a mug of hot tea
and you must place it on your head during your speech; in a believable
way’). Alongside these essentially choreographic exercises, Barkworth
also introduces concepts relating to motivation and character relation-
ships. In so doing, he assimilates into his teaching certain Stanislavskian
principles, notably ‘intentions’ and ‘inner obstacles’ (Barkworth calls these
‘cover-ups’ – as in, ‘I am shy but I’ll be damned if I’ll show it’). The old
Russian is acknowledged, certainly, but his ideas and techniques are cited
in the same breath as Wendy Hiller on walks or Edith Evans on (not) tak-
ing pauses (Barkworth 1991, p. 38). Barkworth is a pragmatic teacher
who has adopted Stanislavsky without turning his ideas into dogma – the
quintessential ‘English’ approach also extolled by his contemporaries at
Central. Gwynneth Thurburn, long-serving Principal at the latter, is fond
of quoting Orson Welles: ‘The only thing wrong with The Method is the
word “The”’ (Susi 2006, p. 131).
Ultimately, ‘mime’ and ‘technique’ are there to reveal the presence of
‘intuition’. Dench herself recalls that she had actually forgotten she was
supposed to prepare the ‘garden exercise’, so she had had to do it off
the cuff. It was the very fact that she was able to respond spontaneously
to an unexpected situation that convinced her she had the talent to
become an actor (Miller 1997, p. 23).
As to ‘character’: whether one starts with a pair of shoes, with the
tempo of a speech in verse or with decisions about ‘covering up’, the

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 (1962, 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
(2015, pp. 215–216, n. 3;
see also Lewsen 1993).
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.
Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 63
effect is meant to be the same – to find ways of ‘identifying’, by which
is meant of assimilating the experiences of the character with one’s
own. The famous voice teacher Kate Fleming, who teaches at RADA
and Webber Douglas before becoming Olivier’s Head of Voice at the
newly formed National Theatre, talks to her students about finding the
‘essential core’ of the character: once they had located certain traits in
themselves, everything else would ‘fall in its place’ of its own accord.
The real challenge is not to create a character, but to summon the
courage to ‘confess in public’ (Stamp 1989, p. 121). Stanislavskian
concepts such as action, objectives or psychophysical transformation
are generally shunned, as they are deemed to be ‘intellectual-analytical’
and thus inimical to intuition. For these teachers, who in comparison
with the pre-war generation actually consider themselves to be innova-
tors, improvisation alone is the wrench with which to prise open
the floodgates behind which the creative waters of the British
theatre stagnate.1
This is not the place to chart the evolution of improvisation classes in
the British conservatoire, beyond pointing out that much of what is being
taught in ‘mime’ classes is an adulterated form of the exercises imported
from France by Michel Saint-Denis, taught by him on either side of
World War II at his two London schools and disseminated by his erst-
while pupils, many of whom find themselves by the late 1950s in positions
of influence.2 Yet even this kind of improvisation remains confined. Ever
restless (and well informed by her family connections) Vanessa Redgrave
misses the full panoply of Saint-Denis exercises: ‘animal mime’, clown,
masks. She complains:
The mime classes were still of the old school, ‘pretend you have a tea-cup
and saucer in your hand’ … Four years earlier the Young Vic Theatre
School3 had been closed down … The Arts Council drama director
Evellyn Rees was hostile to the work he saw the students were involved
in. ‘I went into a class of Saint-Denis’, said Rees, ‘and these boys and girls
were all being animals; it was like going into a lunatic asylum’. When Michel
Saint-Denis took my father around the school for the last time he was
crying … No single glimpse or reverberation of this kind of work and
these great cultural achievements existed in the training of the Central
School … [stuck in] the depths of English middle-class philistinism.
(Redgrave 1992, pp. 53–54)
At around the same time, on the other side of the tracks, a few odd-
balls begin flirting with ‘The Method’. In 1963, The Stage newspaper car-
ries ads for the (somewhat unfortunately named) SM School of Method
Drama and for The Actors’ Workshop, ‘London’s oldest Method studio’.4
In 1956, the BBC even sends a crew to film for its Tonight programme
the goings on at ‘The Method School’ in Dean Street (Wednesday eve-
nings, a fiver for the term), run by one Jos Tregoningo, the ‘self-styled
Lee Strasberg of London … a diminutive man sporting a d’Artagnan-
type moustache and beard’ (Stamp 1989, pp. 25–26). There, the TV
reporter comes across George, one of the more advanced students,
64 V. Mirodan

who is portraying – what else? – a tree. In the midst of being a rather

wonderful tree, George is asked by the BBC presenter how he feels. At
which point George utters the immortal line, ‘I can feel the sap rising in
me’ (Stamp 1989, p. 29).
Redgrave and Christie are not alone in their frustration: George Devine
organises a high-profile round table at the Royal Court during which Peter
Brook, Michel Saint-Denis, the actor Kenneth Haigh and the critic Charles
Marowitz ventilate the challenges of introducing Stanislavskian thinking into
5 The place of this debate
British theatre practice (Brook et al. 1963).5 The foundations of British
in the story of conservatoire training are drying up and wide cracks are beginning to
Stanislavsky’s complex open in its walls. It is at the gates of this exposed edifice that in 1960 the
relationship with British
acting is charted by actor Harold Lang, a passionate, evangelical Stanislavskian, arrives riding
David Shirley (2012, pp. his bicycle.
48–49). Overall, Lang’s
position is closest to
that expounded there by
Charles Marowitz. The outsider

There is some confusion regarding Harold Lang’s date of birth: the most
reliable information is that he was born Harold M. Lankstein on 1 January
1923 in a Jewish family in London. He died of a heart attack in Cairo on
6 ‘Ken [Tynan] told me
16 November 1970, aged 47, allegedly in a male brothel.6 And he should
with relish that he had not be confused with the other contemporary Harold Lang, the
died, as he liked to live, American dancer and musical actor (‘Joey’ in the original production
in a gay brothel in
Cairo’ (Gaskill 2001, p. of Pal Joey), whose dates are 1920–1985.7
56, col. 3). Reiterated in Our Lang is accepted to RADA in 1940 and graduates in 1942 win-
interview with the
author 9 June 2013 (see
ning the Bancroft Gold Medal, despite being (or perhaps because he is)
also Fraser 2004, a flamboyant, outspoken maverick. While at RADA, Lang is at the
p. 221). centre of a rebellious group of students including the future theatre and
7 Lang was very conscious opera director John Blatchley, the actors Alfred Burke8 and Alan Badel
of the confusion and
sometimes made the and the future agent and producer Miriam Brickman. They are not
most of it: there is a satisfied with the formal training offered by RADA and – in the teeth of
photograph of him
mischievously greeting
the long-serving Principal, Sir Kenneth Barnes – insist on taking extra-
his better-known curricular classes, notably with the movement teacher Litz Pisk. Trained
American namesake at in Vienna in the traditions of the Central European School of
Paddington on the
latter’s arrival to play Movement, Pisk promotes the modern arts of movement and group
Joey in London in 1955. improvisation. Barnes hesitatingly gives her a small and strictly circum-
For that London run,
the American Lang had
scribed slot in the RADA curriculum: she can teach ‘mime’, design and
to agree with Equity to history of theatre, but under no circumstances should she expand into
be billed as ‘Harold Lang improvisation – a suspect foreign invention. Throughout her time at
of the United States’
(https://www.alamy.com/ RADA (1936–1942) Pisk repeatedly asks Barnes to allow her to expand
feb-02-1954-harold-lang- her teaching, but her pleas fall on deaf ears. When in 1941 the RADA
meets-harold-lang-
harold-lang-of-the- building is bombed, Pisk entreats Barnes to use the spaces thus unex-
united- pectedly cleared to allow the students to move out of their ‘small stuffy
image69287161.html). rooms’ and experience the possibilities of creative movement
8 Graduated in 1939 but (Tashkiran in Pisk 2017, loc. 160). When she is again rebuffed, she and
joined the group’s extra-
curricular ventures. the rebel students dare to present in public the results of their private
work. This causes ‘quite a stir’ in the profession (Hall 1997). The stu-
dent group continues to meet after graduating: by now Lang has also
become a careful reader of Stanislavsky and the young actors undertake
exercises in playing actions and obstacles and text breakdown in the
 Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 65

spirit of ‘working on oneself’ promoted by the Russian master (inter-

view with Catherine Clouzot-Blatchley). Continuing his interest in com-
bining Stanislavsky with modern movement techniques, from the mid-
1950s onwards Lang is also an assiduous attendee at Yat Malmgren’s
Laban-inspired Movement Studio in Covent Garden (Bill Gaskill inter-
view). It is during these informal encounters that Lang begins to formu-
late ideas about new ways to teach acting.
A contemporary describes him thus:

a shock of white-blonde hair, a cruel slash of a mouth with no lips at all,

and a brisk, small-stepping gait which was ‘camp’ without being effeminate
at all. He was the most fascinating and perhaps the cleverest man I have
ever known well, and by a long neck the funniest. I was not alone in
prizing his mind and his humour above other mortals’, for his devoted
admirers included Kenneth Tynan, Robert Shaw, Margaret Drabble, Tyrone
Guthrie, John Gielgud, Alec Guinness and many others. (Fraser 2004,
p. 218)

In the 1940s and 1950s Lang acts in a series of B-movies, specialising in

sleazy and menacing roles (notably, he can be seen in the 1955 science-
fiction horror hit The Quatermass Xperiment). He also makes an impres-
sion as Edmond in Gielgud’s Lear, (in)famously designed by the Japanese
designer Isamu Noguchi, and will go on to play Robespierre in Buchner’s
Danton’s Death, one of the early productions of Caspar Wrede’s and
Michael Elliott’s ’59 Theatre Company.
At the same time, Lang is also part of a group of innovators and
experimenters who coalesce around the critic Kenneth Tynan. An avid
reader, Lang devours anything he can lay his hands on in the way of up-
to-date thinking on culture in general and theatre in particular. His library
includes heavily annotated volumes by Jung, Arthur Koestler, Havelock
Ellis, Erich Fromm, Frazer’s Golden Bough, the great critics of the
Cambridge school (Leavis, Knights, Empson) and, of course, Stanislavsky
in the Hapgood translations. Modernism is in his blood and he is
constantly on the lookout for the new and the radical – anything to
counteract the daily diet of commercial theatre and B-movie acting with
which he keeps body and soul together. Thus, in the summer of 1950 he
seizes the opportunity to accompany Kenneth Tynan to Salzburg in order
to take part in a seminar on American studies. There, under the direction
of Eric Bentley, the group performs him, an obscure play by e. e. cum-
mings, with Tynan in the lead. While they are at it, Bentley also plays
The Threepenny Opera for them and lectures on Brecht (Tynan 1987,
p. 85). Kathleen, Tynan’s wife, remembers the 30-year-old Lang as ‘a
flamboyant homosexual, a teacher of theatre, a self-educated intellectual
and by many accounts – certainly Ken’s – a mimic and comic fantasist of
genius’ (Tynan 1987, p. 87). Tynan in particular bemoans the lack of a
tradition of political cabaret in England, which leaves talents such as
Lang’s bereft of a suitable stage on which their comic genius can thrive
(Tynan 1987, p. 179).
66 V. Mirodan

Following Lang’s premature death Tynan will mourn the disappearance

9 Tynan’s diary entry for 7
of this ‘outsider of brilliantly fertile wit’9 (Tynan 2001, p. 265). ‘Outsider’ is
September 1975. John right: there is in Lang’s manner something rather brittle and overstated, a
Lahr, the editor, defensiveness which on first acquaintance can make him seem ‘arch’, even
erroneously assigns this
reference to the ‘imperious’ (Mann 2004, p. 165). The playwright Alan Plater, in whose first
Broadway dancer Harold TV play Lang performed, thought him ‘a great, slightly manic actor’, while
Lang, who actually died
in 1985. There is no others were mightily impressed by his penetrating intelligence (http://www.
evidence that Tynan wymark.org.uk/lang.html, accessed 18 Feb 2019). Overall, the consensus
knew the American
dancer. Bill Gaskill, who lies with the director John Schlesinger, who thought him an ‘extraordinary
knew both Tynan and personality’ (Mann 2004, p. 164) and dedicated an entire film to his work
the ‘British Lang’ well,
offers a similar
as a teacher.
correction in his review
of Tynan’s diaries
(Gaskill 2001, p. 56). The class

In autumn 1960, Lang’s former RADA colleague John Blatchley is

appointed Director of the Stage (acting) Course at Central. A long-term
associate of Saint-Denis, Blatchley will now teach the full panoply of
Copeau-inspired exercises: verbal and non-verbal improvisation, animal
work, clown and character mask. In addition – a crucial addition – he
wants to add to his classes a systematic programme of Stanislavskian
exercises. To teach these he invites Lang: for the first time in a main-
stream British drama school, on the timetable Lang’s class is designated
as an ‘Acting Class’.
Soon after, Huw Wheldon, then editor of Monitor, the BBC’s flagship
arts programme, commissions John Schlesinger to make a film about this
new and exciting acting teacher. At first, Lang is dismissive: ‘you must be
mad, why would you want to sit through this?’ But the actor in him soon
relents when it becomes clear that Schlesinger is going to make him the
star of his film (Mann 2004, p. 164). Schlesinger shoots his documentary
during the Christmas break 1960 and it is eventually broadcast on 9 April
10 ‘The Class’, Monitor, 1961, then repeated on 30 July.10 The film shows Lang taking a first-year
BBC TV, 1961. The
film is in the BBC class. During the class Lang covers six different acting exercises as well as
archives. A brief working on text, all collapsed into a single teaching hour and further
description can be
found in Mann (2004, edited to around 45 minutes of film. The impression sought is one of live
pp. 164ff.). action; in fact, the film was shot in sections, over several days, with many
sequences staged and repeated. Nonetheless, Lang and the students are
skilled enough to give the impression that what we are seeing is happen-
ing ‘for the first time’.
It is difficult to ascertain whether Lang would have taught in a single
hour as many exercises as the film shows; it is more likely that in what is
essentially a lecture-demonstration he is offering a quick view of his teach-
ing, showing samples of exercises that in reality would have taken longer
to be executed in depth. Be that as it may, to the best of my knowledge
this is the first record of a coherent programme of Stanislavskian classes
being delivered in a British conservatoire. Through Schlesinger’s film we
are fortunate to have a live account of this pivotal moment.
In a brief introduction, Huw Wheldon sets out the premise of the film:
‘How do you teach acting? Is it teachable?’ – the clear implication being
 Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 67

that, according to what we are about to see, it is; and that this very fact
is something new, unexpected and worthy of note.
The film proper starts with Lang arriving at the door of the Central
School riding an elegant bicycle and wearing a heavy tweed coat. The
camera then positions itself in the empty classroom, facing the door. A
‘No Smoking’ sign is prominent and the camera returns to it on several
occasions: as Schlesinger’s biographer will gloss, there is an implication
here that this is a class in which instructions will be given and are
expected to be followed (Mann 2004, p. 164). The students begin to
arrive: the film is at pains to emphasise the mix of traditional teaching
(bone props in the mouth are a salient feature of the introduction) with
modernity – one of them is reading a copy of Encounter, the radical the-
atre magazine of the period.
Lang makes a brisk entrance: he is compact, dapper, a ball of mercury.
The heavy coat comes off: beautifully cut tweed jacket, cashmere scarf,
smart tie! An expensive leather briefcase is prominent. His manner is
jokey yet authoritative; the RP clearly learned – traces of the London lad
are still there, whether only retrieved for demotic effect it is hard to tell.
Roll-call briskly disposed of, ‘The Class’ begins.
The first exercise is in attention/observation: a student is asked to walk
into the room spontaneously, then repeat the action and note any differen-
ces. His colleagues are enjoined to pay special attention to his body lan-
guage: ‘not what he says but what he does’. Lang makes it clear that for
both actor and observers this is an exercise in learning to discern the dif-
ference between reality and an imaginative reconstruction of reality.
Describing his colleague’s entrance, one of the observing students says:
‘Great charm in the second entrance’. Happy laughter of recognition: in
the second entrance the student was ‘acting’ and both he and his col-
leagues know that charm is the key to success. Lang’s reaction is to shift
their focus: ‘So’, he asks, ‘in the second entrance, what was he doing?’
The students are moved away from ‘charm’ and presence and towards
action: they are invited to infer what the actor wanted. At the most obvi-
ous level, ‘to sit down’; at a deeper level, they are asked to imagine what
passed through their colleague’s mind as he walked into the room, what
his intentions might have been. Lang sums up: this exercise is about ‘being
natural in public’ while at the same time inviting the spectator to draw
psychological inferences from behaviour.
11 The conflation made in
But this is definitely not a Method11 approach: Lang had not learnt his
Susi (2006, p. 126) of Stanislavsky through the intercessions and distortions of American-trained
Lang’s Stanislavskian teachers, but directly from reading the Russian master’s books and prac-
teaching with ‘The
Method’ is typical, and tising what these preached. In the film, Lang emphasises: ‘Keep your wits
wrong. According to about you, not inside you’. He illustrates this by introducing a ‘Magic If’
his students, Lang
never described his
exercise: a scrunched newspaper will be passed around the room – what
approach as ‘The will the student actors do while holding it between their palms as if it
Method’ or even as ‘a were a bird with a broken wing? Lang is emphatic – he is only interested
method’. When after
1963 the same students in action, not in feelings:
were taught at the
Drama Centre by the
Uta Hagen-trained
I do not want you to hypnotise yourselves into believing it’s a bird. I am
Doreen Cannon, they only asking you: what would you do if it were? I don’t want to see a lot of
68
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
(1990) offer a useful
description of how the
two approaches were
made to work in
tandem at the Julliard
School, another Saint-
Denis foundation.
V. Mirodan
emotion and tenderness. I don’t want you to express your feeling at all, I
want all that to go into your contact with the bird. You’ve got to keep it
outside, there … The only way in which one can dramatize or see what’s
going inside somebody is by seeing how they deal with something outside.
This would have appealed to Schlesinger, a director fascinated by the
poetry of small actions, always emphasising doing over high emotions
(Mann 2004, p. 164).
A different set of exercises explores the interplay of actions (‘wants’)
and obstacles (‘resistances’) through simple verbal improvisations: Lang
offers ‘I want a large sum of money to fly home to be with my dying
father’ as a theme and, with varying degrees of success, the students
attempt to overcome resistances in others. Lang stresses the need to
deploy several psychological tactics and communicate one’s needs
through a variety of means, including (especially) through non-verbal
expressions and actions. One can see, however, that these are still inex-
perienced first-year students, yet to master fully the techniques of
improvisation.
Crucially, Lang also undertakes several exercises dealing with trans-
formation: A female student who looks particularly innocent is asked to
leave the room. In her absence, her colleagues are told that she is ‘a child
murderess’. When she returns, one student is asked to try to discern the
signs of her ‘murderous nature’ in the features of her face: Lang’s point is
that actors project a priori knowledge about their fictional characters on
otherwise neutral physical traits and draw imaginative inferences from
physical details (in this case, the student latches on ‘a certain vagueness
about the eyes’), then construct a background and psychological profile
to justify and amplify these.
To illustrate further how a person may be physically transformed
through the effects of imagination, Lang wraps his scarf round his head
until his face becomes invisible and asks the students to imagine that
someone other than him might be hidden underneath. When they vari-
ously describe ‘a surgeon’, ‘a bird’, ‘a man with a funny tic’, he asks them
to add physical details and then turn what they see in their mind’s eye
into a physical reality: ‘show that man’s face’; ‘how does she comb her
hair?’, ‘count out to ten as that man’.
In a further transformation exercise, Lang asks the students to
embody inanimate objects (a camera, a violin) and turn them into char-
acter sketches. ‘That classical drama school exercise so much laughed
about’, says Lang introducing the exercise – as we saw earlier in
Terence Stamp’s description, by 1960 the use of objects as triggers for
characterisation, frequently used in both the Stanislavskian and the
Copeau/Saint-Denis traditions,12 has already become an object of ridi-
cule. Nonetheless, it remains highly effective and Lang asks the students
to create ‘camera-like’ and ‘violin-like’ personalities and express these
through facial expressions, through a song, etc. Again, the emphasis
here is on the transformative effects of imagination: bodies are altered,
however slightly, and the embryo of someone other than the daily
student emerges.
 Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 69

To the modern eye, the work feels familiar yet somehow corseted.
Throughout the hour, the students remain seated formally, in rows of
chairs facing a magisterial desk. No one seems to consider moving the
chairs to the side and creating a clear space large enough to allow the
bodies to move freely. Expression is still limited to the face and upper
limbs; little happens below the upper body. Physically speaking, this is still
a very passive approach: yes, the students are introduced to these techni-
ques, but they do not yet have either the mental or physical space to
explore them fully.
On the half hour, the film moves to work on text. The students will
look at ‘The quality of mercy … ’ speech from The Merchant of Venice.
His approach, Lang emphasises, will be ‘different from that of the academ-
ics’. ‘The academics say’, he explains, ‘“let the words do the work” …
Let’s see if they really do.’ And he asks: ‘What is Portia trying to do. In
order to achieve what?’
This leads to a Stanislavskian analysis of the text in performance:
 What is Portia’s action?
 Played to whom?
 Against which obstacles?
 By what means?
 In order to … leading to defining an objective.
To make this easier to grasp, Lang asks the students to improvise the
Portia/Shylock interaction and paraphrase the text. The link to the earlier
improvisation on ‘overcoming an obstacle’ is there, though Lang does not
make this explicit. The students are asked to explore the means by which
Portia tries to deflect Shylock from his purpose. They pursue the obvious
action (‘to convince’), then Lang puts them on their mettle and in quick
succession they attempt ‘to frighten’, ‘to flatter’, ‘to undermine’. The
effect is to create for the viewer a vivid illustration of Lang’s assertion
earlier in the film: ‘we understand plays by projecting ourselves into the
actions. Not just the words, but the actions’.
At no point does Lang use Stanislavsky’s own terms: there is no talk of
‘objectives’ or of ‘inner tone’ and a ‘through-line of actions’, etc., although
the term ‘task’ will eventually slip in. Whether because of the constraints
of filming, the students’ inexperience, or because teaching in this way is
still raw, Lang also glides over some pretty generalised, imprecise offers
made by the students. Stanislavskian teachers of the generation that fol-
lowed would make great play of the need for exactitude: but then again,
to cover similar material they will have carved out of the curriculum four
or five hours a week, to Lang’s one.
From a historical point of view, the importance of the exercises lies
not in themselves: nowadays they seem no more than the ABC of acting
classes. It is in the novelty of introducing this new way of thinking and
working to the students of 1960; and in the fact that basic acting prob-
lems are being addressed in a systematic, formalised way.
In his final speech, done in close-up straight to the camera, Lang sum-
marises, as much for the Monitor viewers as for his students. The object
of the exercises was, he declares:
70 V. Mirodan

to earn the right to use [Shakespeare’s] actual words by doing Portia’s

task. Wonderful as they are, these words on the stage are never quite
enough. We must know what they are intended to do, to whom, against
what resistance, in order to what. Words … are great drama because …
they pass between people in a particular dramatic situation. That’s what
makes the words live … It’s never the general truth that is interesting in
art, but what is happening now in drama, N O W, at this particular
moment, in the present which is charged with an undecided future.

At which moment a student interrupts his peroration to tell him they

are out of time. ‘Next class’, he sighs, and they all traipse out of
the room.
Schlesinger’s film ends with the bewitching voice of Peggy Ashcroft
speaking ‘The quality of mercy … ’ while the camera pans slowly across
the empty room, the ghost of the magic that has just happened lingering
still, as these passionate young people move on, towards their
‘undecided future’.
One imagines that interested viewers would have responded positively
to this demonstration of ‘new acting’, carried with panache. The film cer-
tainly made a splash: the BBC organised a special screening for the stu-
dents and VIPs at the National Film Theatre, followed by a party at
Schlesinger’s house, attended by Peggy Ashcroft herself. Ashcroft had no
doubt been roped in by Schlesinger, her nephew, to give his film added
credibility and a touch of grandeur. But her presence also somehow vali-
dated Lang’s teaching: here was one of the undisputed leaders of the
British theatre, herself a Central graduate, explicitly associating herself
with this way of working.
Lang’s ‘starmaking turn’, the ‘near-hypnotic’ effect of his interactions
with the students, also made for good viewing. The Controller of
Programmes at the BBC thought The Class ‘splendid’ and even enquired
whether a further opportunity might be found for Lang and Schlesinger to
collaborate (Mann 2004, p. 166). Schlesinger was soon to move on to mak-
ing feature films, however, and The Class remains their principal encounter.
In any case, viewers with a personal interest in actor training were
most impressed. According to some accounts, following the transmission
of the programme applications for the Central acting course trebled. The
actor Jack Shepherd, then still at art school in Newcastle, vividly recalls
watching it: in 1962 he will apply to Central specifically because of the
impression Lang’s teaching had had on him. At the same time, these chil-
dren of the 1960s already have a sense that the earlier generation of
gritty realism, of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, is weakening: as the
actor William Hoyland (taught by Lang 1962–1963) will describe it, they
‘wanted to act in a way which was both real and expressionistic’. Lang
speaks to them: as we have seen, he approaches Stanislavsky not through
the prism of his American followers, but drawing directly from his read-
ings of the Hapgood translations, filtered through his interest in Central
European movement. There is a sense here that Stanislavsky is about
more than the glorification of powerful emotions; this is a vision of acting
 Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 71

which is neither craft nor naturalism, but Art; and many of these future
actors no longer care for the sneers which had inhibited Vanessa
Redgrave’s generation.
And the students we see in The Class? One has to remember that the
film was partly staged and these students are aware of playing the roles
of ‘students’ just as much as Lang plays ‘the inspirational teacher’. At the
same time, Schlesinger is skilled enough to capture genuinely spontaneous
moments. One student is noticeable for being somewhat disconnected
from the proceedings, chewing gum throughout and smiling slightly ironic-
ally from the back of the class. His name is Christopher Timothy: upon
graduating, he will join the National Theatre company, appear in Olivier’s
Othello, then come to fame playing James Herriot in the hugely successful
TV series All Creatures Great and Small and eventually fetch up for a long
stint in Eastenders. By all accounts, his will be one of the longest and
more successful acting careers of that particular cohort. And, to my eyes
at least, he does not seem to set much score on the Stanislavskian pala-
ver brought to Central by Lang. He is not alone: the actor Liz McFarlane
also recalls that as a student at Central (1961–1964) Lang’s exercises
made little sense, and that she only came to adopt them later in her car-
eer. One does not feel that as yet the ‘Acting Class’ sits at the heart of
the students’ learning experience, in the way that bone props still do.
At the same time, there is a sense that something new, innovative and
challenging is happening. Most of the students appear excited by the exer-
cises and some seem genuinely fascinated by Lang as well as committed
to his way of working. Prominent amongst these is Carol Jenkins, a young
woman with a distinctive Tennessee accent, who throws herself into the
improvisations with gusto. For this American, Lang’s way of working is
both familiar and congenial. Soon after Schlesinger finishes shooting the
film, Jenkins will suspend her studies for family reasons and return to
Central to start her course afresh with the 1961 intake. She will thus find
herself in the eye of the storm which engulfs Central in July 1963, when
seven key teachers, Blatchley and Lang included, will resign due to irre-
concilable differences of opinion between them and Thurburn regarding
13 For a detailed account
of these events see
the teaching of acting and its purpose.13 And Jenkins will be among the
Mirodan (2013; also 40 or so students who in that summer will also leave Central en masse
Susi 2006, to set up their own school, Drama Centre London, a school which
pp. 128–133).
embraces Stanislavskian approaches wholeheartedly and places them at
the heart of its curriculum. Eventually, back in the States, as Carol Mayo
Jenkins, she will find in the 1980s international recognition as a stern but
fair-minded English teacher in the TV series Fame.

A ‘guru’ on the theatre lawn

Lang’s departure from Central in July 1963 ends his direct involvement
with actor training. Largely forgotten until now, his influence ought to be
acknowledged afresh: Lang provides a key link between the (limited and
temporary) introduction of Stanislavskian approaches into the British con-
servatoire between the Wars, notably through Theodore Komisarjevsky’s
72 V. Mirodan

teaching at RADA (Shirley 2012, pp. 38–39), and the generation of influ-
ential Stanislavskian teachers that emerged from the mid-1960s onward.
Lang’s own focus shifts to working for Voyage Theatre, the lecture-
demonstration company he founds and with which between 1963 and
1970 he tours all over the world, principally on behalf of the British
Council. With the scripts he writes and performs for Voyage Theatre,
Lang will park his tanks on British theatre’s most hallowed ground: the
way to act and direct Shakespeare and the challenges a Stanislavsky-
14 This material, in inspired methodology pose to traditional, ‘academic’ approaches.14
Harold’s Lang’s papers Due to his commitments for Voyage Theatre Lang will never teach at
(author’s collection),
will form the subject of the Drama Centre. However, during the three years he taught at
a dedicated article I am Central, his classes have shattered the mould: in need of a replacement,
writing with my
colleague Dr the Drama Centre recruits Doreen Cannon, a former student and assist-
Benjamin Askew. ant of Uta Hagen. Cannon will be the Head of Acting at the Drama
Centre for the next 21 years, then move to RADA for ten more years of
revolutionary teaching. In the process, she and others like her will trans-
form beyond recognition the teaching of acting in the British conserva-
toire. By 1970, Pete Postlethwaite, then a student at the Bristol Old Vic
School, could be taught by Rudi Shelley, an Eastern European
Stanislavskian teacher cut from the same cloth as Lang, ‘a real legend …
more of a guru than a teacher’ (Postlethwaite 2011, p. 58).
There is, however, one major difference between Lang and teachers
such as Cannon or Shelley. Lang, alongside contemporaries such as Peter
Barkworth or John Blatchley, has a continuing and fairly solid professional
career. This is important to him (Johns 1961, p. 17) and, rewarding
though it otherwise is, teaching will always take second place to it. Lang
finds it relatively easy to combine the two: after all, his teaching commit-
15 Lang also works with
Nicholas Amer and ment amounts to only three hours out of a busy professional week.15
Greville Hallam, two Once his successors have enshrined the acting class in the curriculum
assistants who cover
his teaching so often and have increased their teaching to four, five, even six hours a week, for
while he is busy with each of the three years of a standard acting course, combining teaching
acting work that,
Oliver Cotton recalls, with a professional career becomes much more of a challenge. The ratio
by 1962–1963 ‘it was a is reversed and, for better or for worse, a different breed of teacher
high day when he
appeared to teach’.
emerges: specialists with their own strongly held views on methodology,
dedicated to teaching as their primary craft.
Ah, yes, and ‘guru’ – as Postlethwaite describes his teacher – the dou-
ble-edged tag that often accompanies those built on Lang’s bespoke last:
‘a dynamic elf-like man with peroxide blond hair, a tan and mad, wild
eyes, projecting a bizarre glamour … and at the same time hugely charis-
matic’ as the actor Oliver Cotton (taught by Lang 1962–1963) remem-
bers him.
There are three branches to the ‘guru’ accusation. The first is the
claim of exclusivity – the charge that teaching a ‘system’ such as
Stanislavsky’s implies that there are no other ways of becoming an actor
except by following his method (Virginia Snyders cited in Susi 2006,
p. 130). As we saw, at Central and more widely in the established British
theatre of the 1960s, eclecticism is an unassailable virtue; adopting a sin-
gle perspective, however coherent, is deeply suspect.
 Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 73

The second branch is the weight given to the authority of the ‘experts’:
not practitioners tested nightly in the crucible of the stage, but specialist
class teachers whose dicta do not bear much challenge from their riveted
students. In an irony common to many a revolution, Lang’s iconoclastic
work can in some cases inadvertently lead to the advent of practices
which brook little challenge and even less change.
To my mind, the third branch is the most interesting: this is the charge of
‘psychologising’, of linking the perceptible aspects of acting (sound, words,
gestures) to particular mental processes. At the root of this accusation is
the endlessly repeated dictum: ‘acting cannot be taught’. Once this is
accepted, the point of actor training is, paradoxically, not to teach acting
but to instil certain physical skills and a sense of acting ‘taste’, of ‘what
works and what doesn’t’. Once absorbed, these enable the mysterious, nat-
ural talent of the student to find its voice, its unique timbre. Oliver
Reynolds, Harold Lang’s immediate predecessor, was remembered with
admiration by his former students as a man who ‘didn’t waste time theoriz-
ing … mentioning Stanislavsky, or indulging in heady talk about acting as an
art’. Pragmatism was his cardinal virtue: ‘gabbling on about Art was not the
way to get a production on stage’ (Bailey in McCall 1978, p. 162). The acting
course at Central was called the ‘Stage’ course and the name said it all: the
student’s progress on the course should be about the acquisition and refine-
ment of measurable stagecraft – verse speaking, dialects, fencing, acrobatics,
make up, ‘the wearing of costumes’ or the language of the fan. The rest was
a matter of innate instinct and the one thing one must never do is to inter-
fere with the psychological mechanisms from which acting emerges. Or to
discuss them: talking about the acting process destroys an actor’s confi-
dence, and confidence is all.
Lang stands at the opposite pole. The entire raison d’^etre of the ideas he has
absorbed from Stanislavsky is to link physical expression to its psychological
sources. For him, if actors are to be independent masters of their creative tools
acting can and should be taught. A contemporary magazine article occasioned
by viewing Schlesinger’s film, which also incorporates an interview with Lang,
seems to show that the latter’s message was being heard:

Is acting creative or just interpretative? … one hour in a class given by

Harold Lang to drama students at the Central School of Speech and
Drama is long enough to convince anyone that the actor is a decidedly
creative artist … Harold Lang’s main function at the Central School is to
help students to find a way of studying a part when alone. They are shown
the folly of relying upon inspiration or the stimulation of a producer.
(Johns 1961, p. 17)

The consequence of such ‘working on oneself, by oneself’, however, is that

some students may become more introspective, self-aware and at times inse-
cure. This implies a different kind of responsibility on the part of the acting
teacher; indeed, a different kind of acting teacher. Lang’s interviewer again:

The teacher must assume every student in the class has talent, but some
need more nursing than others. Some are shy and others take a long time
74 V. Mirodan

to come out of their shell. Suddenly, after many months, a wall will
crumble and there is an exciting moment when the student offers genuine
proof of his ability to become a creative actor. (Johns 1961, p. 29)

This implies systematic work on the students’ development; we have

moved a long way from Judi Dench’s accidental discovery that she could
act through a random ‘mime’. The teacher can no longer stand back,
watching in delight as actors emerge from the student chrysalis. These
new acting teachers consider that they have a responsibility to bring
about growth; at times, maybe even to drive it. This is no mere differ-
ence in pedagogical approach: it is about the purpose of acting as a
whole. For decades, RADA diplomas used to read ‘Awarded for Special
Acting Talent’: talent, taken to mean confidence, grace, ease and wit, was
considered innate and the purpose of one’s years at drama school was to
refine and polish the precious qualities one already possessed. Acting was
a skilful extension of one’s personality. If, on the other hand, the purpose
and glory of the act of acting is to metamorphose before the very eyes
of the audience from you (the actor) into someone else (the character) –
transformation! – then different skills and stronger engines are required.
You need first to find out something about who you are; then to under-
stand in some depth who the character might be; then to acquire suitable
techniques that enable you to move from one to the other. In the new
theatre clamouring for attention from the stages of the Royal Court and
the National, in the challenging narratives of the new cinema, acting can
no longer be a matter of make-up and vocal modulation, or even simply
of ‘identifying’. It is now a matter of psychology. For the actor Peter
Kenvyn (taught by Lang 1962–1963), Lang’s classes ‘marked a move away
from voice to inner life and expression through the body’. This is, I
believe, Lang’s ground-breaking contribution to the development of actor
training in this country.

Interviews

When not otherwise cited, references in the text are to interviews with
the following actors and directors:
Catherine Clouzot-Blatchley – interviewed 18 July 2013
Oliver Cotton – interviewed 6 September 2002
Kenneth Cranham – interviewed 21 February 2019
Bill Gaskill – interviewed 9 June 2013
William Hoyland – interviewed 19 September 2002
Peter Kenvyn – interviewed 14 October 2002
Carol Mayo Jenkins – interviewed 17 August 2013
Liz McFarlane – interviewed 9 June 2013
Jack Shepherd – interviewed 6 September 2002

ORCID

Vladimir Mirodan http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4680-2327

 Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 75

References

Barkworth, P., 1991. The Complete About Acting. London: Methuen.

Brook, P., et al., 1963. Who Alienated Konstantin Stanislavsky? Text of a Discussion.
Encore 43 10 (3), May–June, 18–34.
Ewbank, T. and Hildred, S., 2000. Julie Christie: The Biography. London: Andre Deutsch.
Fraser, J., 2004. Close Up: An Actor Telling Tales. London: Oberon Books.
Gaskill, B., 2001. Diary of a Disappointed Man (review of Kenneth Tynan’s Diaries,
edited by John Lahr). The Spectator, 22 October, p. 56.
Gray, D. and Denison, M., 1964. The Actor and His World: A Young Person’s Guide.
London: Victor Gollancz.
Hall, G., 1997. Litz Pisk Obituary. The Independent, 29 March.
Johns, E., 1961. Moulding Creative Actors. Theatre World, June, pp. 17 and 29.
Lewsen, C., 1962. Compass. Encore 9 (3), May–June, 28–32.
Lewsen, C., 1993. Obituary for Gwynneth Thurburn. The Independent, 26 March.
Mann, W.J., 2004. The Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger. London:
Hutchinson.
McCall, M., ed., 1978. My Drama School. London: Robson Books.
McNab, G., 1994. J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry. London: Routledge.
Miller, J., 1997. Judi Dench, With a Crack in her Voice: The Biography. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
Mirodan, V., 2013. After the Revolution: A Critical History of Drama Centre London, Part I:
‘A Hampstead Revolution’. London: Central Saint Martins.
Mirodan, V., 2015. Lecoq’s Influence on UK Drama Schools. In: M. Evans and R.
Kemp, eds. The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq. London: Routledge,
208–217.
Pisk, L., 2017. The Actor and His Body, with an Introduction by A. Tashkiran. London:
Bloomsbury, Kindle edition.
Postlethwaite, P., 2011. A Spectacle of Dust: The Autobiography. London: Weidenfeld
and Nicholson.
Redgrave, V., 1992. An Autobiography. London: Arrow.
Schlesinger, J., 1961. The Class. Monitor. BBC TV.
Shirley, D., 2012. Stanislavsky’s Passage into the British Conservatoire. In: J. Pitches,
ed. Russians in Britain: British Theatre and the Russian Tradition of Actor Training.
London: Routledge, 38–60, Kindle edition.
Stamp, T., 1989. Coming Attractions. London: Grafton Books.
Susi, L., 2006. The Central Book. London: Oberon Books.
Tynan, K., 1987. The Life of Kenneth Tynan. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
Tynan, K., 2001. The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan, ed. J. Lahr. London: Bloomsbury.
Yakim, M. with Broadman, M., 1990. Creating a Character: A Physical Approach to Acting.
New York: Back Stage Books.

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.