The public only likes ‘thesps’ if they’re national treasures. Why are we embarrassed by acting?

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/jan/09/michael-pennington-the-public-only-likes-thesps

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In his new book, Let Me Play the Lion Too: How to Be an Actor, Michael Pennington explores offers a personal A-Z guide. L is for luvvies and other insults…

Let’s be cheerful about all this, and keep a sense of humour when a journalist (as one recently did) describes the stage as a place where “luvvies strike their poses”.

I suppose the “luv” in “luvvies” means we make real love into something as cheap as chips and just scatter it loosely around. But when I started out, theatre people often signed off a letter with “luv”, not “love”, because it was a matter of being precise about it. It was so that you, the recipient, didn’t get any ideas, and a rather puritanical definition of how you stood with the writer: this close and no more, friendly but no challenge to your real lover for instance. “Luv” was really a term of respect, and “love” a true admission. Nowadays men from all walks of life are always kissing in the street, and emails all end with at least one x: it makes the theatre seem almost restrained.

Aktorrrrs: I can’t really account for the fact that some people can’t pronounce the actual word, as if it were somehow embarrassing. Is this some kind of English dismay? A compliment to your legendary diction, rolling rs as they should be rolled? Or because it would somehow be insulting to suggest that acting were a serious job with a proper name?

“Turns” is at least accurate and brings us fraternally close to circus performers – and that’s fine by me.

It’s odd, isn’t it? Lawyers also wear silly wigs and do their best with hopeless scripts they don’t believe in, using a technique they often seem to have learned off TV rather than the other way round. They too schmooze the judge and attack the other counsel before having a drink with him in the evening; but the public doesn’t seem to have trouble with them. And as for the doctors, I knew an eye surgeon who said, chillingly, that he liked going to the theatre because it reminded him of work in his theatre: you never quite know what’s going to happen. But we don’t call doctors doctorrrrs or lawyers barrristas.

The truth is the public only really likes actors if they’re national treasures. Then a whole different, and deferential, vocabulary comes in. Even then, the thing to remember is they’re probably never going to love you, not really. Tonight I’ve been watching The Review Show on TV: an American academic professed herself “put off” by all the praise for Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of Abraham Lincoln before she saw it. She said she was afraid it had been oversold and she was in for something “thespy”, something “scenery-chewing” – and was pleasantly surprised. Why would she be surprised? She then purred with an unmistakable kind of fervour that she now thinks Day-Lewis is a complete genius: “It’s the best screen performance of our lifetimes…”

But why would she have expected anything else?

Let Me Play the Lion Too: How To Be an Actor by Michael Pennington is published on 15 January by Faber & Faber and is available from the Guardian Bookshop. He is giving a Platform event at the National Theatre on 9 February.