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Playing for Real: Actors on Playing Real People. Edited by Tom Cantrell and Mary Luckhurst. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; pp. 176.
Mary Luckhurst opens the introduction to Playing for Real: Actors on Playing Real People with the claim that in contemporary society, "film and television have reflected a growing obsession with the real throughout the world," promoting a fascination with celebrity culture (1). She states that "despite the explosion of interest in representing persons of historical and contemporary significance on stage and on screen, there has been virtually no attempt to examine this phenomenon from an actor's perspective" (ibid.). Luckhurst and her co-editor Tom Cantrell offer Playing for Real to address that oversight and to document, through the interview transcripts they include, what they call "representations of the real," or the portrayal of a real person as a character. They hope to ignite a new thread of theatre research concerning the process of portraying an actual person onstage or on screen, and desire to help actors and acting theorists better understand and appreciate such approaches.
The editors do not call what follows the introduction a "workbook" or "methodology," but rather an invitation to start a discussion of the performance processes of creating a character based on a real person. Cantrell and Luckhurst conducted interviews with sixteen actors who are critically acknowledged for their portrayals of real people, and these resulting transcripts make up the bulk of the book. The majority of the actors included have played several real people throughout their careers, including Simon Callow (Mozart,...