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| | Speakers / Irving / University of Leicester |
 | | Irving could play sanctity and horror with equal facility, and the paper will examine this phenomenon, as well as the undoubted hypnotic power Irving exercised over his audiences, performing as he did in an age when “mesmerism” and “magnetism” were taken up by scientist, practitioner, and showman alike. |
 | | Irving was also a haunted actor, ideally suited in character and temperament to playing characters driven by fear and remorse and haunted by their impending fate, like Louis XI, Macbeth, Mathias, and Vanderdecken. |
 | | Irving is arguably a prototype for the highly disciplined, physically expressive sort of actor that Craig, Meyerhold and other theorists envisaged and hoped to create in the early twentieth century. |
| www.le.ac.uk /english/irving/papers.html (4188 words) |
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