Richard Hornby (Whose "The End of Acting" manages to be both a withering criticism of 'method' acting and a brilliant rumination on the craft) here collects theatre criticism of his from around 1986 to 1996. The book is extremely interesting and is full of insight into what is wrong with American theatre today. It will be of interest to anyone that loves theatre.

For someone who never met Lee Strasberg, attended his classes, interviewed his students, or grasped the meaning of his work, the author has a lot to say about Strasberg. The bulk of this book grinds its axe on a man who has been dead since 1982. It is wrongheaded, at times cruel, and a complete misrepresentation of Strasberg and the Method. It attributes a lot of our ills to Strasberg, who produced some of the finest actors in America. The book actually ends up repeating much of what Strasberg advocated.

Contrived as a manifesto, this book takes a revolutionary tone. Hornby's revolt is against a certain conception of acting which the author blames on Lee Strasberg; and against the conception of actor-training as being primarily vocational. What of theatre as a humanity? Considering the rate of unemployment in theatre, should we not rethink our motives in training people in theatre? Hornby does a skillful job of confining the scope of his book to American theatre, in spite of the questions he raises about psychology and emotionality.

In his critique of Strasberg's method and teaching, Hornby may be faulting the teacher for the work of those who followed him (the way some have blamed Stanislavsky for what they didn't like in Strasberg). He may be over-generalizing about how American actors box themselves into outmoded Freudian conceptions of psychology and dualistic approaches to the work.

On the other hand, there is much to value in his call for production-oriented training programs and for teaching acting as a humanity more than as a career. Here the reader may find his numbers and his criticisms dated; also, he strangely has little to say about training actors to generate their own work.

As a theatre student, I found Hornby's book to be, at first irreverent, and at times absurd (with all those references to Freud and the "oceanic feelings," "the pleasure principle"). Honestly, you have to read the book to get the connections!Anyway, as I continued to read, I kept an open mind. I read the book not as a Method actor, but as a kid who enjoys learning and reading about a variety of viewpoints. In the end, I found the book to be incredibly worthwhile. I learned a great deal from it. He asks many questions in his book, such as: Is acting an art form? Can anyone act? He makes references to Brecht,Grotowski,and Diderot. He obviously is a very learned man, who had an eclectic range of sources available to him. By far, his annototated bibliography was extremely helpful when it came time for me to research the craft on my own. Yes, he puts Strasberg to shame, but I believe it was Stella Adler who when Strasberg was laid to rest, muttered, "That man set American theatre back 100 years."