The bildungsroman goes to acting school

This chapter considers how actor training has been fictionalized in three recent novels—The Rehearsal (Eleanor Catton, 2008), The Lesser Bohemians (Eimear McBride, 2016), and Trust Exercise (Susan Choi, 2018). In each, the work of “character building” that is central to the training of young actors doubles as the “character building” required of the Bildungsroman form. That is, in learning how to represent others on stage, the protagonists of these theatre-fictions learn how to represent themselves to (and in) the world. In theatre-fictions, protagonists often find themselves through the theatre—here, through training to build and break characters on stage, these protagonists-in-training are able to test the limits of theatre's representational capacities to hold their developing character via theatre training's imperative to build and discard character at will. Throughout these novels, the student actors struggle to appreciate and instantiate a barrier between the characters they play on stage and their life outside the theatre, and reading these novels as theatre-fictions reimagines their protagonist's failures on- and off-stage as alternative routes to success. This chapter also positions training as a constituent part of the theatre experience for the purposes of analysing theatre-fiction, offering new directions for its continued study.