Ms. Payne, the most persuasive performer in the cast of the director, Suzanne Agins, does some marvelous acting here, pacing herself nicely as anxiety evolves into excitement and then back again.
Poetry readings were rarer then than now, but Kirkup, a clear and persuasive performer of his own work, gave to Oxford students in 1952 a memorable premiere of A Correct Compassion, declaring that poets should write about literally anything.
The director, Ludovica Villar-Hauser (Mr. Villar-Hauser's sister), elicits detailed, persuasive performances from all four performers and mostly manages to keep the pace taut despite a few patches of slack writing.
"They deserve it" is the kind of callous remark reserved for what many now condemn in blanket terms as "terrorists".Particularly in big cities, Egyptians by and large continue to rally behind their army, whose soft-spoken chief, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, has proved a persuasive television performer.
Arguments about what it takes to be an elite performer are less persuasive if the performers being studied aren't actually elite.
She proved a persuasive new-music performer in the Crumb, which requires intermittent string strumming and light percussive effects amid the clusters and haziness that swirl around a stylized reduction of the Monk melody.
Ms. Handler is not the first woman to build a career on crude, offensive and often demeaning jokes about men, sex and substance abuse, but she is one of the most persuasive and committed — few performers can stay as fixedly in character as a hard-drinking, man-eating misanthrope.
And there is governmental merit in the object of this ire being the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, for he is a solid performer with a plausible persuasive air at the dispatch box, even under fire.
I've spent over 10,000 hours studying the interactions of top performers to identify what makes them more persuasive than everyone else.
But all the performers, despite their playing deliberate stereotypes, find a persuasive natural pulse in their characters' erratic behavior.
