What is acting? (1)
Crudely, acting could be defined as ‘pretending to be someone else’. But that sounds like dishonesty, so we'd need to add that acting usually takes place within a well-defined frame which sets it clearly apart from ‘consequential life’ (life in which a person’s actions have real consequences). So acting might be more fully defined as pretending to be someone else within a socially accepted context of ‘let’s pretend’.
Even so, actors have long been seen ambivalently, admired for their talents or their attributes or their glamour, but felt to be morally suspect in some way as well. It’s as though the demarcation of acting from ‘consequential life,’ clear though it is on one level, remains oddly blurred on another level. Still, this seems to be far less the case today than it was for much of the past.
But if we look more closely, we see that pretending is by no means a self-evident basis for an adequate definition of acting. In fact, from ancient Greece and Rome on, in other words from the origin of acting as a profession, there have been four basic models of the actor, with each later age tending to prefer one or some in line with its psychological and ethical assumptions. The four models are:
The liar or fraud or deceiver.
The possessed or (temporarily) mad.
The typecast who ‘plays himself’.
The role changer or identity transgressor.
These are socially-produced models, of course, ways in which the wider world tries to comprehend and ‘pigeon-hole’ what actors are (since as a form of work acting is a little odd), so they reflect only in part what actors really do.
Ann Duncan (in Performance and Identity in the Classical World, 2006) argues that two basic conceptions of the actor emerged and then dominated in antiquity, which I’ll call here acting as ‘natural’ and acting as ‘artificial’. In her words,
Acting could be seen as simply ‘playing oneself’ onstage; rather than fooling anyone, the actor would be revealing his nature. A modification of this view was to believe that the actor was ‘inspired’ or ‘possessed’ by the character he played, thus making him temporarily rather than permanently identical to the character. The other approach was to grant acting the status of a techne, a consciously acquired and deployed skill (12).
While this passage emphasizes the second and third models above, it seems to me that any of the four models can be seen as ‘natural’. Some are ‘born liars’ after all, and some may be naturally ‘shifty’ or ‘slippery’ – indeed, conceived as a ‘natural’ character type, the role changer is the most dangerous to social order. But conceiving acting as a skill or technique serves to negotiate or even eliminate the implicit threat in models 1 and 4.
Plutarch’s story about Solon, the Athenian law-maker, and Thespis, the legendary first actor and supposed inventor of tragedy, is interesting in relation to this. In Duncan’s translation:
After the show [Solon] went to speak to Thespis and asked him if he was not ashamed to tell all those lies in front of such a crowd of people. Thespis replied that there was no harm talking or acting like this in play. Solon thumped his stick heavily on the ground. “Yes, but it won’t be long,” he said, “if we hold this sort of ‘play’ in such high esteem, before it rears its head in our contractual engagements too (11).
Here the word “play,” as Thespis resorts to it, is intended to demarcate acting from ‘consequential life’. In other words, it’s all just a game. But Solon is having none of this. Does this make him a little like the ‘cowboy in the theatre’ (the one in the audience who, never having seen a play before, can’t distinguish fiction from life and who therefore shoots the villain when he comes onstage)? No, it doesn’t. Solon objects to the ‘dishonesty’ (the pretence) in acting insofar as this is believed likely to spill over into mainstream social life. Hence acting even in play is a bad example. But this worry seems to rest on the idea of acting as natural. The actor is ‘naturally’ some kind of fraud; if we admire him for this, we implicitly countenance the footballer who dives in the penalty area and the politician who ‘sincerely’ wants to remove a brutal dictator in a foreign oil-rich country for the sake of its suffering people.
What lies behind the ‘Solon-view,’ then, may be the fact that it’s relatively difficult to conceive of acting as a craft or skill. Plato couldn’t. Clearly, it is not a craft or skill like pottery or oil painting or playing the piano since whatever technique the actor makes use of seems to be applied to him or herself. As an actor, you can develop your vocal power and range, and your diction, and you can acquire skills in stage combat and such-like. But these all seem to be extras or ‘plug-ins’. Pretending to be someone else doesn’t seem amenable to technical enhancement in the same way.
There’s a big irony lurking here. In a strange way, much later proponents of ‘truth in acting’ such as Stanislavski and Strasberg share the Solon-view! They too strongly dislike acting as (mere) pretence, so they seek a kind of acting that can transcend its own fictionality.
I’ll come back to this in later posts because it’s central to the problem of how to teach acting. But first, in ‘What is acting? (2),’ I'll look more closely at Thespis’s choice of the word “play” in self-defence.