What is acting? (2)
Was Thespis right? Is acting just a kind of ‘play’ (we refer to ‘play acting’ after all)? According to legend, Thespis was the inventor of tragedy, the most serious of genres. In defending theatre to Solon, who had asked him if he wasn't ashamed to be telling lies in front of all those people, was he suggesting that there’s no need to take theatre, even tragedy, seriously after all?
There seem to me to be four potential sources of ‘acting’ in natural human behaviour other than in simple deceit, but they’re not all forms of play.
Child’s play. Here it is role rather than character that is assumed. Given that these roles (father, mother, doctor, nurse, patient) are sustained, imagination can fill in the scene. This provides the basis for what Peter Brook called ‘rough theatre’.
Impersonation – of the entertaining not the fraudulent kind. The entertaining effect turns on the perceived gap between the impersonated (B) and the impersonator (A) – there’s no attempt to deceive. But in capturing B’s behaviour/mannerisms, maybe A captures something of B’s character too. (There’s a little hint as to how this might work in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” where a boy understands his opponent’s mentality in a game by adopting the expression on their face.)
Brecht’s “Street Scene”. In this model, a witness to a street accident not only narrates the sequence of events to an interested group but also minimally re-enacts certain key actions in order to draw specific attention to their significance. [For a much fuller discussion of Brecht's ideas about acting, click HERE.]
Trance-possession. Being ‘taken over’ by something other than one’s self.
The first two of these are forms of ‘play,’ but the third and fourth aren’t. The third is a social model; people are interested in the behaviour of others and in who is responsible when things go wrong. (Note that this model emphasizes actions rather than character.) The fourth is very broadly ‘religious,’ although it originates in a world in which the sacred and the secular are not as clearly distinguished as they are for us.
Between them, models 3 and 4 establish the full scale of the ‘double-life’ of acting; in the fourth, there’s complete identification – unity – between actor and character, while in the third there’s maximum distance between them. Most acting involves both identification and distance. This is not so evident in the first two more ‘playful’ models. In impersonation distance is part of the effect, but while there’s often a kind of absorption in child’s play, this is not the same as identification.
Nor are the third and fourth models forms of pretence.
It becomes tempting to think of acting as a form of pretence once theatre has been invented, since theatre provides the general context of ‘let’s pretend’. But this may involve a kind of re-thinking or re-positioning of the forms of behaviour in which acting originated, which did not involve pretence.
It’s particularly interesting that in the anecdote about Solon and Thespis there is no sense of the theatre’s origin in Dionysian ritual. (Plutarch was writing at least six hundred years after the event described, by the way. The anecdote is almost certainly invented (though not by Plutarch), but it’s probably based on Solon’s actual ideas and maybe even on his words. But I doubt very much that it tells us anything about the real Thespis’s views, assuming if he existed.) While, in performance, a part of the actor necessarily remains distant from the character being played, it’s arguable that there should be at least a moment in rehearsal when the actor ‘loses herself’ in the character. I think of this as a ‘Dionysian moment’. If the idea of ‘truth’ in acting is going to make good sense, it may be a good idea to look more closely at the nature of the god Dionysos.