At the core of all considerations of the art of acting lies the question of the actor’s emotional experience in performance: Does he really feel with the feelings of his characters, weep with their agony, tremble with their terror, rage with their anger? Or does he only borrow and skillfully display the signs of each passion, while he himself remains cool and uninvolved?
Such questions have been vaulted center-stage by the treatise that has been most influential in shaping modern perceptions of the art of acting, namely, the Paradoxe sur le Come'dien, written by the eighteenth-century French philosopher, art critic, novelist, and playwright Denis Diderot. The controversy it provoked still resonates in such landmark publications of Western performance theory as William Archer’s Masks or Faces? (1888), a survey of the performance experience of hundreds of living actors, and continues to reverberate in the polarity between the ‘‘involved’’ acting style most
Famously associated with Konstantin Sergeievich Stanislavsky, the seminal theoretician of the modern stage, and the ‘‘estranged’’ manner of acting advocated by Bertolt Brecht.
To see how the Greek tragic texts afford their own insights on actors and acting, I turn first to Euripides’ Helen. Trapped in Egypt with her husband Menelaus, Helen sees their only hope of salvation in outright fraud: ‘‘together we must frame a plan {mechanen) for our escape’’ (1033-34). The plot she hatches - wrought around the fabricated narrative of Menelaus’ death - is inherently ‘‘theatrical,’’ as it depends not only on the manipulation of appearances (1087-89) and the sensational effect of props and costume (1079-80, 1204), but also on the assumption of different identities: Helen must pretend to be the newly widowed wife, with the black dress, shorn hair, and torn cheeks that go with the part, while her rag-dressed husband Menelaus is cast in the role of a shipwrecked sailor, sole eyewitness to his master’s dismal death. Playwright, didaskalos (instructor), and actor in her own drama, Helen has conceived what Diderot would call the ‘‘ideal model’’ of her assumed character and executes it to perfection. Her performance in front of Theoclymenus is an excellent illustration of Diderot’s artistic paradox, emotional intensity being the outcome of ‘‘pure mimicry’’ (Diderot 1883, 16) and calculated reflection, tears coming from the brain rather than the actor’s heart (Diderot 1883, 17). If Helen is a figure for the stage actor, her histrionic talent resides not in ‘‘feeling’’ but in ‘‘rendering so exactly the outward signs of feeling’’ that the audience (in her case Theoclymenus) ‘‘fall[s] into the trap’’ (Diderot 1883, 16); ‘‘knowing well’’ and imitating well ‘‘the outward symptoms of the soul’’ she borrows (Diderot 1883, 74), she enshrines a view of acting as co-extensive with the art of simulated, rather than felt, emotion.
Nevertheless, the modern analogue of the ‘‘Diderodian’’ performer is by no means the sole way of conceptualizing the actor in Greek theatrical discourse. Perhaps the most widely known example of the dazzling histrionic possibilities Greek tragedy afforded to its actors for the display of sincerely felt emotion on the stage is the anecdote (which may or may not be true) related by the second century ce sophist Aulus Gellius about Polus, the celebrated tragic actor of the fourth century bce. In this rare insight into artistic subjectivity in the ancient world we read that when playing the role of Electra in Sophocles’ tragedy, Polus took from the tomb of his deceased son the urn containing his ashes and used them as a prop in his performance, embracing them ‘‘as if they were those of Orestes’’ (quasi Oresti amplexus); as a result, he
Filled the whole place, not with the appearance and imitation of sorrow, but with genuine
Grief and unfeigned lamentation. Therefore, while it seemed that a play was being acted,
It was in fact real grief that was enacted. (Attic Nights 6.5.7-8; trans. Rolfe 1927)
Flying in the face of Aristotle’s author-and-text-based approach to Greek tragedy, this story demonstrates that Greek tragedy becomes alive in and through performance, acquiring its fullest meaning at the intersection of dramatic role and actor, embodied stage-character and addressees/spectators. By highlighting artistic techne, the anecdote dovetails with other evidence suggesting the increased prominence of actors over dramatists in the postclassical period. Even more significantly, it implies a view of tragedy as the performance medium that empowers, enables, celebrates, and liberates the actor’s inner self. If the actor can imbue his role with his lifeblood, acting is neither a mechanical nor a derivative task but an all-consuming experience, during which the playwright’s ‘‘role’’ and the actor’s ‘‘self’’ are inextricably welded together. Central to Gellius’ story is a conception of acting whereby the performer demonstrates ‘‘that he is no sham, no puppet, no simulacrum, but in real earnest all that he pretends to be; that Othello, Hamlet, and Samson are not merely aped by him, but live and suffer in his person’’ (Shaw 1962 [1889], 15, on the Italian sensation of the nineteenth-century tragic stage Tommaseo Salvini).
In fact, Polus’ acting, vehemently repudiated as ‘‘barbaric’’ by Brecht (1964, 270), bears a striking affinity to the foundational technique of Stanislavskian acting, namely, ‘‘affective’’ or ‘‘emotion’’ memory (the recall and exploitation in performance of feelings and situations belonging to the actor’s own past), itself anticipated by several actors and theorists of acting on the Victorian stage. Lady Pollock, for example, records that each time William Charles Macready, the famous nineteenth-century tragedian, was called upon to act Hamlet, he ‘‘summoned up’’ the ‘‘extraordinary emotion’’ of a dream he once had as a young man, when he ‘‘saw and heard definitely and distinctly a friend lately dead, who came to address to him words of admonition’’ (1884, 11). And George Henry Lewes, whose collection On Actors and the Art of Acting (1875) was hailed by some contemporaries as a veritable ‘‘science’’ of the actor’s craft, foregrounded genuine emotion, imaginative sympathy, and the memory of past feelings as the most sublime means by which the performer could transmit his passion to the audience (see Roach 1980).
Also foregrounded in Gellius’ narrative is a concept of the actor as an integral aspect of the work of art, the dramatist’s fellow artist and creative equal. What the spectators saw in the performance Gellius describes was not Sophocles’ Electra pure and simple, but Electra as mediated, made present, recreated, and ‘‘reborn’’ in Polus’ body, clothed in Polus’ emotional reserves. It is precisely this irreducibility and ineradicable presence of the actor’s self in the theatrical event that constitutes Polus’ performative legacy: the ‘‘making’’ of stage-characters does not require the complete ‘‘un-making’’ and disintegration of the actor’s real self, the divesting of his own personality, as claimed by Western opponents of the stage. Whether the ‘‘self’’ is seen and used as a repository of emotional experiences that can be reawakened in search of what is most congenial to the fictive character’s stage-life (Stanislavsky) or as a social self that must be distanced from the role so as to criticize or contradict it (Brecht), no actor can escape ‘‘his own material’’ (Coquelin 1915 [1880], 40), his own psychosomatic entity. Even when merging with his part like Polus, it is his own nature that provides the building blocks for the creation of his ‘‘character.’’ Gellius’ tale rests on a perception of the tragic impact as grounded in the actor’s self and in the actor’s feelings (cf. Auslander 1997, 28-38). For, in the words of the nineteenth-century French actor Constant Coquelin, ‘‘It is with this individual self that [the actor] makes you by turns shiver, weep, or smile, the noblest shudders, the most melting tears, the humanest smiles’’ (Coquelin 1915 [1880], 83).
The juxtaposition of metatheatrical material in Euripides’ Helen and Gellius’ anecdote about Polus underscores the fragmentary state of our evidence. The ability to make the audience weep seems to have been the constant measure of performative success from Plato to St. Augustine, yet we will never know the strategies deployed by individual actors in order to move the audience’s collective psuche (soul). With respect to Greek tragic acting or even ancient perceptions of such acting, the dilemma of head or heart, tears from the heart or brain, defies resolution. It is nevertheless possible to affirm that both Athenian tragedy and Greco-Roman discourse about tragedy anticipate modern acting theory in viewing the question of emotional involvement as inextricably interwoven with the actor’s art.
World History
