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Letter to a Poor Actor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

David E. R. George
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Abstract

Why does the vocabulary of the theatre become pejorative as soon as it is applied to everyday experience? Why does the use of theatre as a metaphor for the world carry implications of the deceptive and the artificial? And why, more recently, have sociologists and psychologists used theatricality as a basis for explaining the nature of behaviour in ‘real life’ – at the same time as theatrical gurus have begun to seek a kind of transcendent theatricality in ‘real’ experience? Through an analysis of the ideas of writers such as Erving Goffman and Elizabeth Burns, and of theatre workers from Diderot through Stanislavski to Grotowski, David E. R. George concludes that the apparent contradictions and paradoxes become reconcilable if one replaces the traditional alternative models of theatricality – subjective identification between actor and role versus presentational objectivity – with a triadic approach, which recognizes the partial, overlapping, and multi-faceted nature of all ‘theatrical’ behaviour, on the stage or in the street. After the award of his Cambridge doctorate in 1964, David E. R. George taught in the Universities of California at Berkeley, Göttingen, Malaysia, and Peking, before taking up his present post as Chairman of Theatre and Drama Studies at Murdoch University, Western Australia. He has published books on Ibsen and on German tragic theory, and his study of Indian ritual dance-drama will appear later this year in the ‘Theatre in Focus’ series.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 2 , Issue 8 , November 1986 , pp. 352 - 363
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

Notes and References

1. Barish, J. A., The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (University of California Press, 1981), p. 1Google Scholar.

2. Curtius, Cf. E. R., ‘Theatrical Metaphors’, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 138–44Google Scholar.

3. Lyman, S. M. and Scott, M. B.The Drama of Social Reality (Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 7Google Scholar.

4. Ibid., p. 7.

5. Cf. Barish, op. cit., p. 98f and 127ff, for a brief description of how Shakespeare consistently employed the theatre metaphor in his plays as a model of hypocrisy and deceit. Also Righter, Cf. Anne, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London, 1962)Google Scholar.

6. Goffman, E., The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Pelican, 1971), p. 241fGoogle Scholar.

7. Ibid., p. 244f.

8. Grotowski, Jerzy, Towards a Poor Theatre (New York, 1968), p. 16, 38, 124, 210, 214, 237Google Scholar.

9. Ibid., p. 40.

10. Barba, E., L'étranger qui danse (Lille, 1972), p. 6Google Scholar.

11. Grotowski, op. cit., p. 25.

12. Diderot, in Cole, T. M. and Chinoy, H. K., Actors on Acting (New York, 1970), p. 165Google Scholar.

13. Ibid., p. 199.

14. Ibid., p. 208f.

15. Goffman, op. cit., p. 246.

16. Frame Analysis (New York, 1974), p. 128Google Scholar.

17. Ibid., p. 129.

18. Eadem.

19. Stanislavski as reported by Toporkov, in Cole and Chinoy, op. cit., p. 526.

20. Building a Character (London, 1950), p. 156Google Scholar.

21. This is evident when one finds Goffman explaining how we can find pleasure from seeing a play a second time. His explanation is that spectators who already known the play ‘put themselves as much as possible into a state of ignorance’ (p. 136), in other words pretend that they don't know what is going to happen next. Such a self-censorship would be necessary if all we went to see were characters; it is neither necessary nor desirable if we go in order to compare performances – in other words to compare different personalized enactments of the one ‘character’. Again, the binary misrepresents the spectators' double perspective, a double perspective both provided by and in turn giving further insight to the proposed triadic system.

22. Burns, E., Theatricality (London, 1972), p. 138Google Scholar.

23. Ibid., p. 149.

24. In Phenomenology and Sociology, ed. Luckmann, T. (Penguin, 1978), p. 284fGoogle Scholar.