A new conception of dramatic character as essential for the function of theatre
By Teresa Macey-Dare, undergraduate thesis for University College London, 2023
Introduction
Woodruff’s bold claim “people need theatre, they need to watch, together, something human” explicates an assumption central to this dissertation: theatre has a function uniquely afforded to it, in virtue of being the kind of thing it is. I take ‘theatre’ putatively as ‘art theatre’[1]: what (usually) “happens on a stage, where there are costumes and actors, and the actors have been working from a script.”[2] Limiting scope so as not to include, for example, rituals, coheres with my focus on the function of theatre per se. That it indeed has one follows an anthropological observation: theatre has remained a pervasive feature of human societies, despite the existence of other art forms that bear likenesses to it (especially cinema). To the extent that theatre has been ‘kept alive’, it seems in some way necessary for human culture.[3] Not least given that we continue to engage with theatre, intuitively it is for something - for example, entertainment through story-telling. However, this possibility is shared with other art forms (notably literature) so cannot be the function of theatre qua theatre. Hamilton’s conception of ‘theatrical enactment’ is more illuminating: the social practice in which audiences attend to the behaviour[4] of actors “who, by those means, occasion audience responses to whatever the [actors] arrange for audiences to observe about human life”.[5]
The function of theatre, I thus assume, must regard the relation between actors and audiences developed in the live theatre space. I adopt a view akin to Woodruff’s, that “theatre is the art by which human beings make or find human action worth watching [...mostly] by finding human characters worth caring about”.[6] To preclude cinema, I take ‘action’ to mean live activity, meanwhile excluding literature, ‘human characters’ are characters which are performed through some human (embodied) form.[7] They are ‘worth caring about’ to the extent that attention is allocated to them for the duration of their performed appearance, and this activity (theatre) yields some value(s) for actors and spectators. Combining the emphasis on action and character, we arrive at the idea of dramatic character (DC hereafter). Thus, my contention that this is essential for theatre’s function. The task of my dissertation follows: what must DC be like to be unique to and thereby facilitate the unique function of theatre? I note that by DC I do not mean the individual characters we may identify on the stage (eg. Iago from Shakespeare’s Othello), but the thing that is common to them all, and theatre in turn. Hence, my avoidance of the plural ‘dramatic characters’. Providing some orientation, DC may thinly be understood as what it is to be a character in the theatre (ie. a dramatic character). Unless specified, I shall simply use ‘character’ to mean a performed (ie. dramatic) character.
Section one begins with a thought experiment that provides a methodology for accessing DC (through actors), and the core of my conception: a Nietzschian ‘Apolline-Dionysiac polarity’.[8] In section two I consider two theories that, focusing on the activity and phenomenology of acting respectively, provide accounts of DC that emphasise one or the other side of the dynamic. Showing these to be unsuccessful in providing a coherent account of DC unique to theatre, in section three I propose a ‘synthetic account’ - conveying how when these paradigm cases are viewed in light of one another the problems may be resolved. Hence, I conclude that the ‘Apolline’ and ‘Dionysiac’ aspects are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for an account of DC as essential for the function of theatre.
1) Accessing dramatic character
1.1 The Blank Theatre
Sitting in a proscenium arch theatre, you patiently await the start of Francesco Cangiullo’s futurist play Detonation: Synthesis of All Modern Theatre. Beyond the title, you know nothing about what you are to experience. The curtain rises.[9]
CHARACTER: A BULLET
Road at night, cold, deserted.
A minute of silence. - A gunshot.
CURTAIN
As per your attendance as trial audience, the director instigates some post-production discussion. “You see, this is a new kind of imaginative play, devoid of performed characters, and purely constructed in the minds of the observers… it is like a waking dream. So, tell me, what is it that you witnessed? Describe the central characters.” After a minute of perplexed stares, you and one other audience member enter into a debate - claiming that you imagined a suicide narrative, meanwhile they, a passion-fuelled murder. Although you have both observed the same performance, and your interpretations are thematically linked via your experience, your visualisations could not be one and the same. Counterintuitively, you were not watching the same ‘play’. As Muse brings forth: “The gunshot [...] followed by an abrupt curtain, forces the audience to invent situation and resolution, perpetrator and victim”.[10] Detonation “abandons traditional character in favour of atmosphere, effect, and action divorced from human agency.”[11] Despite, as will become apparent, my more expansive conception of DC beyond ‘traditional character’ (ie. dramatis personae), I argue that Detonation must be performance rather than theatre. This is based on the idea that whilst in acting “one is not being oneself, [...] one is being oneself when performing.”[12] Insofar as the ‘character’ defined here is wholly identical to itself - the bullet as the bullet - it is not a character at all. The other characters, existing only imaginatively, cannot afford the function of theatre. “The action requirement entails that emotions be connected with objects of which we are aware”.[13] This suggests that for the audience to respond to live performance (‘action’) they must collectively allocate attention to the same things (‘objects’). Else the audience is not a unified audience, or even one at all; without characters, actors or an audience, such ‘theatre’ is not theatre at all.
My above thought experiment - I term ‘The Blank Theatre’ - illuminates both how we can go about accessing a conception of DC and what this must be like to facilitate the function of theatre. Firstly, whatever DC is, it appears to stand in an asymmetrical relation to actors and audiences. Unlike literary character, DC requires “corporeal embodi[ment]”[14] on the stage. Hence, what the audience ostensively comprehends as the character(s) (particulars, for example, Iago) is dependent on their being acted[15]. The existence of DC is, in this way, necessitated by physically present actors, in a way that it is not by a physically present audience; this is not least conveyed in our view of the actor as “the person on stage performing a role”.[16] Herein lies the ‘asymmetry’. This offers the rationale for section two, wherein I provide two accounts of DC through consideration of what the actors are doing and experiencing.
1.2 ‘Practical characterisation’ and ‘conceptual character’
Following the above, The Blank Theatre reveals a composite picture that, I will suggest, grounds the essentiality of DC for the function of theatre. Explicating the dual way we intuit character, Abbott questions: “do [characters] exist in the real empirical world [...or] as constructions [...residing in] the mental realm - in the minds of [...] people as they look at other people?”[17] Let us take Iago from Othello once again. According to the first suggestion, Iago exists in performances as what I call a ‘practical characterisation’. Actors “determine what to do and how to do it for every moment of the performance. The deliverances of these decisions are sequences of features determined by” individual actors.[18] I take this to include features of the actors as well as their acting. Contrast Lucian Msmati’s black Iago of the 2015 RSC production, with that of Ian McKelland’s traditional white presentation in 1989. Crudely displayed through the racial differences of the two actors, the role of practical characterisation comes forth: referring to Othello via the racial slur “The Moor”[19], the white Iago appears as a paradigmatically racist villain, meanwhile the black Iago as a tragic product of internalised racism. DC is likened to the embodied characterised form, reliant on the actor’s acting and directly attended to by the audience during the performance. Thus characters exist in the ‘real empirical world’. According to Abbott’s second suggestion, Iago is not the discrete characterisation of Iago in performances, but rather the concept or idea these convey. I refer to this as the ‘conceptual character’. As Stern illuminates: “If I have seen the play twice [...there appears to be] some single ‘thing’ that I have encountered”[20]. In the context of DC and our example, namely Iago. This picture of DC places characters in the ‘mental realm’ - in the minds of actors and audiences as they ‘look at other people’. For actors, this is interpreting the characters defined in the play-text, and for audiences, spectating the play and tracking its objects. Here, the idea of some fictional man (namely Iago) existing within the Shakespearean narrative world.
Abbott’s suggestions need not yield mutually exclusive intuitions about how and where characters exist. Rather actors may be thought to “shape the context within which spectators grasp the developing objects of performance”[21]. To this effect, the nature of DC appears as a psycho-physical phenomenon. I use the word ‘phenomenon’ to describe it’s being an activity established in a live theatre space, wherein practical characterisation and conceptual character are unified. Insofar as DC denotes dramatic character, practical characterisation must be essential to it, and yet, without the conceptual element, DC becomes unintelligible as character since no object seems to be tracked in the performing, thus theatre conflates with performance. This basic reasoning for the interdependence of practical characterisation and conceptual character shall be developed in the next section where I explore the two as stand alone possibilities. For now, I clarify the proposed conception of DC through Nietzsche’s idea of the forces at work in Greek tragedy - Apollo and Dionysus. “Apollo represents the drawing of [...] distinct boundaries between individuals [whilst] Dionysus represents the loss of individuality and the transgression of boundaries.”[22] To the extent that DC involves practical characterisation, there is some “paired actor-character identity”[23]; whatever the actor is doing is the character, actualised in some way. In this way it is like Dionysus. Yet, conceptual character indicates that the character exists somewhat independently of it’s embodied portrayal - both as the possibility to be actualised by some theatrical presentation, and the imaginative interpretation manifest in the observer. In this way, DC is like Apollo. Grounding this dual conception in our example of a putative character, Iago is at once the idea of some fictional person existing in imaginative space, and the physicalised presentation of this on the stage. Hence dependent on actors and audiences, it is at least plausible that my framing of DC as an Apolline-Dionysiac polarity, could facilitate the relational function of theatre.
2) The independent failures of Apollo and Dionysus
To show that taking DC as this polarity allows it to both be a feature unique to theatre and, when conceived of as such, facilitate theatre’s function, I must rule out that an adequate account could be given by either the Apolline or Dionysiac side independently. Recall that these map onto the ‘conceptual character’ and ‘practical characterisation’ respectively.
2.1 Mimēsis exemplifying conceptual character
Considering what the actor is doing yields a historical conception of DC that speaks to naturalistic views of theatre: “we simply take from life the story of a being or group of beings whose acts we faithfully set down.”[24] As I interpret Stern, the property ‘being-an-actor’ appears to consist in the following two necessary conditions:[25]
(1) An actor impersonates, pretends to be or plays a role.
(2) The object of this activity must be something or someone that the actor is not.
These, I think, reflect the classical view of DC as a mimetic object. As with most ancient Greek concepts, there is no singular translation that fully captures ‘mimēsis’, but the cluster of “imitation, representation, replication, impersonation, or portrayal”[26] provides a holistic understanding. I adopt a disjunctive reading of (1) - at any given moment the actor is impersonating, or pretending or role-playing - but because the descriptions are not synonymous, they could, I concede, occur simultaneously in a performance. Consider, for example, Blythe’s verbatim musical London Road, based on real interviews with Ipswich residents in the aftermath of the Steven Wright prostitution murders. As a theatrical take on documentary film, the actors had to learn the exact rhythms and intonations of the lines, for example: “The erm – the people that lived round here wer-were just a bit more vigilant like ya know”.[27] In this way, the actors impersonate real individuals through the character - trying to produce an authentic ie. “reliable [and] accurate representation”.[28] Yet, regardless of how closely the actor is able to assimilate with the resident, the actor is not the real, autobiographical person, and does not become them whilst performing. Acting is a form of pretence: “mimicking [of] a state while maintaining a clear sense of who we are”.[29] The example also serves to highlight the multiple levels on which the actor engages in role-play. Most apparently they portray particular dramatis personae[30] (ie. roles), which form a particular part of the narrative (ie. play a role within the plot).
Through performing as a particular character, the actor represents something they are not. Acting may be understood as the “carry[ing] over [... of] expressions from the world of reality to the world of fiction”[31]; “the boundary between the real and the pretend is manipulated by theatrical forms.”[32] In this way, theatrical mimēsis is infused with Platonic notions of a divide between what appears to be, and what actually is. As Baktir articulates: “image, thought, and opinion combine into a world of appearance characterised by nonbeing, a phenomenal nature and similarity”.[33] This speaks to the sense in which the actor - through impersonating, pretending to be, and/or role-playing - portrays something outside of their reality[34], by copying the world in certain ways. On my reading, ‘image, thought, and opinion’ denote the way in which an actor interprets and presents a certain character to the audience. The character is conceptual; a ‘nonbeing’ insofar as it is external to the being of the actor (for example, Ian McKelland, the individual in ‘real life’). Whilst the image of DC given by (2) locates it outside of the actor, their project as given by (1) is to present a ‘similarity’. In this way, acting may be likened to “‘simple verisimilitude’: the imitation on stage must, in terms of how it looks and sounds, seem to be as much like the [... thing or events] it is depicting.”[35]
A mimetic conception of acting thus results in a picture of DC paradigmatic of Apolline ‘conceptual character’. To the extent that performed embodiments “impersonate their real counterparts, [the objects] gain their secondary and only reality by participating in them”.[36] For the conceptual character (ie. object of representation) to be conveyed, it must ‘participate’ (ie. be given in) some intelligible form, namely whatever the actor does on stage. To avoid a “problem of accuracy, or congruency, in characterisation [which] can be highlighted by specific differences that exist between the representation of character in the theatre”,[37] good mimetic acting (copy) is the “faithful embodiment”[38] of the concept it seeks to convey (original). For example, the real Ipswich prostitute Vicky. Practical characterisation is hence only of conditional significance, and we can arrive at the following picture.
Apolline account of DC: dramatic character is the mimetic representation of an object[39] existing outside of, yet conveyed through, the actor’s “impersonation, participation or copy”[40], by the “copy[‘s being] in some sense, like the original”. DC is, in other words, what I term primarily ‘conceptual character’, existing in imaginative space (the minds of actors and audiences).
2.2 Fixing reference and ‘non-representational characters’
As alluded to by fn.37, Huston argues in theatre there is a “persistent gap [...] between the [material] performance and the thought performed.”[41] Insofar as it is the idea of the real prostitute, Vicky, not the singing characterisation of her that is sought to be mimetically indicated, the representation and means (ie. art form of theatre) appear to be arbitrary. But if practical characterisation is just the representational vehicle for the communication of a particular concept, and does not contribute in any substantial way to it, what ensures that actors and audiences imaginatively engage with one and the same idea? States provides some insight, through an ‘anatomy of dramatic character’ which distinguishes three key features achieved via its theatrical form: personality, character and identity.[42] ‘Personality’ pertains to the “qualities which make a person what he is, as distinct from other[s]”.[43] For example, the traits and emotions displayed by the actor in the performance. ‘Character’ (in States’ technical sense) provides the backdrop to personality; complexity and depth to the performance, encompassing, for example, the dispositions and beliefs of the represented person or thing. Completing the triad, identity is said to be the “sense of being expressed in doing” thus “attach[ing] person, personality and character to the world”.[44] As my emphases suggest, identity particularly highlights the role of action (ie. live performance) for the existence of characters in both the fictional world and theatre space. Supported by Hamilton’s ‘feature-salience model’, this anatomy explains how, through the medium of acting, unified interpretable particulars (eg. the idea of ‘Iago’, a fictional person with certain traits, relations, and function(s) within Othello) can be conveyed.
Whilst States’ anatomy describes how actors access and thus interpretively translate conceptual character, Hamilton’s feature-salience model accounts for the convergence of spectators on the same characteristics of theatrical performances. On this account, features of the performance are salient for some characteristic iff spectators can plausibly think “that all or most other similarly situated spectators are projecting the feature as part of the same pattern, for the same characteristic.”[45] This speaks to the Blank Theatre. ‘Feature’ may be understood as observable parts of the performance, and ‘characteristic’ as a combination of States’ ‘character’ and ‘personality’. A great illustration of feature-salience can be found in physical theatre. For example, in Things I Know to be True, the actor playing Rosie is lifted up by other cast members on the word ‘happy’ during her first monologue. This feature of the performance saliently conveys elation, and thus a certain concept - namely, that of the elated individual, Rosie. However, as Hamilton rightly points out, “what the [actors] intend is not what settles the issue of what is presented.”[46] We are thus left wondering how it is that the actors and audiences can ‘fix reference’ - interpreting unified representations of certain objects (ie. characters) that can be not only identified in a performance but re-identified in other performances.[47] This calls for a closer connection between the representation (copy) and represented (original) such that the features of performance (ie. the chosen means of representation) determine the characteristics of the concept, though also allow for different interpretations of it.
The emphasis on fixing reference raises a second question; as Stern highlights, “character do[es] not feature in any conventional sense in many kinds of avant-garde theatre”.[48] In these performances the actor is not committed to impersonating or imitating any particular, consistently unified entity[49], thus there is no clear object they convey. I term such characters, ‘non-representational’. For example, in Ionesco’s absurdist play Les Chaises, the orator continually “makes the same unintelligible attempts at speech [...consisting in] the same meaningless series of letters”.[50] Making the lack of clear trackable character (in States’ sense) more salient, Ionesco writes: they have “no metaphysics, no order, no law. (...) They are puppets, undone.”[51] Here we face two options. Firstly, one may argue that such theatre is not in fact theatre, but performance, since without interpretable objects being represented, conceptual character and thereby DC is lacking. However, given my definition of the distinction between acting and performance (cf. section 1.1) this conclusion cannot be warranted. To the extent that actors in avant-garde theatre are still representing something they are not, they are actors. This is in fact supported by the very thing that appears to restrict theatre, namely the Apolline account of DC derived from Stern’s notion of what actors typically do. As suggested by condition (2), mimēsis is a representational activity of something or someone that the actor is not.
This leads me to the second option: DC must be able to account for the existence of non-representational characters. This would require a much greater emphasis on the performance of actors (ie. practical characterisation); as Richardson brings forth “the characters’ portrayal by actors can greatly affect the [...] dramatic representation [...] by its very nature tend[ing] to complicate, enhance, or dissolve the unity of character”.[52] Here I take ‘unity’ as the connection between the represented and representation found in the concept delivered. The necessity for further emphasis on practical characterisation is illuminated by the fact that, even in the case of putative characters that appear as unified concepts (eg. dramatis personae such as Iago), DC cannot be some object distinct from its representation; “to impersonate the actions in a make-believe manner, the actor must use parts of his or her own real self, observations of other people, and imagination.”[53] The very nature of (1) undermines the separation suggested in (2), calling the status of DC as the mimetically represented object into further question. Affording practical characterisation only a secondary significance (the representational means by which concepts are translated), the Apolline picture is incoherent. Acting as mimēsis cannot place further emphasis on practical characterisation; in doing so it would suggest that the actor is the character in some representational form, and hence undermine the character’s being what the actor is not. Yet, as the feature-salience model itself suggests, what the actor does and how they do this, importantly influences the ideas delivered to spectators. Claiming that “character unfolds in the closed field of an art object and a single action”[54], States also alludes to the significance of the means through which conceptual character gains its representational being. Namely, the ‘art object’. We thus need to show how the very artistic form of theatre, allows characters to be what they are (ie. performed).
2.3 Existential amplification exemplifying practical characterisation
Following the above remarks, I now present a Dionysiac account of DC - emphasising practical characterisation. This is again arrived at by considering the actor, but with a shifted focus onto the phenomenology of acting. On Zamir’s view, acting is a form of ‘existential amplification’; “forg[ing] a link to a potentially unlimited range of new, hitherto unimagined possibilities through the intimate identification required by theatrical embodiment.”[55] The property ‘being-an-actor’ can be framed with a fundamentally ‘existential’ quality insofar as the performance is (perceived as) an expression of some alternate way of being. This chimes with the actor experience of Callow: “Not performing, or posturing [...] I was being in another way.”[56] Accordingly, DC is the actualisation of some unimagined possibility in theatrical space; the emphasis is not on what is or may be being represented in performance (ie. conceptual character), but the way in which it is done so (ie. practical characterisation). As Goldman captures, “acting is never simply mimetic [...] we feel an energy present [...] in performance that goes beyond the demonstration of what some ‘real person’ is like.”[57] Here I take the ‘energy’ to refer to the distinctive sense of live engagement manifest in theatre, through the very way in which the possibility is physically and imaginatively actualised through performance. With dramatic possibilities rooted in the beings of those who actualise them (namely the actors), existential amplification speaks to the existence of non-representational characters without over-extending the scope of DC into other art forms, notably dance.[58] “Characters [...] are fragments - identity-effects”.[59] As I interpret Zamir, these ‘identity-effects’ may be likened to Brecht’s concept of a ‘theatre of ideas’ in which “characters [are] the embodiments of a point of view”.[60] The nonsensical Orator of Les Chaises, for example, embodies the point of view of an absurdist reality. In its particular embodied presentations on stage (practical characterisations), each of which is distinct, an imaginative possibility is imbued with “presence and life”.[61] As such, the Mickey of Pokrvní bratia - a Slovak adaptation of Blood Brothers - will not be the same as the Mickey performed by an English actor, although (at least on a mimetic account) they are the same conceptual character. This example particularly emphasises the point, since the language and accent chosen, portray Mickey as the product of a specific location, time-period and social-class: “Yis y’ are. Y’ bloody well said it in assembly yesterday”.[62]
The sense in which acting may be viewed as the embodiment of a new way of being, leads on to the ‘amplification’ aspect of existential amplification. Zamir presents this first as ‘content-oriented’: “fictional embodiment [...] is an arduous process of progressively inhabiting an alien world”.[63] This ‘alien world’ refers to the place of ‘unimagined possibility’ explored through practical characterisation. For example, what it might be like to be a young boy in mid 20th Century Liverpool (Mickey from Blood Brothers). Secondly, amplification can be interpreted as ‘self-animation’: it not only regards the quantitative “broadening of one’s possibilities but of a quality of inhabiting a lived possibility.”[64] This reframes acting in terms of a relational kind of amplification. The “willing suspension of disbelief”[65] involved in theatre (namely on the part of the audience) allows the actor “to communicate stronger and weaker relations to lived content”.[66] In this way, Zamir elucidates and heightens the aforementioned concept of ‘energy’. In an inspired or intense performance (one that we may, in other words, call ‘good acting’), the actor can be thought to achieve a state of oneness with the content (conceptual character) that they are presenting. In characterising themself in a certain way, they become the character.
Thus the Dionysiac[67] core of the picture of DC I suggest is implied by existential amplification becomes apparent. “Theatrical embodiment is [...] relational; it engages in a constant dialogue with something that lies outside the boundaries of the work - audience response.”[68] On my reading, ‘audience response’ denotes both the active reaction of an audience (for example, audible laughter), and the passive awareness on the part of actors that characters are essentially performed. The actor can be seen as possessing a ‘dual citizenship’: “populat[ing] both the nonfictional and fictional world”[69] and hence acting as a medium through which imaginative reality can become physically manifest for an audience to be absorbed in. This bolsters the view that the actor is, in a substantial way, what they embody. As an analogue, DC is the performative embodied exploration of some possibility. Here a third framing of amplification comes in - ‘disembodiment’. Taking the actor’s performance as transitional between two realities, it is plausible that a prerequisite of engaging in the process of “selfing”[70] (becoming one with the character) is its inverse, namely ‘unselfing’ (disembodiment). Disembodiment moreover captures how “the actor toys with the role to help us temporarily rediscover rolelessness”.[71] Whilst the actor ‘identifies’ with the conceptual character, in practically characterising it, they display its mutable nature as a ‘potentially unlimited’ possibility.[72] For example, the Iago of Lucian Msmati is not the same character as that of Ian McKellen, and likewise the Mickey of Blood Brothers not the same as that of Pokrvní bratia.
Synthesising these interpretations of amplification with the ‘existential’ aspect, existential amplification results in a picture of DC paradigmatic of Dionysiac ‘practical characterisation’. DC transgresses boundaries between actors and audiences, and the lived realities of individuals, in its being an exploration of new ways of being. Afforded by the very ways in which the unimagined possibilities are created (ie. practical characterisation), characters amplify our being. As Arnott puts it: “Dionysiac rapture annihilates the bounds of ordinary existence.”[73]
Dionysiac account of DC: dramatic character is the constructive actualisation of some previously unimagined possibility, via a particularised theatrical embodiment, which serves to amplify the being of those who participate in its creation. It is, in other words, primarily the ‘practical characterisation’, existing in observable performances (on the stage, as the actor’s acting).
2.4 Actor-character identity and characters as agents
Barrymore writes of existential amplification: “I thought I was the character, and in my dreams I knew that I was he”.[74] Framing DC as an existential possibility (ie. tied to the actor’s being, both in its possible and actualised states), the Dionysiac account thus appears to conflate the actor and the character. Consequently, “the gap between the actors and the characters is closed: the actor [or, more specifically, their acting] is the character”.[75] The problem of such ‘actor-character identity’ is that, counterintuitively, it implies that there is not one thing (for example, Iago) being presented in different ways through discrete productions and performances, but that each time a new character is performatively actualised. Again, the theory seems to undermine itself insofar as characters are ways of “be[ing] rather than forever becoming”.[76] Yet, speaking to my articulation of the Dionysiac account as ‘amplifying the being of those who participate in its construction’, “the audience also is supposed to be actively sharing in the creation and acknowledgment of an imagined construction to which it can then respond.”[77] To this effect, the audience too imbues the possibility with ‘presence and life’[78] by imaginatively engaging with the performance. This may imply the being of the character as a co-constructed possibility, distinct from the actor. ‘Living Theatre’ - a form of “immersive performance that develop[s] based on direct interaction with an audience”[79] - supports this in particular.
However, a threshold is reached; blurring the lines between actors and audiences to greater extents appears to inhibit rather than enhance the latter’s active involvement in the actualisation of characters, hence the success of the performance. Take for example, reports on a series of experimental plays written by students at the University of Exeter in 1982. With one the goals being destroying “the barriers between the players and the audience”, the audience were left with “cognitive dissonance” - in a state of complete uncertainty, “without a clue how to behave.”[80] Hence, an account that emphasises the transgression of boundaries (ie. Dionysiac) may not be able to cement the function of theatre. Woodruff bolsters this: “for you to be a character in theatre, they must see you as a character”.[81] An audience sees “human possibilities heightened by [the] art and deepened by the emotions they cultivate in us”[82], and such empathetic watching often leads to the “unthinking transfer [of] the qualities of the characters to the actors who play them”.[83] To the extent that existential amplification suggests that ‘identification is required by theatrical embodiment’[84], the account it yields of DC implies that the character is the manifestation of some possibility open to the actor. The character, as its practical characterisation, thus appears as the expression of features[85] of the actor who embodies it, and the actor-character identity problem pervades.
Hamilton’s feature-salience model captures this, meanwhile offering a diagnosis of the problem. Spectators seem to experience ‘double-focus’: “having their attention drawn both to characteristics of the object being developed in the performance and to features” of actors.[86] Here I take the ‘object’ as the conceptual character, and ‘features of actors’ as the practical characterisation. The conflation between actors and characters, Hamilton suggests, results from a continual ‘slippage’ of focus of the spectators’ attention. For example, being distracted by an actor’s bushy eyebrows, but also considering how the object of the performance (their particular character) is reflected in the expressive facial movements of these eyebrows. Speaking to the emphasis on practical characterisation given by the Dionysiac account, and the sense in which the audience is non-reductively involved in the actualisation of DC, “spectators attend to performers’ voices and bodies.”[87] Whilst “in some performances, bodies seem not to mean something (else) but to be something (ie. themselves)”,[88] theatre (as I have distinguished from performance) involves the actor’s being something they are not in some way. In turn, by attending to the actor’s voice and body, it plausibly follows (as per the feature-salience model) that the audience is tracking some object beyond the actor and their performance.
Brechtian theatre exploits this via ‘alienation-effects’. Whilst for Brecht, a “dramatic character can only be conceived of by its interhuman relationships”[89] this is achieved by the othering of spectators, actors and characters in relation to each other. Assuming ‘interhuman relationships’ to map onto the actualisation of DC by actors and audiences, this coheres with the existential amplification account of acting. And yet, with the actors both performing as, and presenting characters through report, Brecht’s theatre heightens a critical distance between actor and character: “the actor [for example] must not only sing but show a man singing”.[90] There is a clear emphasis on the conceptual character, as emerging from and interplaying with the practical characterisation. In this way, Brechtian theatre reveals a second problem for the Dionysiac account - the diminishing of character agency. By ‘character agency’, I mean the sense in which characters seem to be independent from their performative instantiations. Aristotle’s ambiguous framing of character brings this forth: “the character in a play [is an] ‘agent’ (hoi prattontes), and the character of an agent [...is it’s] ‘êthos’.”[91] Taking it as an ‘agent’ denotes the sense in which the character is the “free artist of [itself]”[92]; to the extent that the actor interprets and thereby constructs the êthos (the characteristics of their role(s)) the character is given its physical theatrical form. Hence, just as the Brechtian actor shows a man singing and sings (where one is not reducible to the other), a character can be understood as both what is being portrayed and how this is being done. The what exists in a conceptual and imaginative space independently from the actor, free to be embodied in their performance (hoi prattontes) through the how - the characteristics (êthos) selected to present the character on stage.
The Dionysiac account must, it seems, be supplemented by another that emphasises conceptual character, else it renders Brechtian theatre and what it displays about the nature of characters incomprehensible. As Storm saliently captures: “dramatic character must appear to be alive and autonomous, [...] and yet that same character is necessarily constrained, and even defined, by the dramaturgy – [...] the structure, style, form, or genre of the particular play in which he or she appears.”[93]
3) A synthetic account
3.1 Existential amplification as creative mimēsis
Framing mimēsis and existential amplification as exemplifying conceptual character and practical characterisation respectively, I have attempted to convey the shortcomings of these views of DC. Insofar as neither one amounts to a coherent picture that is unique to theatre, I argue they could not be essential to it, hence not facilitate its function qua theatre. This is not to suggest, however, that the two views on theatre are incompatible; by contrast, existential amplification can be viewed as a creative form of mimēsis, as given by Aristotle. Reframing acting as such, I arrive back at the Apolline-Dionysiac account of DC.
Aristotle claims that acting is imitative to the extent that it “represents man in action.”[94] As Baktir interprets it, dramatic character is, through “its performative aspect, an actualisation, [and] presentation of what [is] mimetically indicated”.[95] Insofar as acting may be an embodiment of a new way of being (ie. existential amplification), it thus appears to (re)present that new way of being. Furthermore, to count as the ‘actualisation’ of some previously unimagined possibility as existential amplification proposes, it must minimally represent that possibility. This resonates with Aristotle’s prior articulation of mimēsis: taking ‘action’ as the live performance (practical characterisation), which ‘represents man’ to the extent that it is the actualisation of some new way of being (conceptual character as existential amplification). As Ian McKlelland frames it, “the actor is the playwright and the character at the same time”.[96] DC thus appears as neither the embodied performance of actors in the ‘real empirical world’, nor the idea or concept these convey, located in the ‘mental realm’[97] of actors and audiences. Jointly participating in the actualisation of some possibility on stage - the actor, performing, the audience, imagining - the idea of the character as some thing that stands outside the performance, emerges. Vidhya neatly summarises this: actors and audiences “must use parts of [their] own real sel[ves], [...] and imagination [...to] engage in a creative act whose end product is a construct.”[98] Hence DC appears as a mimetically represented object (conceptual character), inextricably connected to the way in which this possibility is theatrically presented (practical characterisation). This allows the unimagined possibility to “cross over from inanimate matter into life”[99] - becoming a character, no less a dramatic one. Taking our putative example, Iago is at once the embodied being of Iago in individual performances and the idea of Iago identified and re-identified between them.
The appropriateness of understanding existential amplification in mimetic terms comes forth in Halliwell’s presentation of Aristotelian mimēsis: “constituted partly by the experience that it opens up for [...] its audience”.[100] This clearly resonates with the idea that acting affords new ways of being, for its participants. Mimēsis, on Aristotle’s conception, is the creative unification of (in the context of theatre) actors and audiences of a representation.[101] As I interpret this translating onto DC, there exists some concept presented by the play-write (potentially one and the same as the actor in the case of improvised theatre). This is not the character, but the idea of it. Then, interpreted in acting - actualising the concept in the specific artistic form of performance - the idea of the character is represented as such a performed possibility. The resonance between existential amplification and mimēsis is no less explicit than Halliwell’s articulation of the latter as “a locus of possibilities within a fully human perspective, [...] that interprets ‘reality’”.[102] Synthesising the two ideas of acting in this way, we arrive at an analogously synthetic picture of DC as follows.
Apolline-Dionysiac polarity: DC is the theatrical embodiment of some previously unimagined possibility, which, in its very performance, is mimetically created by actors and audiences. It is the unification of conceptual character and practical characterisation, afforded via the particular form of artistic representation (theatre).
In this way “dramatic characters [...] can be understood as an unfixed phenomenon”.[103] To the extent that the idea of some character emerges from the collaboration of actors and audiences in live theatrical performance, DC places characters liminal between them. It is thus in one sense Apolline - particular characters appearing as distinct bounded possibilities, to be ‘identified’ with. Yet, simultaneously, it must be Dionysiac - the theatrical embodiment of particular characters is the transgression of boundaries between the actors and audience, the real and imagined. Insofar as acting creatively represents possible ways of being to an audience who jointly actualise these, character is present (ie. some thing that one is not). As arrived at through the form of live embodied performance, it is dramatic. The Apolline-Dionysiac account seems unique to theatre; as such, it is a plausible candidate for facilitating its function (hence being essential). Walton captures this in his idea of mimēsis as ‘make-believe’: “works do not simply prompt imaginings, they authorise them, making certain imaginings appropriate.”[104] The artistic form is crucial in the determination of what can be imaginatively afforded by works, and hence the function they serve.
3.2 The success of Apolline-Dionysiac polarity
As is implicit in its being a ‘polarity’, I take the Apolline-Dionysiac account to be a complete account of DC as unique to theatre. As Arnott brings forth “in the ancient world itself polarities and antitheses were always popular methods for analysis and explanation”.[105] As Nietzsche contends, Apollo cannot function without Dionysus, and vice-versa.[106] A similar perspective is found in sections 2.2 and 2.4 of this dissertation, wherein I suggest that the problems of over-emphasising one side of the polarity call to be answered by the other side. The two thus seem in dynamic equilibrium. With the mimetic object not some unified representation prior to and instantiated in the performance, but emerging from it as a new way of being, non-representational characters can be accounted for. Insofar as the way in which the actor acts (ie. practical characterisation) and the audience in turn allocates attention, creates the concept of the character, the actors performance represents some identifiable/ trackable object. Fundamentally tied to the “spectator’s [...] participation in dramatic action”[107] (taking ‘dramatic action’ as theatrical embodiment of possibilities), the conceptual character develops in performance, appearing as a dynamic construct. Further, resonating with my link to Walton, practical characterisation speaks to the problem of fixing reference, since the form determines what can appropriately be imagined. With conceptual character emerging from a character's performative being - this relying in no insignificant part on the audience, and existing in some imaginative space beyond the actor’s performance - the actor-character identity problem may also be resolved. Appoline conceptual character can maintain the agency of characters as open though distinct possibilities, to be accessed through theatrical forms.
The question we are left with then is, in what way does this new conception of what it is to be a dramatic character - DC as an Apolline-Dionysiac polarity - facilitate the function of theatre? Recall that I take this as being relational: “the art by which human beings make or find human action worth watching [...mostly] by finding human characters worth caring about”.[108] As existential amplification as mimēsis conveys, “an actor stands there and simply by being there is a transformation of the space of the between in the direction of communicative possibility.”[109] Actively constructed in the theatre space, which provides the means for unification of conceptual character and practical characterisation, characters emerge from and consequently form “a web of relations”[110] between the actors and the audience. Since the existence of DC is necessitated by the attention of the audience to the behaviour of actors, audiences express that human characters (ie. embodied ways of being) are worth caring about. Likewise, with DC relying on the specific artistic form of theatre, involving a process of “imaginatively becoming other”[111] necessitated by live performance, actors make human action worth watching. Through acting, they represent novel possibilities that could not be afforded in real life.[112] DC as an Apolline-Dionysiac polarity relies on the constant and engaged interplay between actors and audiences; it creates “a new sense of spatiality that allows people to navigate between a variety of real and imaginary spaces into which they imaginarily project themselves”.[113] With the existence of DC (thus particular characters) facilitating and facilitated by this dynamic relation, it appears as essential for the function of theatre.
Conclusion
Following from an assumed function of theatre, I have argued that dramatic character - where this is something akin to the universal ‘being-a-dramatic-character’ common to particular characters of different kinds[114] we identify in performance - must be like an Apolline-Dionysiac polarity. Characters are separate (‘bounded’) from their performative actualisation and exist as concepts in the mental realm. Yet, with this concept evolving from the activity of actors as they represent some possibility, together with the audience as they watch, characters are mutable and infinite (‘transgressing boundaries’). As such, for something to be a character it must be comprised of i) conceptual character, and ii) practical characterisation - the two existing in an interdependent relationship, itself dependent on the live theatrical performance. Characters thus appear as relational activities. Occupying the liminal space between the audience and actors, the embodied and the psychological, DC is “being inside and outside the play at the same time”.[115] Theatre hence allows us to observe human life, as intersubjective and creative. Human action (practical characterisation) is worth watching because it affords new imaginatively explorable possibilities (conceptual character).
My new ontological and metaphysical conception of DC (what it is to be a dramatic character; the essential role this feature plays in theatre; and how and where characters exist) is radical but more intuitive than at first glance. Warranted by the particularly close relation of actors to characters, as conveyed by The Blank Theatre, DC as Apolline-Dionysiac polarity arises from and coheres with a plausible theory of acting: existential amplification as mimēsis. In separating this and presenting the ‘Apolline’ and ‘Dionysiac’ accounts in turn, I demonstrated the mutual dependence of the two. Not least, an emphasis on either practical characterisation or conceptual character yields counterintuitive ideas of DC; the former, taking Iago as existing only within discrete embodied forms for the duration of performances, meanwhile the latter, suggesting that Iago is merely the idea of Iago capable of existing without being theatrically performed, in turn, making the form of presentation (theatre) arbitrary. Neither of these would be the dramatic character, Iago. DC as Apolline-Dionysiac polarity can not only account for the ways we intuit character, but also what theatre is and has the potential to be, which a traditional account of character[116] could not. Ending as I began, with a bold Woodruff claim: “Theatre embodies fantasies that we would not have the courage to shape deliberately in our own imaginations”[117] The novel conception of DC achieves this consequence.
- [1] Hereafter ‘theatre’.
- [2] Woodruff,P. 2008, pg.25 - where ‘script’ may be minimal eg. the basic principles for improvised theatre.
- [3] Ibid. pg.14 4Ie. expressive and ‘non-expressive’ movements and sounds.
- [5] Hamilton,J. 2007, pg.59
- [6] Woodruff,P. 2008, pg.22 - NB: still ‘theatre’ as ‘art theatre’ despite Woodruff’s explicitly broader use.
- [7] Though importantly, need not represent humans.
- [8] Arnott,G. 1984, pg.137
- [9] Reprinted in Muse,J. 2017
- [10] Muse,J. 2017, pg.1 - my emphasis
- [11] Ibid.
- [12] Hamilton,J. 2019, sect.2.2
- [13] Woodruff,P. 2008, pg.156
- [14] Storm,W. 2011, pg.243
- [15] Taking this to include non-human forms of acting, eg.puppetry.
- [16] Stern,T. 2014, pg.3 - my emphasis bringing out the necessity of the activity (acting) for the realisation of characters.
- [17] Abbott,P. 2014, pg.134
- [18] Hamilton,J. 2007, pg.153
- [19] First occurrence: Act 1, Scene 1
- [20] Stern,T. 2014, pg.13
- [21] Hamilton,J. 2007, pg.154. Where ‘shaping the context’ maps onto practical characterisation and ‘developing objects’ onto conceptual character.
- [22] Stern,T. 2014, pg.68
- [23] Mittel,J. 2015, pg.120
- [24] Zola,E. 1963, pg.206
- [25] Stern,T. 2014, pg.3 - at least in what we may typically consider as ‘theatre’.
- [26] Gass,W. 2006. pg.192
- [27] Blythe,A. 2011, Act 1.2 (Dodge)
- [28] Somogy,V. et al. 2020, sect.1
- [29] Zamir,T. 2014, pg.34
[30] NB: here persons, but could be other kinds of entities. - [31] Schyberg,F. et al. 1962, pg.82
- [32] Furniss,G. 1996. pg.120
- [33] Baktir,H. 2003, pg.172
- [34] Ie.the character in fictional/ conceptual space.
- [35] Stern,T. 2014, pg.29 - my emphasis
- [36] Gass,W. 2006. pg.206 - taking ‘real’ as the character (original) existing outside of the actor.
- [37] Storm,W. 2011, pg.241
- [38] Ibid.
- [39] Ie. what is being represented.
- [40] Gass,W. 2006. pg.203
- [41] Huston,H. 1992, pg.45
- [42] States,B. 1985, pg.88
- [43] Ibid. pg.89
- [44] Ibid. pg.96
- [45] Hamilton,J. 2007, pg.101
- [46] Ibid.
- [47] Ibid. pg.114
- [48] Stern,T. 2014, pg.2 - my emphasis. Taking ‘in any conventional sense’ to invoke dramatis personae.
- [49] Ie. person or thing
- [50] Zinman,T. 2015, pg.224-225
- [51] Ionesco,E. 1984
- [52] Richardson,B. 1997, pg.95 - my emphasis
- [53] Vidhya,B. et al. 2015, pg.77
- [54] States,B. 1985, pg.87
- [55] Zamir,T. 2010, pg.230
- [56] Callow,S. 2004, pg.31
- [57] Goldman,M. 1975, pg.5
- [58] Ie. I interpret these as not different ways of being, rather features of being (activities).
- [59] Zamir,T. 2014, pg.28
- [60] Sokel,W. 1971, pg.179
- [61] Derrida,J. 1997, pg.54
- [62] Russell,W. 1995, Act 2 (Mickey) - abbreviations and profanity displaying Mickey as a working class youth from Northern England.
- [63] Zamir,T. 2014, pg.19
- [64] Ibid. pg.24
- [65] Coleridge,S. from Stern,T. 2014, pg.65
- [66] Zamir,T. 2014, pg.24 - taking ‘lived content’ as what is delivered in live performance.
- [67] Cf. section 1.2
- [68] Zamir,T. 2010, pg.240
- [69] Ibid. pg.230
- [70] Zamir,T. 2014, pg.24
- [71] Hornby,R. 1992, pg.21
- [72] Cf. Zamir,T. 2010, pg.230
- [73] Arnott,G. 1984, pg.138
- [74] Barrymore,J. from Morrison,M. 1997, pg.115 - my emphasis
- [75] Stern,T. 2014, pg.183
- [76] States,B. 1985, pg.87-88
- [77] Zamir,T. 2010, pg.228
- [78] Cf. Derrida on Artaud
- [79] Stern,T. 2014, pg.7
- [80] Crick,B. 1982, pg.28
- [81] Woodruff,P. 2008, pg.95
[82] Ibid. pg.223 - [83] Stern,T. 2014, pg.62
- [84] Cf. Zamir,T. 2010
- [85] Ie. ‘qualities’
- [86] Hamilton,J. 2007, pg.104
- [87] Hamilton,J. 2007, pg.104
- [88] Ibid. pg.106
- [89] Sokel,W. 1971, pg.181
- [90] Brecht,B, 1964, pg.44-45
- [91] Woodruff,P. 2008, pg.101
- [92] Bloom,H. 1998, pg.6
- [93] Storm,W. 2016, pg.41
- [94] Dutton, 2016 from Baktir,H. 2003, pg.173 - my emphasis
- [95] Baktir,H. 2003, pg.168
- [96] McKellen,I. 1979
- [97] Cf. Abbott,P. 2014
- [98] Vidhya,B. et al. 2015, pg.77 - my emphasis
- [99] Zamir,T. 2014, pg.24
- [100] Halliwell,S. 2002, pg.161 - my emphasis
- [101] Ambrosio,C. 2021, pg.36
- [102] Halliwell,S. 2002, pg.376
- [103] Storm,W. 2011, pg.242
- [104] Currie,G. 1993, pg.376
- [105] Arnott,G. 1984, pg.139
- [106] Ibid. pg.138
- [107] McCollom,W. 1947, pg.184 - my emphases
- [108] Woodruff,P. 2008, pg.22
- [109] Desmond,W. 2011, pg.116
- [110] Woodruff,P. 2008, pg.101
- [111] Zamir,T. 2014, pg.32
- [112] See Zamir,T. 2014 for contrast with ‘genuine amplification’.
- [113] Bleeker,M. 2008, pg.154
- [114] Ie. both representational and non-representational.
- [115] Schyberg,F. et al. 1962, pg.82
- [116] Ie. dramatis personae
- [117] Woodruff,P. 2008, pg.177
Appendix: plays cited
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