The History of Acting - Part One

A History of Western Acting

(But first, the link that I promised yesterday. It's not live yet, you'll need to copy and paste it into your browser to see the interview with Denszel Washington and Viola Davis.
http://www.dailyactor.com/2010/04/denzel-washington-and-viola-davis-on-the-broadway-revival-of-fences/)

As far as we know, the first actors were probably pre-language. They may have been "cavemen" of some sort, trying to communicate to others of their kind the thrill of a hunt. Since this happened pre-history, we have no record of their early efforts. Such performances, born out of a pre-language need to communicate, had to have been very physically involved.

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EXERCISE:
Try this right now. Communicate without words to someone you know, some wonderful or interesting experience you had. Don’t stop until you’ve gotten it largely across. You can use sounds. Observe how physical you need to be to accomplish this?
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What we do know is that some 2,500 years ago, the Greeks started to present the first theatrical plays. It appears they began as religious events, performed (probably in song) by a group, called a chorus, wearing masks. The first plays were doubtless religious rituals, tributes to unseen Gods.

Then, someone got the bright idea of separating from the chorus and portraying a particular personality in one of the celebrations, such as the Greek God of wine, Dionysus. Putting on a mask uniquely designed to create the appearance of the character, he stepped forward from the group and spoke (or sang) the first dialogue, “I am Dionysus. I did this!”, and the chorus answered. Tradition tells us that this first actor’s name was “Thespis of Icaria” (around the 6th Century B.C.). Since that first performance, actors have been known as “Thespians”.

At the birth of theatre, it is believed that the writer always directed his own work. This was a trend continued for thousands of years, until very recently. This means the first Greek authors of tragedy, Aeschylus (525B.C.-456 B.C.), Sophocles (496 B.C.-406 B.C.) and Euripides (480 B.C.-406 B.C.), were also the first directors, as was Aristophanes (456 B.C.- 386 B.C.), the author of the first comedies and satires, and Menander (342 B.C.-291 B.C.), the father of the “domestic comedy”, the comedy taking place in the home, and often about family.

The history of acting is the history of theatre, as film didn’t exist as a media until the late 1800s, and TV and radio are 20th century inventions. Sadly, then, we have no recording of the first great performers, or the first 2,300 years worth of performances.

We know that the Greeks wore massive masks when performing, with megaphones built in to amplify their voices in large amphitheaters. They were forced to “declaim”, or to speak boldly and as loudly as possible. Probably volume was a more desired result than subtlety in early acting. They wore shows with enormous bottoms, a foot or more tall, as they were playing Gods and needed to appear larger than life. They clomped about in those shoes throughout their performance.
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EXERCISE:
Try this right now. Get a paper bag big enough to place over your head. Cut small holes for eyes and a mouth. Place a cone of some kind in the mouth, to amplify. You can make one from paper and tape, about two inches long. Tie bricks, or something large, to the bottom of your shoes. Go to a large, open and outdoor area like a football or baseball field. Do it with a friend if possible. Then, mask on, speak for about ten minutes through the mask and homemade megaphone, while walking about.
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Theatre largely died after the Greeks, with the exception of a few strolling troops of performers in Rome who did farces and comedy, as exemplified by Plautus (254 B.C.- 184 B.C.), whose comic pieces, sometimes adapted from Aristophanes, were performed on the city streets of Rome. Acting was a profession held in low regard to the war-like Roman.

Theatre died again, until reborn in Churches as religious dramas of little lasting quality, in the 1200s-1400s, in Europe. Actors still carry a legacy from that time. When performing on stage, “upstage” means to move away from the audience toward the back of the stage, and “downstage” means to move toward the front of the stage and the audience. This comes to us from these days, when religious dramas, considered beneath the dignity of the Catholic Church, were performed on the Church Steps, with the audience seated on the road before the church. At this time, there was no such profession as “actor”.

This changed first in Italy, as troops of actors, picking up where the Roman, Plautus, left off, toured from city to city playing largely improvised comedies using the same stereotyped characters over and over. This was the famed “Commedia Del Arte”, a school of acting that was to influence comedy for centuries, and which can trace its real birth back to Plautus, and Aristophanes.

It should be clearly stated, so you know, that actors were despised throughout history, until the 20th century or so. The Catholic Church had a nasty tendency to excommunicate them, cutting them off from God and religion, as “undesirables”. Actors, once dead, were not buried with “good Christians”. Unless supported financially by royalty, one actually had no way to survive as an actor, not until around the 1700s. Acting, since the Greeks, has not been considered a “noble profession”, and was certainly never lucrative, not until our time. And still, there were actors.

Commedia made its way through Europe, as a part of an expanding Renaissance, a period of rebirth in Europe of knowledge and art. Along with Commedia, a new interest in the works of the Greeks and Romans flooded the continent. These interests made their way to England, and were latched onto by many great writer, the greatest of all (and of all writers) being William Shakespeare (1564-1616 A.D.). The greatest plays ever authored were directed by and featured Shakespeare himself as an actor, in their first productions. Bu perhaps the first great actor after Thespis was Shakespeare’s star, Richard Burbage (1568-1619), who portrayed the first Richard III, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and Othello. Burbage, a man from a poor family, was the most in-demand actor of his day, performing in other great author’s works as well, such as in Ben Jonson’s Volpone. At this time, there were no actresses in England, as only men were allowed on stage. Yes, this means the first Juliet was a man.

Shakespeare offered advice to the actors of his day, through this speech delivered by Hamlet, through the lips of Shakespeare’s greatest actor:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, by use all gently, for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant. It out-herods Herod. Pray you avoid it. Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve, the censure of the which one must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly (not to speak profanely), that neither having th' accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. Reform it altogether! And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them, for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the mean time some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That's villainous and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. Go make you ready.

You’ll notice that the greatest dramatist in history never suggests that the ACTOR need feel anything? His concern is for what the AUDIENCE will feel and understand. It is the audience’s response he continuously refers to.

The theatre found its greatest master of comedy, and one of its greatest comic actors, in France. Moliere (1622-1673), a trained lawyer, had a terrible stutter, and put it to use to gain huge laughs in his many, great comedies.

Acting continued along these lines for centuries, until the 1800s. In the mid 1800s, a shift occurred in the arts. A new kind of artist decided that art should “hold the mirror up to nature” far more realistically than Shakespeare had intended in Hamlet’s speech to the players, and with far more “realism” than Shakespeare’s plays ever exhibit. The school of “realism” in art started in Northern Europe. It was felt by these new-age artists that art should represent life. In this author’s opinion, this was the worst thing that has ever happened to the arts. In theatre, the Russian playwright, Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883), started the trend. The first theatrical apostle of realism was Henrick Ibsen (1828-1906). Ibsen’s first great play, A Doll’s House, told the tale of a dysfunctional marriage, and a wife who finally leave her husband, an act called by many theatrical critics the “door slam heard ‘round the world.”

Suddenly serious dramas were being authored about the “common man”. Everyday problems became the source of theatre, and actors learned to play “smaller”, more “real”, more “life like”. In doing so, techniques were thought necessary that would assist an actor to access his “real” emotions and portray them. At about the same time, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) created analytic theory, psychoanalysis. This pseudo-science, a nearly random string of theories unsupported by any real data, pretended to understand the functions of the human mind. (Psychologists and Psychiatrists still make this ridiculous claim, though they can’t seem to cure or help anyone.)

A Russian director, and a student of psychoanalytic theory, Constantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938) developed the first “usable system” for an actor, largely based on the actor’s ability to recall and relive personal experiences repeatedly. He believed the actor should “live the part”. This author disagrees with nearly all of Stanislavsky's teachings. Stanislavsky himself is often said to have denied “The Method” he created at the end of his life, as unworkable. Even he suggested strongly that the student not stick to his technique, but that they create his own. In this, he was correct.

His teachings have been made more destructive through the work of several “master teachers” throughout the world, who have left a string of broken actors and shattered lives in their wake. Some great actors have come out of the Method, this is true. One wonders how much better they might have been without the Method to hamper them. One wonders if some of their careers could have been more productive, or their lives, longer.

The great Russian playwright, Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) wrote many theatrical masterworks. He said they were comedies, and in the classic sense, they are. (I’ll explain this to you in a later chapter on Theatrical Schools and Styles.) Yet Stanislavsky directed the great writer’s works like they were intense, serious, psychological dramas. Modern, BAD directors do the same thing to Chekhov’s works. “The Method” is, in fact, infected by a “seriousness” which does not often suit the arts very well.

Let me state this plainly for you. The history of theatre and acting is NOT realism. Theatre does not support the realistic, not very well, and until 150 years ago, the theatre correctly avoided realism like a plague. Shakespeare is regarded by one and all as the greatest author of theatre known to man, and his plays simply never descend into “realism”. Nor do any of the great playwright’s works, prior to Turgenev. There’s nothing wrong with progress when it is truly an advance is man’s understanding. Realism in theatre is not an advance, it denies what theatre is, and finally, is degrading to both artist and audience.

MORE TOMORROW!

Steven Horwich