So, for example, wefind Pinciano claiming that actors are necessary for
the theatre and so, because we like theatre, we might as well tolerate
actors.^63 Unfortunately, considerations similar to these led to the claim
that theatre would be better off without any actors at all. Lessing thought that
actors are at their best in mediocre plays, that their artistic success is transi-
tory, depending on the whims of the audience and that they are frequently
better off masked; Kleist claims that marionettes would be more graceful;
and then in the twentieth century, E. Gordon Craig developed the influen-
tial idea of the actor as an‘Über-Marionette’, based on his view that acting,
as mere impersonation, is not really an art.^64 The remainder of this chapter
looks at the most common complaints made against actors and actresses.
Becoming what you pretend to be
As we saw in Chapter 1, Plato treats theatricalmimesisas comprising a
third-person and afirst-person component: the stage looks like something
(from the audience’s point of view); and the actors are pretending to be
people whom they are not. We’ve already looked at Plato’s objections to
the former; he also has objections to the latter. InThe Republic, Socrates is
concerned that imitating someone, although atfirst it requires work, can
increasingly become natural–so much so, that one can begin to take on
characteristics of the person one is imitating.^65
To understand Socrates’claim, it may help to recall (from Chapter 1)
that one of the meanings ofmimesis–the word here translated as‘imita-
tion’–describes one person using another person as a kind of role-model or
exemplar. Hence, in one of the examples we used in Chapter 1, the cheat-
ing wife who followed her cheating husband’s example would have
engaged in a kind ofmimesis.Obviously, she isn’t pretending to be her
husband or trying to pass herself off as him. However, Plato is obviously
positing a link between mimicking someone and treating them as a role-
model: pretending to be an evil character has a tendency to lead one to use
that person as a role-model, to take on some of the characteristics of that
person.
This, of course, leaves room for imitating (i.e. pretending to be) good
people and thus developing their good characteristics, which, Plato
thinks, is possible in principle but extremely rare in contemporary tra-
gedy and comedy:‘If [the guardians of the city] do imitate anything,
then from their earliest childhood they should choose appropriate models
to imitate–people who are brave, self-disciplined, god-fearing, free, that
sort of thing.’^66 In other words: there’s obviously nothing wrong with
using other people as role-models–and, consequently, there’s nothing
wrong (in principle) with acting. You just have to use the right role-
models and act the right parts. The trouble with theatre, of course, is that
116 From the Stage to the World