excesses of emotion that she wouldn’t leave her dressing room at all. In
fact, the successful actress is precisely the one who doesn’t get emotional,
who keeps under control at all times, and never lets herself go.
Diderot’s remarks should also be understood as an attack on theatrical
verisimilitude, which we discussed in relation to Plato (in Chapter 2). If
actors really did‘feel’the parts they were playing, then they would perhaps
look more realistic–more like ordinary people, in such circumstances,
would look. But because the theatre is not at all verisimilar, this would
hardly help matters. For example, he points out, death on the stage–
quick, poignant and often beautiful – looks nothing like the slow,
grubby, agonising deaths of real life.^75 Similarly with excesses of emotion:
when one is really angry or passionate, one typically says very little.
Diderot is therefore making two separate and independent claims
about, for instance, the actor playing an angry character on stage: (1) that
the actor does not feel angry at all and (2) that the external signs that the
actor makes to indicate anger do not look like anger as it really is in the
world. For Diderot, we read emotions off actors by way of a kind of
convention or symbolism: the audience knows that certain gestures (when
performed by an actor on the stage)indicate anger, even although, on
reflection, real, everyday anger looks nothing like that.
For our purposes, what’s important about Diderot’s argument is this:
acting is not just an extension of everyday passions; it is, instead, a craft
by which one learns to mimic certain outward signs of emotion, without
inwardly feeling anythingat all. After all, says Diderot, actors need to
know where to stand and what to say; they need to react to new and
unpredictable situations (e.g. another actor forgetting his lines); they
must remember not just the script but certain emphases, phrasing and
accentuation. In the depths of their‘passion’, they must look in the right
direction for the light, they must make the correct outward signs and
gestures. In all of this, there can be no room for the supposed passion that
is being portrayed. A passionate person would forget all of this. Hence
the conclusion:‘it is we who feel; it is they [actors, but also playwrights]
who watch, study, and give us the result.’^76 Acting is therefore inauthentic
in this sense: that there is no correspondence between the emotions that
the actor displays (or indicates by certain conventions) and the emotions
that the actor feels. He is not what he seems to be.
Both of Diderot’s claims seem extreme and are open to more moderate
versions. As for the notion of emotional conventions, it seems more likely
that actors exaggerate or caricature typical emotional reactions–rather like
cartoon versions of surprise or fear. Hence, the‘symbols’or gestures that
indicate some emotion are related to the everyday non-theatrical counter-
part of that emotion. This leaves room for the stage version of the emotion to
look very little like its counterpart, thus preserving Diderot’s central
120 From the Stage to the World