case, it seems at least possible that, had Krull gone to see the performance
knowing Müller-Rosé’s off-stage character and appearance, he wouldn’t
have found him so attractive when he was on the stage; similarly with the
actor’s frailty.
Krull, as we have seen, does not believe that Müller-Rosé is an attaché.
But sometimes we do unthinkingly transfer the qualities of the characters
to the actors who play them, without necessarily realising it. For some
philosophers I have corresponded with while developing this chapter, the
idea that we can be seriously confused about what‘belongs’to the actor and
what to the character after a performance is simply unthinkable. But consider
the following anecdote, reported by the playwright Michael Frayn:
I once saw a performance ofThe Elephant Manat the National Theatre where
one of the cast collapsed on stage. [...] Nicky [Henson, another member of
the cast] told me afterwards that a doctor who happened to be in the audience
[...] had at once gone backstage to help. After examining the patient he
diagnosed not a heart attack but simple hyperventilation–then turned to
Nicky and asked him with courteous professional deference if he agreed.
Nicky looked around to see if there was a second doctor standing behind
him. There was not. The second opinion was himself, or rather the character
he had been playing on stage, who happened to be a doctor and whom he
evidently embodied offstage still, even in the eyes of a real doctor.^47What this anecdote tells us is, of course, open to interpretation. Clearly,
in the heat of the moment, the (real) doctor got a little confused; in
general, once the performance is brought to an end, we do not take the actors
to have the knowledge of the professionals they portray. It’s unlikely, fur-
thermore, that the doctor mistook the actor for theVictoriandoctor he
was playing on stage, or a doctor involved in the case of the Elephant Man,
and so on. But this story might help to caution us against oversimplified
dismissals of the power of theatrical illusion. After all, the doctor was not
improvising along to the play, or suspending his disbelief, or taking some
sort offictional stance to the patient–that would have been wholly inap-
propriate to the gravity of the situation. Nor did the doctor lack a rudimentary
understanding of how theatre works. Rather, he made a mistake, directly
as a result of the theatrical performance. A mistake this pronounced
may be rare–the exception, rather than the rule–but it should not be
ignored, all the same.
It’s likely that there will be types of theatre in which these sorts of
illusions do not arise. Marionette theatre, for example, is unlikely to raise
questions about the personality traits of the actors compared with the char-
acters. But so far we have identified four types of illusion that it would be
hardly surprising tofind at a typical performance: optical illusions in the
62 From the World to the Stage