The Actor's Presence

One way of approaching the phenomenology of the actor is to consider him as a kind of storyteller whose speciality is that he is the story he is telling. Presumably, the transitional between the true storyteller and the actor would be the rhapsode who tells his story (or rather someone else's) directly to the audience, simulating the more exciting parts of it in the manner of the First Player in Hamlet, who gets so carried away by the plight of Hecuba. With the actor, of course, the narrative voice (Anon he finds him striking too short at Greeks) disappears entirely, and we hear only the fictitious first-personal voice (Now I am alone, or Now, mother, what's the matter?)rather, we overhear it, since the voice is no longer speaking to us. The audience is now an implicit or unacknowledged you, at least in the more naturalistic styles of acting. This is, of course, what bothered Rousseau so much, that the actor was the final step in the disintegration of presence and direct discourse

Art · Classical Antiquity Studies · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Theatre and Performance Studies

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