16. From the Actor

A few years ago, Hermann Bahr asked a number of actors about their art. They told him many interesting things about the old and the new stage style, they spoke about their position as poets and about the rehearsal of their roles. All this can be read in Bahr's book "Studien zur Kritik der Moderne". The most significant are the words spoken by Flavio Andò, Duse's brilliant partner: "First of all, I don't pay any attention to the text and I don't pay any particular attention to my role. First I have to explain the whole work to myself. First I have to feel the poetry - that is, in what stratum of society, among what people, in what mood the whole thing is set. Then the individual characters slowly emerge, as each one is from his parents, from his upbringing, from his destiny. When I finally have him, quite clearly, so that I can see every gesture and hear every sound, then I try to transform myself into him, to put aside my own nature and take on his. Tireless observation must help me to do this. I am always observing. I observe my colleagues, I observe you, I observe the waiter there. This is how I gather the means of expression. The text is then the least of it. It comes very last, often only at the rehearsal."

It would hardly be wrong to believe that these sentences characterize not only Andò's own style, but also that of Duse. The creation of a role out of the whole of a play must be asserted as a decisive requirement of the art of acting. It stands in contradiction to the usual task that actors seem to set themselves. They only play the individual role that they have in mind in some way, without regard to the whole poem.

An excellent example of this latter kind of acting is Zacconi. One need only convert Andò's sentences into their opposite, and one will characterize Zacconi. Anyone who can accept the fact that an actor, without regard to the content of the whole poem, plays a role to the highest technical perfection, as he made it up, but as the poet never imagined it, may admire Zacconi.

Andò said to Bahr in the aforementioned conversation: "Nature is our only law. That distinguishes us from the French, who always work with a traditional mechanism. As far as I could see, they have extraordinary artists, but it is always tradition, the beautiful line, the mechanism. Sometimes nature breaks through for a moment, but then the sought-after beauty and the artificial arrangement come right back."

This mechanism does not ask for the individual character of a personality in a piece, but has certain templates into which it forces everything. These templates more or less approximate the individual characters that the poets draw. There is a person with a hundred special qualities who commits an intrigue. The actor simply lets the hundred special qualities fall by the wayside and plays the conventional schemer. There are traditional rules for how to play the schemer.

This kind of acting according to the template is unfortunately much more common than you might think. Naturalism transferred to the stage has done a great deal to overcome it. Under its influence it has been recognized that there are no two identical human individuals, and that it is therefore impossible to reduce all the characters to be portrayed on stage to five or six typical figures. Naturalism has made it so that people enjoy going to the theater again because they don't see the same general schemes, the villain, the bon vivant, the comic old woman and so on in different plays every time, but because individual characters are embodied again.

But the actors who play in this way are not yet very numerous. A lot of the actors seem boring when we see them for the fifth or sixth time. We know exactly how they are going to do something, because we know the whole inventory of their postures, gestures and so on. They know nothing about the fact that one makes a declaration of love in this way and the other in that. They make the declaration of love - the theatrical declaration of love - in all cases.

The thing can go so far that you can't tell the difference between two actors who speak the same scene one after the other behind a curtain. At most, one does it quantitatively a little better, the other a little worse; qualitatively there is often not the slightest noticeable difference. The people change, the template remains.

All this has been discussed several times in recent years. The need to point out the existing shortcomings arose from changing tastes in the dramatic field. The time is not far behind us when stage plays dominated the theater, in which the characters were not characterized according to life, but according to the traditional acting templates. In the plays, too, one naïve girl looked desperately like the other. It was not a naïve girl who was portrayed, but "the naïve". Today we are happy to have reached the point where we disregard those who make plays in this way as playwrights. Even among theatergoers, who are still only looking for a few hours of comfortable, trivial entertainment, there are enough people who share this disdain. Today, poets are expected to base their creations on life, to deliver a piece of real life in each of them. Behind these demands on playwrights, the other demands for actors who do not want to play according to tradition, according to mechanism, could not be left behind. Today we have enough stage works that cannot be performed according to the old theatrical rules. If they are forced to be, then their best is lost.

I don't believe that the eternal principles of beautiful lines that transcend the everyday have to be lost by playing individualities.

Andò also said the right thing about this to Hermann Bahr: "I am asking a lot about beauty. But not for a conventional beauty that comes from the school - but for my individual beauty, which I carry within myself, as my own aesthetics give it to me. But this does not contradict the truth. Just as little as the self-evident concessions to the 'optique du théâtre'."

We no longer want to buy beauty on stage by faking life. We know that beauty does not lie outside, but within the realm of reality.

What does Andò call his individual beauty? What does he mean by the conventional beauty that comes from school? There is a way of presenting the qualities of the human personality in such a way that its essence is more externalized than is the case in everyday life. In the realm of everyday life, the essence is not completely absorbed in the qualities. There always remains a residue which we have to guess at, to discover. This residue must disappear if the personality is to reveal its beauty. It must, as it were, turn its essence outwards. But it is precisely its essence that it turns outwards. That is why the beauty is its own. The situation is different with conventional beauty. Here the personality does not externalize anything that it has within itself, but denies this essence and modifies its qualities in such a way that they are similar to the qualities of an imaginary being. The personality gives itself up in order to conform to a general norm.

Beauty cannot be imprinted on the personality from the outside; it must be developed from within. If there are not enough germs in a personality to produce the desirable effect of beauty, it will be deficient. However, if a person puts on an outward cloak of beauty, he or she will not usually appear flawed - if the thing is otherwise well done - but will not be able to rightly reject the label "caricature".