A Grand Pas de Deux

In concluding this dissertation I have changed my position between arguments that support a semiotic approach to the question about the relationship between the playwright and the actor, to one that is clearly much more phenomenological in approach. 

Both analytical frames have provided me with important questions that have allowed me to interrogate the process of making theatre and, one of the things I have realised in addressing this question is, that there are as many approaches to this relationship as there are grains of sand on a beach. Which one is correct? All and none of them is perhaps the best answer I can give, but in terms of the evidence I have brought to this enquiry I think the conclusion that can be best drawn is best couched in the following terms... 

The film actor, J.J.Feild, addresses these questions in the following way...

“The development of a character, for me, is a coming together of all the aspects you describe; but finally the underlying and overwhelming influence for me in performance is the actor’s imagination. Basically, as an actor I have available to me all the clues that are written in the script. Then quite naturally my empathy will grow with the character and the circumstances he's in. Where the leaps come for me [as an actor] are with the ‘filling in’ of the gaps in the script through one’s imagination. There is a whole world around a character’s life that is not mentioned in a script that can only come from my imagination.”

The actor clearly has a role to play in the interpretation of any character depicted in a playwright’s script but this quote from J.J.Feild, I believe captures something that is perhaps beyond definition... a “filling in of the gaps” accidentally perhaps, defines almost perfectly the last piece of the jigsaw, because from my point of view as a playwright, that is exactly what the actor does; he/she makes a connection, often instinctually, between the originating spirit of the playwright and the outcome of the play on the page. Until the actor takes on the responsibility to manifest as truthfully as he can the character I have written, the character, for all the careful structuring I might have completed, does not breathe. What J.J. Field describes here though is something more than that; for me this quote is simply not about getting the character up on its feet, it is about breathing life into the words and the creation of a new spirit in the world.

In 2024 I recognise this as the actor working in simpatico with the playwright. In short I think this is an example of the actor as ‘creative artist’ whilst still serving the role and function of the playwright.

We are all familiar with the philosophical conundrum about whether a tree makes a sound when it falls in a forest where there is no one to hear it. In someway I feel that about the relationship between the actor and the playwright defined here in this thesis, in that without the actor there are no characters and so no play. But I think such a causal definition only partly describes the relationship. Earlier I talked about the actor and the playwright walking the same path in different directions, undertaking the same journey but from different perspectives: a set of actions that might also describe the act of dancing. 

When we see two people dance well, we know that one is leading and the other is following, but that’s not important; what is important is that they seem to be in perfect harmony’ - one facing forward, the other backwards but moving together as if one and just occasionally perhaps... stepping out into a ‘grand pas de deux.’

Indeed, in 2024, I would see this as the ideal partnership between actor and playwright. The role of one does not diminish, in any way, the role of the other. Indeed, it describes what should be a perfect partnership between the two.