Chris Hemsworth Full Real Story 
Chris Hemsworth (born August 11, 1983, Melbourne, Australia) Australian actor who came to fame for his role as Thor in several Marvel Cinematic Universe movies.
Hemsworth’s mother was an English teacher and his father a social-services counselor; his two brothers, Luke Hemsworth and Liam Hemsworth, also became actors. The family moved back and forth between Melbourne and the Outback community of Bulman, Northern Territory, eventually settling on Phillip Island. Hemsworth’s first acting job came in 2002, when he played King Arthur in two episodes of the fantasy television series Guinevere Jones. Like many Australian actors, he cut his teeth with a role (2004–07) on the soap opera Home and Away.
Hemsworth then moved to the United States in hopes of transitioning his acting career to film. He was cast in the role of Captain Kirk’s father in J.J. Abrams’s 2009 movie Star Trek, and that same year he played a menacing hitchhiker in the thriller A Perfect Getaway. He appeared in the minor action movie Ca$h (2010) before his first outing as the title Norse god in Kenneth Branagh’s Thor (2011). The movie told the story of Thor’s arrogant breaching of a peace and being banished to 21st-century Earth to learn humility. Hemsworth’s light, self-mocking, and human touch in his portrayal of the comic superhero made the film a hit and launched a popular franchise. He later starred in Thor: Ragnarok (2017) and Thor: Love and Thunder (2022), both of which were directed by Taika Waititi. Hemsworth also played the character in other Marvel movies, including The Avengers (2012).
During this time Hemsworth appeared in numerous other films. He had a leading role in the horror movie The Cabin in the Woods, filmed in 2009 but not released until 2011. He then portrayed the Huntsman in the reimagined fairy tale Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), a character he repeated in the less-successful The Huntsman: Winter’s War (2016). Other notable roles included that of Formula One race driver James Hunt in Ron Howard’s critically praised Rush (2013), a computer hacker in Michael Mann’s crime thriller Blackhat (2015), and a sexy receptionist in the gender-flipped remake Ghostbusters (2016). He gave a well-received performance as an underestimated Green Beret captain in the Afghanistan War story 12 Strong (2018), and he played a heroic mercenary in the action movie Extraction (2020).
In 2022 Hemsworth starred in the docuseries Limitless, which centres on wellness and self-improvement. Throughout the series, he undertakes various health-related challenges that test his limits.
Theatrical production :
Theatrical production, the planning, rehearsal, and presentation of a work. Such a work is presented to an audience at a particular time and place by live performers, who use either themselves or inanimate figures, such as puppets, as the medium of presentation. A theatrical production can be either dramatic or non dramatic, depending upon the activity presented.
While dramatic productions frequently conform to a written text, it is not the use of such a text but rather the fictional mimetic (from Greek missiles “imitation,” “representation”) nature of the performer’s behaviour that makes a work dramatic. For example, a person walking a tightrope is performing an acrobatic act, whereas a person who pretends to be an acrobat walking a tightrope is performing a dramatic act. Both performers are engaged in theatrical presentation, but only the latter is involved in the creation of dramatic illusion. Though a dramatic performance may include dancing, singing, juggling, acrobatics, or other non dramatic elements, it is concerned mainly with the representation of actual or imagined life.
In non dramatic theatrical productions there is no imitation of “another existence” but simply the entertainment or excitation of the audience by the performer. Whether acrobatic or musical, gestural or vocal, such activity is theatrical because it is presented by a live performer to an audience, but it remains non dramatic so long as it has a purely presentational quality rather than a representational one.
In any single theatrical production, one or another type of activity may so prevail that there is little difficulty in determining the aesthetic nature of the final work. A play by the 19th-century Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, with its depiction of middle-class behaviour, minimizes non dramatic activity; the recital of a song by the 19th-century Romantic composer Franz Schubert, by contrast, with its emphasis upon musical values, may ignore dramatic elements and, to a considerable extent, even the act of presentation itself. Between these two extremes, however, there are many types of theatrical production in which the aesthetic nature of the form is less simple. Opera, for example, employs both drama and music in shifting patterns of emphasis.
In Europe and the United States several forms arose in the 20th century that combine dramatic and non dramatic material. Vaudeville, or music hall, for instance, employs a succession of various acts, such as fictional sketches, musical and dance numbers, and feats of dexterity, of which some are representational and others are not. In the musical theatre, song and dance serve both to further the narrative and to provide a break from purely dramatic presentation. This variety also characterizes much Asian theatre, in which dramatic moments are elaborated in dance exhibitions. In light of these examples, the definition of what constitutes theatrical production must remain elastic.
For a general discussion of theatre as an art form, as well as a specific treatment of the crafts of acting and directing, see theatre, directing, and acting. The aesthetic dimension of a dramatic production is discussed under stage design. Drama as a literary genre is treated under dramatic literature. Drama or dramatic literature is also treated in numerous other articles, including those on the literature or theatre of a specific country or region, of which the following are examples: Western theatre; African literature; American literature; English literature; French literature; German literature; Greek literature; Japanese literature; and Oceanic literature. Other articles that pertain to theatrical production include circus and property.
Elements of theatrical production :
According to the British director Peter Brook, theatre occurs whenever someone crosses neutral space and is watched by another person. This definition of theatre raises some problems, such as the difficulty of determining neutral space, but it is useful in its firm commitment to demystifying theatrical production. In former times the idea of the actor as motivated by a desire to create astonishment and wonder was sometimes seen as the basis of all theatre. Certainly there are types of theatrical performance that entail ritual and magic, but theatre is far more frequently rooted in attempts to structure emotion and experience.
Generally speaking, all theatrical productions have certain elements in common: the performer or performers, their acting in space (usually some sort of stage) and time (some limited duration of performance), and a producing process and organization. These elements are treated in separate sections below.
The performer
Skills and attributes :
The work of the actor falls into five main areas: (1) the exhibition of particular physical, including vocal, skills; (2) the exhibition of mimetic skills, in which physical states and activities are simulated; (3) the imaginative exploration of fictitious situations; (4) the exhibition of patterns of human behaviour that are not natural to the actor; and (5) interaction, while engaging in these activities, with other actor-characters and with members of the audience.
At certain times in the history of Western theatre, the highest degree of physical skill has been associated with non dramatic performance. In Asian theatre, however, such distinctions do not apply. Chinese opera and Japanese drama require an actor to play one type of role for his entire professional life. The actor must play this role in a manner strictly determined by tradition, reproducing specific patterns of movement and speech that can be mastered only by first gaining control of complex physical skills. Later, if especially gifted, an actor may bring to a role certain refinements of the tradition, which may be handed down to a succeeding generation.
Western drama, however, does not usually provide the actor with quite so defined a repertoire of movements and utterances. It is true that actors in the Italian commedia dell’arte of the 16th to the 18th centuries specialized in one role and transmitted to their successors a body of situations, speeches, and lazzi (stage sketches, or routines). Nevertheless, they seem to have had more leeway than their Asian counterparts in exercising invention and personal expression. Great rhetorical skill has been demanded of the Western actor, for the intricate metrical patterns of Greek, Latin, French, English, and Spanish drama have been part of the glory of their respective theatres.
Naturalistic theatre, which flowered in the late 19th century, made rhetoric obsolete, requiring the actor to hide virtuoso performing skills by creating the illusion of everyday behaviour. This meant that more weight was given to the actor’s depictions of psychological attributes. The magnetism of a performance derived no longer from stylized behaviour but from intense personal revelation. This requires a marked ability to focus energies, to concentrate intently either upon the audience directly or upon a fellow actor and, thereby, indirectly upon the audience. All good actors can project a concentrated force, or “presence,” which has become increasingly important to the actor as set patterns of playing have disappeared. Presence is not a fixed, definable quality but rather a process of continuous growth and change that takes place before the eyes of the audience.
Relation to the audience :
In nondramatic theatre the performer generally acknowledges the presence of the audience and may even play directly to it. In dramatic theatre the actor may or may not do so. In Greek Old Comedy, for example, an actor speaking for the author might cajole, advise, or challenge the spectators. By contrast, the naturalistic actor plays as though a “fourth wall” closes off the room of the stage. Between these two extremes fall a variety of relationships. In some instances, although direct contact is made, the audience is itself assumed to be playing a role, as in trial plays in which the audience is treated as a jury or as spectators in the court of justice. In other instances, the actor may address the audience one moment and play as though there were a fourth wall the next.
The quality of the contact between performer and audience is subtly modified by the nature of the performer’s place and role in society. In the broadest terms, the performer may be seen as a celebrant, servant, or critic of society. As a celebrant, the actor performs an almost priestly function, and in certain types of production the actor may in fact be a priest. In such instances, the actor mediates between the audience and the divine or spiritual dimension. In Greek tragedy, Japanese Noh theatre, and medieval mystery plays, the actions of the performers have both a religious and dramatic significance, but this is by no means always the case.
More often the actor has been a servant, akin to the household retainer or court jester. In classical Rome, for example, actors were slaves or lowly freedmen. In Elizabethan England the actor was nominally the protégé of a powerful courtly patron, but, if he lacked patronage, he was legally considered a rogue and vagabond. Such performers, as servants or inferiors, necessarily approached their audiences in supplicatory terms. However, with the growth of the commedia dell’arte companies, which were established on a commercial basis, the relationship between the performer and the audience changed into one of producer and consumer.
In the late 18th and 19th centuries, with the flourishing of the Romantic movement and the rise of nationalist consciousness throughout Europe, the actor as rebel began to appear. The role of the theatre was then a powerful one; actors learned to utilize the material of the play, even of classic works, to make political statements. Later, in the 20th century, the traditional boundaries between actors and spectators were broken down, and the performer became in some cases a virtual assailant of the audience. The Living Theatre, formed in 1947 in New York City by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, engaged the audience in direct personal and physical contact. In the 1970s, Augusto Boal of Brazil developed the theatre of the oppressed, in which performance was intended to serve the triple function of entertainment, education, and consciousness-raising. Similar techniques found wide use in the 1970s and ’80s in such movements as feminist theatre, homosexual theatre, black theatre, prison theatre, theatre of the deaf, theatre of the handicapped, and theatre of the aged.
The actor as character :
Another aspect of the dramatic performer’s work has to do with the portrayal of characters, both as individuals and as types. In portraying an individual character, the performer adopts a fictional framework and acts according to the text’s demands. When playing Macbeth, for instance, he behaves “as if” he sees the phantom dagger referred to in the text. In many roles, however, the actor must work within established categories of stock types. Roman comedy, for instance, utilized a limited number of stock characters, such as the cunning slave, the passionate young lover, and the suspicious old father. The king, the wise counselor, the raging tyrant are examples derived from historical and biblical sources; the leading man, the juvenile, the ingenue, and the villain are examples from theatrical tradition itself.
While stock types stress those features of personality common to all human beings, naturalistic, or “slice-of-life,” drama seeks to individualize each role. This requires that the actor as well as the author draw from personal observation and experience. With the rise of dramatic realism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there arose corresponding theories of acting, notably those of Konstantin Stanislavsky, director of the Moscow Art Theatre. While an actor of this period might start with a generalized “type” (a country doctor, for example), efforts during rehearsal were bent on differentiating this doctor from any other. This style of acting demanded extensive preparation, with rehearsal periods of up to a year.
Realistic acting raises questions about the relation between the actor and the role performed: Does the actor merely simulate behaviour, or does he in some sense actually experience the passions and thoughts of the character? Central to the actor’s art though this question is, it has never been satisfactorily answered. The clearest statements of the problem were rendered in Denis Diderot’s essay Paradoxe sur la comédien (written 1773, published 1830; The Paradox of Acting) and subsequent commentary by William Archer in Masks or Faces (1888).
Space and time :
The distinction between actor as performer and actor as character is matched by a distinction between the presentational and representational nature of space and time in theatrical production.
Globe Theatre London :
Performer and audience exist together in a common area, within which there is a clearly delineated performing space (ring, stage platform, pit) and an audience space, the two structurally related. Some of the more common patterns of relationship are (1) an amphitheatre, with a bank of spectators half surrounding a playing area; (2) a circle of spectators standing or sitting around a ring in which the performance takes place; and (3) rows of seated spectators facing a raised platform. Theatre space is often associated with a special building, but this has not always been the case, nor is it always the case in modern times. Often theatre space has embraced a town square or even an entire town so that performers and audience are able to mingle. Modern attempts to create a space within which the distinction between performer and audience is blurred (called environmental theatre) echo earlier examples from the popular theatre.
Isolation of the performer :
Almost all productions (the so-called happenings of the 1960s and guerrilla theatre are notable exceptions) endeavour to achieve two basic aims. First, every production seeks to impart a special quality to the theatrical area. Use of a theatrical building may in itself provide a heightened sense of locale. Otherwise, special decoration of familiar locales (town, market square) may transform them into ceremonial or festive spaces. Next, every production tries to make the performer visible and audible to the audience. On flat ground the circle or ring has often proved best. In hilly country the amphitheatre is the readiest solution. When a playing area is to be permanent, some means of raising the performer above the level of the crowd is often introduced, such as boards laid over trestles. The degree to which the performer is to be isolated depends partly on how complete and detailed a view of the presentation the audience expects.
The isolation of the performer has, however, another property. Marking out a playing area was in early antiquity an activity connected with religion. In classical Greece, for instance, the altar of the god Dionysus was surrounded by a circle for dancing. This was the origin of the performance space. Even when the direct religious tie was broken, stepping into the ring or onto the stage still marked a passage into another world. This is equally true of the sawdust ring of the circus and the bare boards of the trestle stage. Some traditional theatres, especially those of Asia, still regard the act of preparing to go on stage (putting on makeup, for instance) as sacred. Because of this, the isolation of the actor is spiritual almost as much as physical.
IIIusion of place :
In dramatic production the magical property with which a performing area is invested is augmented by the fictional action of the drama. The stage becomes another locale by an act of imagination undertaken by both actors and audience. The illusion of place may be created simply by speech: at the opening of a scene in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, for instance, one of the characters asks, “What country, friends, is this?” and is told, “This is Illyria, lady.” It may be created visually, by the designer’s ingenuity; the audience sees a room or a garden, and its attention is fixed on this imaginary setting, while its consciousness of the stage as a performing space becomes secondary. Alternately, it may be established through sound: crickets or birds evoke a garden as clearly as a visual image.
In some productions, especially those inspired by the antinaturalistic theories of the Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold, the audience is constantly reminded that it is in a theatre. Realist productions, in contrast, following the principles of Stanislavsky, encourage a clear distinction between performing area and viewing area. On the other hand, the theatre has often reconciled the contradictory elements of dramatic space. Renaissance masques combined the actor’s platform with a more public dancing circle, to which there was ready access from the seats. The 18th-century English stage moved out from a recessed picture of a representational locale to a projecting apron that merged with the auditorium. In both examples, the theatre found a physical convention for mediating between actor and audience.
Real versus illusory time :
Time likewise has a dual character in drama. The performer and audience exist together in chronological time. But the actor as character exists in dramatic time. Neoclassical drama of the 17th century, especially in France, endeavoured to make the duration of the performance coincide with that of the play’s action. But, as a rule, drama has achieved its effects by accentuating the discrepancy between “real” and “illusory” time.
On one hand, the performer projects a sequence of activity upon which the audience concentrates intensely. Because it is difficult to maintain full attention over very long periods, it must be modulated; that is, stimulated, relaxed, and stimulated again. These contrasts and suspense make the real time spent at a performance absorbing and deeply felt. This experience is heightened by the illusion that another time scheme is also operating, that of the fictional event. Some drama gains its effects by suggesting that chronological and dramatic time differ between, but not within, scenes; that is, months may pass between Act I and Act II of Three Sisters by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, but within any act the dramatic time scale is the same as the chronological one. Shakespeare, however, presents a scene in Othello (Act II, scene 2) that takes about 25 minutes to play, yet during this scene an entire night supposedly passes. One of the most extensive temporal schemes in drama is to be found in the medieval cycles of miracle plays, which unfolded over a period of two to four days and which covered the history of the universe from a time before Genesis to the Day of Judgment yet to come. Indian and Indonesian performances of the epics Mahabharata and Ramayana may last for up to a day.
In contrast to this ambitious inclusion of all time is the handling of time in Japanese Noh theatre, in which real time, with its inevitable passage, is retarded to create a sensation of timelessness. The deliberate pace of the performer, the reiteration of the drum, and the unchanging facade of the stage add to this impression. During the second half of the 20th century, the American Robert Wilson devised performances that lasted through the night. In these circumstances, the tension that results from expectation and that directs the mind to anticipate events and outcomes is dissipated, the spectator tires, and the mind fluctuates between waking and half-sleeping states in which the events on the stage mingle with mental fantasies to produce a new mode of consciousness.
The piece and its performance
Preparation of content
Traditionally the dramatic piece has been planned in advance and rehearsed, although there are degrees of advance planning and rehearsal. Even the supposedly impromptu performances of the commedia dell’arte players could not take place without detailed preparation beforehand. In much dramatic theatre advance planning involves the preparation of a written script, sometimes prepared by a dramatist and sometimes created by the actors themselves in collaboration with each other or with a writer. The script thus may be either a tentative scenario or a finished blueprint of the final presentation (a play text).
Whether scenario or playtext, a piece consists of segments of activity arranged in a meaningful sequence. More often than not this is a narrative sequence, and thus each segment of activity presents a step in the unfolding of a story. But the sequence may also be based on a common motif or recurrent characters. The segments of activity, usually termed episodes or scenes, can include many kinds of behaviour—e.g., persuasion of one person by another, delivery of a speech, singing of a song, hand-to-hand combat.
Theatrical tradition and social practice largely determine the scope of the material to be presented. In ancient Greece, for example, myths often provided the material for tragedy, with debate, lamentation, prophecy, and choral comment constituting the main activities. In other traditions, storytelling, singing, acrobatics, and speeches are the ingredients. The dramatist, manager, and actor all operate within the context of performing routines and production conditions. Material drawn from other arts and from personal experiences may also be used.
Performing the piece :
The occasion affects the manner in which the actor addresses the audience or represents a character; it also influences his physical appearance. In Japanese Noh theatre and ancient Greek drama, the actor is often transformed by costume into a superhuman figure. Raised headdresses, painted or masked faces, enveloping robes all contribute to the creation of a figure endowed with symbolic significance. In some societies, the actor is viewed not as a hero or demigod but as the epitome of contemporary society; elsewhere, the actor is a quixote, a member of a low class whose convincing impersonations unsettle concepts of order and rationality.
Although the actor is the focus of attention while performing, the preparatory and rehearsal phases tend to be organized by others. While in the Renaissance the actors themselves were in control of all phases of production, at other times they have been under the control of theatre managers and stage directors. A significant part of the alternative theatre movement in the mid-20th century was an attempt on the part of actors to establish a collective organization and to reclaim a share of power in the process of making theatre.
The importance of stage scenery is determined by the degree to which either the auditorium or playing area needs to be transformed for a performance. Four possibilities exist: little or no change is introduced into either area (as in the Elizabethan public theatre); the playing area remains unaltered while the audience area is changed (as in erecting banks of seating in a town square); the playing area is changed while the audience area remains fixed (as in proscenium theatre, in which a frame or arch separates the stage from the auditorium); or both areas are transformed (as in Renaissance court theatre or some contemporary theatrical productions).
The fixed playing space often has emblematic significance. In Japan, the Noh stage has three pine trees symbolizing heaven, Earth, and man, and on the Kabuki stage the right-hand side is more eminent than the left. The Elizabethan playhouse used trap doors to signify transit from Earth to heaven or hell. The practice of changing the visual and physical arrangement of the playing area became widespread in Europe during the Renaissance. At first, designers devised generalized scenery to be used for tragic, comic, and pastoral dramas. Later they created a setting unique to a particular play. With the emergence of designed space and changeable scenery, there arose an entire profession of scenic architects and mechanics whose work at times overshadowed that of the actors in importance. By the 20th century the designer’s task had become so complex that it was usually divided among scenic, costume, and lighting personnel and involved technicians, electricians, stagehands, prop masters, wardrobe keepers, and many others working together.
No single pattern for production exists, since there are too many social and personal variables at work. Certain broad observations can be made, however. First, any production is normally part of a more continuous enterprise. The continuity may be provided by the civic or religious life of the community, the stable associations of an acting troupe, or the permanence of a producer’s office.
Next, the production process tends to be either cooperative or hierarchical. The company for which Shakespeare wrote and to which he belonged seems to have been a collective. It remained for more than 25 years a community of professional associates and friends. More usual is the hierarchical organization, in which a single individual controls a production. In most instances, the professional specialty of that leader is dictated by the conditions of the particular theatre in which he works. In 17th-century France, for instance, the leader virtually had to be an actor (Molière was an actor turned actor-manager-dramatist). In the commercial theatre of the 20th-century United States he virtually had to be an impresario.
Finally, the mode of planning and rehearsing a production may be influenced by the artistic concept of an individual or a group. As long as theatre was part of a continuing tradition, its mode of production varied little, being conditioned partly by the social role of theatre and partly by the type of material the actor performed. Thus, the actor who played one type of role for an entire professional life concentrated on perfecting recurrent stage routines, while the actor who handled many different roles within a brief season had to be more adaptable.
During the 19th century there evolved new theories of production that affected both styles of performance and methods of rehearsal. Gradually, the idea of ensemble arose, stressing harmony of ideal and craft among what was usually a small group of actors in order to achieve a unity of effect. These ideas necessitated the careful orchestration of all elements of production. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the dominant element was the star actor; it then became the star ensemble (the Moscow Art Theatre, for instance) and, through the ensemble, the director.
Aspects of theatrical production :
The development of international communications has had its effect on the theatre. The advent of railway and steamship travel in the 19th century led to an increase in international touring by theatre companies, and performers such as the French actress Sarah Bernhardt and the Italian operatic tenor Enrico Caruso became as well known in North and South America as in Europe. In the 20th century the cinema, radio, and television and video recording extended even further the range of potential audiences for theatrical performances. In the 1960s the Living Theatre inspired a generation of performers throughout the world, and Jerzy Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory Theatre influenced performers who had never been to Europe or seen him work firsthand. International theatre festivals that brought together performers from many varied traditions were regular occurrences by the end of the 20th century.
Types of production :
Numerous forms of spectacle, such as dramatic and non dramatic pageants, the circus, son et lumière, and gymnastic presentations, are closely allied with theatre and indeed are considered by some classifications to be theatrical.
Non Dramatic pageantry includes civic processions, such as parades, as well as static displays, such as gymnastic demonstrations. The appeal of non dramatic pageantry lies in coordinated visual spectacle. The performer is presented as a member of the collective, and, even where one individual may stand out, such as the parade “royalty,” he is essentially passive and wins attention merely as the focal point of a number of performers. In certain religious pageants the focal figure is not a living person at all but the icon or statue of a god or saint.
Dramatic pageantry has much in common with the non dramatic: both have communal involvement, stress on visual display, processional or static masses, and fictional or allegorical characters. Segments of the pageant may illustrate a historical or legendary incident, or the pageant as a whole may have a historical, mythical, or allegorical theme. Performers in the United States reenacting the dumping of tea into Boston Harbor exemplify historical pageantry; in England the assault on the Castle of Beauty by Knights of the Mount of Love, a pageant celebrating the marriage of Prince Arthur to Catherine of Aragon in 1501, exemplifies the allegorical type common at Renaissance courts. Pageantry of both the dramatic and non dramatic sort continues to play a significant role in the legitimization of political actions and the assertion of social prestige.
Non Dramatic theatre :
Non Dramatic productions include diverse oral and musical presentations, circus and vaudeville acts, sporting displays, and ceremonial occasions such as the coronation of a monarch. There is no narrative line in such productions, but the technical virtuosity of the performers or the ritual significance of the event becomes the focus of audience attention. There may be the element of catharsis (purging), which Aristotle identified as the aim of tragedy. As a form of presentation, the circus encompasses a wide range of different types of performance, including feats of daring, illusion, and skill. The type of circus performance that comes closest to dramatic theatre is that of clowns. The clown engages in simplified and circumscribed dramatic activity, sometimes a ludicrous parody of other forms of performance, but one that follows established conventions of dress, gesture, and behaviour.
More often the actor has been a servant, akin to the household retainer or court jester. In classical Rome, for example, actors were slaves or lowly freedmen. In Elizabethan England the actor was nominally the protégé of a powerful courtly patron, but, if he lacked patronage, he was legally considered a rogue and vagabond. Such performers, as servants or inferiors, necessarily approached their audiences in supplicatory terms. However, with the growth of the commedia dell’arte companies, which were established on a commercial basis, the relationship between the performer and the audience changed into one of producer and consumer.
In the late 18th and 19th centuries, with the flourishing of the Romantic movement and the rise of nationalist consciousness throughout Europe, the actor as rebel began to appear. The role of the theatre was then a powerful one; actors learned to utilize the material of the play, even of classic works, to make
The actor as character
Another aspect of the dramatic performer’s work has to do with the portrayal of characters, both as individuals and as types. In portraying an individual character, the performer adopts a fictional framework and acts according to the text’s demands. When playing Macbeth, for instance, he behaves “as if” he sees the phantom dagger referred to in the text. In many roles, however, the actor must work within established categories of stock types. Roman comedy, for instance, utilized a limited number of stock characters, such as the cunning slave, the passionate young lover, and the suspicious old father. The king, the wise counselor, the raging tyrant are examples derived from historical and biblical sources; the leading man, the juvenile, the ingenue, and the villain are examples from theatrical tradition itself.
While stock types stress those features of personality common to all human beings, naturalistic, or “slice-of-life,” drama seeks to individualize each role. This requires that the actor as well as the author draw from personal observation and experience. With the rise of dramatic realism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there arose corresponding theories of acting, notably those of Konstantin Stanislavsky, director of the Moscow Art Theatre. While an actor of this period might start with a generalized “type” (a country doctor, for example), efforts during rehearsal were bent on differentiating this doctor from spectators standing or sitting around a ring in which the performance takes place; and (3) rows of seated spectators facing a raised platform. Theatre space is often associated with a special building, but this has not always been the case, nor is it always the case in modern times. Often theatre space has embraced a town square or even an entire town so that performers and audience are able to mingle. Modern attempts to create a space within which the distinction between performer and audience is blurred (called environmental theatre) echo earlier examples from the popular theatre.
Isolation of the performer
Almost all productions (the so-called happenings of the 1960s and guerrilla theatre are notable exceptions) endeavour to achieve two basic aims. First, every production seeks to impart a special quality to the theatrical area. Use of a theatrical building may in itself provide a heightened sense of locale. Otherwise, special decoration of familiar locales (town, market square) may transform them into ceremonial or festive spaces. Next, every production tries to make the performer visible and audible to the audience. On flat ground the circle or ring has often proved best. In hilly country the amphitheatre is the readiest solution. When a playing area is to be permanent, some means of raising the performer above the level of the crowd is often introduced, such as boards laid over trestles. The degree to which the performer is to be isolated depends partly on how complete and detailed a view of the presentation the audience expects.
The isolation of the performer has, however, another property. Marking out a playing area was in early antiquity an activity connected with religion. In classical Greece, for instance, the altar of the god Dionysus was surrounded by a circle for dancing. This was the origin of the performance space. Even when the direct religious tie was broken, stepping into the ring or onto the stage still marked a passage into another world. This is equally true of the sawdust ring of the circus and the bare boards of the trestle stage. Some traditional theatres, especially those of Asia, still regard the act of preparing to go on stage (putting on makeup, for instance) as sacred. Because of this, the isolation of the actor is spiritual almost as much as physical.
Illusion of place
In dramatic production the magical property with which a performing area is invested is augmented by the fictional action of the drama. The stage becomes another locale by an act of imagination undertaken by both actors and audience. The illusion of place may be created simply by speech: at the opening of a scene in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, for instance, one of the characters asks, “What country, friends, is this?” and is told, “This is Illyria, lady.” It may be created visually, by the designer’s ingenuity; the audience sees a room or a garden, and its attention is fixed on this imaginary setting, while its consciousness of the stage as a performing space becomes secondary. Alternately, it may be established through sound: crickets or birds evoke a garden as clearly as a visual image.
In some productions, especially those inspired by the antinaturalistic theories of the Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold, the audience is constantly reminded that it is in a theatre. Realist productions, in contrast, following the principles of Stanislavsky, encourage a clear distinction between performing area and viewing area. On the other hand, the theatre has often reconciled the contradictory elements of dramatic space. Renaissance masques combined the actor’s platform with a more public dancing circle, to which there was ready access from the seats. The 18th-century English stage moved out from a recessed picture of a representational locale to a projecting apron that merged with the auditorium. In both examples, the theatre found a physical convention for mediating between actor and audience.
Real versus illusory time
Time likewise has a dual character in drama. The performer and audience exist together in chronological time. But the actor as character exists in dramatic time. Neoclassical drama of the 17th century, especially in France, endeavoured to make the duration of the performance coincide with that of the play’s action. But, as a rule, drama has achieved its effects by accentuating the discrepancy between “real” and “illusory” time.
On one hand, the performer projects a sequence of activity upon which the audience concentrates intensely. Because it is difficult to maintain full attention over very long periods, it must be modulated; that is, stimulated, relaxed, and stimulated again. These contrasts and suspense make the real time spent at a performance absorbing and deeply felt. This experience is heightened by the illusion that another time scheme is also operating, that of the fictional event. Some drama gains its effects by suggesting that chronological and dramatic time differ between, but not within, scenes; that is, months may pass between Act I and Act II of Three Sisters by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, but within any act the dramatic time scale is the same as the chronological one. Shakespeare, however, presents a scene in Othello (Act II, scene 2) that takes about 25 minutes to play, yet during this scene an entire night supposedly passes. One of the most extensive temporal schemes in drama is to be found in the medieval cycles of miracle plays, which unfolded over a period of two to four days and which covered the history of the universe from a time before Genesis to the Day of Judgment yet to come. Indian and Indonesian performances of the epics Mahabharata and Ramayana may last for up to a day.
In contrast to this ambitious inclusion of all time is the handling of time in Japanese Noh theatre, in which real time, with its inevitable passage, is retarded to create a sensation of timelessness. The deliberate pace of the performer, the reiteration of the drum, and the unchanging facade of the stage add to this impression. During the second half of the 20th century, the American Robert Wilson devised performances that lasted through the night. In these circumstances, the tension that results from expectation and that directs the mind to anticipate events and outcomes is dissipated, the spectator tires, and the mind fluctuates between waking and half-sleeping states in which the events on the stage mingle with mental fantasies to produce a new mode of consciousness.
The piece and its performance
Preparation of content
Traditionally the dramatic piece has been planned in advance and rehearsed, although there are degrees of advance planning and rehearsal. Even the supposedly impromptu performances of the commedia dell’arte players could not take place without detailed preparation beforehand. In much dramatic theatre advance planning involves the preparation of a written script, sometimes prepared by a dramatist and sometimes created by the actors themselves in collaboration with each other or with a writer. The script thus may be either a tentative scenario or a finished blueprint of the final presentation (a playtext).
Whether scenario or playtext, a piece consists of segments of activity arranged in a meaningful sequence. More often than not this is a narrative sequence, and thus each segment of activity presents a step in the unfolding of a story. But the sequence may also be based on a common motif or recurrent characters. The segments of activity, usually termed episodes or scenes, can include many kinds of behaviour—e.g., persuasion of one person by another, delivery of a speech, singing of a song, hand-to-hand combat.
Theatrical tradition and social practice largely determine the scope of the material to be presented. In ancient Greece, for example, myths often provided the material for tragedy, with debate, lamentation, prophecy, and choral comment constituting the main activities. In other traditions, storytelling, singing, acrobatics, and speeches are the ingredients. The dramatist, manager, and actor all operate within the context of performing routines and production conditions. Material drawn from other arts and from personal experiences may also be used.
Performing the piece
The occasion affects the manner in which the actor addresses the audience or represents a character; it also influences his physical appearance. In Japanese Noh theatre and ancient Greek drama, the actor is often transformed by costume into a superhuman figure. Raised headdresses, painted or masked faces, enveloping robes all contribute to the creation of a figure endowed with symbolic significance. In some societies, the actor is viewed not as a hero or demigod but as the epitome of contemporary society; elsewhere, the actor is a quixote, a member of a low class whose convincing impersonations unsettle concepts of order and rationality.
Although the actor is the focus of attention while performing, the preparatory and rehearsal phases tend to be organized by others. While in the Renaissance the actors themselves were in control of all phases of production, at other times they have been under the control of theatre managers and stage directors. A significant part of the alternative theatre movement in the mid-20th century was an attempt on the part of actors to establish a collective organization and to reclaim a share of power in the process of making theatre.
The importance of stage scenery is determined by the degree to which either the auditorium or playing area needs to be transformed for a performance. Four possibilities exist: little or no change is introduced into either area (as in the Elizabethan public theatre); the playing area remains unaltered while the audience area is changed (as in erecting banks of seating in a town square); the playing area is changed while the audience area remains fixed (as in proscenium theatre, in which a frame or arch separates the stage from the auditorium); or both areas are transformed (as in Renaissance court theatre or some contemporary theatrical productions).
The fixed playing space often has emblematic significance. In Japan, the Noh stage has three pine trees symbolizing heaven, Earth, and man, and on the Kabuki stage the right-hand side is more eminent than the left. The Elizabethan playhouse used trap doors to signify transit from Earth to heaven or hell. The practice of changing the visual and physical arrangement of the playing area became widespread in Europe during the Renaissance. At first, designers devised generalized scenery to be used for tragic, comic, and pastoral dramas. Later they created a setting unique to a particular play. With the emergence of designed space and changeable scenery, there arose an entire profession of scenic architects and mechanics whose work at times overshadowed that of the actors in importance. By the 20th century the designer’s task had become so complex that it was usually divided among scenic, costume, and lighting personnel and involved technicians, electricians, stagehands, prop masters, wardrobe keepers, and many others working together.
No single pattern for production exists, since there are too many social and personal variables at work. Certain broad observations can be made, however. First, any production is normally part of a more continuous enterprise. The continuity may be provided by the civic or religious life of the community, the stable associations of an acting troupe, or the permanence of a producer’s office.
Next, the production process tends to be either cooperative or hierarchical. The company for which Shakespeare wrote and to which he belonged seems to have been a collective. It remained for more than 25 years a community of professional associates and friends. More usual is the hierarchical organization, in which a single individual controls a production. In most instances, the professional specialty of that leader is dictated by the conditions of the particular theatre in which he works. In 17th-century France, for instance, the leader virtually had to be an actor (Molière was an actor turned actor-manager-dramatist). In the commercial theatre of the 20th-century United States he virtually had to be an impresario.
Finally, the mode of planning and rehearsing a production may be influenced by the artistic concept of an individual or a group. As long as theatre was part of a continuing tradition, its mode of production varied little, being conditioned partly by the social role of theatre and partly by the type of material the actor performed. Thus, the actor who played one type of role for an entire professional life concentrated on perfecting recurrent stage routines, while the actor who handled many different roles within a brief season had to be more adaptable.
During the 19th century there evolved new theories of production that affected both styles of performance and methods of rehearsal. Gradually, the idea of ensemble arose, stressing harmony of ideal and craft among what was usually a small group of actors in order to achieve a unity of effect. These ideas necessitated the careful orchestration of all elements of production. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the dominant element was the star actor; it then became the star ensemble (the Moscow Art Theatre, for instance) and, through the ensemble, the director.
Aspects of theatrical production
The development of international communications has had its effect on the theatre. The advent of railway and steamship travel in the 19th century led to an increase in international touring by theatre companies, and performers such as the French actress Sarah Bernhardt and the Italian operatic tenor Enrico Caruso became as well known in North and South America as in Europe. In the 20th century the cinema, radio, and television and video recording extended even further the range of potential audiences for theatrical performances. In the 1960s the Living Theatre inspired a generation of performers throughout the world, and Jerzy Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory Theatre influenced performers who had never been to Europe or seen him work firsthand. International theatre festivals that brought together performers from many varied traditions were regular occurrences by the end of the 20th century.
Types of production
Numerous forms of spectacle, such as dramatic and nondramatic pageants, the circus, son et lumière, and gymnastic presentations, are closely allied with theatre and indeed are considered by some classifications to be theatrical.
Pageantry
Nondramatic pageantry includes civic processions, such as parades, as well as static displays, such as gymnastic demonstrations. The appeal of nondramatic pageantry lies in coordinated visual spectacle. The performer is presented as a member of the collective, and, even where one individual may stand out, such as the parade “royalty,” he is essentially passive and wins attention merely as the focal point of a number of performers. In certain religious pageants the focal figure is not a living person at all but the icon or statue of a god or saint.
Dramatic pageantry has much in common with the nondramatic: both have communal involvement, stress on visual display, processional or static masses, and fictional or allegorical characters. Segments of the pageant may illustrate a historical or legendary incident, or the pageant as a whole may have a historical, mythical, or allegorical theme. Performers in the United States reenacting the dumping of tea into Boston Harbor exemplify historical pageantry; in England the assault on the Castle of Beauty by Knights of the Mount of Love, a pageant celebrating the marriage of Prince Arthur to Catherine of Aragon in 1501, exemplifies the allegorical type common at Renaissance courts. Pageantry of both the dramatic and nondramatic sort continues to play a significant role in the legitimization of political actions and the assertion of social prestige.
Nondramatic theatre
Nondramatic productions include diverse oral and musical presentations, circus and vaudeville acts, sporting displays, and ceremonial occasions such as the coronation of a monarch. There is no narrative line in such productions, but the technical virtuosity of the performers or the ritual significance of the event becomes the focus of audience attention. There may be the element of catharsis (purging), which Aristotle identified as the aim of tragedy. As a form of presentation, the circus encompasses a wide range of different types of performance, including feats of daring, illusion, and skill. The type of circus performance that comes closest to dramatic theatre is that of clowns. The clown engages in simplified and circumscribed dramatic activity, sometimes a ludicrous parody of other forms of performance, but one that follows established conventions of dress, gesture, and behaviour.
In the latter part of the 20th century, boundaries between types of theatrical production became increasingly eroded. So-called third theatre companies often used circus training techniques, and actors employed juggling and acrobatic skills in their dramatic performances. In the 1980s the Footsbarn company began traveling the world in a manner reminiscent of the medieval and Renaissance players, with productions of Shakespeare that used circus imagery and techniques. Samuel Beckett used the image of the clown in Waiting for Godot to create a parable on the absurdity of the human predicament, perhaps in direct quotation of vaudeville traditions.
Cabaret and vaudeville shows also bring together different types of performance, such as music and dancing, dramatic sketches, feats of daring, and illusion. These productions can take place in any kind of theatre or in nightclubs and restaurants, since staging requirements are usually minimal. It is possible to see this kind of performance as deriving directly from the street entertainers of folk culture and from the entertainments that took place between courses during medieval court banquets.
Dramatic theatre
The most common form of dramatic theatre is the presentation of a scripted play in which the actions of the performers depict a narrative. Typically, performers of such works consist of actors portraying characters, although Sicilian Paladin puppets, Javanese wayang shadow puppets, and Japanese Bunraku puppets are examples of nonliving representations of characters, manipulated by living performers.
In some forms of dramatic production, music and dance may provide or supplement the narrative content. Opera inhabits a special region between drama and music and has prompted much discussion as to the relative importance of literary and musical elements in advancing opera’s dramatic aspects. The musical development of opera predominated in the 17th and 18th centuries, whereas new works and productions since Richard Wagner in the late 19th century have increasingly emphasized dramatic features. Opera is often the site of the greatest innovation in the visual arts of the theatre, attracting ambitious directors and designers who see its aesthetic (and budgets) as appropriate to spectacular experimentation. Operetta and musical comedy are often seen as more closely allied to the theatre than to opera (see theatre music and opera).
Over the course of the 20th century, the musical, which developed out of the operetta and musical comedy as an indigenous American theatrical genre, became a powerful art form in its own right. Beginning with Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern’s Show Boat in 1927 and proceeding by way of the Rogers and Hammerstein musicals to the work of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, the musical exhibited a growing sophistication and maturity in both themes and techniques. The modern musical integrates singing, dancing, and acting to a degree that no other Western theatre form attempts. It is usually the most expensive (and potentially remunerative) genre in contemporary theatre.
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