ABSTRACT
The cybernetical system which theatre sets up between playwright, director and actor is completed by the audience-the drama’s patrons whom, as Johnson told us in The Vanity of Human Wishes, the actors must not only ‘live to please’ but ‘please to live’. However interesting as a craft and fascinating as an ego experience, acting is finally done for an audience-the great Them’, who for most actors are both enemy to be subdued and lover to be seduced; the impersonal personality that completes the performance; the many-headed Hydra that has to be made to listen and look in the actor’s direction as if it were one. Joan Littlewood said there are no good or bad audiences, only good or bad performances. This may or may not be true, and many actors would disagree, but what is certainly true is that there are different audiences; and different audiences both evoke and require different responses from the actor.
