ABSTRACT
From the psychology of the actor we turn to the much-discussed issue of the use of psychology in the acting process. One of the major problems in dealing, today, with the nature of acting is that we are the immediate inheritors of the sensibility of the naturalistic period, when a comparison with the lineaments of an external reality became a popular criterion for the judgement of acting. This has become the more entrenched as the spread of film and television has brought ‘acting’ into the living rooms of virtually every member of society. Thus the necessary conventions of a theatrical experience, whereby one goes to a particular place at a particular time to witness an event that, although part of the spectator’s total life experience, has its own particular identity, have been lost. Television now brings ‘acting’, intermixed with the ‘real’ life of news and talk shows and interviews, and the salespitch pseudo-sincerity of commercials into the undifferentiated consciousness of everyone, as they eat their evening meal and flick from channel to channel.
