Acting and the phenomenological problem

Discussion of the acting process usually resolves itself into the received dichotomy of emotion versus technique. This dialogue goes back at least as far as Diderot, who gave it a first complete examination in his Le Paradoxe sur le comédien (1830).1 Most recently it has been illustrated by the conflict, dear to the journalists of the 1940s and 1950s, between ‘feelers’ and ‘nonfeelers’; adherents, mostly Americans, of the ‘Method’, and those, said to be British, who supposedly based their technique on physical and verbal skills alone.