ABSTRACT
All performance art depends on the spectator’s recognition of the doubleness of the body, whose physical presence must be understood as belonging to both the actor and the character incarnated. The actor’s body comes to represent, continuously if not seamlessly, two identities. Historical dramatizations further problematize the representational capacity of the performing body, installing a doubleness of the second degree. Characters based on personages from a bygone era are also, in terms of reference, reanimations of the dead. They are simultaneously fictional and historical, and the actor’s body comes to bear an additional representational weight, standing in as it does for a person who once lived. As is well known, the co-presence of the actor’s self and his assumed character creates an unresolved tension that can damage the drama’s fictional effect if the disparity between self and character becomes unintriguingly obtrusive, but it can also become a source of intense pleasure, a quality exploited, for example, to immense profitability in the classic Hollywood star system, whose luminaries were always understood (and consumed) as both their perdurable selves and as the characters of the moment.
