Role-playing on stage

Role-playing on stage, e.g. an actor playing Shakespeare’s Richard III, clearly differs from role-playing in real life, e.g. Richard playing his real life role as King. The difference is often said to be that on-stage role-playing, unlike its real-life counterpart, involves ‘;make-believe’, with audiences having to ‘;suspend their disbelief’ (e.g. that they are watching Richard III); or ‘;pretence’ (the actor pretends to be Richard III); or ‘;imitation’ (the actor imitates Richard III).

I argue that none of these will do, and that the clue to the real difference lies in the title of Erving Goffman’s 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. People in real life present themselves; actors on stage present real or fictional characters. So of course do histories, biographies and novels; but whereas they do it by describing characters, actors do it by depicting them, as indeed do portraits, cartoons, puppets and CGI animations.

What makes on-stage role-playing differ from these other ways of depicting people is that, in it, the depiction of people (the characters) is done by other people (the actors). This requires actors to use some of their own attributes (voice, appearance, etc.), adapted as required (by costume, makeup, etc.), to depict those of their characters. That raises the question of what fixes which of their attributes audiences will and won’t read into their characters. After discussing that, I’ll turn to what I think actors mean by saying they try to become their characters (since they can’t mean that literally), what that involves, and how it lets interestingly complex characters be played very differently by different actors.