ABSTRACT
Characteristics are random rather than gradually cultivated, are stuck to the character like a label. Characteristics reveal essential problems of the character’s psychological life, they are not external, accidental tokens of personality. To find for each concrete character their unique, inherent characteristics, the actor must first learn to make detailed observations of all the different sorts of people they meet in life, storing up all the observations they have made in their creative piggy-bank. The actor has to develop their powers of observation. The subject of staging during the course of active analysis of the play is fascinating and profoundly important. If, during the period of active analysis, the actors have made the content of the play their own, they will become aware of how much the author’s actual text enriches them, allowing them to savour the well-honed form of the original dialogue.
