Presentational acting and the related representational acting are opposing ways of sustaining the actor–audience relationship. With presentational acting, the actor acknowledges the audience. With representational acting, the audience is studiously ignored and treated as voyeurs. In the sense of actor-character relationship, the type of theatre that uses 'presentational acting' in the actor-audience relationship, is often associated with a performer using 'representational acting' in their actor-character methodology. Conversely, the type of theatre that uses 'representational acting' in the first sense is often associated with a performer using 'presentational acting' methodology.
The actor–audience relationship In every theatrical performance the manner in which each individual actor treats the audience establishes, sustains or varies a particular kind of actor-audience relationship between them. In some plays all of the actors may adopt the same attitude towards the audience (for example, the entire cast of a production of a Chekhovian drama will usually ignore the audience until the curtain call); in other plays the performers create a range of different relationships towards the audience (for example, most Shakespearean dramas have certain characters who frequently adopt a downstage 'platea' playing position that is in direct contact with the audience, while other characters behave as if unaware of the audience's presence).
Presentational acting
'Presentational acting', in this sense, refers to a relationship that acknowledges the audience, whether directly by addressing them, or indirectly through a general attitude or specific use of language, looks, gestures or other signs that indicate that the character or actor is aware of the audience's presence. (Shakespeare's use of punning and wordplay, for example, often has this function of indirect contact.)
Representational acting 'Representational acting', in this sense, refers to a relationship in which the audience is studiously ignored and treated as 'peeping tom' voyeurs by an actor who remains in-character and absorbed in the dramatic action. The actor behaves as if a fourth wall was present, which maintains an absolute autonomy of the dramatic fiction from the reality of the theatre. Robert Weimann argues that:
Each of these theatrical practices draws upon a different register of imaginary appeal and "puissance" and each serves a different purpose of playing. While the former derives its primary strength from the immediacy of the physical act of histrionic delivery, the latter is vitally connected with the imaginary product and effect of rendering absent meanings, ideas, and images of artificial persons' thoughts and actions. But the distinction is more than epistemological and not simply a matter of poetics; rather it relates to the issue of function.
The actor–character relationship The use of these critical terms (in an almost directly opposed sense from the critical mainstream usage detailed above) to describe two different forms of the actor–character relationship within an actor's methodology originates from the American actor and teacher Uta Hagen. She developed this use from a far more ambiguous formulation offered by the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski in chapter two of his acting manual An Actor's Work (1938).
Stanislavski's typology
In "When Acting is an Art", having watched his students' first attempts at a performance, Stanislavski's fictional persona Tortsov offers a series of critiques, during the course of which he defines different forms and approaches to acting. They are: 'forced acting', 'overacting', 'the exploitation of art', 'mechanical acting', 'art of representation', and his own 'experiencing the role'. One common misrepresentation of Stanislavski is the frequent confusion of the first five of these categories with one another; Stanislavski, however, goes to some lengths to insist that 'two of them deserve to be evaluated as 'art': his own approach of 'experiencing the role' and that of the 'art of representation'. He also makes the concession that so called "mechanical" can appear (when done well enough) to be almost the same as representation in the eyes of the audience, and is therefore occasionally artistic in quality. The distinction between Stanislavski's 'experiencing the role' and 'representing the part' (which Stanislavski identifies with the French actor Coquelin) turns on the relationship that the actor establishes with their character during the performance. In Stanislavski's approach, by the time the actor reaches the stage, he or she no longer experiences a distinction between his or her self and the character; the actor has created a 'third being', or a combination of the actor's personality and the role (in Russian, Stanislavski calls this creation artisto-rol). In the art of representation approach, whilst on-stage the actor experiences the distinction between the two (the philosopher and dramatist Diderot calls this psychological duality the actor's 'paradox'). Both approaches use 'living the role' or identifying with the character during rehearsals; Stanislavski's approach undertakes this process at all times onstage, while the 'art of representation' incorporates the results of the rehearsal process in a "finished" form.
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