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Realism and A Doll House
by Brian Johnston

IV. An Observation on the 'Game' of Realist Drama

This approach does not contradict the actor's and actress's conviction that they inhabit a 'real' human being driven by emotions and compulsions: not, of course, spontaneously as in real life or they would have to go off script: but sufficiently to render a performance convincing and compelling. In these cases, however, actors are not given sufficient credit for their own creativity. The 'reality' of the character is what the actor/actress assembles into life from the opportunities the role encourages. In interviews, they often seem ashamed of this fact and insist the realty they have brilliantly simulated is 'there' in the role as in real life.

Critics and interpreters who treat dramatis personae as 'real' and therefore vulnerable to the judgments we pass on actual humans, usually are a good deal more naïve than theater practitioners who are well aware of the artificiality of all art: how much rehearsal is required, for instance, to bring off a scene between, say, Nora and Krogstad: and how, under new inspiration, that whole rehearsed sequence may be radically altered, or scrapped as not functioning aesthetically. Performers in interviews might tell us how real the characters and situations they are impersonating are, but we know they talk like this because they are psyching themselves up to put on a more effective impersonation. And audiences, too, though willing to suspend disbelief for a couple of hours, really are aware that the characters that cause them to bring out the Kleenex still exist in the aesthetically delimited arena of stage space and could not survive transplanting into our medium of existence. We know we cannot take them home with us nor enter and influence their situations. Our approval or disapproval of them is self-indulgence - a way of re-asserting our own preconceptions over the experience the play has offered.  The world of the drama inhabits a fundamentally different space, strictly demarcated from the space of everyday reality.

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