Presentational and representational acting

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.

These premeditated and 'composed' forms of actor-audience persuasion are in effect metadramatic and metatheatrical functions, since they bring attention to bear on the fictional status of the characters, on the very theatrical transaction (in soliciting the audience's indulgence, for instance), and so on.

)[1] '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.

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.

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).

In the most common sense (that which relates the specific dynamics of theatre to the broader aesthetic category of 'representational art' or 'mimesis' in drama and literature), the terms describe two contrasting functional relationships between the actor and the audience that a performance can create.

Both teachers were fully aware of the 'outside' to the dramatic fiction, but they believed that from the actor's perspective these considerations do not help the performance, and only lead to false, mechanical acting.

Each, in her native tongue, had played the same popular melodrama of the time, the high point of which was the moment when the wife, accused of infidelity by her husband, swore her virtue.

Hagen stated that style is a label given to the "final product" by critics, scholars, and audience members, and that the "creator" (actor) need only explore the subjective content of the playwright's world.

'Fourth wall' performances foreclose the complex layerings of theatrical and dramatic realities that result from this contact and that are built into Shakespeare's dramaturgy.

Opponents of the Stanislavski/Hagen approach have argued that this complexity is unavailable to a purely 'naturalistic' treatment that recognizes no distinction between actor and character nor acknowledges the presence of the actual audience.