Structure of an Actor's Work : The dialectical structure of the actor’s interpretation of a role

The will

The fundamental concept for the actor is not the ‘being’ of the character, but the
‘will’. One should not ask ‘who is this?’, but rather ‘what does he want?’ The first
question can lead to the formation of static pools of emotion, while the second
is essentially dynamic, dialectical, conflictual, and consequently theatrical. But
the will chosen by the actor cannot be arbitrary – on the contrary, it must be the
concretion of an idea, the translation of this idea or thesis into terms of will. The
will is not the idea, it is the concretion of the idea. It is not enough to want to
be happy in an abstract way, we must want the particular thing that will make us
happy. It is not enough to want ‘power and glory’ in general, we must concretely
want to kill King Duncan in very concrete and objectified circumstances. From which we can derive the following formulation: idea = concrete will (in particular, specific circumstances).

The counter-will

No emotion is pure or constant in quantity or quality. What we observe in reality is quite the reverse: we want and we don’t want, we love and we don’t love, we have courage and we don’t have courage. For the actor truly to live on stage, he must find the counter-will to each of his wills. In certain cases this counter-will
is obvious: Hamlet wants only one thing, to avenge his father – but on the other hand he doesn’t want to kill his uncle. He wants to be and not to be. Will and counter-will are concrete and obvious to the spectator. The same phenomenon applies with Brutus, who wants to kill Julius Caesar, but struggles inwardly with his counter-will, his love for Julius Caesar. Macbeth wants to be king, but he hesitates to assassinate his guest.

The actor who makes use only of wills ends up looking a complete idiot on stage.
He stays the same all the time. He loves, and he loves, and he loves, and he loves.
. . . People watch him and think: ‘Well, looks like he’s in love’; five minutes later, the same look; second act, still no change. Who would want to go on watching such a person? The internal conflict of will and counter-will creates the dynamic, the theatricality of the performance and, with this dynamic, the actor will never be the same from one moment to the next, because he or she will always be in a continual state of flux, in this case a constant alternation of coming and going.


The dominant will

From the interior conflict between will and counter-will there always emerges, on the exterior, a dominant will, which is the manifestation of the will in conflict with the other characters. Search as actors must for all the wills and counter-wills of their characters, they must always refer back to the dominant will which structures the conflict of all these wills. When an actor develops her interior wills
to the extreme without objectively exteriorising them, she runs the risk of ‘subjec-tivising’ her character to too great an extent and making it unreal. When the actor dwells in the interior life of her character, forgetting objective reality, when the conflict between will and counter-will takes precedence for her over the conflict
of character against character (or dominant will against dominant will), she ends up playing the autopsy of a character and not a living, real, present character.


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