GEGEN DEN WAHNWITZ DES GEDANKENS. DER SCHAUSPIELER BEI DIDEROT, BRECHT UND ANDEREN

When something touches our senses our feelings can take over, we are arrested in our momentary state, we do not act, we are. This is ‘sensibilité’ as promoted by the theory of Sainte Albine and, in the last century, by Stanislavsky and Strasberg. We feel, we do not think. Diderot criticizes this. But at the same time, the trio emphasizes the rational side of the process of creation. Similarly, Riccoboni cannot only be considered as a representative of the art of purely rational acting, for he sees the necessity for fire and violent passion. Ideally, acting should be a mixture of these two: reason and feeling. Different schools of acting lay stress on one or the other. And, they are forced to put stress on the – to quote Mao Tse Tung and Bertolt Brecht – main side of the contradiction. Unfortunately, we do not have the word to define the entity clearly.