Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love (25 page)

The researchers gave the following explanation. When you encounter a real character, even if you have never met him or her, they will integrate into a wide, comprehensive and intricately connected structure in the conceptual storage of your mind. You are familiar with their basic behavioural features as human beings. You know more or less how they think, what kind of opinions they may produce. You are aware of the range of emotions that you can expect from them. By contrast, your mind is not equally familiar with fictional characters. No matter how much we know about the world of a fictional character there will still be something alien and inscrutable to us about that world. Take Harry Potter, for instance. You may have read all the books, but the amount of information you have gathered about Harry Potter – the hierarchy of wizards and the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry – is still definitely limited compared with the wealth of information that is available to you about members of your family, friends, or famous real people who are part of your immediate and past experience. Basically, in order to understand a fictional character, you need to dig deeper into your imagination, because he or she is bound up to fewer nodes of reference in your network than are real, or relevant, people in your life. Such nodes of reference as exist for the fictional character are also different in quality.

The fact that encountering a fictional character engages frontal lobe areas linked to language processing, such as the IFG, has an additional meaning. These areas are not responsible for understanding syntax, but more complicated components of language, such as semantics – that is, the meaning of words and symbols as well as other finer aspects of language such as metaphors. The fact that these areas are selectively activated when we encounter a fictional character implies that we are busy deciphering a whole new world that might be described with words and signs that require more than the simple decoding of syntax.

Abraham and her colleagues suggest that her experiments question what we mean by the
reality
of a situation. Reality is not just about what is ostensibly real or fictional for you. We do tend to distinguish between what is objectively real and what is fictional, but the distinction is much more subjective. If you live in Scotland, particularly if you’re near a loch, the Loch Ness monster will be in some way real for you.

Basically if something is relevant for you, it doesn’t matter if it is objectively real or fictional, it will be real for you, in your mind.

Suspension of disbelief

In theatre, the boundary between reality and fiction is porous.

Throughout a play, we constantly switch between two worlds. One is the physicality of the boards of the set and of the actors in flesh and bone. The other is the fictional world of the characters and their story. When in a theatre, we witness actors in their corporeal appearance. We perceive their presence on stage. We hear their voices. If we are sitting in the front row, we may even feel their breath blowing towards us – as well as be met by some of their flying sweat. Simultaneously, as a parallel reality superimposed on that of the stage, we perceive and imagine the story being told. The set transmutes into anything from the palace of Thebes or the court of Elsinore to a cherry orchard, a battleground or someone’s living room. We meet all sorts of different characters and we are introduced to their world. Some are well-known historical figures whose vicissitudes are deeply imprinted in our cultural background. Some are made up. Among these, some are more realistic than others, or rather, closer or more relevant to our own world.

Hamlet is a prince in Denmark. There may have been a Danish prince named Hamlet, but the one in the play is based on a legend and belongs anyway to a different historical time. Yet we understand Hamlet’s plight. In Michael Frayn’s play
Copenhagen
, on the other hand, we see on stage a theatrical representation of Nils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, two great physicists who really existed. In
Death of a Salesman
, we face the struggling, desperate soul of a middle-aged man whose whole existence suffers a huge blow in one day, whereas other plays may shift across far wider timespans. Whatever the case, we always need to follow the story and temporarily adhere to the world of the characters, relate to them.

Theatre, and fictional representation in general, has for a long time employed a technique to reduce the distance between spectators and the characters: creating the circumstances in which spectators
suspend disbelief
.

The suspension of disbelief is a phrase first coined in 1817 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834). In his romantic poetry, Coleridge employed fantastic and supernatural characters that a rational, educated readership would not easily have identified with. Wanting to keep fantastic elements in his writing, Coleridge thought that by imbuing his narrative with enough facts and contemporary references he would help readers accept the story, rather than condemn it as implausible. He asked of his readers that they recognize ‘a human interest and a semblance of truth’ to the characters. He demanded ‘a willing suspension of disbelief’.
⁴⁹

Unless you still believe in wizards, when you are enjoying J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books you are also suspending disbelief, big time. In the specific case of theatre, suspension of disbelief is achieved by believing that in addition to the three walls of the set there is a fourth transparent wall separating the audience from the action on stage. Erecting such a wall secludes the play into an independent box. The actors go on with their scenes as if nobody were watching them and the audience believes the world of the characters is real, despite it being played on a stage.

In the prologue to
Henry V
, Shakespeare begs the audience to forgive the bare stage and use their imagination to picture it as the world of the king in war with France:

But pardon, gentles all,

the flat unraised spirits that have dared

on this unworthy scaffold to bring forth

so great an object: can this cockpit hold

the vasty fields of France?

 . . .

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;

 . . .

and make imaginary puissance . . .

Give power to the imagination to accept, and then ignore, the illusion of a reality that is not real.
⁵⁰

The suspension of disbelief is not a universal aim in theatre. The great twentieth-century German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) deliberately turned this tactic on its head and had specific expectations of the relationship between actors and their audiences. Brecht believed theatre should not force empathy. He disliked audiences that would passively absorb and believe in the events of the story embodied on stage. He was deeply frustrated with the majority of the traditional theatre of his time. Provocatively, he used to say that traditional theatre turned the audience ‘into a cowed, credulous, hypnotized mass’. He even said that the ‘audience hangs its brains up in the cloakroom along with its coat’.
⁵¹

On the contrary, he ensured that his audiences became occasionally and strategically detached from the scene. Bertolt Brecht introduced the theatre technique of alienation – originally
Verfremdungseffekt
in German. He wanted his audiences to breach the fourth wall and become aware they were witnessing fiction, not a real-life event.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, theatre is a tremendously powerful vehicle for portraying the world we live in. It can be used to denounce the problems afflicting our society, sometimes in a satirical fashion. The ultimate aim behind Brecht’s revolutionary staging choice was to empower the viewers to critically question the social realities represented in the play and see them in a new light. He encouraged dissent from the action and the freedom to judge it. For instance, Brecht’s
Mother Courage and Her Children
, written in response to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, is a play set during the Thirty Years’ War that condemns the rise of Fascism and Nazism.

Some of the elements Brecht used to interrupt the flow of the play were simple. For instance, by having an actor stand beside a bare placard on a stage deprived of even the most basic items of scenery, he reminded the audience that they were in a theatre. He also had actors sing out of character or address the audience directly by introducing pieces of text that were not part of the main body of the story. Occasionally, he would bring the lights up in the auditorium. In all cases, the adhesion to the story would cease temporarily and the audience was invited to abandon their dreamful state and judge the social reality of the characters portrayed. In Brecht’s plays, the characters are not always or entirely who they are supposed to be. In other words, the actors disconnect from the part they are playing.

Although the alienation effect disrupted the flow of the drama, Brecht was not aiming for an absence of emotional transfer. If in traditionally realistic theatre the transfer of emotion is achieved through the superimposition of actor and character, in Brecht emotion stems from their divergence.

During the last hundred years theatre has certainly escaped from the confines imposed by traditional dramaturgical rules – such as causal linearity, plot, plausible characters – both in the writing of theatre texts and in staging choices. Fragmentary scenes made up of sounds, images, movements and games of lighting that do not require the adhesion to a realistic story can be laden with poetic metaphor and symbols of equal emotional power. Even the selection of the physical space for a show has become significant, the traditional four walls often being abandoned. A story may be told in a small intimate room, in big arenas, across multiple rooms, or played in spaces that lend themselves as excellent metaphors for the meaning or content of the play. Emotions flow in a theatre room not solely through a story being told in words and acted from start to end.

For three entire months, from March to May 2010, the acclaimed artist Marina Abramovic, the ‘grandmother of performance art’, sat for seven and a half hours every day on a chair at the centre of a large room in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The work was entitled
The Artist Is Present
and was the central piece of Abramovic’s retrospective at the museum. In front of her was another chair on which, one by one, visitors sat to face her gaze. Each encounter was unique, but followed a simple ritual: when a visitor stood up from the chair, Marina would close her eyes and slightly duck her head into her breasts while waiting for the arrival of the next guest. Then, as soon as the latter took his or her seat on the chair, she would slowly raise her head and look right into their eyes. In the course of three months she looked into 1,565 pairs of eyes. Many wondered: what was going on there? What was her aim? And: was that theatre?

In an interview following her show Abramovic settled the issue by firmly expressing her distaste for theatre because of its fakery: ‘to be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre. Theatre is fake: there is a black box, you pay for a ticket, and you sit in the dark and see somebody playing somebody else’s life. The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real. It’s a very different concept. It’s about true reality.’
⁵²

Abramovic speaks from personal experience. She is renowned for having employed real knives to pierce her skin in front of an audience, in addition to having put herself at risk of death in some of her performance pieces.

But theatre is not just fake. Theatre is fake and real at the same time. So is Abramovic’s performance, we could say. We know that the person who is sitting on a chair at the MoMA the whole day is the artist Marina Abramovic, but during her performance our imagination does not shut off. That person could be just a character, a mysterious and charismatic woman with beautiful long hair and a long red gown who has lost her speech. That a woman would choose to sit in a room for three months is plausible, but also not very common. The encounter between Marina and her guests was a frontal exchange, in which spectators had a chance to constantly switch between two planes of reality. That normally happens in theatre, too. And, as I explained above, as human beings we are equipped to distinguish between real and false, the actual and the imagined.

But whether or not you call Abramovic’s courageous and elegant performance theatre, empathy was certainly at work across those two chairs. Most of the people who confronted Marina’s gaze became emotional. Many of them shed tears. A few sobbed. It’s important to remark that Marina gazed her visitors directly in the eyes. Actors on stage rarely have the chance to gaze into the eyes of their audience. This has an interesting scientific implication. The facial broadcast of our emotions is a fundamental vehicle for conversations between minds. But the brain reacts in sharply different ways when we simply glance at someone’s face and when we look right into their eyes. The eye gaze, after initial processing in subcortical regions of the brain, goes on to stimulate structures that modulate our social interactions.
⁵³
In addition, only direct eye-to-eye contact activates areas such as the dopaminergic system that induce reward and inspire proximity.
⁵⁴

In sum, whatever nature of performance you watch, there will always be an emotional filter to it, and a veil of illusion.

Carried away

Illusion is a crucial element throughout a performance.

One study specifically looked at the nature of illusory moments in theatre, those instants in which we forget where we are. Researcher and theatre director Yannick Bressan and collaborators in France explored the blending of reality into fiction in the context of theatre with a creative fMRI experiment, in which participants watched a live performance while their brain was being scanned and their heart rate measured. The goal of the study was to discover what brain regions are active during moments of adhesion to fiction.