David Peat

204 From Certainty to Uncertaintymore confident and outgoing and eventually had several brief affairswith women. After the play closed his behavior gradually slipped backto his earlier self.An actor puts on makeup and particular clothing, adopts bodypostures and gestures, and speaks a particular script. In this the charactercreated by the actor is a little like a persona. Likewise, some people“act the part” of a maitre d’ or bank manager in their daily lives. Manygood teachers say that what they do is close to a “performance” in frontof their class.In most cases these masks can be taken off and put on with eachperformance or situation, but in the case of our actor something slidover into his daily life and stayed with him for a time. All actors don’thave that problem, yet with particular powerful and dark characters,such as Lady Macbeth, there is the danger that the character will “takeover” some aspect of a person’s individual personality. Or conversely,in order to play such a character, an actor must discover aspects withinhim- or herself that have lain unsuspected for years or even decades. 5The point I’m making here is that the persona can eventually becomeourselves, or an aspect of ourselves, to the point where we don’t knowwhich is the mask and which is the I. And so we ask: Is there really acentral, real, and true person? Or are we all a complex series of aspectsand creations? Rather than the “I” being a stable object in space andtime, is it more like a process or integrating principle that collects everchanging fragments together and binds them, for a time, into patternsof behavior, attitudes, and motives?This is analogous to the processes of vision, which begin with variousstrategies for seeing—edges, bars, moving fields, patches of color—that operate relatively independently and are only later integrated intoa tree or a face. So too, the self may not be so much a fixed object as a5Almost paradoxically, the worst villains must be played with sympathy otherwisethey become cardboard figures. Sir Alec Guinness spoke of this dilemma whenplaying Hitler in the movie Hitler: The Last Ten Days. He had to delve both intohimself and into the character to discover something of sympathy that would engagethe audience and provide them with a motive to re-create this character in their ownreading of the film.