The Performing Arts 6: Play

 We’re told that Carl Jung said, “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct, acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. ”

This is precisely right. On the page the play may be less easy to see. Probably it’s because writing involves words, which inevitably drags in boring brain stuff like vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure. But the performance arts, acting and music and singing, are very close to play. Improv is familiar because we all did it in kindergarten, on the playground: Let’s be the Avengers, okay? You be Iron Man, and I have the trash can lid, I’ll be Captain America!

The whole point of improv is that there  is no script. There may or may not even be words. There may be a general idea — act like a tree! But no one will tell you how to act like a tree. And when you do it, it can’t be put described. You just do it.

There’s probably an improv theater near you somewhere (google will guide you) where you can watch this done. Some of the great comedy groups of our time are comedy improv groups — the best known one may be the actors of Saturday Night Live. All their stuff begins in improv, riffing on current events or internal creativity. It didn’t begin on paper. It began with a bunch of actors playing, pretending to be newscasters or the vice president or aliens with paper cones on their heads.

And that’s how an actor creates a character — how Dustin Hoffman created Benjamin Braddock, or how Benedict Cumberbatch became the Creature in Frankenstein. The actor reads the script and studies the role. How would you act, if you were not born but created last night in a Swiss lab by Victor Frankenstein? And then … Cumberbatch played with it. He used his body to embody it, and we believe.

Watch just the first few minutes of the National Theatre production here, as the Creature is born and comes to unnatural life, flopping out of its artificial womb. The central nervous system hooks up to the limbs, as he lies there on the stage, twitching. Gradually control increases, as the Creature totters to its feet. He doesn’t say a word — the Creature hasn’t come to words yet — but you can see his struggle.

It’s uncanny and yet real. View that clip, and then look up, at the engraving at the top of this post. It depicts this exact same moment. You see the difference? What you’re seeing, my dears is the theater. Something that was never there, never alive, appears before us. No wonder it was part of religious worship, when they invented it in classical Greece. This is a scary power.