Blog #3: Character development

I thought it was interesting how Augusto Boal traced the function and presentation of the character with respect to political/religious agendas in theatre. The portrayal of characters and how they are played by actors has always fascinated me, as it is incredibly influential in terms of the style of the performance and effect on the audience.

I had not realized before that the development of the character in relation to realism vs. abstraction over time seems to form a bell curve parabola. This curve traces the political character from its feudal origin as an abstraction of moral values/object acting as a representative of the value it symbolized, to Shakespeare’s multidimensional portrayal of a character in possession of exceptional qualities e.g. virtù, where the character becomes a bourgeois conception, to the character as a concrete embodiment of an ethical principle à la Hegel, to realism, to the new abstractions of Bertolt Brecht and Eugène Ionesco.

In case the above paragraph was not clear, here's a general outline in diagram form.