What Do Actors Do in Contemporary Theatre

Abstract

The article addresses the issue of strategies of acting in contemporary (largely postdramatic)theatre. In thefirst part of thearticle, theacting isconceptualized asplaying, with referencetorelevant theories, particularly that of Thomas Pavel. The article puts forward the argumentthat the play world created in a theatre performance can be described by the continuousfictional ? real spectrum that accommodates a number of strategies of acting. Within thecontinuum, there exists an ongoing tension between the fictional and the real; theirrelationship is largely variable depending on the strategies of acting at work in a particularperformance. In the second part of the article, these strategies are divided into three groups:?being someone else?, ?being oneself ?and performing actions ? and are then analyzed on thebasisof examplesthat aredrawn primarily fromEstonian contemporary theatre.