Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self by Tzachi Zamir (review)

It is common to regard studies of the intersections of theatre and philosophy as interdisciplinary, but Tzachi Zamir argues that this perspective is imprecise. “Disciplines are aspects of knowledge, not of being, and acting is not a discipline,” he writes in his new book (218). Zamir, a philosopher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, knows from which he speaks: in preparation for writing Acts, he joined two acting companies and enrolled in an intensive actor-training program. The result is a philosophical study that aims to take play-acting seriously on its own terms. “Philosophy,” Zamir writes, “is a rigorous expression of the wish to know—acting, a committed manifestation of the desire to be.” In the spirit of acknowledging and respecting these differences, he regards his book as calling for “a meeting of vocations rather than for an interpenetration of disciplines” (ibid.; emphasis in original).

For its methodology alone, Acts is a milestone work. Unlike previous philosophical considerations of the theatre that have been written from the vantage point of the reader and the spectator, Zamir attempts to write a philosophy of the theatre that takes as its starting point the perspective of the performer. He avoids referencing his own performance training and experience in the body of the book, using this embodied background research only to “shape and guide the questions that seemed to me important to ask” (3). But his work is replete with the voices of professional actors and theatre practitioners: references to Plato and Nietzsche stand alongside acting instructions from Uta Hagen and Declan Donnellan or recollections of a life on the stage from Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando. In fact, the intertwined voices of philosophers and actors are nearly the only ones to be found in the main body of the book; while Zamir is intimately familiar with the theorization of acting and performance within theatre studies, he engages with that literature directly only in his book’s extensive endnotes. Acts is a book of philosophy scrupulously designed to put the actor center stage.

Zamir’s argument is organized into four discrete sections that progress from his core consideration of the actor’s experience in part 1 to an investigation of real-world phenomena that draw from the actor’s technique in part 4. Acting, Zamir argues in the book’s first section, is “an aesthetically-controlled embodied imaginative transformation” and an act of “existential amplification” that offers an “expansion of one’s sense of being alive” (12, 17). In this definition, which tracks closely to much of the literature on actor training from which he draws, the author positions himself against what he calls “the idea that agency is constituted by performativity, a staple of postmodernism” (216). According to Zamir, “the postmodernist’s mistake is revealed as a precise inversion of Plato’s error. . . . In reducing acting to pretense, both miss the capacity of acting to become a vehicle of truth” (217). That access to truth is, of course, mediated through the contexts in which performance takes place, and in part 2, Zamir considers the fictive theatrical structures in which acting as it is traditionally practiced occurs. He aims in this section to disentangle the unique work of the actor from that of the writer, the reader, the director, and the spectator—a distinction that relies upon the central place of animation as an accompaniment to identification within the actor’s art. One of the most illuminating portions of this section concerns the work of puppets and puppeteers rather than actors proper. Puppetry, Zamir writes, “structurally duplicates the process that is inherent in all acting: the manner whereby something that is not alive becomes animated through the joint imaginative work of performer and audience” (68).

Having defined the actor’s art and distinguished it from other interpretive and imaginative processes required by the theatre, Zamir proceeds in part 3 to subject that art to a piercing ethical critique. He readily acknowledges the famous anti-theatrical bias that...