If we take acting as the presentation of stories through oral and physical means (or more formally ‘story telling by enacting a character’; then acting probably started before there were modern humans. The first actor was a proto-human who rose up to tell a story about the day’s hunts… probably somewhere on the African plains maybe as long ago as half a million years before present. As humans evolved and societies began to form, with divisions of labour shaman probably represent the first professional class or storytellers and thus the first actors. Using clothing, dancing and relating stories to tell of the gods and the seasons.
Indeed, the first recorded professional actors recorded in written history were also from the priest caste, the priests of Karnak in Ancient Egypt during the first dynasty c 3500 BCE who related the tales of the gods through performance.
Acting as a theatre performance (and even the theatre itself) evolved in Ancient Greece from about 600 BCE. However, this was based on an ensemble cast with a dithyrambic chorus narrating the main events of the play. Then, in c 535 BCE, the first true actor, Thespis of Icaria in Athens stepped out of the chorus and spoke as if he were the character. Indeed, it is Thespis’ name that gives us the term ‘thespian’ for an actor. It was in Greece that the dramatic styles of ‘tragedy’, ‘drama’, ‘comedy’ and ‘satire’ evolved.
Rome primarily adopted the comedy as their main art form and with Christianity it was this that evolved into the mystery plays of the early Medieval period. This gave rise to travelling players and the theatre troupes of Northern Europe and the ‘commedia dell’arte’ of Italy and France.
As these travelling troupes of performers began to move away from religious plays political commentaries evolved and playwrights became embedded in the troupe. So we have the emergence of figures like Shakespeare who were both playwrights and actors. The breadth of stories told also expanded, so the requirements of actors also grew. During this period of the 16th century, former travelling troupes started to lay down roots and playhouses were built where a theatre company could form.
So by about 1550 we have modern-style theatres, plays were written by playwrights and actors were professionals (though still only men, it was not deemed seemly for women to perform).
By the 18th century there were women players… Conservatories and drama schools began to spring up, so actors were more likely to be trained and theories of acting began to be concocted.
Russian theatre, however, unlike its western counterparts often emphasized improvisation as a core part of theatre. From 1910, Konstantin Stanislavski’s began developing his ‘system’ of actor training. Late in 1910, the playwright Maxim Gorky invited Stanislavski to join him in Capri, Italy, where they discussed training and Stanislavski’s emerging “grammar” of acting. Inspired by a popular theatre performances that utilized the techniques of the commedia dell’arte, Gorky suggested that they form a company, modelled on the medieval strolling players, in which a playwright and group of young actors would devise new plays together by means of improvisation. Thus the disparate strands of European theatre were unified and characterization was brought to the fore.
The emerging artform of the moving picture built upon these fundamentals, leading to the acting theory of ‘method acting’ and modern-day performances.
