Part I: Psychological: Chapter 5: Only pretend.

This section looks at the creation of a play about a schizophrenic. Concerned as it is with the public representation of private human behavior, the theater has much to do with the concerns of psychiatry. Dealing as it must with extremes, it is inevitably much exercised with paranoia, persecution and the circumstances which give rise to them. Metaphorically, the very act of performance is often taken to imply not only pretence but also deceit. While the actor is not intending to deceive the audience, a great deal of the drama is about the actor's character deceiving other people. Denied the novelist's facility for psychological description and inner monologue, dramatists have had to invent an array of devices to make the internal external. The two most obvious examples are the soliloquy and the aside, both of which are designed to allow the character to reveal his or her deceits to the only people who would not snitch on them. Ghosts have one crucial characteristic as a theatrical device, which they share with all those alter egos and imaginary friends which are the contemporary drama's equivalent. The audience expect that they will not be seen by all the characters on the stage. The distinction between role and character arises out of drama's historic commitment to genre.