Book launch

The book is divided into two major sections. The complete text of the monodrama and texts written by artists – both past and present – on the phenomenon of the Actor. The monodrama itself is divided into two parts. The first part contains the Prologue and eleven scenes, in which the Actor begins by ironically reflecting on the global attitude towards art and the creative process of staging a play, while criticizing the contemporary social status of actors. The Actor builds his monodrama through a boulevard-style story about the problems with the set design, as the Ministry of Culture had failed to pay for the truck needed to transport and install it, thereby preventing the guest performance. He “acts” as if the play cannot be performed without the set, even though he remains on stage the entire time. As the Actor explains, without the set, he cannot embody the thoughts and emotions that would arise from a dialogue, i.e. conflict with the absent set. He then “pleads” with the audience not to let the performance be canceled, promising instead to “explain” everything to them, to act out everything that is “missing” from the absent set, which supposedly prevents the play from taking place. Once he has “explained” and performed everything that is not there, and the audience “sees” what is absent, finally agreeing that they do indeed “see” it, the Actor can then “begin” the play.

That seems to be the path to a possible Actor’s total “reign of illusion”. Through the form of a circus, with the clown on stage and his clown-partner in the audience, he develops a dialogical dramatic conflict, thereby dissolving the classical structure of monodrama. With elements of

Commedia dell’arte, even the spectators join the Actor in his performance, acting out the scenes of the “non-existent” play, “creating the illusion” of something absent and “seeing that which is not there.” Art, total theater, the Actor as the “master of illusion.” The Actor is the only one who proves the existence of theater. The Actor in an empty space.

The second part of the text consists of twenty-four scenes, dramaturgically connected into a dramatic story of how “he” became an Actor, and how he understood theater as a form of both art and communication. It traces his becoming an Actor – as a man, as an artist and as a clown, alongside his transformations along the way. Scenes from real acting life, performed monologues, lines, and dialogues from plays in which he has acted, skilfully command dramatic time. The Actor constructs a cyclical narrative about both the fate of the Actor and the fate of man, organizing the power of illusion from his own standpoint. He performs the existential essence of the actor’s vocation and of art itself, portraying the Actor in his own world, burdened with the bitterness of laying himself bare before the audience. In truth, the Actor is playing. He plays alone on stage.

The second section of the book gathers philosophical reflections, emotions, stories, analyses, poetry, memories, and expressions of love for the phenomenon of the Actor….