Can Acting or Theatre Be Correlated with Moral Good or Moral Evil?

Abstract

Beyond religious concepts, in order to strengthen moral exigencies and the promise of metaphysical or practical compensation, morality could
be interpreted as abstract. In the absence of moral goodness, everything is, in fact, allowed. This is the premise on which this research is based. Moral good and moral evil are fluctuating concepts and are the effect of individual actions, messages and ideas of specific processes determined by will, creativity or imagination. The concept of theatre, like the one directly related to the art of the actor, aims precisely at the idea of consent and the Grotowskian idea, taken from Artaud, of ”piercing” the human nature. In addition, the audience is invited to make the effort to find out the truth about themselves. Both the good and the evil that we can recognize in the proximity of art, result from the way in which our inner make-up adapts to the experience of meeting the ”other one”. Hence the moral goodness-moral menace polarity. The art of the actor, as a concrete element, is firstly linked to the unique human nature and then, indirectly, through the transmitted emotional elements, to the necessary and universal moral law. This is why the only valid theatrical ”ideology” is represented by the metaphysical human knowledge. When the actor processes and then transmits and the audience lets themselves be ”pierced” – Grotowskian specific term – by the emotion transmitted by this higher court, only then the freedom of having honest self-interrogative hopes can be born.