"Plays are not only about life, but about the process of playing, the theatre in

which actors perform, and the playwright’s art that gives the life. When we applaud at

the end of the performance, do we not acknowledge the dual role? The story has been

convincing, like life, important to our own world, and--equally--the actor’s skill has been

manifest in making us believe, at least temporarily, in what we know is at heart only a

stage illusion. If plays were just about issues, then any competent history or sociological

study or psychologist’s case file would be just as good, and surely more efficient. But at

some point what the play is about merges with what “happens” during a production.

We play a role in the audience no less--and no less important than--the actor playing a

role onstage: together we make an illusion seem real enough so that it touches us,

reminds us of our own life, perhaps influences us in that real world outside the theatre.

Aristotle says that when we watch a performance we experience both “fear” and

“pity.” The theatre is so real--live men and women onstage occupy the same space and

time as live men and women in the house--that we experience fear, in the sense that we

know what happens to the characters could also happen to us--we identify with them.

Conversely, because we know it is all an illusion, a fake, we can relax in the knowledge

that what happens is not real--Hamlet doesn’t really die at the end, or at least the actor

playing him doesn’t die. Hence, Aristotle, concludes, we can feel pity, in that we can

separate ourselves from the character. There is a distance between him or her and us:

however convincing, the character is only an actor’s impersonation, while we are real.

The Tempest is no textbook for the theatre, no essay on acting or playwriting.

Nevertheless, it does remind us, as much and more than any other play of

Shakespeare’s, that the experience of watching a play (or acting in it) is no less

important, indeed equally as important as whatever the play is about."