Philosophy has become an increasingly important discipline in the field of theatre and has helped to question it conceptually. To approach theatre philosophically is to rethink the training and methods of actors and to allow actors to reinterpret their own experience from different perspectives. While the body continues to be a conceptually debated issue in these philosophical enquiries, the literature on debates about what the body is has oscillated historically between Cartesian dualism and opposing ideas. Thinkers have come to different conclusions about the existence of the body, its relationship to the mind, and how it perceives the world. These studies have taken place not only in philosophy, but also in theatre and performance.

The purpose of this article is to present some propositions about the relationship between the actor and their fictional character in the context of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Several reasons exist as to why this relationship is seen as a philosophical problem. The first and most important reason is the intense relationship between the actor and the fictional character. Within the framework of studies related to the body, a desire exists to interpret the process of the actor’s embodiment of a character from a philosophical perspective. The aim is to redefine the process by discussing the actor’s orientation to the world of the fictional character as a philosophical body object. Another reason is the parallelism between the mind-body connection, which is the starting point of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body. A similar relationship is believed to occur in rethinking the process of the creation of a character.

In order to interrogate the actor’s body in a philosophical context, a framework has been established using French philosopher Merleau-Ponty’s conceptualizations of the lived body, orientation, perception, spatiality, and embodiment. The starting point of this framework is the claim that the body is a philosophical phenomenon. The dualistic perspective, which proposes the body to be a form of representation, is excluded here. Merleau-Ponty’s fundamental objection to dualism and the problem of representation is well known. Moreover, the spatial existence of the body is related to the actor’s perception of the character. This perception belongs to staged and fictional spaces. Because space is as important an element as character in theatre, the actor’s spatial perception is emphasized. Therefore, in order to reinterpret the relationship between the actor’s body and the fictional character, the philosophical meaning of the relationship between the actor’s body and the fictional character can be discussed in light of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology based on the mind-body connection.

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment suggests that the body and mind are interconnected and that everything in the world has a connection to the human body. This interconnectedness allows access to the truth about objects in the world. To have a body is to exist in the world, and the body is the means by which one accesses everything outside of oneself. Similarly, the truth of a fictional character must be accessed through the body of an actor. The actor’s body temporarily erases itself and becomes a vessel to make the character visible in the world. The actor can physically interact with the object and evaluate it based on its external appearance. 

The actor who perceives the real world in which they live through their own orientation will also experience the space of the fictional character within their own perceptual limits. The talent generally associated with acting and expressed as the actor’s intelligence can be related to the limits of the world that the actor constructs for themself. The experiences they carry with them and in all their formations open up a space for them to perceive the mind-body unity of the fictional character. Merleau-Ponty said that the objects that surround one determines one’s attitude toward the world. The actor constructs new ways of thinking by bringing the experiences of the world they perceive with their own experience to the character’s perception of the world. This thinking is really an attitude. In other words, the body is the result in which all states of the world are immanent.