StageStruck

You can't have a zoo without animals, or, to use a more dignified metaphor, a library without books, so why should it be any easier to imagine a theatre without actors?, writes Peter Crawley.

Lately though, in an art form whose more experimental reaches have downgraded the importance of the writer, the director and even the performance space, the actor's position has proven no more secure.

Richard Maxwell, the American theatre maker who established a "deadpan" style blanched of emotion, doesn't dispense with actors altogether. But he does prefer to work with casts of limited experience. Last week The Project hosted his Ode to the Man Who Kneels, a characteristically bare approach to a western, in which performers spoke in uninflected drones without emoting, gesticulating, indicating or otherwise engaging in that process known as "acting".

"They're not trying to pretend that what you're watching is not a play," Maxwell, an amiable and unpretentious figure (and a trained actor himself) explained in a post-show talk. So the anti- acting style was meant as an egalitarian gesture: "It feels much closer to how it would be if you all came up here to perform."

That reminded me of Tom Stoppard's line, "We're actors - we're the opposite of people". But Maxwell had even less charitable views of an actor's experiences: "You're not in the real world. You're recording. You're storing up for a moment where you can use this for later."

It's a little extreme to say that actors are neither people nor members of the real world, just because they work at the coalface of make-believe.

But there's something quite revealing in this latest show of distrust of artifice and illusion and those that make it happen. When the "real world" amounts to just so many fictions - the disputed tears of a presidential candidate, say - art is asked to come clean.

There's nothing especially new about this. Eighty years ago Bertolt Brecht did something similar with his famous alienation effects, preventing audiences from identifying with a character and appealing to their heads, not their hearts.

Now it seems that real actors are no longer necessary for a performance at all, if recent works by Audio Detour, Brokentalkers and the UK's Blast Theory and Rotozaza are anything to go by. Watching my cousin, who has no formal training that I know of, follow a series of recorded commands during Rotozaza's show Etiquette ("sniff, collapse into your chair, look down, cover your mouth") and make those gestures seem suffused with emotion, I was as aware of the artifice of performance as its real effect.

Still, none of these curious trends should distress Equity members. For all the intrigue of deliberate amateurism, alienation and the DIY approach, audiences will always be seduced by performers with experience and technique. Whatever the fad or the style, acting is still something best left to the professionals.